232
PARTISAN REVIEW
from the last delivery. You deliver to sound' the depths, not to explore
them, to assure yourself there is no danger, you go through motions. I
describe our lovemaking; I said softly. To whom? she flared. Fuck, shit,
piss, tit. A degenerate case of exalted litany. She did not move. Once I
said the words I did not understand why I had repressed them for so
long, they were indispensable, how had I ever done without them. So
long floundering before an accessible threshhold. For so long those
words had poisoned other words, to which they loan a little of their
stench. Out in the air they had no stench. Goodbye, edge of virulence.
They had converted all other words, harmless words, neutral, exact,
into sacks ready to split their seams. Now those words were restored to
their purity.
She was impatient to get back to the city. And she did not wish to
take me with her. That was why she was finding fault. She wanted to
drink again at the city's trough, fatten herself for its maw. I understood
her need to depart. What could I offer her, fortified with the world's
words, which she recognized and understood in any context, without
context even. When she left for good I waited for the sound of her
footsteps down the corridor. She had come to the stockroom to tell me.
But that sound never came to me, only sounds that were preparatory to
the craved sound. Her going was peppered with injunction. Don't
think too much, she told me. Her unspoken prescription for happiness
as scrawny celibate was to lie in shadow and listen to rain falling on
dead leaves. And in some part of me I was only too glad to let go of my
thoughts. In the face of imaginary encroachment we have seen how I
tend to discard. That clears a path toward confrontation, spares me
the leap over impedimenta. Or rather, it clears me a path toward
myself, so I know the self that confronts is the self in essence, all
connections severed, like nerve ends. I am only too eager to relinquish
what encroaches on my essence when I must call upon it in times of
crisis. For I cannot hide behind a scrim of luminous decor, like a Von
Sternberg hero or heroine, both, for in times of crisis I am restored to
my status of androgyne. But I am on ly too eager to relinquish my
essence, my privacy. It is only in the comforting presence of others that
I impersonate one who is guarding his privacy against encroachment.
What good is privacy after all if I cannot feel the incisions that affirm
it, its reality, that is to say, its ability to be incised. She told me to stop
thinking and I had a tendency to make objects of my thoughts. They
cluttered my sku ll. Even when they were only the shadow of thoughts,
in embryo. A fart, a belch, was enough to make me miscarry. It was
then, when they were lost to me, submerged beneath the waves of my
