There is something basically disgusting about needing an audience. The finest performers give us the impression that they would be behaving just the same if they were alone. The charm of a child is strongest when it prattles, unselfconscious, unaware of being observed. But the same child at the same game seems sly, unpleasantly precocious, and self-serving when we see that it knows we are watching. The ancient suspicion of actors, the denigration of their morals and the general disdain for their psychic makeup (insecure, suffering from massive inferiority complexes, no personality of their own, egotistical) all derive from that dependence on the audience, despite the specifying of their intentions by the formal act of stepping onto a stage. It is, I propose, the basic wariness of all those things that smack of duplicity. Doing something not for its own sake but for the sake of attention or approval is dishonest and considered showing off. Then, too, we despise that which is dependent, weak, cowardly.

Ray, in his tidiness, in his ingrained decency, left after the debacle. His retreat dispelled my fantasies of a righteous attack and left me alone with the drip of my own slime. If he had not been there, I would have conceived of saying, wished to say, and perhaps bragged to friends of having said, all the same cruel phrases without ever muttering a syllable in actuality. The thought and the deed bearing totally dissimilar consequences in real life, these ephemerals would have distracted not an iota from my self-esteem. Faced with Clancy alone I might have elicited the same account of her relations with my friend Dusty in precisely the same way, ushered her out with the warm sentiments of alliance and avoided her and the man forever after. That smarmy bit of grande dame behavior would have been a satisfaction. Instead I have this fewmet of the craven bully to carry, tucked inside my helmet, melting down my neck in the sun, and cascading chills in the rain.