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Show /ot t's birthday because they knew Wallace Stevens' poem about the i with the blue guitar-even her most private gift of love was one-lanship. he looked at Milt. "I didn't make any choice for him. I didn't that racist cop for just one reason-so / wouldn't feel guilty." lut she hadn't known how true that was until she said it, and uptly she started from her chair and ran into the bathroom. She the seat up just in time. Later, undressing in the bedroom and hearing him in the bathroom ining water, she felt a curious unreality to being in this place, to ing with this man. She felt as detached as if she watched some other I taking off her dress in a strange man's apartment, but when she mapped her bra, freeing her breasts, abruptly she knew the past sgone, any safety of childhood, any thoughtless teen-age joy. She sineversibly a woman, but about that she felt only crushingly tired d depressed. Undressed now, she looked down at her body, noting (personally that her skin was very white, in the artificial light a lid-looking white. The body itself meant little to her, did not seem jiticularly attractive, and it occurred to her that men made a lot ol is about not much, that sex was mostly a matter of status and pride, nd while she stood there looking at herself as she might at an unin-resting chair with a high price tag, she remembered the young po- [eman's appraisal of her body, his eyes brutally taking in the sex-ling before him. Remembered too her answering erotic tingle, and a rill swept over her, raising and puckering her skin in ugly gooseflesh, id abruptly her body repelled her, this dying animal with its gro-sque functional bulges, its patches of immaterial hair. She got into rclfrom habit because they slept naked as they thought lovers should lid lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Now she knew. He came to bed almost cheerfully. He had followed her into the bthroom, had held her forehead, had flushed away the stinking mess, W drawn water for her to rinse her mouth with. When she had liengthless sunk to the floor, overwhelmed by how rotten she was, lown to the very core of her, he had knelt beside her and held her |W to him, comforting her, in an attempt to comfort her further lith his soft mocking voice saying: "Look as us, typical Americans, "lour knees before the plumbing." But with him all tenderness to cipher, she could not bear him; he was cheered by her smile only be-anse he did not know how mirthless she felt, that she smiled only to 'ilemma 175 |
