Ridiculous narrative digressions
He gets back in the cab, and says that because he feels very tired he is going to hold them all to a discussion to keep him awake. He and his German colleagues like to do this very much, but they focus mainly on philosophy, on philosophical concepts, or major ideas. For instance, he thinks his stance on love has changed. Mr Hauser says that as a boy, he used to think love was just getting used to someone; that you said you loved your mother because you were used to her being there, and if she were suddenly gone you would miss where she had been. As he matured – as they say, though perhaps it is not a good word – he fell in love with a girl who had yellow hair. She worked as a machinist in the factory where he ran deliveries after school. The factory made metal bottles for the seltzer water – but that wasn’t important. What was important was that all of the workers there, including the woman he loved, wore a uniform of mauve and red. To the strap of the uniform she had affixed a ribbon of the same scarlet red, folded over to look like a rose. When he would see this particular color somewhere else – in a catalog, in the window of the grocery where he was transferred, it would remind him of her. He thought love was the spark of someone that you see in all things, everywhere else. The following summer, when he returned to the factory, he saw that the the pressing machine was empty where she had once stood, moving her arm up and down like she was operating a well. He asked Romano Pegroud, from whom he picked up the deliveries, what had happened to the girl who stood there, and Romano – who was never one to mince words — said that she had left for a factory that paid more, though maybe she had left to become a common whore. And when Mr. Hauser asked why there was no one who had replaced her, Romano said that they were not using the machine anymore: stamping was old-fashioned. Now they used a laser machine that ran based on a computer. Now, he says, the affairs he has fade more and more quickly. What he loved in a woman was something he recognized from a woman of the past, and it was as if everything was compressing and compressing. With each new woman, there was more to love that called up the other women – the way she wore her hair was like a woman from Alexandria, the dress she wore was like the shopgirl of Bergen – but that more and more quickly, the details wore down. After a few nights with the woman from Alexandria, he had seen how she kept her hair up with pins. After a day with the shopgirl out walking along a yellow cowpath, he had become bored with the stiff way her dress moved in the air. He wondered if he were becoming as miserly as his father. Then it was Leisl’s turn. Leisl agreed with some of what Mr. Hauser said, but she said that for a woman it was different. When she was young, she had been afraid of love. She remembered running from a boy who kissed her hand in the lot outside of her father’s jewelry store. In college, as well, she avoided the subject. For her, love was power. If you loved someone, they had power over you. She supposed it was because of the house where she grew up that she felt that way. Her mother was beaten very often by her father, but the woman would never leave. Leisl felt that her mother had been brainwashed, like the black and white soldiers of The Manchurian Candidate, and that love had done what a surgeon had done in a newspaper report: it gave you a clock heart, set to a beat controlled by someone else’s meter. But she did feel some desire. Late at night, sometimes, she would have an urge. At these times, she would walk across campus to the all-night cafeteria. There, she would buy a box of candy from the girl at the candy register. This girl, Leisl was sure, knew about what Leisl did. There was some mystery to the girl’s eyes that made her think this. She started with other candies, but found that licorice worked well. Red vines. Boys liked them, and when you were eating one, you could do it in a sort of sexy way. She laughed at the memory. Then, Leisl said, she would walk back across campus to the all-night computer lab near her dormitory. In the lab there were four long rows of computers and in each of the chairs, a man was working on a project. Sometimes there would be one or two attractive men, sometimes she just settled. She would sit in a wheelie chair pretending to work on her own project and offer the man candy. When he accepted, she would ask him about his project, and she found he always wanted to talk about it – about his report, however boring it was, because he was in the throes of it. Maybe that was where she learned reporting, but that was getting beside the point. The point was simple. After he had eaten the candy, she would lead the men into her room. It was only a quick walk away from the computer lab, and sometimes she would have to offer the men cokes up there that they could drink, but more often than not she did not have to say anything, and when they got to the little apartment, not one of them ever asked for a soda. After college, she stopped playing tricks like that. She would fall in love very consistently with men she wasn’t really interested in; and then when they reciprocated – and they usually did, after a time – she would balk. It was a way of staying away from love. Then, there was Belize, where she was a foreign correspondent, and there was a man there — but it was a convenience, and she could say nothing more. She supposed she had never stopped thinking of love as something for other people, and that she thought of sex as a hobby, like model train-building, which required energy but was in the end rewarding. She supposed she thought that love was possession, and she thought most Americans thought it so. There was even a song by the black American singer Beyonce about women wanting to be owned by men. Freddie said he didn’t know. “Freddie is in love with a girl,” Leisl says. “A telecaster. They slept together. Back August He won’t tell you much more. You won’t meet her, but if you did — It always shocks everyone when I tell them about – about Freddie’s little fling.” Mr. Hauser wants to know how tall the woman is – as though that matters – and what kind of clothes she likes to wear. Only afterward does he ask what station she works for, and where she is from, and what languages she speaks other than English. He talks for a long time about how a woman who knows French is not necessarily good in bed, but there seems to be a correlation the other way. He thinks it has to do with how the French place their adjectives, always after. Which is a way of prolonging everything, becoming aware of prolonging, so that prolonging is a muscle you are always exercising.
