PARTISAN REVIEW
541
other leg over the boulder and scramble up beside him. He checks the
tautness of the rope that rises from his waist to the loop he's thrown to
a cornice above, then yanks hard. The loop holds. He looks upward.
The sun is still high. Dry-mouthed, contemptuous of his craving for a
cigarette, Jekyll pulls more clean air into his long, robust body. He is
not thinking of Utterson. He would be, though, if a substitution could
be made, if Utterson were in Enfield's place, tied waist to waist to
Jekyll, equally inept. For then Jekyll could imagine cutting the rope
and letting Utterson fend for himself during this last, most strenuous
part of the ascent. But he would be unlikely to go so far as to imagine
Utterson panicking, losing his grip, scraping the air, shrieking like a
flayed pig, hurtling from rock to rock down to the fjord below.
Tanned and fit, back from his Canadian holiday, Jekyll is loiter–
ing on an empty street below the World Trade Center. He's waiting
for Hyde, who is supposed to bring his X-rays. Hyde is usually late,
but not this late. Jekyll has skipped lunch to keep this date with Hyde,
who, by insisting on meeting at the World Trade Center, which is out
of everyone's way, and on a Sunday, shows that he hasn't lost his yen
for the picturesque rendez-vous. Utterson, who drove into town this
morning with a sample entourage and has not skipped one meal in
the last thirty years, is mid-lunch at the Russian Tea Room. He is
sucking on an unlit pipe, hungry-eyed, truculently waiting for his
second order of borscht and pirojkis.
It
is possible that a line extends
from the flattish back of Utterson's head to Jekyll's striped tie or to the
laces of his new oxfords. But Jekyll doesn't consider this possibility.
He's too preoccupied with Hyde.
The young man Jekyll expects to materialize any moment no
longer makes
it
into town often; today, if he comes, it's as a special
favor to his respectable, would-be alter ego. Also, if he comes, he
won't look the way he is usually pictured. In the old days, the days of
his citified wickedness, Hyde got the reputation of being big and
hulking. But this is a fantasy concocted from 19th century middle-class
nightmares about the immigrant urban poor, and diffused in our own
century by Hollywood monster movies. The truth, which once per–
plexedJekyll, is that Hyde is small, sickly, and, of course, younger than
he is. "Naturally," Utterson has explained. "The evil part of your
nature is less developed than the good part." Jekyll is not convinced
