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PARTISAN REVIEW
Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, and Leslie Fiedler. They
invited Norman Podhoretz and Elizabeth Hardwick. They in–
vited Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer
and William Styron and Donald Barthelme and Jerzy Kosinski
and Truman Capote. None of these came; all of them had
unlisted numbers, or else machines that answered the telephone,
or else were in Prague or Paris or out of town . Nevertheless the
apartment filled up. It was a Saturday night in a chill Novem–
ber. Taxis whirled on patches of sleet. On the inside of the
apartment door a mound of rainboots grew taller and taller.
Two closets were packed tight with rain coats and fur coats; a
heap of coats smelling of skunk and lamb fell tangled off a bed.
The party washed and turned like a sluggish tub; it lapped
at all the walls of all the rooms. Lucy wore a long skirt, violet–
colored, Feingold a lemon shirt and no tie. He looked paler than
ever. The apartment had a wide center hall, itself the breadth of a
room; the dining room opened off it to the left, the living room
to the right. The three party-rooms shone like a triptych: it was
as if you could fold them up and enclose everyone into darkness.
The guests were free-standing figures in the niches of a cathe–
dral; or else dressed-up cardboard dolls, with their drinks, and
their costumes all meticulously hung with sashes and draped
collars and little capes, the women's hair variously bound, the
men's sprouting and spilling: fashion stalked, Feingold moped.
He took in how it all flashed, manhattans and martinis, earrings
and shoe-tips-he marveled, but knew it was a falsehood, even a
figment. The great world was somewhere else. The conversation
could fool you: how these people talked! From the conversation
itself-grains of it, carried off, swallowed by new eddyings, swirl
devouring swirl, every moment a permutation in the tableau of
those free-standing figures or dolls, all of them afloat in a tub–
from this or that hint or syllable you could imagine the whole
universe in the process of ultimate comprehension. Human
nature, the stars, history-the voices drummed and strummed.
Lucy swam by blank-eyed, pushing a platter of mottled cheeses.
Feingold seized her: " It's a waste!" She gazed back. He said, "No
one's here!" Mournfully she rocked a stump of cheese; then he
lost her.
