“You’ve left out a hatred for hypocrisy,” said Olga, with the same abstracted indifference to words and the same instinctive cunning at piecing them together. “Some of the people who have been flaying you alive walked up to you to-night with outstretched hands and congratulations. And I felt the emotion of one too tired to have more than a twinge of disgust.”
“It requires no effort to be stoical to this joke,” said Carl. “The masks are too exquisitely futile to become interesting unless, indeed, they attain a moment of dextrous humor.”
Jenesco and Murovitch, who had been disputing in a corner of the studio, walked over and offered a belated introduction.
“Sorry to interrupt love scene, but maybe you do not know names of each other,” said Murovitch in his deliberate, shattered English. “Names tell people how much like nothing they are. But maybe both of you want to be somebody, in which case it is wise to pity you.”
“You have a crudely spontaneous imagination—it spies love scenes and vacuums with a truly lumbering swiftness,” said Carl, annoyed at the interruption.
Murovitch laughed—he had made a religion of giving and receiving heavy blows and it made an excellent screen for his inner timidities.
“I like your frankness. It reminds me of a heavy negro. It’s black and excited,” said Olga.
“Felman’s complexion is a little dirty itself,” said Murovitch, defiling his saint-like face with a prearranged grin.
As Carl and Olga walked to the studio where she was living with a woman friend, she told him some of the immediate facts of her life, as though clearing away an opaquely intruding rubbish.
“I’m working now as a waitress in a little cafeteria on Winthrop street. Eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. Two afternoons a week off. These burns on my hands come from the hot coffee. On the two afternoons I write poetry. My body, you see, passes into a less visible conduct, and thoughts rattle more effectively than china cups. Then, on the next morning, I am forced to recollect that life is in a continual conspiracy to prevent this transformation of manners. The plates are once more held up. Beans and roast beef refuse to betray the secret.”