PARTISAN REVIEW
321
The mathematics of her face demanded precision, answers
III
kind,
not self-analysis. I clicked on the smarts:
Stanger wanted Mildred; his missus wanted me. I wanted the
job. The question now was what could I get. The answer answered
everything.
If
I couldn't just get what I wanted, I had to want what
I could get, to get what I wanted. Things equal to the same, equal
one another. "Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?" I said,
"Let's fuck."
"You are a party pooper." She blinked, then sighed and shook
her head.
I'd been too quick. Too smart. I shrugged like a man with noth–
ing more to say, and looked across the room at them, sitting close
together on a couch, talking. To express life's failure I lifted a
cigarette. Mrs. Stanger knocked it out of my mouth.
"That's a social disease, Mr. Liebowitz."
She stood up in a blur of dancing and a storm of jazz, turned
away, pushed through shuddering couples, and went around a corner,
disappeared. Reappeared. Frowning at me. To my feet, I leaped.
Down a hall in pursuit of her gliding back, all feeling concentrat–
ed in crotch, a monolithic shark with blood in its nose and no least
appetite for analysis. I'd read that eating is the final extension of
touch and believed it. I also believed the reverse. Paintings, etchings,
great Chinese jugs, chairs, tables, sculptured metals whispered as
they flashed by - because I looked at none of them - "Beast, beast,
beast." They whispered, one by one, the great eyeball-sucking–
life-deniers, vanishing behind me, "Beast, beast, beast." Right. Psy–
chology was dead. I didn't feel too sure I understood my motives,
but that wasn't proof I had any. Does the moon have a motive?
"Love," said Aristotle. All right, love. Later, with nothing at stake,
I'd look at a jug, and make excuses for love, recall the meal, hideous
smiling, how he didn't talk to me and how Mildred did. I'd argue,
between me and her, had loomed the shape of a foreign penis. His
moon. My motive. I'd recall the job, my own penis, and I'd raise the
distinction between men and women. Men do what they have to do.
A woman can do anything a man can do, but does she have to do it?
Mrs. Stanger didn't have to open the door. I stepped through it into
another world. The enemy of Freud, son of Marx, Phillip Liebowitz,
plunging beyond analysis in the wake of a shark.
