All That Follows Read Online Free PDF Page B

a finger prod to acknowledge a joke that does not quite deserve a laugh. She’s still unfledged and gullible, blurtingly self-confident, both at ease and twitchy. Uncalculating, actually. Only a kid after all, and behaving, physically, as a teenager might behave, perching at a tram stop with her mates.
    Leonard is not blurtingly self-confident, except on rare nights with the saxophone. But he is old enough to be her father. He could have been her father, if things had worked out differently in Austin. He was besotted, briefly, with her mother, after all. Anyway, he’d rather be mistaken for her father than for—his current apprehension—an older and inappropriately attentive man sitting far too near to this too trusting, this underage girl. Her groper boss, perhaps. Her ancient grooming predator. So it might appear to anybody catching them wrapped together in a veil of smoke. She certainly is close to him. The bench is short, of course, but it’s too late to move to another bench and his own elbow room. That would seem standoffish—sitoffish, actually—and shy, both of which are timid attributes and not consistent with the man who has just promised that none of his fire has been lost. He’ll stay. The cigarette, the much-missed fellowship of nicotine, he thinks, provides an alibi. He’ll try to let the roll-up burn down between his fingers, not put it to his mouth. Still, he can’t prevent the cough. Her smoke and his are overpowering. She puts her hand on his, as if to stay his cigarette. “Don’t finish it,” she says. He is infantilized by her. He lifts his cigarette, inhales. He clears a strand of tobacco from his lips with his tongue. He is determined not to cough again.
    Sitting next to Maxie’s daughter on the bench is the closest Leonard’s got to intimacy of any kind, carnal or otherwise, for many weeks. Of late, his life has shrunk by stages. Age, routine, and common sense plus the adhesions in his rotator cuff have combined to frustrate most fleshly pleasures, not just sex. He has been drug-free and loosely vegetarian since his thirties, but now he is a dieter as well, a resister of alcohol, chocolate, dairy, modified foods, and whatever produce is currently targeted as unsafe or unsound. In his household, shopping is a morally burdened expedition; cooking is a series of ethical quandaries. Dietary self-defense has turned every meal into a combat zone. He does his best to be a “naught percenter,” as health-conscious citizens are called. Naught percent sugar. Naught percent salt. Naught percent saturated fats. Cholesterol has become for him a grave and present enemy. Certainly he does more these days to combat sticky deposits in his own bloodstream than any failings in the body politic. He is more regularly engaged by the struggle to keep below seventy-five kilos in weight than by any dogma or belief. And while it has become a simple matter to exile his aspirations for the world to the back of his mind, his ambitions for a trimmer waist or a lower pulse are never far from the front of it.
    So naught percent passion, then, naught percent fire, naught percent tossing pebbles at the wall, but he can at least take comfort from his evident personal control, his lifestyle sacrifices and restraints. He still has public political principles, of course, but he has been able to persuade himself that fighting for these principles on the street, as he tried to do when he was younger and has only affected to do more recently, is far too facile, especially given his safe distance from the problems themselves. How hard is it to wear a badge? Or sign a sheet? Or send a check? It’s living by his private principles that’s hard. Yet he cannot help but reply, “Why ever not?” when she drains her glass, stands up, says, “Gluggedy-glug,” half roguish child and half stage drunk, and asks, “Another one?” And he cannot help but stare at her back and legs as she walks toward the rear door of the pub and judge