A Sport and a Pastime Read Online Free PDF Page B

pause, he says,
    “Uh, I don’t have much money with me…”
    “Don’t worry.”
    “I’m supposed to get a check,” he says. “I should have had it two days ago.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” I reassure him.
    “Do you know many people in town?” he asks.
    “Oh, a few,” I say. “It’s pretty quiet.”
    “Quiet,” he says. The idea seems to settle in. “Well, I mean, how quiet?”
    “It’s quiet,” I tell him. “Shall we have one more?”
    We arrive at the hotel about eight. The dining room is well lit, it seems even brighter than usual. Perhaps it’s my mood. After all, it is an event, I’ve been eating alone. We open the menus. Our heads lower a bit to consider things. Around us are the soft, reassuring sounds of dining. In the center of the room a table gleams with fruit. Beside it is a tray of cheeses: bleu de Bresse, heavy and rich, pungent as a woman’s armpits; roquefort, veined like marble; the small, wrapped chèvres; gruyère… And now I notice for the first time, near the entrance, a party that includes Mme. Picquet and her little girl. They’re all talking agreeably. I don’t know who the others are. They’re much older. They could be relatives. Anyway, I’ve found out a little about her. She’s been divorced. Her husband fell in love with another woman. Claude was too abundant for him, perhaps, too sumptuous. She’s always carefully made up, her hair arranged and laid across her brow. Bracelets on each wrist. Big rings, one of them on her left index finger. She even wears it when she types. She might be twenty-eight, Claude, or twenty-nine. When she walks, she leaves me weak. A hobbled, feminine step. Full hips. Small waist. Her legs are a little thin. I see her in the Hôtel de Ville, where she works. She leans over the typewriter, erasing. There’s a glint of white slip where her sweater parts slightly at the bosom. My eyes keep going there in quick, helpless glances.
    Her divorce was very expensive, she told me. I noticed the mole painted on her cheekbone. It cost four hundred dollars, she said, and her husband four hundred, too, and besides that, she had to give him almost all the furniture, this vanished husband who was an eyeglasses salesman and had to travel a lot. She makes a little gesture of resignation.
    Her daughter sits beside her, attentive, composed. She’s eight years old and already as marvelously slow of movement as her mother. Quite a pretty child. She eats with a fork that is too big for her. She glances up at Claude from time to time.
    Dean has a healthy appetite, but after the second glass of wine there’s a tendency for things to fall from his fork. He casually eats them right from the tablecloth. We’re having quenelles made from river pike, quenelles de brochet . He keeps asking me what they’re called.
    His French is better already. Of course, the waiter pretends not to understand him. Dean doesn’t care.
    “They’re all like that,” he says. “ Quenelles . Is that right? What did you tell me?”
    Long, unhurried hours of evening, the car parked outside where light from the entrance falls on it, people pausing to look, the winter coming on. Plates being silently removed, the taste of foods lingering. The immortal procession of a French meal. We’ve finished the wine. Dean is pouring Perrier water into his glass. He’s thirsty as a horse, he says.
    “They always tell you drink wine to be safe.”
    “Yes, but I drink the water.”
    “Everywhere, so do I,” he says. “You know where the cleanest water in the world is?”
    “No.”
    “The Yale swimming pool,” he says. His voice is fading. “Anyway, that’s what they always told us.”
    “When did you get out of Yale?”
    “I didn’t,” he says. “I quit.”
    “Oh.”
    He describes it casually, without stooping to explain, but the authority of the act overwhelms me. If I had been an underclassman he would have become my hero, the rebel who, if I had only had the courage, I might