PARTISAN REVIEW
235
why they came? Someone asked me if I had eaten, and I said no,
and they said I should because now you have to fill two roles . I
moved on, confused by that. People smiled at me, saying things
with their eyes that I couldn't understand. I was confused by that
also. Lots of people asked me if they could get me a sandwich.
"Do you want a chicken liver and onion, Noel?"
"No thank you."
"I t's importan t you should eat."
I moved on.
"Can I fix you something?" A friend asked.
"Keep your health up," someone else said whose name I
didn't know. "There's only you. You have to be a mother and a
father now."
I saw the rabbi and went over to him . He was an all right guy.
He went up to the pulpit that morning, and didn't say any of that
shit that rabbis say about people coming and people going and the
tides come and the tides go but the oceans remain and all that
supershit stuff. He looked out over the hundreds of people there
and in a voice so quiet that someone in the back actually said
louder, (if I had a gun I would have shot the cocksucker) and said
after a time that he had known
J
and was sorry that she had died,
and he personally was going to miss her. He looked around some
more, as if he was almost looking for someone or something, and
repeated what he had said, that he was going to miss her for a long
time to come, and with that walked off the pulpit. There was a lot
of murmuring. I suppose a lot of people felt upset by his lack of
form, or the fact that he showed real emotion, but I think he is a
very all right human being.
"How long does this last?" I asked him.
"Seven days."
"God." I moved on.
"Did you eat something?" someone asked me.
"Fuck off." I went into the kitchen. It was a beehive of
activity.
"We're out of CCL," someone shouted.
"Above the phone, two down from the vet's number and one
