He passed what she believed to be from one mimicry to another: the pompous policeman, for which he filled his lungs with air, the sinuosities of the woman walking in front of them, for which he tangoed his hips.

Sabina was still laughing, wondering when the charades would end and the true Donald appear.

At this moment, in front of her at the restaurant table he was ordering with the exaggerated tyranny of the business executive, or he became prim with the salesgirl like a statesman with little time for charm. He ridiculed women in their cycles of periodic irrationality with an exact reproduction of whims, contrariness, and commented on the foibles of fashion with a minute expertness Sabina lacked. He made her doubt her femininity by the greater miniature precision of his miniature interests. His love of small roses, of delicate jewelry seemed more feminine than her barbaric heavy necklaces and her dislike of small flowers and nursery pastel blues.

At any moment, she believed, this playfulness would cease, he would stand more erect and laugh with her at his own absurdities of dress, a shirt the color of her dress, a baroque watch, a woman's billfold, or a strand of hair dyed silver gray on his young luxuriant gold head.

But he continued to assume mock professions, to mock all of them. Above all, he possessed a most elaborate encyclopedia of women's flaws. In this gallery he had most carefully avoided Joan of Arc and other women heroines, Madame Curie and other women of science, the Florence Nightingales, the Amelia Earharts, the women surgeons, the therapists, the artists, the collaborative wives. His wax figures of women were an endless concentrate of puerilities and treacheries.

"Where did you find all these repulsive women?" she asked one day, and then suddenly she could no longer laugh: caricature was a form of hatred.

In his gentleness lay his greatest treachery. His submission and gentleness lulled one while he collected material for future satires. His glance always came from below as if he were still looking up at the monumental figures of the parents from a child's vantage point. These immense tyrants could only be undermined with the subtlest parody: the mother, his mother, with her flurry of feathers and furs, always preoccupied with people of no importance, while he wept with loneliness and fought the incubus of nightmares alone.

She danced, she flirted, she whined, she whirled without devotion to his sorrows. Her caressing voice contained all the tormenting contradictions: the voice read him fairy tales, and when he believed them and proceeded to pattern his life after them, this same voice gave an acid bath to all his wishes, longings, desires, and distributed words worse than a slap, a closed door or dessertless dinner.