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PARTISAN REVIEW
because I was interested in it as a notion and not as something en–
ducing an immediate kiss. That was an injustice, some error was
heavily here:
"If
you were an honest man, you would kiss me in front
of everyone." I felt a smart man would have known what to do or say
but I didn't and, so, I was quiet, a little stiff and angry, though. He
said , "You don't love that bitch, you're about as hetero as a toe slip–
per: all your dreams are about cock - you dream of
me."
He had be–
come greenish with tiredness and booze . His eyes were distorted .
The almost supernatural noise of the party dinned and banged at me
but he seemed unmoved -leaden-eared, leaden-nerved. "You love
me : you don't want to be happy, you're aJew. I know what I'm say–
ing- I'm a love poet. I know what love is backwards and forwards ."
He paused, he gazed for me to get it. He said it before to people .
"Your come was so thick , it choked me: I know what that means."
I said, "Oh shit, you're being crazy again. You're making stuff
up , Johnno . You're playing dumb games." That last phrase was kind
of a newish statement that year and had almost a street intensity .
"No,
I'm
honest," he said in a flat, dense voice, compacted now
with hysterical drunkenness - and with feeling that I felt was merely
will, that I felt like a bludgeoning from the wings of something large.
"It's a responsibility being courted by a poet." I said it with half–
bland sarcasm, but civilized sarcasm, intelligent and affectionate,
and I said it sexlessly, bodilessly : it was all nerve-endings and voice .
I saw him, in his hysteria, register the technical device - he was
slightly jolted by it.
He didn't want to give me credit for it.
"It
is
your responsibility to love me," he said angrily, with un–
necessary anger, vaguely unbalanced, unfooted, pushed off-center
by me , "I am a
great
poet." Rage and some placation in him were
sloshing around in nervous stridency and extreme attention inside a
drunken and, I believe, malicious hysteria -like a state of shock in
which a man might enter battle and function without knowing what
occurred physically to him .
I started to laugh , not a kind thing. Before he could speak , I
said, "What isn't?" My responsibility. "I suppose I have to give up."
He quieted then, quieted some, at once - some hysteria.
But I am a liar in a certain way. I said, as his breathing sim–
mered down, "I think I better go home ." That is, it was my turn to
complain.
But he took it as abominable insult, I think , and as abominable
hurt. He sobered his hysteria to a degree so final that it was abruptly
