The Drowning People

The Drowning People Read Free Page B

Book: The Drowning People Read Free
Author: Richard Mason
Tags: FIC000000
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lips fades and she looks serious once more. Her fingers become conscious of the string of pearls in her left hand, which she puts into a small square bag at her feet with an unconscious gesture of protection.
    “That’s a complex question. More complex than it sounds,” she says. But realizing my awkwardness, she continues: “Let’s just keep the answer brief and say that I know someone who has them.” She takes a last sip from the Styrofoam cup and discovers that it is almost empty. She seems surprised and faintly irritated.
    “Who?” I am eager for her to define herself to some extent by her acquaintance with someone I can judge.
    “You wouldn’t have known him, unless you’re older than you look.”
    Since she doesn’t seem disposed to say anything further, I question her more closely, telling her that one never knows.
    “His name’s Charles Stanhope,” she says, uttering a name I indeed do not recognize. I say this and she looks up at me and smiles.
    “I’m sorry to have interrupted your run,” she says. “But I’ve been sitting out here on this bench for so long I think I’d’ve stayed here forever if someone hadn’t disturbed me and broken the spell.”
    “What spell?” I am bold enough to ask.
    “The spell of wakeful hours.” She looks up at me, eyes twinkling. “The rut of question-answer-same-question your brain gets into when developments take a turn you didn’t really expect.”
    I see her fumble absently in her bag for a cigarette, watch her light it, and follow silver-gray smoke circles upwards to a pale blue sky. The park is noticeably warmer now; people are trickling in, and as they pass they cannot help but look at us, an odd pair under the trees. I can smell the faint odor of sweet perfume and soap and stale cigarette smoke that surrounds her; can hear the click of her lighter flint as she makes a flame; can see, as she holds her cigarette, that one of her nails is bitten to the quick.
    “Have you been out here all night?” I ask.
    She nods, with a little tightening of pale lips. “Oh yes,” she says. “This bench and I are old friends. It’s heard more of my secrets than it cares to remember, I suspect.”
    “And has it offered good advice?”
    “Well that’s just where benches have the advantage over people. They don’t offer advice; they don’t sympathize. They just sit, listening, reminding you by their very immovability that nothing in your life can be that earth-shattering. I think benches are a good guard against melodrama.” She looks up at me. “I suppose you think me very melodramatic.” She says this more as a half-murmured musing to herself than as a question to me. “Sitting here in these clothes,” she goes on. “Smoking. Drinking coffee. Forming crazy relationships with benches.” She looks up at me again, shyly this time, and we both laugh.
    “Not at all,” I say, itching to ask her more but being constrained by … what? By twenty-two years of being told that it is rude to pry; by a certain social reserve which is characteristic of me to this day; by a fear that she is troubled by love for another, whom I instinctively hate and whose existence I want to put off confirming until the last possible moment.
    “You are very polite,” she says eventually, in a tone which sows doubt in my mind about the sincerity of the compliment.
    I nod, and as I do so her words sound in my ears like an accusation. I feel that something is required of me, but what it is I do not know, and as I am not experienced in talking to pretty women I say nothing.
    “I wonder if that is your personality or your education,” she goes on. “This admirable respect you seem to have for my privacy. In your place I should be curious to know what prompts a fully grown woman to sit up all night in a lonely park and grow garrulous with the larks.”
    This sounds like an invitation, which I cautiously accept. “Would you tell me if I did ask?” I say quietly.
    “Five minutes ago

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