endowed by nature in that way, and certainly not these days when I’m going to pieces in all directions, but finally all it takes is the littlest thing and you’re in the sack. She wets her lips with the gin, I shake my glass to make the ice cubes clink. We smile at each other. The content of this evening is not yet clear. A waiter sets a saucer of shelled pistachios on the counter. “Do you still see Lionel?” she asks. Shelled pistachios, wonderful, I think to myself. “Still. And you?” I take a handful and pop them in my mouth. I’ll never know what Genevieve’s answer was because my teeth, all set to encounter something with the gentle bite of almonds, have just met an unexpected resistance that is completely and instantaneously disorientating. Simultaneously a glance at the saucer confirms the ghastly truth. I’m in the process of crunching spat-out olive pits.
It’s not true, I think, it can’t be true. I make a face and spit everything back into the saucer, I take a gulp of whisky—there was foresight in that order—and gargle it noisily, then another gulp, and another, seized with the uncontrollable need to disinfect myself. Genevieve, who hasn’t been following all this, stares at me dumbstruck. Between two doses of mouthwash and grimaces of disgust, I point to the saucer and the pits. “My poor friend,” she cries, helpless with laughter. “That’s horrible.” As I glance out of the corner of my eye at the scary clientele of this place, fat sauerkraut-eaters and beer guzzlers, provincial wrecks with grease-smeared mouths, i.e., the assembled pitspitters, it’s her laugh once again that delivers both me and our dinner from everyday wretchedness and its ordinary slot in time.
“I would never have thought,” she says once we’ve been seated at our table, “I would never have thought you’d be the kind of man who’d shut himself off in a house. Let alone the kind of man who’d take up gardening.”
“Nancy, my second wife, inherited a house in the Marne from her father. We used to go there from time to time. There are a lot of woods in the area. I like woods. On my side of the family we never had a particular place, I didn’t know what it was to become attached to a landscape by habit, walking through familiar trees, walking the same ground, the only variation being a little more to the right or to the left, or taking the longer way round or the shorter. I liked going back there. One day I bought a weeping willow at a tree nursery, then some privet that I planted in the garden every which way. I didn’t want to learn, I wanted to create. I dug little holes when what was needed was a hole ten times the size of the root ball, I went mad for manure, things to amend the soil, peat, I spread three bags of manure where one was required, telling myself it was better, I bungled around, I burned everything, but life had substance.”
“And rue Ampère?”
“I’m still there. A few days a week.”
I tell her I’m still there a few days a week and for the second time that day I feel the black wing of desolation unfurl and settle over me. Is it alcohol that makes the phrase so painful? A few days a week, and for how long? Am I shut off from the future forever? How did it happen? I hate the days. Where are the days, the real days? Stagnation is killing me.
“This is my life. A few days in rue Ampère, a few days in the Marne, rue Ampère, Marne, the stock exchange, the garden. The ancients used to go off on wars of conquest to ward off tedium. Conquest versus tedium, the bloodied saber versus unendurable peace. Me, I take the train to Châlons and plunge into GardenEarth to buy a manure pitchfork or my umpteenth sprayer. Genevieve, my friend, Genevieve, let’s use this evening to fight the grayness of existence. This morning I was thumbing through a magazine article about the correspondence of a Nobel Prize–winning Japanese writer and Oz, the Israeli writer (my daughter wants to cultivate
It’s not true, I think, it can’t be true. I make a face and spit everything back into the saucer, I take a gulp of whisky—there was foresight in that order—and gargle it noisily, then another gulp, and another, seized with the uncontrollable need to disinfect myself. Genevieve, who hasn’t been following all this, stares at me dumbstruck. Between two doses of mouthwash and grimaces of disgust, I point to the saucer and the pits. “My poor friend,” she cries, helpless with laughter. “That’s horrible.” As I glance out of the corner of my eye at the scary clientele of this place, fat sauerkraut-eaters and beer guzzlers, provincial wrecks with grease-smeared mouths, i.e., the assembled pitspitters, it’s her laugh once again that delivers both me and our dinner from everyday wretchedness and its ordinary slot in time.
“I would never have thought,” she says once we’ve been seated at our table, “I would never have thought you’d be the kind of man who’d shut himself off in a house. Let alone the kind of man who’d take up gardening.”
“Nancy, my second wife, inherited a house in the Marne from her father. We used to go there from time to time. There are a lot of woods in the area. I like woods. On my side of the family we never had a particular place, I didn’t know what it was to become attached to a landscape by habit, walking through familiar trees, walking the same ground, the only variation being a little more to the right or to the left, or taking the longer way round or the shorter. I liked going back there. One day I bought a weeping willow at a tree nursery, then some privet that I planted in the garden every which way. I didn’t want to learn, I wanted to create. I dug little holes when what was needed was a hole ten times the size of the root ball, I went mad for manure, things to amend the soil, peat, I spread three bags of manure where one was required, telling myself it was better, I bungled around, I burned everything, but life had substance.”
“And rue Ampère?”
“I’m still there. A few days a week.”
I tell her I’m still there a few days a week and for the second time that day I feel the black wing of desolation unfurl and settle over me. Is it alcohol that makes the phrase so painful? A few days a week, and for how long? Am I shut off from the future forever? How did it happen? I hate the days. Where are the days, the real days? Stagnation is killing me.
“This is my life. A few days in rue Ampère, a few days in the Marne, rue Ampère, Marne, the stock exchange, the garden. The ancients used to go off on wars of conquest to ward off tedium. Conquest versus tedium, the bloodied saber versus unendurable peace. Me, I take the train to Châlons and plunge into GardenEarth to buy a manure pitchfork or my umpteenth sprayer. Genevieve, my friend, Genevieve, let’s use this evening to fight the grayness of existence. This morning I was thumbing through a magazine article about the correspondence of a Nobel Prize–winning Japanese writer and Oz, the Israeli writer (my daughter wants to cultivate
Similar Books
