104
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the name of our love, our unique, unrivaled love, 1 believe 1 could
have forgiven him an infidelity of the flesh - with poets as with the
gods, anything is forgivable. But the fact that he wrote to the young
woman about his poetry, his soul, the mysterious sources of his in–
spiration, the fact that, in one ambiguous context proffered by the
poetry itself, he shared with her something 1 felt belonged to me
alone, and to him, a kind of
jus primae noctis-that,
sir, is what shat–
tered me, shook my very being, and put my erstwhile serenity to the
test. All at once, in a disturbance of seismic proportions, the "yel–
lowed boards" opened beneath my feet and 1 began to flounder as
one flounders in a nightmare. 1 realized that the only way 1 could
stop my headlong fall was by taking decisive action, breaking a mir–
ror, the lamp with the pink shade (that, too, a gift from him), a
Chinese teapot, or a precious thermometer. Otherwise, fd have had
to do something much more terrible. Then it occurred to me: the let-
ters.
Because his apartment had been searched several times,
Mendel Osipovich had moved our correspondence to mine. "I fume
at the idea of
faceless people
poking their noses into your letters," he
told me. 1 had tied the letters together with a black velvet ribbon he
bought me when we first met.
It
appears in one of his poems, a poem
in which enjambment stretches from line to line like a headband
from temple to temple . From the moment 1 cut the ribbon with a
pair of scissors 1 had handy - 1 must have been intending to cut my
hair-my fall went into slow motion. As soon as 1 tore the first letter,
1 knew 1 could not retreat, and this despite the realization running
through me like a knife that 1 would regret my action, that 1 already
regretted it. Our love was now like a precious novel with pages miss–
ing, like a defective copy one returns to a bookshop. So blinded was 1
by fury and remorse that 1 could make out nothing but a blur of
stamps like a blob of red sealing wax. Since you are so at home in
Mendel Osipovich's work, you must be wondering how
he
would
have depicted the scene, this Flemish portrait with light streaming
through the curtains onto the young woman's face and hands. For
the sake of light, for the sake of the image, would he have lit a fire,
fanned its flame, opened the doors of the stove? Would he have
added a fireplace? (I had no fireplace, and the iron stove was out,
even though it was March, icy March.) 1 don't believe so. A
"transparent twilight" is all he would have needed to illuminate the
