CHARLES NEWMAN
577
"I will
not,"
Geoff said with some dignity, "take the onus for
this snafu! ' ,
"You know, Geoff, you are beginning to smell like my hus-
band."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Scotch."
Geoff thought for a minute as he half-knotted his tie.
"Well then," he said, "you smell like your husband too."
Then he left without another word, for some reason carrying
his loafers on his two longest fingers like a part-time fisherman with
two incredible champion trout.
Corinne woke to moans. She reached out to embrace Geoff but
found only slick sheet. Then she thought she was dreaming, not
awake in a dead city, that her difficult breathing had startled her,
and that this was somehow indicative of her life, forever being shaken
out of real release, prevented from dreaming by her own banal breath–
ing . But slowly the inventory of the room took stock of her: the dirty
Degas prints, stiff crinoline drapes, the dry whine of the radiator
enforced themselves. The moans reached a crescendo. A woman's
moans, and not three feet from her through the wall, that conventional–
ly rhythmic cry, somewhere between ecstasy and pain, a wordlessness
refined to the point where it could be taken in whatever way its inter–
preter wished, named by every man to suit his fashion.
It
was the first
time Corinne had heard it from another, and she lay rigid, nearly
comatose, waiting anxiously for the silences to come.
What happened after that can only be related by the numbers,
very much as in Kindergarten where all experiences are supposed to
be of the same duration and intensity, utterly undifferentiated. At
any rate, Corinne found herself in her robe in the hall, standing
before room 427, where moaning had given way to the low squabble
of a late nite talk show. She was startled by a stunning black maid in
a pinafore, at least six feet two with the face of a West Indian god–
dess, who strode peremptorily down the hall and disappeared through
double swinging doors into the Help's respite room. Corinne watched
the doors until they ceased shuffling against one another, and then
she heard voices again, charmingly accented, then tearful, and finally,
