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By Root 17677 0

’t have very much of either position or money, but who had some credit at the better clothing stores and who could be bullied by Lois. They all read Vanity Fair or Harper’s Bazaar (according to sex, and some read both) and Smart Set, and they quote Dorothy Parker, and those who had been merely to Chicago licked the spittle of those who had been to New York, and those who had been merely to New York licked the spittle of those who had been to Paris. As I say, there was nothing particularly wrong with these people, many of whom were quite agreeable and attractive. The only thing I found wrong with them, I admit as I look back, was that they were Lois’s friends. First, I developed a certain reserve in my dealings with them, then I developed an attitude with Lois defined as snotty. After one of my exhibitions Lois would try to discipline me by withholding the sweets of her gender.

That was the matter of Lois’s friends. But there was, second, the matter of Lois’s apartment. I took a distaste for the apartment. I told Lois I didn’t want to live there. That we would get a place on which I could afford to pay the rent out of my salary. We had some rows on that point, rows which I didn’t expect to win. Then the sweets would be withheld.

That was the matter of the apartment. But there was, third, the matter of my clothes and what Lois loved to call my “grooming.” I was accustomed to thirty-dollar suits, shirts that had been worn two days, a bimonthly haircut, unpolished shoes, a hat with a brim that looped and sagged, and fingernails always broken and sometimes dirty. And I regarded the habit of pressing pants as something which had not come to stay. In the early days when I looked on Lois as merely the luscious machine, I had allowed certain scarcely perceptible changes to be made in my appearance. But as I began to realize that the noises that she made with her mouth resembled human speech and were more rudimentary demands for, or expressions of gratification at, food or copulation, a certain resistance began to grow in me. And as the pressure to improve my grooming increased, so the resistance increased, too. More and more often, accustomed objects of my wardrobe disappeared, to be replaced by proclaimed or surreptitious gifts. Originally I had interpreted these gifts as springing from a misguided and love-inspired attempt to give me pleasure. In the end I understood that my pleasure was the last consideration involved. The crisis came when I polished a shoe with a new tie. A row ensued, the first of many occasioned by the divergence of our tastes in haberdashery. And the sweets would be withheld on that account.

They were withheld on many accounts. But never for very long at a stretch. Sometimes I would capitulate and apologize. My early apologies were sometimes sad and, for the moment, even sincere, though sometimes sincere with a kind of self-pity. Then later, they became masterpieces of irony, double-entendre, and histrionics, and I would lie in bed, uttering them, aware that my face in the dark was twisted into a mask of self-congratulatory cunning, bitterness, and loathing. But I wasn’t always the one to crack first, for sometimes the juice machine-Lois got the upper hand over the dry and brittle person-Lois. She might utter an invitation in a low voice tense with hatred, and then in the subsequent process avert her face from me, or if she did look at me, she would glare like a cornered animal. Or if she did not invite me, she might collapse in the heat of a scuffle which she had undertaken against me in all seriousness but which had proved too much for the dry and brittle person-Lois and had given the other Lois the upper hand. In any case, whether she cracked or I, we demonstrated, in the midst of tangled bedclothes, unspoken loathing, and the wreckage of somebody’s self-respect, that we were, as Lois had affirmed to her guests, perfectly adjusted sexually. And we were.

The fact that the adjustment was so perfect merely meant that in the end, with the deep-seated instinct for self preservation, I was consorting with common whores. I was at that time on the evening edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon. After a couple of drinks and a late lunch in a speak-easy, then a couple more drinks and a game of billiards at the press club, I might call on one of my friends. Then at dinner, if I managed to get home to dinner, and in the evening I would study Lois with a clinical detachment and a sense of mystic regeneration. It even got so that almost at will I could produce an optical illusion. I could look at Lois in a certain way and find that she seemed to be withdrawing steadily, the whole room elongating with her, until it would be as though I were staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. By this practice I gained great spiritual refreshment. I finally grew so adept at it that I could hear her voice, if it was one of her vituperative and not sullen evenings, as though it were coming from a great distance and were not, as a matter of fact, even addressed to me.