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PARTISAN REVIEW
half into the grave afterward with the outrage to his sedentary heart.
So here was a man who could give her a furious pleasure, for
an
evening at least, and therefore meeting him at the door to her party,
accepting the introduction from her good friend and favorite psycho–
analyst (who will become for us a figure of obsessive interest later on)
(he had introduced the physicist as an old college friend), she dipped
into her enormous reserves of relaxed sensuous attention, took
an
im–
mediate plot of the physicist's clang-riddled nerves, and came
back
with a tight formal smile and the suggestion of a feminine will-driven
tic at the comer of her own eye (if she thus momentarily debased her
beauty, she was seizing the opportunity to relax the muscles of her
eye and make a friend-on the whole a profit for our hostess). In–
deed she succeeded; the physicist liked her-he liked her even more
when late in the evening and pleasantly if quietly-in his way-hys–
terically drunk with the blending of the tongues, the reentrate cool
jazz of the combination for the night-four homosexual Negroes
in
hom-rimmed glasses-and the murderous ambiguities of such varied
honey-wild pussy as paraded at that party, the physicist had the
fair
opportunity to discuss physics with the remaJI'kable knife-eyed intelli–
gence of the face in
cafe au lait
who had greeted him at the
door.
I choose their conversation to repeat because it is essential to our mys–
tery, and if you find it bizarre you must recognize that we hover
at
the edge of an orgy of language, the nihilism of meaning fair upon
us.
"Isn't modern physics to the square side?" she asked of
him.
'A
true language of indeterminate functions, he was thinking,
an
expression of the off-phase waves of the Negro masses. "Oh, no, not
at all, not really," he said. "After all, Einstein was no square."
"I could die that he is dead--so hoped to meet that man," Cara
Beauchamp said, "he was hip--a funny man." She sighed for
the
dead. "But, like I mean,
procedurally-aren't
you physicists nowhere
with Time?"
"Nowhere-the philosophical groundwork is lacking I suppose."
"Yes, you don't make the scene." She restrained her force
and
added softly, "Like Time is when you connect."
"It doesn't exist in between?" He had answered easily, pleased
at how well he had picked up this contextual field, but then he
re–
peated it, "Time does not exist when it makes no ... connections?"
