228
PARTISAN REVIEW
that eluded us. Perhaps that ideal fucking would never take place.
Perhaps I would have to be both inside and outside the fucking to be
able to ratify it as a perfect example of what the world understood to be
fucking. Everyone seemed to know what they were talking about when
they said fucking. Same with masturbation. And yet had we ever
verified communall y that clinical entity. Talking about it was a way of
warding it off. Doing it was even a way of warding it off. As I fucked,
we fucked, I thought of my future, that gray abeyance, that nest from
which birds emerge, at dusk, to sing, to lure with song the wary joyless
neophyte, You guessed it. She tired of me. She tired of the fact that
J
did
not coincide with my present, our present. So I evicted her before she
cou ld evict me. When I told her I was leaving and this time for good, no
doubt about it, we both knew I had left long before. This kind of
farewell was less painful than all the others, all the unspoken, for now
I had actual motion, the saunter of the legs past house and garden, as a
kind of so lace. Whereas before I was leaving, left, and yet stood still,
rooted to the spot, soiled in my fixity, aghast at my flight. In leaving I
coincided with myself. In flight I came into my own at last. The selves
that had come back before, resplendent in the garden's ooze, were my
puny surrogates. I said, in order to say something, I knew I shouldn 't
have come. To visit her was to lapse from sorting and delivering,
themselves lapses. I confused lapse with evasion, which it sometimes
was, and lapse from a lapse with confrontation which it wasn't, ever,
my mathematical training only confused me.
It
soi led me with too
much expectation, like the silver screen. But what was confrontation
after all, in its pure state. How did I begin to confront what I was
supposed to confront. Perhaps it was when I began to hurt and wanted
to £lee the source of the hurt. Then I knew I was doing something for
my own good.
I went back to the post office. I needed an interim before returning
to Livia. I felt depleted. In order to resume sorting a large new letter
had to be placed before me. I could not just dig into the heap. For a
long lapse from sorting, from any activity worth a damn, was the
interment of that activity. In this case, of all the letters I abandoned
when I set out to deliver, skirt delivery, dump, philander. I needed the
incentive of a recent postmark. Novelty protected me from coinciding
with myself. As I sorted I felt something that felt like need. I rose,
ecstatic, and hurried toward the manor. It was shrouded in fog. I
thought I was going to cement our relation, I thought
L.
would be
delighted to see me. But when I got to her, saw she was different from
what I imagined, constructed during our separation, then I cou ld only
