PARTISAN REVIEW
539
That
was
all.
I didn't make love to her (my wife was in the
kitchen, getting ice from the refrigerator, Rose and I were standing
in the middle of the living room, Rose's boyfriend, the grade school
teacher,
was
in the bathroom, flushing the toilet while pissing, to cover
the splash of his urine's fall into the water). I let go of Rose, went over
to the record player and put on a record; she went back to reading
the titles on the spines of the books. Now that it's about to begin, I
said to her from my corner of the room (just
as
my wife came in
with the ice), what do you think of our New Hampshire winters?
Not much, she said, smiling at the books. They begin too early, and
from what I've heard, they last too long, she said. We talked that
way, in code, for the entire evening, right in front of my wife and
Rose's grade school teacher boyfriend. My wife, more beautiful than
Rose, grew bored rather early and, as a result, silent, and by ten she
was
yawning and making sleepy references to how early she had to get up
to get the kids ready in time for school. Rose's boyfriend (whose name
I could not remember for longer than thirty seconds at a time)
spent the evening in unrelenting, embarrassed discomfort, mainly, I
think, because of the way I ignored him and attended constantly to
Rose. And I did make a number of unnecessary references both to wa–
terfalls and to the noisy plumbing of the house, how you could hear
wa ter gushing, like a waterfall, all through the house every time
someone used the toilet. I remember that he wanted badly to tell me
all about his mother's having recently taken up ceramics, at the re–
markable age of sixty-four. But I kept interrupting him with the
story of my friend 's arthritic thumb and forefinger on his left hand,
the way he had turned their dead rigidity to his advantage as a
potter, adding several times that arthritis can actually aid a potter in
his work,
as
long as it affects no more than a couple of fingers and
doesn't stiffen an entire hand. He pretended to be relieved to hear
that. I smiled. He and Rose left early. My wife and I made love for
a long time and fell asleep immediately after and together.
After phoning my wife from the motel, informing her that I had
no intention of coming home again as long
as
she remained there,
I went out to look for a woman. My plan had been simply to drive
to downtown Portsmouth, and avoiding the bars that catered strictly
to seamen, to find a crowded, neighborhood bar. I pictured a woman
slightly older than I, in her late thirties, say, or maybe around forty,
still attractive, and lonely, because her husband would be at sea, either
