PARTISAN REVIEW
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had nothing to do with them. She would not be Anna out there, the
lady in the drawing. He would not be her lover.
"I love you so much. • . ." she whispered.
"Please don't cry! We have only a few hours, please...."
It was absurd, their clinging together like this. She saw them as
a single figure in a drawing, their
arms
and legs entwined, their heads
pressing mutely together. Helpless substance,
so
heavy and warm and
doomed. It was absurd that any human being should be so important
to another human being. She wanted to laugh: a laugh might free
them both.
She could not laugh.
Some time later he said, as if they had been arguing,
"Look.
It's
you. You're the one who doesn't want to get married. You lie to me - ."
"Lie to you?"
"You love me but you won't marry me, because you want some–
thing left over -. Something not finished -. All your life you can
attribute your misery to me, to our not being married - you are using
me-."
"Stop it! You'll make me hate you!" she cried.
"You can say to yourself that you're miserable because of
me.
We
will never be married, you will never be happy, neither one of us will
ever be happy - ."
"I don't want to hear this!" she said.
She pressed her hands flatly against her face.
She went to the bathroom to get dressed. She washed her face and
part of her body, quickly. The fever was in her, in the pit of her belly.
She would rush home and strike a razor across the inside of her arm
and free that pressure, that fever.
The impatient bulging of her veins: an ordeal over.
The demand of the telephone's ringing: that ordeal over.
The nuisance of getting the car and driving home,
in
all that five
o'clock traffic: an ordeal too much for a woman of her size.
The movement of this stranger's body in hers: over, finished.
Now, dressed, a little calmer, they held hands and talked. They
had to talk swiftly, to get all their news in: he did not trust the people
who worked for
him,
he had faith in no one, his wife had moved to a
textbook publishing company and was doing well, she had inherited a
Ben Shahn painting from her father and wanted to "touch it up a little"
- she was crazy! - his blind son was at another school, doing fairly
well, in fact his children were all doing fairly well in spite of the stupid
mistake of their parents' marriage - and what about her? what about
