546
PARTISAN REVIEW
my hands, particularly my fingers , it was but a foretaste of the pain
to
come but in my madness I ignored it , ignored-everything, even the
queer twittering of my conscience , that, like some obscene rodent of
night, tittered. Suddenly, she placed my hands on a spot I dare not
name . Grass stains appeared on my trousers , somewhere a flashbulb
popped, I seemed
to
gaze out a window at waves that broke on an un–
discovered shore, a phonograph record scratched over and over , its
lonely song ended, we would have let the phone ring had we but a
phone. Blind stupid fool! I thought, and just then a roman candle
burst far above the bay . I could only imagine its glorious effulgence
plangent on the wintry sky off there to the sleeping subutbs
to
the
north. Houts passed, or perhaps it was only moments-sometimes I
think it was an eternity . Would that it were it! She was speaking now ,
her voice soft and fulfilled, muffled because her mouth was somehow
lost , lost in one of the pockets of my coat which latter I now gently
lifted off of her . Dear, girlish voice! But I found that I was not listen–
ing, instead, my ears seemed
to
hear the erotical rasp of "another ,"
the insouciant creaking ofher stays as she rattled the ice in her highball
and her voice rose
to
ever a higher pitch of hysterical fury. Her warning
flared in my brain. . . what was that warning again? No matter, it was!
That was enough for me . And over all, like the guffaw of a demented
warlock, howled the bitter wind that chilled me
to
the very soul, the
wind that could only have been coming down from Canada! The very
word seemed freight with horror even then. How strange .
. . . and in the tiara-like glitter of madcap nights how often I
thought of Berkeley and of my faux pas there, a stupid act that de–
stroyed what happiness we had wrested from the bowels of the Cali–
fornia air . But were we really happy? Such a question often haunts me
yet and troubles the night's repast . Who can interrogate the face of
happiness , and who can tell when it passes from our clutching hands?
What mysteries holds this cruel and mortal coil, is it not? All I did
know was that we had reached the nadir of connubial relationship long
before . What else but that shabby oven trick-yes, trick! For I did not
want
to
extinguish this little light, and yet . .. I wished that I might be
a pair of jagged drawers battling across the moors of salient trees. It was
in a book , I think, that I read of a girl who got her husband back to New
York by putting her head in an oven. It was as if the book had been
written for me!
It
had waited for me, its true reader ... don't you
