The Abyss of Human Illusion Read Free Page B

the coffee can in the refrigerator of the wretched St. Louis apartment in which they lived, all the money that they had. Nobody who had known them in New York ever discovered why they had moved to St. Louis, and when the young woman returned, bitter and humiliated, to her husband and two older children, she never told them, except for some vague references to “teaching jobs.” Her husband, perhaps understandably, treated the new child as if he were a demanding visitor who would soon miraculously disappear. As for his wife, he thought of her as a stupid maid whom he occasionally and quite gently, he thought, raped.

— XVI —
    I n the winter of that year, after his post-basic training leave, he took a train to San Antonio, to report for duty at Fort Sam Houston; he would be there for three months, at the Medical Field Service School, for advanced training. On the train, he discovered that the club car was painted a pale rose; its armchairs were a soft feathery blue. A girl came in and he and she began to talk. It was very late and they were alone in the car and quite comfortable together. The train drove through the darkness, and the promise of kisses lay in every dim corner.
    After a time, the girl closed her eyes to the night rushing by outside the windows, the silent night in which black demons and black wolves ran silently through the black countryside. The train crashed on through the darkness.
    He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek, then her ear, then put his lips in a light spidery touch on her neck, first at her hairline, then down to the collar of her dress. How sweet she smelled.
    “It feels like a spider,” she said, “so soft and light. You’d better catch it.” He took a long time finding that spider; for the little monster roamed everywhere under her clothes, everywhere.
    The next morning, at sunrise, the train pulled into Dallas and she got off. He waved to her from his coach window, but she pretended not to see him. The sky was turning rose and blue.

— XVII —
    H e wasn’t intrinsically contemptible, yet there was no way, it seemed, that he could avoid being thought of with contempt, at least not by those who got to know him, men and women alike. There was a sweetness about him, an attractive innocence, when he forgot what he thought he was supposed to be; what, it sometimes appeared, he had been mysteriously instructed to be. But these instances of candor were few and short-lived.
    Most of the time he was at his worst, and this worst always manifested itself in the same way: he flagrantly and openly and with a kind of nauseating pride—real or constructed—insisted on boasting of his flaws and faults as if they were virtues.
    To note a pedestrian example of his irritating pretensions: he rarely combed or brushed his hair and, even more rarely, shampooed it; so that it was a greasy, matted tangle that smelled of rancid and sour fat. This aberration, which he would, of course, call attention to, would too, without fail, prompt him to remark that this was the way of Greek warriors, the way that Odysseus and Achilles dressed their hair. He used the word, “dressed.” It was this sort of thing, this sort of foolish affectation that made him an object of contempt, sometimes seasoned with a vague pity.
    When he died, rather suddenly, of a heart attack, nobody really cared, although there were the usual insincere obsequies. But someone said, in a fair imitation of his voice, “Death is a groove, man!”

— XVIII —
    S he was an old woman now, as he was an old man, and seeing her made him realize just how old he really, as they say, was. He thought of her as she looked, God, forty-five years ago?, as she looked on the night that he and she had surrendered to their desire for each other, a surrender nicely camouflaged by and blamed on their having had “too much to drink.” But he knew the truth and so did she. From that moment on, he relegated their lapse to the simplest of reasons, lust and