540
PARTISAN REVIEW
But everyone drank a lot then; these days if you invite people to dinner or a
party, the amount of alcohol drunk is a tenth of what it was then. He drives
me home and says, "I'm sorry, I can't make it, I'm too drunk." Yet there had
not been a flicker of sexual interest between us. I am furious. The oaf. The
idiot. The conceited fool. The story "One Off the Short List" is apropos.
I look back and see myself, a forthright, frank young woman, often
tactless out of a genuine outrage at what I still saw as dishonesty. I despised
all female ruses, as insults to real friendship, to humanity, and to human–
ism itself. I would have scorned to play hard to get, to coquette, play hot
and cold. I would say this is generally true of the Western female, but I was
also a colonial and even more liberated from the hypocritical shackles of
the past-as I saw it. A comradely equality, that was my style, easy friend–
liness, even intimacy.
To see the difference between liberated Western girls and, let's say,
Indians, one only has to spend an hour in a mixed group and watch the
languishing eyes, deep glances, sighs, little fluttering withdrawals, coquet–
tish veils and scarves always at their work.
It
is not that such operators do
not exist in the West, and when she appears then the liberated ones have
to stand back helpless and watch men fall before her, for the traditional
dishonesties are based on the soundest knowledge of male and female
nature. A woman playing hot and cold is at the oldest and most success–
ful game in the world-the rules are admirably set forth in Stendhal's
Love.
But how can one enjoy that ideal, perfect,
honest,
loving friendship
with a man on whom you are playing such tricks? And yet for some
women these aren't tricks, they're doing what comes naturally...and so we
go around and around.
With Western women, particularly the English, men don't know where
they are: except those men with an instinctive understanding of women,
with whom one immediately sets up a current of happy complicity.
To put an end to this flounder in marshy waters: the comradely and
helpful equali ty meant that (means that) a man may think a woman is in
love wi th him--simply because he has been adrni tted into an easy intimacy–
and may rejoice or run a mile. But equally, since she is still a woman and
full of a certain residual shyness underneath all that friendliness, she may
be madly in love with him and he never suspects it.
I look back on tangles of misunderstanding. Men who I liked, with
whom I intended friendshi p, imagined I was in love and were confused
when refused, became huffY, were hurt:
Why
did she lead me on?
Men whom
I hoped would see I fancied them did not know it, since the signs were so
well camouflaged by general mateyness. The free-and-easy, anything goes
of the fifties, and then the sixties, obscured genuine emotions, attractions,
repulsions. If there is a convention that easy sex is a sign of general libera-
