PARTISAN REVIEW
459
the delicacy of my good fortune, all mounted there in green, leaflike,
around me. Maple against which I pressed all I had of my face and
eyes.
It
was a faery delicacy, and what made it so was the seventeen–
year-O'ld presence itself - goodness, sweetness. AlsO' the unstabbed raw–
ness with the pain I couldn't see, because it was - and who can see
the wind? The March day on a beach, maid Ophelia face down (as on
an aerosol) floating over the hurt, bent, lilac waves.
The lover is the mourner of what shapes his destruction: cave of
his hands; wan-willow smile. To possess is to see it all go extinct–
glass pane upon which I press and press, and no day rises. A growing
doom; a sense of continuing breakage. Each day under the sheets. That
same lightlessness.
She had contracted vaginitis from an overdose of sulphur, and
each love-making was, accordingly, a stab. After a while I saw only salt,
crystals, blood; the blood of a being in the process of becoming just
her rock hardness, the father-like man she was being defeminized into,
who stood in the back of my head screaming, "You've seduced my
daughter- statutory!" I was terrified and no wonder. For even
if
this has been made up for now, there was still this mute suffering, this
unfulfilled vengeance that her eyes had to accept, like a testing. The
worst was that she could not ascribe a certain time to it and let it go
at that; since for neither of us was there any time, just these sea-black
days that only California can make believable. We lit our fire, we put
it out, we sat with our little knees out over the doorjamb of the bal–
cony where we then lived, a plate nearby on a chair, picking at it while
the sunset watermeloned through the arches of the city-reflected bal–
cony. The wind was grape glow, satiny, without fixture. We sat by it,
felt its moisture on our elbows and cheeks, and dreamed, of other places,
other men (I the other places, she the other men). The world was a
fallen tablet. We had picked it clean, and our views formed incom–
patible zones. We had arrived, each, at our own narrow perfection and,
like some costly china, held it close to our chests, inverted. For her, it
was some faith humanly shared, like existentialism or buddhism. For
me, probably just she: the last of all last countries; the perfect adobe
hut. I entered, I put my parka down, I took off my shoes, I lit a match,
and as I did this parody of the ascetic I forgot how nail-like and short
and painfully stabbing was this life I had yoked her to, cell where
she was but the nudest of bulbs.
Round face, or rather mO're deerlike than round, carved in wood,
in sun-smile; with great blue-green-gray eyes such as Patinier loved to
put in his pictures' backgrounds. And, like Patinier's blue, these eyes
signified a quest, they were she. Thoughtful, like a day that is just a day,
