578
PARTISAN REVIEW
the sobbing. From behind every door, the voices of women whisper–
ing, sighing, weeping.
Back in her room, Corinne bolted the door, then unlocked it,
realizing Geoff would misinterpret
if
he chose to return. Then she
turned on the TV and spun the dial-news, weather, sports, Charlton
Heston, moonshot reruns-snapped it off, then, her lungs crackling
with dehydration, she tried to open the window. She got it up about
an inch, and the fearful whine of fifty-eighth street entered with a
few toxic snowflakes. She tried the other window which gave off to
a gray airshaft, but it was nailed shut. Corinne then poured a water
tumbler full of Geoff's scotch and traced with her finger the paisley
pattern which flung itself from the drapes to the cornices and re–
appeared in the tassels of the bedspread. She tried the lyre-back chair
at the writing desk; through the glass top, a card garlanded with
puppies and rhododendrons announced: "We shall do our utmost
to please you." Above the desk, she reached for a book but found
that the spines of the leather editions had been sawn off and glued
to a board. And then in the mirror she caught sight of her touseled
bed, the swatches scattered about the pillows and the floor, exploded
as artificially as in a store-window display, a buyer's market, and then
she found herself fumbling in her purse for ... Fitz's card. But when
a cloudy voice in room
818
at the St. Regis answered, Corinne banged
the receiver down and felt, for the first time in her thirty-two years,
that she was perfectly capable of both inconsequence and betrayal.
It was close to midnight. Corinne Huff sat crosslegged in her
chair, eyeing herself in the mirror in a way that she hadn't since she
was sixteen. She began to slowly open her robe, then let it fall back.
She touched her stomach, ran her hands over her crispness, as
if
it
were a stranger's pet, and then lay back, strangely calm. She had not
at all suddenly come to that irrefragably momentous American
knowledge, contracted the nation's most recent humor. Corinne
was "simply" fed up. She didn't want to go home. She didn't want
to stay in New York and live it up. She didn't want to apologize to
Geoff even though he perhaps deserved it. She didn't want to take
the night flight to Acapulco, she didn't want to buy one more single
thing, she didn't want to be anybody else, or with anybody else,
and she didn't want to be alone. Corinne knew then that no person,
group, idea, option, feeling, or law would ever solve the common
