“I do remember once going to a bar with some people after a dinner meeting. Hi ho, let’s have some fun. One of the people who lived out there took us to a place, and some young movie stars were there playing pool. They were all so good-looking that just looking at them was completely engrossing. Anyway, one of them, an actress, took off her gloves—she was wearing these old-fashioned gloves with cross-stitching on the fingers—and set them down by her beer and started to play. She was very good, actually, and she had these long, lithe arms, which she was definitely showing off while she played. She seemed haughty and shallow. Simply from watching them play pool I knew that neither she nor her friends were possessed of any civilization or culture or charity or seriousness. And I thought to myself: God, I wish I were one of them.”
He stopped, out of breath and in a state of panic. How could he have kept babbling on nonsensically like this? During his speech, he had been addressing the back of the seat in front of him. Now, fearfully, he looked over at the young woman, and—her expression was not so discouraging! She seemed to have been listening intently. Her eyes were wide and her lips were apart. She almost seemed transported by what he had said. Encouraged, he gave her a smile indicating his appreciation of her receptiveness. She lowered her eyes for a moment and then looked up at Peter and said, “That is the most beautiful, the most inspiring thing I have ever heard in my life.” Then she began to laugh. She raised one long-fingered hand to cover her mouth and turned away.
To his surprise, Peter noticed that this response had not caused him to blush hotly; rather, something in the young woman’s tone and manner emboldened him.
“Okay,” he said, “since it worked out so well for me, maybe you can explain why you are going to Los Angeles.”
The young woman didn’t answer right away. She ran her finger down the lock on her tray table. Looking at the lozenge of her nail, Peter thought about the soft pad on the other side. The pause grew longer. Peter waited. She turned to him with a dimmed smile, as when the edge of a cloud passes over the sun.
“I’m going to visit my sister,” she said. “She just had a baby, a girl named Clementine.” She laughed. “It’s going to be a little strange being Aunt Holly.”
Holly.
“My sister’s living with my father at his house. It’s in the hills behind Malibu. My sister and I lived in L.A. when we were little, but then my parents got divorced when I was three and my sister was five, and my mother took us back to Chicago, where she was from. My father was a director. Once in a while, he still rolls down the hills and goes into town to let some old producer pal buy him lunch. Mostly, though, he spends his time drinking schnapps and reading detective stories.” She paused. “He made some okay pictures,” she said. She paused again, before continuing. “We’re a little cross with my sister. She naturally didn’t think it was really necessary to have a husband to go along with the baby. The father is living with somebody else in Hawaii. He’s all excited about the kid and was in the room for the delivery. The only thing that surprises me is that he didn’t insist on his girlfriend’s being there, too.” She sighed, then looked at Peter. “Hey, here I am telling you all my family problems and I haven’t known you for five minutes.”
She smiled and studied him. She was looking at his eyes and he looked back at hers. Then their focus shifted, and they were looking into the other’s eyes, rather than just at the surfaces. For that instant, Peter felt that the whole universe simply stopped, as if its entire purpose had been to whip out its material until it had reached this perfect point of equilibrium. They both forced their eyes to dart away, and matter and time took up where they had left off.
Holly insisted that Peter tell her something about his family and his childhood, despite his protests that it was all very dull. He had grown up in New Jersey and had two older sisters, and he was the son of a business executive and a mother who was passionate about three things (aside from her husband): her children, her charities, and her garden. Holly succeeded in forcing Peter to talk about corporate finance and she actually managed to seem interested in it. He even showed her a tombstone ad in the paper announcing a deal he had worked on. Holly, meanwhile, was not really sure about her career; right now she was teaching high school math in the Dominican Republic, and this was inspiring on some days and incredibly depressing on others. She got to New York fairly often because her aunt lived there. They talked about a lot of things. And for periods they were quiet. She read and he looked at spreadsheets. Then one of them would say something, speaking the words aloud as naturally as he or she had thought them. They would talk for a time and then once again fall into a friendly, active silence. As in a painting, the negative space counted.
“Well,” Holly said after a long period of quiet, “that’s enough of Hans for a while.” She turned to Peter. “Have you ever read this?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “It’s a Bildungsroman.”
“Correct.”
“Do you like it?” Peter asked.
Holly thought for a moment. “Do I like it? I don’t know. It’s not exactly one of those books you ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ Reading it, I feel as if I’m attending a very, very long religious ceremony, which sometimes seems ridiculous and at other times is tremendously absorbing and disorienting. But ‘liking,’ as in ‘enjoying,’ doesn’t really come into it.
“I guess I do like being plunged into this totally serious—even if it does have its ironic bits—profound, ultraprofound consideration of all the big things. Life, love, death, art, freedom, authority. It’s like being transported to a different planet. And then, when you think about what eventually really did happen to Europe, it’s hard to complain that it’s portentous.”
“I totally agree,” Peter said. “But I have to admit that the thing that struck me most, even though I knew that I was supposed to be thinking about all that big stuff, the thing that struck me most was—”
“Second breakfast,” Holly interposed.
“That’s right!” said Peter. “That’s right! How did you know?”
“Well, come on,” Holly said. “Who reads that they have a meal at the sanatorium called ‘second breakfast’ and doesn’t think that, tuberculosis or not, it sounds like paradise? With a mild case like Hans’s? It would definitely be worth it.”
Two minds with but one thought! Peter felt faint, but he carried on.
“Where are you now?”
“I just finished the snowstorm.”
“My favorite part.”
“A little gruesome. The dream about the old ladies dismembering a child …”
“Yes,” said Peter. “But, you know, despite that sort of thing and the incredible thick soup of philosophizing, I was surprised that the book does have moments that are romantic, actually. When Hans is thinking about Clavdia’s wrists. And even though she is a complete drag, you can see how she gets under his skin. The love thing, it manages to sprout a few blades through the cement.”
Holly turned toward him and tilted her head. “So you’re a romantic?” she asked.
Peter blushed. He couldn’t answer or look at her. Eventually, clenching his hands together and staring in front of him, he managed to say. “I guess. Kind of”
He could see Holly out of the corner of his eye, still looking at his profile.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a fair question to ask a male. Sorry. But anyway … me, too.”
Peter turned to her. “Could I see the book for a second?” he asked. She handed it to him, and he flipped through the section she was reading.
“Here it is,” he said. “Here’s the line I remember, a couple of pages back. Since it’s italicized, it’s easy to find.” He swallowed and then read. “‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion