GILBERT SORRENTINO
537
to be the savant of his age, who, dying, said, "I have lived the life of a
lentil. ' , Daisy blew her nose daintily in a large linen handkerchief with
the initials NB embroidered in the corner. My heart almost cracked
with the absurdity of jealousy, an unimpeachable pain that torments
the lost. But who are the lost? Why, I asked, my face a carefully frozen
mask, should I feel jealousy? Absurd! Ha! Ha! Ha!
... and of course you are right to laugh, Martin, Daisy opined,
for she had begun talking again, when she had started, I didn't know. I
had lost track of time and found myself staring at her heaving nipples,
those young and strangely delicate attributes of this girl's flushed
beauty. And I felt again jealousy-and something else! Some–
thing ...
. . . perhaps a shred ofpity. But you are right, there is no sense in
raking over dead leaves. Let them lie and crepitate. Anyway, our return
to the city was the beginning of the epd, the real beginning of the end.
Oh, Tom knew it-knew it as surely as he would have known that a ball
had come to his hands on the end zone or something. How often he
told me of those days! His eyes would twinkle and shine. Silly me! He
sensed it and a coldness began to grow up between us like a wall. He
stopped caring. I had my freedom, he had his business, and I became
one of those gad-about women, with my first affair in the wings. Tom
knew that too-for a big, and rather stupid man, he has extraordinary
powers
of
perception.
It
must be his intrigue. I sometimes think that
Tom even knew the man with whom I went to bed. Ah, it was a joyless
bed, but I had to have my scatterbrained fling! You'll note that I'm
really not crying. I seem to have something in my eye. My lover was a
poet, tall, sloppy, with a deep voice and a head ofwild hair. He lived in
a hovel of an apartment on the lower East Side, crammed with huge
bags of garbage and trash, which he often told me had blown in the
window. Ah, he was a witty man! He knew a thing or two about love
and had an endearing way of wearing a watchcap down over his ears
that made him look like somebody's old grandma. How old he
seemed, old and wise. Perhaps he really was, in some other life, some–
body's old grandma. Oh, I hardly remember anything about him! He
liked taxis, I recall. He knew a lot of people named Bob so that I never
knew who he was talking about. He allowed his teeth to rot because it
was natural and also he liked to pay dentists. He had been married to a
woman who went to Idaho and lived in a chicken coop, I think. There
