152
PARTISAN REVIEW
about her habits and idiosyncracies that recur from time to time.
When all of these moments are counted, he figures that three dollars
an hour is a plausible figure, even counting the bad times, of which
there was only one: when he told her he loved her and felt he coerced
her reciprocal reply. At the end of this meditative calculation he is
left wondering why , since the pain is foreknown and lasts longer
then the pleasure, one doesn't say that one won't do that again : he
has put one thousand dollars into it and come out with an old shirt,
her parting gift to him.
The narrator's reluctance to reach a conclusion in spite of his
meticulous calculations bespeaks a confusion of values, of how to
measure various things in relation to each other. His desire to find
some kind of equivalence between money expended and emotional
experience is perverse, if common. Syntactically, the same desire to
delay conclusion is expressed by the absence of those signs of com–
mencement and closure that we take so much for granted in writing
and imagine in speech: the capital and the period. A very, very long
"sentence" finally ends :
. .. you hold back and touch the edges of everything, you edge
around until you have to plunge in and finish it off, and when
you're finished, you're too weak to stand but after a while you
have to go to the bathroom and you stand, your legs are trem–
bling, you hold onto the door frames, there's a little light coming
in through the window, you can see your way in and out, but
you can't really see the bed .
The attempt here to avoid a rupture in the flow of thought that
might be caused by the punctuational and typographical signs of a
new sentence is itself a sign of distrust or defiance of formal closure;
it is echoed mimetically by the difficulty of seeing the bed, of attain–
ing one's object. Rather than being frustrating, however, the nar–
rator's myopia or delirium is understood as part of the nature of
things, against which one cannot argue. And things as they are are
bound to be unsatisfactory.
This almost willing acquiescence to the same vaguely hostile
order defined by someone else also appears in Davis's stories as sex–
ual malaise .
In
"The Letter," a woman analyzes a poem sent to her
by her exhusband , hoping to find in it some assurance of a possible
reconciliation . She finds only the smell of the ink on the paper.
