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PARTISAN REVIEW
hardly been a successful union, a kind of side- by-side life, you might
say, as close and on our own, each one of us, as two plants in the same
row, stealing substance from one another, water and air and all the
rest, what's near, what's by, that's all, yet meeting , I suppose, once in
a while, like leaves meet in a pile, for breakfast or in bed-ha-ha ha–
never touching except, like I've said, when I reach out and whack her,
and not even then, she sees to that, I think she knows days in
advance-yes siree, no mistake-why sometimes the bruise will be
there, yellow and green like a young banana, before the day before the
blow . The rug rolled. Goal or threat. Perhaps a promise. Designs slid
out of the rim of his eye. Something to aim at : a telepathic bull's-eye . I
don't.
: know. The shriek
bf
the bird left silence foaming behind it like
a boat's wake and Mr. Hess thought of the boats he had seen in the
showroom, turning slowly around and gleaming on their cradles like
the girls he had ogled on the stage, paint too perfect for a world of logs
and oil, and promising more escape than a plane . So .Well. Who had his
hat? Mr. Hess thought he would apologize first for being so faithless–
no-he wouldn't put it like that-for being so irregular in attendance ,
whatever it was, but it didn't matter because he hadn't come about
himself, he'd say, but about his wife, Ella, who was in dreadful dan–
ger, hefelt, he'd say, danger of conspiring, was it? with the Devil. She
was a goddamned witch, that's what she was ... a witch. She said
sometimes her real name was Pamphila, Father, and I looked it up at
the library, with a little help in the library, and it's the name of a
witch-who would believe-? She said it with a small smile-true-a
small smile, but in the bathroom one day he'd overheard her singing in
her thin thin seldom songful singing voice:
I Conjure and Confirm
upon you,
something like,
ye holy Anf?els,
though she never encoun–
tered any, what pretensions, what a liar ,
and by the name Cados,
Cados, Cados, Eschereie, Eschereie, Hatim, Ya, stronf?founderofthe
worlds,
it filled his feet with immobility to hear her,
Cantine , jaym,
janie, Auie, Calbot, Sabbac, Berisay, Alnaym,
noises she accompanied
by clapping,
and by the name Adonay, who created Fishes, and
creeping things in the waters, andBirds upon the face ofthe earth, and
by the names ofthe angels serving in the sixth host,
better she'd been
