Miss Lonelyhearts Read Free Page A

handle and he was
unable to cut through the matted wool.
    Their hands were covered with slimy
blood and the lamb slipped free. It crawled off into the underbrush.
    As the bright sun outlined the altar
rock with narrow shadows, the scene appeared to gather itself for some new
violence. They bolted. Down the hill they fled until they reached the meadow,
where they fell exhausted in the tall grass.
    After some time had passed, Miss Lonelyhearts begged them to go back and put the lamb out of
its misery. They refused to go. He went back alone and found it under a bush.
He crushed its head with a stone and left the carcass to the flies that swarmed
around the bloody altar flowers.

 
MISS LONELYHEARTS AND THE FAT THUMB
     
    Miss Lonelyhearts found himself developing an almost insane
sensitiveness to order. Everything had to form a pattern: the shoes under the
bed, the ties in the holder, the pencils on the table.
When he looked out of a window, he composed the skyline by balancing one
building against another. If a bird flew across this arrangement, he closed his
eyes angrily until it was gone.
    For a little while, he seemed to
hold his own but one day he found himself with his back to the wall. On that
day all the inanimate things over which he had tried to obtain control took the
field against him. When he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the
floor. The collar buttons disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil
broke, the handle of the razor fell off, the window
shade refused to stay down. He fought back, but with too much violence, and was
decisively defeated by the spring of the alarm clock.
    He fled to the street, but there
chaos was multiple. Broken groups of people hurried past, forming neither stars
nor squares. The lamp-posts were badly spaced and the flagging was of different
sizes. Nor could he do anything with the harsh clanging sound of street cars
and the raw shouts of hucksters. No repeated group of words would fit their
rhythm and no scale could give them meaning.
    He stood quietly against a wall,
trying not to see or hear. Then he remembered Betty. She had often made him
feel that when she straightened his tie, she straightened much more. And he had
once thought that if her world were larger, were the world, she might order it
as finally as the objects on her dressing table.
    He gave Betty's address to a cab
driver and told him to hurry. But she lived on the other side of the city and
by the time he got there, his panic had turned to irritation.
    She came to the door of her
apartment in a crisp, white linen dressing-robe that yellowed into brown at the
edges. She held out both her hands to him and her arms showed round and smooth
like wood that has been turned by the sea.
    With the return of
self-consciousness, he knew that only violence could make him supple. It was
Betty, however, that he criticized. Her world was not the world and could never
include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit
experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her
order was not.
    He tried to reply to her greeting
and discovered that his tongue had become a fat thumb. To avoid talking, he
awkwardly forced a kiss, then found it necessary to
apologize.
    "Too much lover's return
business, I know, and I..." he stumbled purposely, so that she would take
his confusion for honest feeling. But the trick failed and she waited for him
to continue:
    "Please eat dinner with
me."
    "I'm afraid I can't."
    Her smile opened into a laugh.
    She was laughing at him. On the
defense, he examined her laugh for "bitterness," "sour-grapes,"
"a-broken-heart," "the devil-may-care." But to his
confusion, he found nothing at which to laugh back. Her smile had opened
naturally, not like an umbrella, and while he watched her laugh folded and
became a smile again, a smile that was neither "wry,"
"ironical" nor "mysterious."
    As they moved into the living-room,
his irritation increased. She sat