717: One night . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 35
35
ONE NIGHT, when my grandfather walked into Corinne’s and took the round table in the back, Ariane saw something in the way he walked that told her things had changed. What she saw was enough to keep her from calling out a greeting to him. If this were a melodrama, she would have dropped a glass, and she would have cut herself when she bent to pick up the pieces.
The men at the bar didn’t see things as subtly as Ariane did, so they didn’t notice the difference in Grandfather. They waited until he sat down and then looked at one another, tacitly deciding whose turn it was to make a courtesy call. They gave the nod to Nasty Dunbar.
“Evening, John,” said Nasty.
Grandfather’s grim grin.
“How’s she doing, John?”
Grandfather drew a breath and said, “Hanging on.”
Nasty nodded.
“Hanging on,” said Grandfather, “but—”
The “but” resounded in the room like a thunderclap. The men at the bar froze. Would he say what none of them wanted to have to hear? How should they react if he did? What could they say? What could they do?
“Now, John—” said Nasty.
“She’s weakening,” said Grandfather.
“Well—”
“Weaker every day.”
“Ah.”
“I’m going to have to be staying with her now—most of the time—just about all of the time now—from now on.” He shook his head. He hadn’t said it the way he might have wanted to say it if he had thought about how he might want to say it, but he hadn’t thought about how he might want to say it. He looked at Nasty, so discomfited by what he had said, and he knew that he couldn’t—he shouldn’t—say anything more. He couldn’t tell Nasty or Bitzer or any of the others anything about how he was struggling to keep an illusion alive. If he had told him about his preposterous voyage they would have thought he was nuts. If he had tried to explain that he was trying to hold Eleanor under the narcotic spell of the illusion that she was holding her own, that she was hanging on, they would have stood with their eyes down and felt ashamed of themselves for being so impotent in the face of this. He really wanted to explain himself. He wanted them to understand all of it, why he would have to be with her more now that she was weakening so much more quickly, so quickly that he could see it, that sometimes he seemed to see it from day to day. He wanted to tell them why they wouldn’t be seeing him anymore. But it would have made them feel awful, so instead he did the generous thing.
“Hanging on, though,” he said.
“Hanging on,” said Nasty. He nodded. He returned to the bar, where the men were still and silent.
Ariane brought my grandfather his drink, unbidden, holding the glass with both hands for fear that she would betray herself by trembling. She wiped the table before she set the drink down, and as she did so she brushed his hand with hers. He seemed not to notice. He looked ahead, but at nothing, and his enormous hands lay unmoving on the table.
[to be continued]
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