Oh What a Paradise It Seems Read Free Page B

the platform as she called their names. One of the women was bent with age, surely a septuagenarian. One of the men was perhaps nineteen. He had three cowlicks and a high color and wore a sweatshirt with Odium University printed on it. Beside him was a blond young man in a full suit and next was his beloved Renée, wearing one of those very simple frocks that cost a littleless than a good used car. She looked as lovely—as bright—as she had looked to him from the start.
    “Turn out the lights, Charlie,” said the woman in the long dress. The lights went out and after a minute or two of suspense a door opened and a man came in carrying one of those flat, cheap cakes with candles that are ordered to celebrate the retirement of the building maintenance assistant or the oldest member of the stenographic pool. The lights went on and the gathering got to their feet and sang in the customary genuinely sincere and tuneless voices, “Happy anniversary to you, Happy anniversary, dear celebrant …” Renée smiled, laughed, and seemed truly happy with their wishes, and he looked back at the congregation. It seemed that he should be able to make some sense of the variety in their faces, and then he found himself, countenance by countenance, man and woman, young and old, trying to imagine how their faces would look contorted by the throes of erotic love. He was chagrined at his willingness to invade their lives—he was ashamed of himself and he closed the door.
    A workman was sweeping the vestibule. “What is going on in there?” Sears asked. “I don’t know,” the workman said. “They’re either trying to stop smoking or drinking or eating but I don’t remember which bunch is in there tonight. It’s the no smokers that give me a pain in the ass. I smoke a pack, maybe a pack and a half a day, I sweep up cigarette butts, that’s my job, that’s what I get paid for and it’s nobody’s business but my own. For instance I went to pay my state tax last week. This is in a government building, this is in a building I pay for and right on the wall there isthis sign that says THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. How the hell do they know that I’m not going to smoke? How do they know that I’m not going to piss or fart or get a hard-on? Thank you for not smoking. What the hell business is it of theirs? Thank you for not breathing….” Then he went out a door.
    A few minutes later Sears heard the group recite something in unison. He guessed from the eagerness and clarity in their voices that it could not be an occult mantra. It was difficult to imagine what it could be. The cadence had for Sears the familiarity of church scripture and might have been the Lord’s Prayer or the Twenty-third Psalm, but there was some sameness to the cadence in the seventeenth-century translations of scripture and unless he was told he would never know what they were chanting.
    Then the doors opened and they came out—not like a crowd discharged at the end of an entertainment or a lecture but gradually, like the crowd at the close of a social gathering, and he had, after all, seen them blow the candles out on a cake. He looked for her, he sought her brightness as he had for all his long life looked for lovely women in airports and railroad stations and ships’ piers and now in a parish house. He saw her, as bright as ever, and he went to her and she took his arm as they went out the door and he hailed a cab on the avenue. “What in the world were you doing in there?” he asked, when they were in the cab. “Will you promise not to ask me that again?” she said. “I know this must sound unreasonable—I would think it unreasonable if I were you—but I spend quite a few nights in parish houses and I’d just as soon not tell anyone why. If you evertake me out on Friday you’ll have to pick me up at the New School for Social Research. If you want to know what I’m doing there I’ll tell you.”
    “What are you doing at the New School for Social