the matchbooks into tight little wads and then opening them
up all softened and tearing them into little pieces, and then I
began to tear the fetid butts into pieces by tearing off the paper
and rolling the burnt tobacco between my palms which were
tight and wretched with strain and perspiration and I was
making little piles of torn papers and torn matchbooks and
torn cigarette packs but not touching the cellophane (he was
talking), and making the little piles as high as I could and
watching them intently, staring, as if their construction were a
matter of symmetry and perfection and indisputable necessity
and it required concentration and this was my job. During this
we talked, of course mostly he talked, because I was there to
be talked to, and have certain things explained, and to be
corrected, especially to be set right, because I had gone all
wrong, gotten all Dostoyevsky-like in the land of such writing
as “ Ten New Ways to Put on Lipstick” and “ The Truth About
How to be Intimate with Strangers. ” Coitus was what?
In the rain we walked to another restaurant, to dinner. Oh,
he had liked me. I had done all right.
*
When I walked into the coffeehouse, he knew me right away.
The mountain of thigh, not any other kind of fame. The place
was wet, smelly, crowded, and I had picked it, it resembled me,
not modest, dank, a certain smell of decay. The other women
huddled themselves in, bent shoulders, suddenly, treacherously lowered heads that threatened to fall off their necks, tight little legs wrapped together like Christmas packages,
slumping down, twisting in, even the big ones didn’t dare
spread out but instead held their breath, pulled in their
tummies, scrunched their mouths, used their shoulders to cover
their chests, crossed their ankles, crossed their feet, crossed
their legs, kept their hands lying quietly under the tabletops,
didn’t show teeth, moved noiselessly, melted in with the gray
9Z
and the mud and the wet, except for some flaming lips: and no
monumental laughs, no sonorous discourse, no loud epis-
temology, no boom boom boom: the truth. I wanted to
whimper and contract, fold up, shrivel to some version of
pleasing nothing, sound the call: it’s all finished, she gives up, no
one’s here, out to lunch, empty, smelly, noiseless, folded up.
But I would have had to prepare, study, start earlier in the
day, come from a warmer apartment into a cleaner coffeehouse, be dry, not wear the ancient denim articles of an old faith, witnesses, remembrances, proofs, evidences of times without such silly rules. He stood, nodded, smiled, pointed to the seat, I sat, he gave me a cigarette, I smoked, I drank coffee, he
talked, I listened, he talked, I built castles out of paper on
tabletops, he talked, oh, I was so quiet, so soft, all brazen
thigh to the naked eye, to his dead and ugly eye, but inside I
wanted him to see inside I was all aquiver, all tremble and
dainty, all worried and afraid, nervy and a pale invalid, all
pathetic need contaminated by intellect that was like wild
