PARTISAN
REVIEW
229
of its cocktail lounge and dining room and coffee shop. Grow old, leave
me, die, go back to your neurotic wife and your sad, ordinary children,
she thought, but still her eyes closed gratefully against his skin and she
felt how complete their silence was, how they had come to rest in each
other.
"Tell me about your life here. The people who love you," he said,
as he always did.
One afternoon they lay together for four hours. It was her birth–
day and she was intoxicated with her good fortune, this prize of the
afternoon, this man in her arms! She was a little giddy, she talked too
much. She told him about her parents, about her husband. . . . "They
were all people I believed in, but it turned out wrong. Now, I believe
in you...." He laughed as if shocked by her words. She did not under–
stand. Then she understood. "But I believe truly in you. I can't think
of myself without you," she said. . .. He spoke of his wife, her ambi–
tions, her intelligence, her use of the children against him, her use of
his younger son's blindness, all of his words gentle and hypnotic and
convincing in the late afternoon peace of this hotel room . . . and she
felt the terror of laughter, threatening laughter. Their words, like their
bodies, were aging.
She dressed quickly in the bathroom, drawing her long hair up
around the back of her head, fixing it as always, anxious that every–
thing be the same. Her face was slightly raw, from his face. The rubbing
of his skin. Her eyes were too bright, wearily bright. Her hair was
blond but not so blond as it had been that summer in the white Nan–
tucket air.
She ran water and splaShed it on her face. She blinked at the water.
Blind. Drowning. She thought with satisfaction that soon, soon, he
would be back home, in that house on Long Island she had never
seen, with that woman she had never seen, sitting on the edge of
another bed, putting on his shoes. She wanted nothing except to be
free of him. Why not be free?
Oh,
she thought suddenly,
I will follow
you
back and kill you. You and her and the little boy. What
is
there to
stop me?
She left him. Everyone on the street pitied her, that look of ab–
solute zero.
III.
A man and a child, approaching her. The sharp acrid smell of
fish. The crashing of waves. Anna pretended not to notice the father
with his son - there was something strange about them. That frank,
