The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

or perhaps more intimately a friend. It is a strange and lonely thing to lie awake at night and listen to your parents making love in the next room and to be able even to count the strokes. And to know that they really do not know how much you know, but to know that they do know that you know; and not to know when the knowledge of your knowing came to them any more than they know when it came to you. And during these last four or five years lying here while the waves of embarrassed horniness roll over me, I have developed, apart from the problems of my own tumescent flesh, a sort of sympathy for the problem that must be theirs and for the awful violation of privacy that all of us represent. For it must be a very difficult thing for two people to try to have a sex life together when they know that the first product of that life is lying listening to them only a few feet away. Also, I know something else that I do not think they know I know.
    I was told it by my paternal grandfather seven years ago when I was ten and he was eighty, on a spring day when, warmed by the sun, he had gone downtown and sat in a tavern most of the afternoon, drinking beer and spitting on the floor and slapping the table and his knee with the palm of his hand, his head wreathed in the pipe smoke of the mine-mutilated old men who were his friends. And as I passed the tavern’s open door with my bag of papers he had hailed me as if I were some miniature taxi-cab and had said that he wished to go home. And so we had wended our way through the side streets and the backalleys, a small slightly embarrassed boy and a staggering but surprisingly erect old man who wanted me beside him but not to physically support him as that would hurt his pride.
    “I am perfectly capable of walking home by myself, James,” he said, looking down at me off the tip of his nose and over his walrus moustache, “no one is taking me home, I only want company. So you stay over on your side and I will stay on mine and we will just be friends going for a walk as indeed we are.”
    But then we had turned into an alley where he had placed his left arm against a building’s brick wall and leaned, half-resting, his forehead against it while his right hand fumbled at his fly. And standing there with his head against the wall and with his shoes two feet from its base he had seemed like some strange, speaking hypotenuse from the geometry books at school and standing in the steam of his urine he had mumbled into the wall that he loved me, although he didn’t often say so, and that he had loved me even before I was born.
    “You know,” he said, “when I learned that your mother was knocked up I was so happy I was just ashamed. And my wife was in a rage and your mother’s parents were weeping and wringing their silly hands and whenever I was near them I would walk around looking at my shoes. But I think that, God forgive me, I may have even prayed for something like that and when I heard it I said, ‘Well he will have to stay now and marry her because that’s the kind of man he is, and he will work in my place now just as I’ve always wanted.’ ”
    Then his forehead seemed to slide off his resting arm and he lurched unsteadily, almost bumping into me and seeming to see me for the first time. “Oh God,” he said with a startled, frightened expression, “what a selfish old fool! What have I done now? Forget everything I said!” And he had squeezed my shoulder too tightly at first but then relaxed his grip and let his gigantic hand lie there limply all the way to his home. As soon as he entered hisdoor, he flopped into the nearest chair and said almost on the verge of tears, “I think I told him. I think I told him.” And my grandmother who was ten years younger turned on him in alarm but only asked, “What?” and he, raising both hands off his lap and letting them fall back in a sort of helpless gesture of despair said, “Oh you know, you know,” as if he were very much