I HAD A WONDERFUL TIME reading to this group. They were shy about responding at first, but when I began hamming it up a little more than usual they began to realize that they could laugh, that they weren’t required to suffer through this live literary experience with the fake reverence that they were expected to bring to the dreary “selections” in their literature anthologies, pressed and preserved there like dead moths. When I finished, they applauded, they whistled, they stamped their feet. I was tempted to read another episode, but before I could make the mistake of giving in to that temptation, Ms. Fletcher-Hackford announced that I would take their questions.
Most of what they asked was what I would have expected, but there were some questions that I had never been asked by an adult audience. One of those was, “Where are those friends of yours now?”
“Well,” I said, “first, you have to understand that the people in my memoirs are not always exactly as they were in my life. Sometimes I combine people, because I couldn’t ever write about everyone I knew, and because sometimes they just seem to drift together over time, at least within my memory, and sometimes I invent people, if there seems to be a blank spot in my life that should have had someone in it. With that in mind, let’s see where they are now. The boy I called Marvin died in Vietnam. The boy I called Raskol started out as my imaginary friend, but I’ve added to him characteristics of many of my friends over the years, so he has become a kind of scrapbook, a repository of friendship. If he were based on a single person, he would be running a boat yard in Babbington now, still running it as he has for — hmm — quite a few years. The boy I called Matthew was here just a few days ago, with a woman he’s been in love with for a long time, a wonderful woman who has been combatting social injustice, legally, long enough to have become exhausted at last by the massive indifference of human beings to the sufferings of their fellow creatures. She has thrown in the towel and decided to live the rest of her years for herself. Matthew was ill for a while. I guess he had a heart attack, and is now very aware of his mortality, so he’s concentrating on the time left to him, and what he can make of it. That leaves Spike, or the girl I called Spike. She had quite a life.” At this point, I might have said, “She dropped out of college, got pretty heavily into drugs for a while, worked for a telephone sex service, then started her own, made a success of it, raised two daughters entirely on her own, went back to college, became a teacher, and is standing at the back of the room right now,” but I did not. All I said was, “She disappeared from my life for quite a while, but we made contact again, and now I see her from time to time.”
“How old were you in that story?”
The question surprised me. “Didn’t I say?” I asked. I glanced at the first paragraph. “Funny,” I said. “I usually mention my age in these episodes, but I left it out of this one. I was twelve, almost thirteen.”
Exclamations greeted that news. I wasn’t sure whether the kids found it hard to believe that I had once been twelve or were just pleased to have the little Peter of my memoirs be the same age as they were.
“Do you ever wish that you were twelve again?” asked the enchanting schoolgirl on the sofa.
Before I quite realized what I was doing, I smiled at her meaningfully and said, “I’m wishing that right now.”
Laughter exploded from the back of the room. All the adults were amused by me and embarrassed for me, including me.
“It was a great time of life,” I said, trying to camouflage what I had actually meant. The girl on the sofa smiled up at me, a smile with nothing much in it, and I was struck with the full realization of what I had been doing — flirting with a twelve-year-old girl, trying to seduce a child — and by the great gulf that lay between me and this girl — the whole story of my life between nearly-thirteen and nearly-fifty — a gulf that the man of good will could not bridge, must not bridge, must not even entertain the thought of bridging. “It is a great time of life, boys and girls,” I said in the manner of Baldy the Dummy, with a dummy’s creepy grin. “Enjoy it.”
[to be continued]
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