PARTISAN REVIEW
77
stopped and I happened to turn to a window.
It
was always a wm–
dow, now that I think of it. Whenever I came anywhere near the
old neighborhood it was always a window that seemed to find
me....
"You don't have to tell me anything about kidneys. My father
spent practically half his life in the toilet. What that man went
through. Especially in the morning. He'd be in there a good half
hour sometimes. Like a fire inside him he said it was. Can you
imagine ? A fire inside you." She shuddered and, in front of a garage
door, a little further on, stopped and told me I could kiss her. But
that was all, she added immediately, a threat to her tone. "Just so
you don't get any funny ideas.
If
you know what I mean...."
It was then that I turned and realized where I was. The window
of a kitchen it was. Its hard, yellowing light burned monotonously on
the night and those inside. A man and two women they looked to be
from there. But as I watched , and my eyes became better adjusted, I
S<lY
that what I thought was a man was just some clothes hung there,
and that one of the women was actually a child. The other was old,
an old woman with colored hair and a growth at her neck. She kept
touching it and turning to the child. But the child never so much
as
looked her way. Her attention was fixed on what I guessed to be
a
door, on that side of the room which was invisible from where I
stood. They seemed to be waiting for something from it. And I
couldn't help feeling that it was not going to come, whatever it was,
and that they knew it. Yet they waited, and I watched. I watched
and presently, as I did, imagined myself being drawn, sucked with
a force that
I
could do nothing against, into that light, their lives. My
hand at that moment froze on the breast it had been given.
"What is it?" Sophie wanted to know.
"It's getting late. "
.• Is thar all you can think of?" She pressed up tighter against
me, but I still couldn't feel her. Not even her smell reached me any–
more. She had blurred with the light and was now no more real than
I
was.
"Move," she insisted, prodding me with her thighs. "Let your–
self
go."
I couldn't.
If
I could I would have run. I would have run until
the life went out of my legs, and I had all I could do to breathe.
"You're not some kind of queer, are you?"
