Small Change by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online Page B

under the burden of so much emotion, became patronizing. “Don’t worry about it,” they would say after their wives exploded disgracefully in public. And when pressed, “No. Your outburst didn’t bother me.” The wives would feel relieved, grateful not to be condemned for their lack of self-control, yet at the same time unsatisfied. All that emotion and so little response?
    Jill said, “Ted must feel so hurt.”
    I said, “But I don’t think he does. That’s the point I’m trying to make.”
    Jill said, “Oh, oh. You and Mary McCarthy.” Then she relented a bit. She generalized. She said, “I guess everybody misses the obvious sometimes.”
    I persisted. “He
looks
as if it doesn’t bother him.”
    “You can’t go by looks,” said Jill. “Hasn’t anybody ever told you that?”
    It wasn’t long after this that I had my sudden, long-overdue illumination. The sun was shining, the air was cool and dry, and I was standing beside Ted on the corner of Amsterdam and 105th while the traffic whizzed by. Ted said for the second time, quietly, and staring out at the traffic, “Rudy will come around.” I looked at him and the following words dropped into my head:
He uses optimism to shield himself from pain
.
    He’ll come around
didn’t mean, I have faith in him and in the strength of our friendship. It meant,
I don’t want to think about him because it’s too painful. I’ve put him out of my mind
.
    What had seemed a gift – the gift of eternal friendship – now seemed like an exquisitely-arrived-at means of survival.
    The Chinese smile. The Eskimo smile. Johnny’s smile. For a moment, basking in my revelation on the corner, I floated above Ted and Johnny, and even Rudy. I looked down through their smiles into a cross-section of everything that might have caused them pain and joy. It was the sort of view that appears in storybook illustrations of woodland dwellings or in a doll’s house. I thought: this is how I should visit friends: like a fly on the wall, or a benevolent cloud.
    That year Jill spent almost as much time inside the hospital as out. One afternoon when I was visiting her, Johnny came into her room with gifts. He brought
The Lover
, “Little booksare best,” and a muskmelon, “So are little melons,” which he sliced up with a jackknife and handed around. He sat there grinning and chewing, a happy sloppy grin that you’d walk miles to see.
    “Have you read it?” he asked her. She hadn’t. It was one of the few books (she was a librarian, remember) that she had never read.
    “You see,” he said. “Today’s my lucky day.”
    She wanted to know what it was about, and he said a girl from a crazy French family in Vietnam has a rich lover in a black car. They meet on a ferry and have to keep their affair secret, since she is fifteen and white and he is much older and Vietnamese. He said the key to
The Lover
was pacing: Duras took you to the river and onto the ferry, and you didn’t know what was happening and then you did. I said I thought the key to the book was distance. No matter how close Duras was to what was happening, or how removed, she never got in her own way. Getting the right distance is the ticket, I said.
    Jill held the little book, I sat in a padded green chair beside her bed, Johnny sat on the foot of the bed. His smile was like sunshine that day, at peace with me and with everything inside him. For an hour, while we kept Jill company, we had nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
    A few months later Jill was back in the same hospital, but not in the same room. This time she didn’t have a view. “What do you do,” I asked her, “when you aren’t giving the doctors a hard time?”
    She said, “I choose a day from the past and relive it.”
    “Any day?”
    “Always the same day. I never change a detail. It was a beautiful day in September. Maureen went off to boarding school and my grandfather gave me his ring.”
    After Johnny told Jill that he and Lee couldn’t