PARTISAN REVIEW
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as if she had pulled at his skin with her fingers. Children ran nearby
and distracted him - yes, he was a father too, his children ran like
that, they tugged at his skin with their light, busy fingers.
"Are you so unhappy?" he said.
"I'm not unhappy, back there. I'm nothing. There's nothing to me,"
she said.
They stared at each other. The sensation between them was in–
tense, exhausting. She thought that this man was her Savior, that he
had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded comple–
tion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting
and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save
another. So she drew back from him and released
him.
A few hours later they stopped at a gas station in a small city.
She went to the women's rest room, having to ask the attendant for a
key, and when she came back her eye jumped nervously onto the rented
car - why? did she think he might have driven off without her?–
onto the man, her friend, standing in conversation with the young at–
tendant. Her friend was as old as her husband, over forty, with lanky,
sloping shoulders, a full body, his hair thick, a dark, burnished
red,
a
festive color that made her eye twitch a little - and his hands were
always moving, always those rapid conversational circles, going nowhere,
gestures that were a little aggressive and apologetic at once.
She put her hand on his arm, a claim. He turned to her and
smiled and she felt that she loved him, that everything in her life
had forced her to this moment and that she had no choice about it.
They sat in the car for two hours, in Albany, in the parking lot
of a Howard Johnson's restaurant, talking, tl)'lng to figure out their
past. There was no future. They concentrated on the past, the several
days behind them, lit up with a hot, dazzling August sun, like explo–
sions that already belonged to other people, to strangers. Her face was
faintly reflected in the green-tinted curve of the windshield, but she
could not have recognized that face. She began to cry, she told herself:
"/
am not here, this will pass, this
is
nothing."
Still, she could not stop
crying. What if a policeman ran up to the car and accused this man
of molesting her? The muscles of her face were springy, like a child's,
unpredictable muscles. He stroked her arms, her shoulders, trying to
comfort her. "This is so hard ... this is impossible, ..." he said. She
felt panic for the world outside this car, all that was not herself and
this man, and at the same time she understood that she was free of him,
as people are free of other people, she would leave him soon, safely, and
within a few days he would have fallen into the past, the impersonal
