PARTISAN REVIEW
425
a white sweater cut like a man's undershirt. The top of her breasts
were dark. A miraculous medal hung on a thin gold chain around
her neck. She was meticulous in her movements, looking at Jim
with the expert blank eyes of an experienced subway rider, opening
her purse with fussy delicate fingers, extracting a folded Kleenex
from an orderliness that bordered on stupidity. He had gone out with
a girl like that when he was fifteen, in the first throes of calling up
girls and going to dances. She had gyrated as though her whole
body was filled with sex, in a trance smiling her clean smile at
him
out of her private sensual world and like this one whose heavy thigh
touched his, had turned to stone when the music stopped.
Her
little
gold chain had dangled a cross, and her father's name was Jesus.
That had always killed him. She had looked good out there with him
in the lights and for months he was the envy of his friends. He was
never allowed to touch her - she was saving it. She carried movie
magazines inside her notebook and had nothing to say to him. He
was her foreigner, some girl friend, cuento; she had quit school the
day she turned sixteen and married some guy who had probably
been into her for months.
"Hot," Jim said to the girl next to
him
who was carefully
blotting her upper lip. When he spoke she got up at once and moved
to
the door.
Cuento,
he said to himself, one of
his
few Spanish
words. Shelley was something else, indifferently willing and ready
at all times. He thought about this for a while, seeing her bedraggled
hair like tangled honey, her narrow naked body, wondering when
she would show up next and in a moment the wonder turned to
desire. At Fifty-ninth Street Jim got off, full of sorrow - already
his
resolution had weakened. Knowing that he was late for work he
stood
on a windy island facing the Coliseum and read to the end
of the article:
When faced with an audience of today's youth the Senator
in–
sisted that our history was still important, that we must take heart
from the courageous dissenters of the past. On his desk last week
his secretary had found this note midst the disorder of a hun–
dred practical details: "Like the course of the heavenly bodies,
harmony in national life is a resultant of the struggle between
contending forces. In frank expression of conflicting opinion lies
the greatest promise of wisdom
in
governmental action; and
in
suppression lies ordinarily the greatest peril." (Louis Brandeis,
1920)
