PARTISAN REVIEW
436
place of
this
man another might
be
put, a substitute. There is a space in
the air that needs filling. A man steps
in, to
fill
it. It is not Monroe E. Mason,
the man on the right, whom I love. It
is the man on the left I love, Vince
Ellman. Watching them on the tele–
vision screen, looking carefully from one
to the other, I cannot judge them. I
cannot say why it is that I love one man
and not the other. I don't know either
of them. There is nothing in their faces
that is personal. There is nothing in
anyone's face that is personal. What
can you get from a face? Too many
smiles wear out a face, that's true; but
my mother, who almost never smiles,
has
a worn-out face. My own face feels
worn, but not from smiling. I sit here
while the minutes of the program
flash
by, second after second - time rushes
when you are on the air - and I feel
the old, dull, sickening trance begin in
me, a crystallization of the Fear. Why?
I will be sensible about this. The Fear
did not exist, ever.
It
was a lie. Never
behind the drawn blinds of a house
on Dougal Street . . . never behind the
bathroom door ... never, never shaping
itself in the darkness of the basement,
never . . . all a lie,
all
of it. A sick
woman, that is all. My mother, aged
thirty-four, became sick, and off and
on for years she was sick, she was well,
she is sick, she is well. . . . Nothing else.
There is no Fear, there was never any
Fear, only sickness.
