The Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page A

out all the flowers while you were gone: a change in the interior you don’t even notice at first, not until you see the stems sticking out of the garbage.
    To call my brother’s wife a ‘presence’ would be putting it mildly. There were men, I knew, who felt intimidated or even threatened by her figure. She wasn’t fat, no; fatness or thinness had very little to do with it, the proportions of her body were in perfect harmony. Everything about her, though, was big and broad: her hands, her feet, her head – too big and too broad, those men thought, and they went on to make insinuations about the size and breadth of other parts of her body, as if somehow to reduce the threat to human proportions.
    In high school I’d had a friend who was two metres tall. I remember how tiring it could be always to stand next to someone who towered head and shoulders above you, as though you were literally standing in his shadow, and as though that shadow kept you from getting enough sunlight. Less sunlight than I deserved, I thought at times. Of course there was the usual stiff neck from looking up all the time, but that was the least of it. In the summer we would go on vacation together; my high-school buddy was not fat either, only tall, but still I experienced every movement of his arms and legs, and the feet that stuck out of the sleeping bag and pressed against the inside of the canvas, as a struggle for more space – a struggle for which I felt in part responsible and which physically drained me. Sometimes, in the morning, his feet would be sticking out of the entrance to the tent, and that made me feel guilty: guilty about the fact that tents weren’t larger, so that people like him could fit in them completely.
    When Babette is around I always do my best to make myself bigger, taller than I really am. I stretch, so she can look me straight in the eye: as equals.
    ‘You’re looking good,’ said Babette, giving my arms a little squeeze. With most people, especially women, a compliment on your appearance means nothing at all, but with Babette it did, I’d found that out in the course of the years. When someone she liked looked bad, she said that too.
    ‘You’re looking good’ could therefore mean that I did indeed look good, but it could also be an indirect request that I say something about her own appearance – or, in any event, pay more attention to it than usual.
    I took another look at her eyes, behind those lenses that reflected almost the entire restaurant: the diners, the white tablecloths, the tea-warmers … Yes, dozens of tea-warmers were glittering in those lenses, which, I saw now, were really dark only at the top. Below that they were only slightly tinted, so I could see Babette’s eyes clearly.
    They were red around the edges, and bigger than normal: unmistakable signs of a recent crying jag. Not a crying jag that had happened a few hours ago: no, crying that had happened just now, in the car, on the way to the restaurant.
    Maybe she’d stopped in the parking lot and tried to cover up the worst of it, but it hadn’t really worked. The dark lenses might have fooled the staff in the black pinafores, the floor manager in his three-piece suit and the smart owner in the white turtleneck, but they didn’t fool me.
    And, at the same moment, I knew for a certainty that Babette wasn’t trying to fool me at all. She had come closer to me than usual, she had almost kissed me on the lips. I’d had no choice but to look into her damp eyes and draw my own conclusions.
    Now she blinked and shrugged, body language that could only mean ‘I’m sorry’.
    Before I could say anything, though, Serge forged ahead, almost pushing his wife aside as he seized my hand and shook it forcefully. He never used to have such a powerful handshake, but in the last few years he had realized that ‘the people of this country’ had to be met with a firm grip – that they would never vote for a fishy handshake.
    ‘Paul,’ he