681: “We adjusted.”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 15 begins
15
“WE ADJUSTED. He knew exactly what he wanted. He told us exactly what he wanted us to do. We did it. In less than a month, he had the place humming. It was much more like a performance—no improvisation permitted. Your lines were set. Your role was fixed. Your steps were choreographed. It made the job boring, but you could just shrink inside the shell of your performance and hide. We looked like a bunch of zombies—to the discerning eye. All of us tried to give Guy what he wanted, but none of us gave him any more. There was no sucking up to him. He was too cool, too aloof—”
“He, too was a zombie, living inside a shell, and the thought of getting close to him sent a shiver of repulsion—”
“Oh, not at all! There are shells and there are shells, and some of them make excellent bedtime companions. It was more that we thought it wouldn’t work.”
“Oh.”
“Then came a night—”
“Naturally.”
“The last customers were gone. In the dining room there was that queer kind of silence that you get in a large, empty room—”
“An echoing silence that seems to have an edge of noise around it, as if the last clatter and rattle were still bouncing from wall to wall.”
“Yes. Not a restful silence.”
“Silence before the storm. A queer hush. A chair scrapes across a floor somewhere.”
“Sounds like a Greg Tschudin film.”
“It was. He used that scraping chair in A Case of Mischief. There was someone mopping the floor, and he kept moving chairs around, scraping them along the floor. The scene was almost silent—just the slop of the mop, and the janitor singing to himself, that old song:
Come on, honey, come with me
Sail away, across the sea
To Rarotonga,
Where the nights are longa
And our love will grow much stronga.
Oh, honey, won’t you come alonga,
Across the sea
To Rarotonga—
With me?
And every now and then he’d shove a chair aside and you’d hear that scrape, a jagged kind of sound in that echoing space.”
“We were tired. It was late. We were finishing our cleanup and setting up for the next night. Renée was in a hurry. One of the customers had asked her out. I knew. I was watching. I had seen him make the invitation, and I was sure Renée had accepted it.”
“You had seen her stiffen, and from the tension in her back, the way she glanced from side to side, barely moving her head, and the blank look that came across her face you knew that she was about to do something she thought she shouldn’t, because you’d seen those signs in yourself.”
“Now, I could see Renée’s eagerness and anxiety and I knew that she’d accepted the invitation.”
“You recognized all the symptoms.”
“I certainly did.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 681, Mark Dorset considers Places, Real and Fictional: Rarotonga; and Music: Songs: Real and Fictional: “Rarotonga” from this episode.
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