Unfinished as these boys beside me are, they are sufficient, just like the boys I knew as a girl, though in the present we're divided by period or time or generation and age, but it also doesn't matter what has separated us when I listen to them and watch the TV in its cozy, habitual corner, and yet don't hear much, either. I'm seriously considering inquiring of the cafe owner if I can buy the chair I'm sitting on, a precious, valuable misfit in this bizarre room, with its chaotic accumulation of chairs, more like a scattering of mismatched shoes, where everything is helter skelter. The boys' sincere discussion of their college friends in trouble with the law, or some dropouts like them, or kids broken by excoriating love, instigates blurred snapshots of fast cars on stoned streets, greasy-haired girls and bearded, hunky guys, and I say, "When she was young, Leslie Van Houten supposedly beat her adopted younger sister with a shoe," and the kitchen helper asks who Leslie Van Houten is, and I realize, or acknowledge, that I have reached the age when I have to tell everything I know.
There was still less light in the room, and the mild darkness incited the past to recur as a sequence of sepia-tinted slides on the room's brown walls, and the faces of the boys melted into those warm walls. I warmed to my subject, my skin rosy with passion and heat, and explained: "Some Americans think it was Manson who ended the 1960s, along with a rock concert at Altamont, where the Rolling Stones sang and the Hell's Angels acted as cops, and they stabbed to death a black man right in front of the stage. Everyone who hated the protests against the war"-"which war," the skinny boy asks; "Vietnam," I say-"and civil rights, women's rights, sexual liberation"-at this they all leaned toward me-"just lots of people think Manson's gang and those murders, their murder spree, sum it up, that's what the Sixties were. So because of that, Leslie Van Houten will probably never get out of jail. Even though people who murder, and she was just an accomplice, usually get out in seven years. She looks like a secretary now, she's had a lot of sun. She's in jail in California, and you can tell from her skin, she doesn't protect it, not that I would either, probably, in jail for life, except for a fear of skin cancer. She's been up for parole at least fourteen times. Most recently the judge tried to help her, but she'll never be forgiven."
It's not just history to me the way it is to them, but they listen with some curiosity, their bodies ever restless, shifting with nowhere to go, but now my coffee cup is empty, and I might also be finished, while the kitchen helper's presence has turned as insubstantial as a leaf fallen on the ground. I believe I'll soon leave his long, strong legs and beguiling vulnerability, since even desire can't keep me, though I'd like it to, because what then keeps me anywhere, except duty or obligation, though I'm not sure to what, but when I watch him, I don't feel the lust I want, and instead rise to ask the cafe owner about the Prouve chair. Bemused, he says he'll think about it, that I should return, but I bet he won't let me buy it because he's cunning and knows it's worth a lot. The kitchen helper looks at me, confused and muted with abstract longing, and I could rent a room in an historic inn, where I might stumble upon the Polish aesthetician and her friends, and invite him into it, to disappear with me for a time, and he might, he would, and now I think it's either the chair or him, since both could provide comfort or be a distraction from what I believe I must accomplish. Near the bar, where the cafe owner looms over the cozy, light-deprived room, in his 18th century gear, a frail woman with red ridges on her thin face, which mark it like rings on a tree trunk, remarks adamantly to her balefully attentive female companion, "If I had the money, I'd have my entire face planed." Her skin shouts of that rough adolescence my dermatologist explicated, her teenaged years spent buying pimple concealers to cover unsightly red bumps and holes, picked at with furious hands and nails raking the skin, and her sobbing in a bedroom in a modest two-story house near here.
Opening the cafe door brought me to near-collision with the odd inquisitive woman from the residents' library, who was, like the kitchen helper, on a bicycle, but hers was rickety, as she herself might be described, and when she was forced to slow down and jump off it, rolled her bike near to me, and I became aware of the blotchiness of her skin against the dove-gray sky. She, flustered from her sudden stop, declared:
— Some people are full of hate. Have you thought about it?
— 1 think about hate, I say.
— What do you think?
— I don't know, I don't know you. Or, are you also still talking about men?
— You're waiting for what kind of other information about people?
— There are other subjects than men, but the way you put it the other day, men are important. Some people are filled with hate. I've known some.
— Yes, they are. Listen, you don't know what's what. I can see that right off. Look at the sky!