56
PARTISAN REVIEW
escape this feeling. Like a meteor hitting water, I am engulfed after a large
explosion. I can lift my head, and, freed, shake off my timidity. She stands
there, looking at me. I
will
speak.
"It
seems as if you've been waiting for me."
"And just how is it you know me?"
"Are you busy this evening?"
"No. What do you suggest, your place?''
I close my eyes again and am completely submerged. When I raise
my head, I will be quiet, calm.
"You're pretty. Men probably don't leave you alone."
"I'm not pretty and men still don't leave me alone. Surely you can
come up with something more original."
"I doubt I could. I'll wait for you at eight. At the phone booth in
front of the theater."
"So, wait then."
There was nothing left to say. I could mumble something in another
language or mutter as if I were automatically reciting the lesson from a
previous class in some common subject that had lost any significance long
before, and in which I had lost interest.
"So tell me, before the bus comes, why you're so bored."
"You are too.
It
could be a cause for tact."
"Yes, I guess it could."
At eight, I waited by the phone booth. In front of the large glass
door, in front of her deeply cut, revealing black blouse. Her white skirt
was strewn with large red flowers.
"Where should we go?"
"To the end of the world."
"Hm . .. Is it far?"
"Two stops."
I would not admit it, but I wanted to gather all the armor and arro–
gant defenses of my daily dissatisfactions into a single, explosive dissatis–
faction that would finally catapult me beyond myself Perhaps these small
dissatisfactions had to be brought into contact with great pleasure before
they could become large and explosive. Satisfaction, dissatisfaction, the
need for them. I was afraid to open myself up, unprepared, to such an ex–
penence.
Each street corner signals a possible retreat, or at least a brief pause.
Even the slightest hesitation threatened my ability to resist despair.
We climb the stairs. Her heels clatter decisively, too decisively, on the
glass and I do not turn on the light.
It
is always too timid or too bold a
gesture and spoils everything. More than anything I dread the moral and
rhetorical effect I would then have to reckon with, and I keep silent. I
look out the window absent-mindedly and beat an imaginary rhythm in
