The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West Read Free Book Online

don’t fit into his life. He only tolerates me for my body. He only wants one thing from me, and I want, oh how I want, love.
    The ridiculous, the ridiculous, all day long he talks of nothing else but how ridiculous this, that, or the other thing is. And he means me. I am absurd. He is never satisfied with calling other people ridiculous, with him everything is ridiculous—himself, me. Of course I can laugh at Mother with him, or at the Hearth; but why must my own mother and home be ridiculous? I can laugh at Hobey, Joan, but I don’t want to laugh at myself. I’m tired of laugh, laugh, laugh. I want to retain some portion of myself unlaughed at. There is something in me that I won’t laugh at. I won’t. I’ll laugh at the outside world all he wants me to, but I won’t, I don’t want to laugh at my inner world. It’s all right for him to say: “Be hard! Be an intellectual! Think, don’t feel!” But I want to be soft. I want to feel. I don’t want to think. I feel blue when I think. I want to keep a hard, outside surface towards the world, and a soft, inner side for him. And I want him to do the same, so that we can be secure in each other’s love. But with his rotten, ugly jokes he keeps me at arm’s length just when I want to be confiding and tender. When I show him my soft side he laughs. I don’t want to be always on my guard against his laughter. There are times when I want to put down my armor. I am tired of eternally bearing armor against the world. Love is a merging, not an occasion for intellectual warfare. I want to enjoy my emotions. I want, sometimes, to play the child, and to make love like a child—tenderly, confidingly, prettily. I’m sick of his taunts.
    Pregnant, unmarried, and he won’t marry me. If I ask him to, he will laugh his terrible horse-laugh: “Well, my little bohemian, you want to get out of it, do you? Life, however, is Life; and the Realities are the Realities. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, you know.” He’ll tell his friends the story as a joke—one of his unexplainable jokes. All his smug-faced friends will laugh at me, especially the Paige girl.
    They don’t like me; I don’t fit in. All my life I have been a misfit—misunderstood. The carnival crowds are always hurrying past my window. As a kid, I never liked to play in the streets with the other kids; I always wanted to stay in the house and read a book. Since my father’s death, I have no one to go to with my misery. He was always willing to understand and comfort me. Oh, how I want to be understood by someone who really loves me. Mother, like Beagle, always laughs at me. If they want to be kind it is, “You silly goose!” If they are angry, “Don’t be an idiot.” Only father was sympathetic, and he is dead. I wish I were dead.
    Joan Higgins would know what to do if she were in my position—pregnant and unmarried. Joan fits into the kind of a life he and his friends lead better than I do. Like the time Joan said she had gone back to live with Hobey because it was such a bore looking for healthy men to sleep with. Joan warned me against him; she said he wasn’t my kind. I thought him just my kind, sad and a poet. He is sad, but with a nasty sadness—all jeers for his own sadness. “It’s the war. Everybody is sad nowadays. Great stuff, pessimism.” Still he is sad; if he would only stop acting we could be very happy together. I want so much to comfort him—mother him.
    Joan’s advice would probably be for me to make him marry me. How he would howl. “Make an honest girl of you, eh?”
     
    You can see the Café Carcas from the window. You are living in the Rue de la Grande Chaumiere, at the Hotel Liberia.
    Why don’t I fit in well at the Carcas? Joan would go big there. Why don’t they like me? I’m as good looking as she is, and as clever. It’s because I don’t let myself go the way she does. Well, I don’t want to. There is something fine in me that won’t let me degrade