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PARTISAN REVIEW
of all the flaws that might soil our entente, some kind of promise of
punishment postponed for all the flaws that I would inevitably expose.
I could not understand her distrust of words, her ability to live in the
silence. I took it for insolence, indifference, even torture. She was the
proud proprietor of the silence and I was trying to steal it, deprive her
of its balm.
When I finished my tea she was asleep. More insolence. Sleep
abducted her. I studied her in sleep. She looked flabby, vulnerable. I did
not know what to do with her vulnerability.
It
frightened me. She slept
with her mouth open. I was caretaker, I was keeping a vigil for another.
She robbed me of vigilance on my own behalf. I could have murdered
her just to have done with the abeyance to which she marooned me, by
falling asleep.
It
showed she trusted me. How did she know I would not
try to cut her head off, or caress her, as one does the dead. I was less
tormented by ambivalence than the inability to accept it. I walked
around the room, pretended to be comfortable with her sleeping and
the manor sleeping and the footbridges half awake. When I at last
admitted my ambivalence, my revulsion at her snores, her £lilting
smiles, I fell asleep. After that night I began a night shift. Midnights
alone buoyed me up. I laundered my ambivalences in its stream. No
downpour, no drizzle, just the smooth flow of its current. By dawn they
were almost fragrant. Sometimes I thought I saw her through the
stockroom window, at the depot. She was perhaps going
to
the city and
she would return. She cou ld not leave me high and dry.
In
the city there
are no indiscretions, no ambivalences, the city gathers them up and
converts them to haze punctured only by incessant neon. So much for
the city. I was always surprised when cities to which I became attached
proceeded to carryon in my absence. But when you walk the main
thoroughfares of the principal ones you are their pulse and therefore
indispensable. Perhaps she was leaving me forever, not merely for one
night. How would I know it was the same L. who returned. She did
return. She tapped at the pane. The clerks looked up, her gaze bypassed
them discreetly.
It
was me she wanted, after all those years. I tried to
identify her at a g lance. I subtracted the scar left by the city. She was
basically the same, a little more knowing, a little more schooled in
unpredictable peripatetics like me. She had probably seen enough of
them. Maybe I had lost my fascination for her. Where she came from
my kind was a dime a dozen. She told me, when we were seated in the
orchards beyond the pale of the post office, it did not answer my needs
(answer my needs!) to work for the post office, sorting and rambling. It
solves nothing, she said. She was changed. Gone the decorum of the
