by
Joy Williams
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Each among them had to confess to a loss.
“I lost my skill at baking cakes,” one of them ventured.
“I lost a rucksack once.”
“A ring.”
“My hair.”
“My trigger finger.” The fellow raised his hand, and it was true. It was maimed. There was no trigger finger.
“My beech trees outside Lyon. Every one!”
“My driving privileges.”
“My husband.”
It was amusing how this had slipped in there, and they chuckled.
“My memory.”
They howled at this one.
“It’s true. Can’t remember…get everything mixed up!”
“You never know when the last time for anything might come!”
“Now we’re cooking,” one of the Pauls cried.
My breast…my potency…my beloved Skippy.
Time began to tear through there. Inside, their lives were passing as though in a single night. They longed for a nice Teeny-Tiny, you know, of the GIVE ME MY BONE! sort. For a spectral bridegroom or a brain on a stick, even a vampire or a cannibal. Anything but this deathly entertainment, these dreadful drinks, these hideous old gentlemen whom they were feeling more and more indebted and attached to. These Pauls, urging them on to even greater and more fearful acts of admission to loss. The time passing. The blackness pressing against the greasy windows. And the morning that had always come, delayed.
I could far more easily drive to church and spare myself the discomfort of walking through this wasteland but I am in no hurry to reach home. I never know whom I will be coming home to, whether it will be mother, father, wife or son. Often it is just my son, my boy, and matters are quite as they should be, but since the end of school things have become more volatile. We live alone, you understand, the child and I. He’s nine, and the changes in this decade have been unfathomable. Indeed, it’s a different civilization now. My parents, with whom we were very close, died last year. My wife left in the spring. She just couldn’t feel anything for us anymore, she said, and was only trying to salvage the bit of life she could.
It’s as though he is answering the very question posed at Come and See! I took him there once. Sometimes someone brings a child or grandchild, it’s not unheard of. He listened attentively. No one expected him to contribute and everyone found him adorable. “Don’t ever take me into that stupid room again,” he later instructed me.
she's good at this sort of thing. the (dialectical?) reversal
The week passes. Colson has a tutor in mathematics for the summer who is oblivious to the situation and I have the office I’m obliged to occupy. Colson wants to be an engineer or an architect but he has difficulty with concepts of scale and measurability. The tutor claims he’s progressing nicely but Colson never talks about these hours, only stubbornly reiterates his desire to create soaring nonutilitarian spaces.
heh
The room was not welcoming. It had seen too many people come and go. It was wearying to be constantly reminded that time passes and everything with it, purposelessly.
[...] Sometimes talk, which for a barman means I listen while he throws out sentences that don't always know where they're going, about his life, his career, his children. [...]
relevant to valet story?
[...] You really are a useful thing in other people's lives when you're a barman. The customers don't realize it outright, of course, but when all's said and done, in good times and bad, there's always a bar in their lives, and a barman, a bit wizened but very professional, to serve them whatever they want, and then when they're done they snap out of their little reverie, unless they've been thinking of nothing at all, and when it comes time to go the barman has told them thank you, good-bye, and have a good day. [...]
After all these years as a barman, everyone I know's in my own line of work. My friend Roger, my friend Pierrot, and then the others. They come and go, for the most part. Let the world turn around us, beyond our spotless bars, in the end every day will be carefully wiped away to make room for the next. [...]
[...] I'd run around with a lot of women when I was younger, before and after my divorce, and I'd worked in Paris bars a week at a time. I'd even done a season at a vacation club in Agadir because of a love affair that hadn't worked out, a woman from Bois-Colombes. I wanted to marry her. [...]
(going through paystubs)
We have our own images of ourselves and our fellow workers as diverse as the characters that generate them. I am known as Big Red, and I've worked ships for fifteen years, along with Flugo, the Commander, Strong Arm Louie, the Old Ranger, Crazy Jack, Moanin' Jack, Drugstore Larry, Bicycle Larry, Shovel Mouth, and Hardrock. All of them are good storytellers, and every name has a story. Some are veterans of the Big Strike in 1934 or the sociopolitical causes that are a part of our union history. They all taught me that progress and change are not products, created by wizards with T-squares, but processes.