ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
531
Perhaps he was too drunk, but there was an old physicist's terror in
the beauty of the thought. My God, maybe she's on to something,
he was thinking.
"Well, it don't exist, and yet it does."
"Time rests as potential?" he asked, excitement in his dry sad
voice, "rests there until the gap is jumped to Time dynamic."
"Yeah-potential and dynamic-that's Time. It dies if it don't
connect," ,and for an instant she was as fond of him as a mother
learning from her child. For the rest of her life she had two new
words, and what words they were. Through all her unconscious were
flexings of cellular pleasure-so much of her experience was rushing
to the higher plateau of more precise language.
Actually she had been not altogether inspired in this conver–
sation. She still had the masculine mind of a whore or a hostess–
she was a business man-she searched for synthesis, the big view,
and her ideas on Time had come from Marion. Finally she was a
salesman-she cannibalized the salvageable from the junk of old
conversations to put together some speed for the pitch of her con–
versation.
She could hardly have done otherwise. She came from a poor
Harlem family, late-migrated to New York from the North Georgia
line, and her mother had run a cheap Georgia brothel (three girls)
and sold heroin in New York until the arithmetic of cutting the
ounces wore her down. Cara was the first child in the family to be
able to read and write with less difficulty than it took to load a
trailer truck. Yet she now had the pride that they all came to her
parties, the hothouse haul from Madison Avenue, advertising men
and television people laughing at homey house jokes about the sick,
curling themselves around a Martini or a model like ivy which slides
over ubiquitously from vertical support to vertical support; there was
the subtle cream of Negro entertainers from certain particular bistros
at ,the moment not out of favor with Cara Beauchamp, there was
a sprinkling from the theatre (those flamboyant timid people) , there
was a gossip columnist who exercised the discipline not to print a
word of what he saw, one or two of the most overrated and/ or
berated young writers in America would be there, and one fashion
photographer, not to mention the pads of Harlem and the cellars
of the Village, painters (a growing collection of Abstract Expression-
