The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) Read Free

constantly expressing the same thing — the eagerness to rid ourselves, as soon as possible, of the static in our communication in order to be able to communicate more fully and take fuller advantage of each other’s company. It was more a recognition of the value of one’s interlocutor than irritation.
    In my memory, that moment was marked by a triumphal blast of imaginary trumpets that announced my friend’s entrance into the conversation, for a quick review revealed that until then he had participated with nothing more than a few murmurs, raisings of eyebrows, whats , hows , whiches , and not much more. Now he was ready to talk, and the conversation was set in motion along with the engine of memory.
    What he said sounded strange to me. At first, it even greatly perturbed me. During my nocturnal reconstruction, when the weight of that perturbation had lifted, his words were both light and dark. At this third instance, of writing it down, I will try to maintain a balance between the light and the darkness, and my surest guide will be the exact sequence of our exchanges.
    All fine and good: he told me that he still did not see the reason for my original remark. He found nothing erroneous about the presence of my famous Rolex on the wrist of the protagonist. As to its price and its condition as a status symbol, he was perfectly aware. Perhaps I didn’t know who the actor was. He didn’t give me a chance to say that I did know who he was: nothing human is alien to me. Leaning slightly over the table and lowering his voice theatrically, he assured me that this actor had more than enough money to buy himself a Rolex, as well as six more, one for each day of the week, and, if push came to shove, the entire Swiss company that produced them.
    And he wasn’t exaggerating, he added. I myself had made reference to the complexity of making a movie, a complexity that indicates the magnitude of the enterprise, on which millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars were commonly spent. Now, given the system on which Hollywood bases its audience appeal — the so-called star system — the actors occupy a place of central importance. Movies are marketed using the names of these shining figures that perform in them, and the audience pays its entrance fee to see their extremely well-known faces. That’s why they are paid so highly, for their names rather than for the actual work they do — which in the end isn’t any different than that of the lowliest electrician, who earns a pittance. This actor in particular was one of those privileged few. He had so much money that he could not possibly live long enough to count it all. True, he acknowledged, taxes take the lion’s share, but if one pays them on time, they are never more than a percentage of one’s earnings, and no wealthy person has ever become poor from paying them.
    Anyway: the several-thousand-dollar watch meant nothing more to him than a cup of coffee meant to us. With this, verisimilitude had been rescued.
    Even before I began to think of a reply, and while I was listening to him speak, a vague sensation came over me, the precursor to a much more vigorous one soon to come … a sensation of strangeness — tinged with a certain amount of disappointment and a remote bit of despair — upon hearing my friend speak so knowledgeably about the world of show business, the money movie stars make, such frivolous nonsense so far beneath the sphere of our interests. It was a nuanced sensation, or one with echoes, because it revealed that I possess that same knowledge. But maybe the modern world is so infused with this information, which is so much a part of even the air we breathe, that it is impossible not to know it.
    But when the time came for me to respond, I had to pause. Without realizing it, we had started down a road so subtle that it would carry us from the lowest lows to the highest highs, without many stopovers. Th e only thing that was obvious, clear as a bell, fit