But what really eats at you, as you stand there looking at a face that’s no longer young, a face that’s smiling (boldly, bashfully) up at you in the half-dark, isn’t actually the fact that her beauty’s fading (if she was even attractive to begin with), no, it’s the realization that the very same processes are at work in your own face (though in your case they’re much more advanced), though it’s not the fact that you’re no longer so easy on the eye that bothers you, not at all, instead it’s the nagging feeling that something important has been left undone, something it’s too late to do anything about, something (you’ve got no idea what) it’s too late to do over, something for which it’s just too late in generaclass="underline" a dreamlike scene is playing in your head, you’re walking down the main street of a small town, and as you’re passing by, each shop on the street locks its doors, one by one they lock their doors, close their shutters, and bar their windows, and after you’ve passed by each one you remember something that you needed, something that it was absolutely necessary to pick up, and it’ll take forever to reach the next corner store, and as you’re standing in the middle of an empty, windswept street on the far side of town, you realize you’re lacking everything, no, not everything, but the most important things, you lack the most important things. However, the allegorical distance of that dream image or parable can’t begin to express the raw pain you feel at this thought.
Did it hurt? You shake your head, bite your lip, and hobble resolutely on, since you were clumsy enough to bang your knee against the paper delivery cart. Insisting on taking a look, though, she grabs your leg, pushes up your pants (you’re suddenly conscious there’s an icy wind blowing) and examines your knee; imprisoned (by your own politeness, not by her physical strength) between her hands, you feel the icy touch of a late summer or early fall breeze against your leg (her hands are strangely warm, and you have to admit you like it); you glance around, because you haven’t forgotten that you’re too old for all this nonsense, but when you don’t see anyone, you let your hands rest against her head while you contemplate the distant hills, which are nothing more than dark silhouettes against the royal blue western sky, where the last slivers of daylight are (seemingly) being compressed into one thin, pale, glossy strip, like the fatty rind on a blue, celestial piece of pork, as if they’re being squeezed together by the massive weight of the oncoming dark, until the fatty rind of day between the hills and the sky finally disappears.
A short pause. Then a new unisonous round of laughter breaks out from the outdoor restaurant, though softer this time, and then all is relatively still. You can feel her breath on your injured knee, right before she kisses it, and you wonder what it’d be like if her hands and her lips were touching you now, you feel the pain in your knee subside, only to be replaced by the uncomfortable sensation of naked skin exposed to the icy air (a feeling made substantially worse by her drying saliva), and you tell her that everything’s fine now, and she believes you; she lets your wide pant leg fall of its own accord, gently pats your knee, and says with mock solemnity, What would your wife think about all this? but regrets it immediately and adds with drunken sobriety, That was stupid of me (you glance in surprise at your wedding ring, as if you’re objectively trying to confirm your married state; after a moment, it no longer interests you), and you answer No, she’d say (you distort your voice, imitate a drill sergeant’s in falsetto): Go back there and bang your knee against that cart again so I can see exactly how it happened and we can avoid these episodes in the future I’ve got enough on my plate already you know and to top it all off I have a terrible headache; and through the sound of your loud, drunken hyperbole, you can hear how spiteful the words are, but she snickers with half-suppressed delight, or with schadenfreude (the laughter seems too young for her, like she’s put on a little girl’s pair of jeans, which have been covered with the names of her idols), just like what you’d expect from an amateur theater’s overly enthusiastic, naïve local audience. You (implicitly) believe the world’s a stage, but you also find that statement deceptive, that the idea implies too much professionalism, amateur theater is what the world’s about, where every role is played in the same clumsy way, both suave and crass, overplayed and understated, frenetic and phlegmatic, rigid and unrooted, insulting to the eyes and ears, which gives rise to the discouraging feeling of having seen too much and too little, because the actors expose themselves in embarrassing ways while at the same time remaining inaccessible, as if they’re dressed in suits of armor, unable to really accomplish a single thing, blundering through life, and, you think, the attempt to challenge stereotypes is the greatest stereotype of all, the obsessively modish businessman, say, who stinks of expensive aftershave and grips his briefcase bravely, who has a head full of trite, pseudo-philosophical phrases that assure him that making money requires real genius, that guy’s just as laughably ridiculous as the righteously indignant student revolutionary, who out of pure ignorance dons dirty rags, which are like a badge of rank, and screams for attention from his much-mourned, imaginary, hyper-conformist, disciplinarian dad, who never got around to giving him a good, sound spanking; only pain and disgust and doubt and sorrow and fear are convincing, though they’re never expressed, you think, they stay locked inside a person, like a flock of stuffed vultures that only come alive when nobody’s looking at them (the vultures, that is), or possibly, on occasion, if fleetingly, when their victim forgets to look at himself.
What if I’m dangerous? you ask, and she says, Yeah, no one can see us down here in the dark. The wind is seriously picking up. The treetops (visible in silhouette against the sky) cast themselves back and forth, sometimes all in unison, in the same direction, other times asymmetrically, bowed in all different directions (as if a gigantic, invisible hand were ruffling a green patch of fur); caught by various eddies and currents of wind, the trees are blown this way and that, and the trunks and branches demonstrate varying elasticity, all of which makes for a surprisingly dramatic show, and the only elements missing from the scene, you think, are flashes of lightning, peals of thunder, and pelting rain, although in reality there’s very little sound save the hum of a car passing somewhere in the distance, and the sigh of the wind up above you.
The path is man-made, that much is obvious, it twists, turns, and slithers down the hillside in hairpin curves; low, steep mounds of dirt piled along the side are meant to keep you from sliding off, effectively giving the whole thing (to the extent that you can see it in the dark) a rustic, old-fashioned appeal. The path itself is covered in fine, hard-packed gravel, though where the gradient is especially variable steps have been cut into the earth and branches laid across them; this particular footpath (the word definitely has romantic undertones) is so steep, narrow, and irregular that you can’t walk it with your arms thrown around each other, locked in an embrace (so to speak), especially not when you’re drunk, so you have to content yourselves with holding hands, helping each other to maintain balance, yanking each other back where necessary, making the descent by fits and starts, sometimes with her in front and you behind, sometimes with you in front and her behind; she might suddenly trip and grab your jacket for support, forcing you to grab a tree branch to keep from going down, and it’s while you’re hanging in the balance, so to speak, wobbling in place, semaphoring with your arms, or more precisely, when you’ve just regained your balance, that she says Do you think you could fall in love with me? (you realize you’d answer her immediately, if she were to ask, but that won’t happen; this isn’t her, and so you answer:) Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that, but she isn’t listening, she just continues, You either will or you won’t there’s no point in discussing it further I think if left to themselves every single person would be screaming to high Heaven for someone to love if they could if they dared after all if you were lost in the forest and terrified you’d call out for someone anyone and hope they’d hear you no I don’t mean anyone but. and during this painful emotional diatribe, you glance up at the sky and see the silhouettes of trees cast back and fort, though down where you are there’s hardly any wind, it’s as if a cataclysmic event is taking place up there in the leaves, something wild, crazy, something that’s got nothing to do with you at all, like a news report about a hurricane hitting a foreign coast, and between the erratically waving branches you catch sight of a large passenger jet, or rather the lights from a large passenger jet, some static, some blinking, some red, some white, and when she finally quits talking, you can even hear the sound of its engine.