near the fireplace, over which hung an enormous blue-green fish. Thatâs all you need to know. She was my âdate.â You donât need to know anything more about her. We were not in any sense together, nothing like thatâthat beautiful word, âtogether.â We were talking about Marvin Gayeâs tragic death and cider doughnuts and how amazing it is that we can both speak English. We were describing all the things we had to know in order to speak this crazy messed-up language.
There was a little round moderno light above our table, sending down rays of electric energy onto our salads, and I could see the lightbulb reflected in Pollyâs lipstick, and suddenly I told her that I was so happy to be sitting at the table with her that I wanted to get up and embrace the light and say thank you for lighting up our dinner. Because we are enjoying ourselves, and weâre covering a lot of ground, and weâre ranging wide over the field of human aspirations, and this is what weâve got right now, is this single date in a restaurant.
I wanted to say more to Polly because I knew it was going well, even though she didnât like me as much as I liked her, and I knew that was because she was smarter and more sensible and mainly prettier than I was smart or sensible or good-looking. I said, âPolly, let me ask you this. Do you think all of our selves are pointed at this moment right here in this restaurant?â I tapped the bread in the breadbasket. It was a basket of bread, tucked in with a white cloth like a newborn child. I said, âDo you think that the bread in this breadbasket is the only thing in life right now?â
She said, âIn a way I do. But in a way I think of the whole city stretched out, and of other cities, and of distances between cities, and of long train rides or plane rides to get from one city to another, so I try to keep mindful of the fact that my moment isnât the entire moment, but itâs difficult especially when Iâm having fun and when Iâm talking to a nice man in a restaurant.â
Wow, I felt a glow when she said that. Then a little later she said how much she liked Philip Glassâs movie soundtracks. Well, all right, I thought, with some effort I can learn to like Philip Glassâs soundtracks. Theyâre insanely repetitive, but I can come around. Then I made a dumb move. We were on the topic of Mark Rothko, and for some inexplicable reason I was moved to say critical things not only about Mark Rothko but also about Pablo Picasso. Why, why, why? I said Picasso would be all but forgotten in a hundred years, that he was a coattail-rider and a self-trumpeter, and that his kitschy blue guitars made me want to scream with boredom and rage at the moneyed injustice of the international museum establishment. And that those awful demoiselles from Avignon were nothing but a hideous cruel joke. And that he consistently ripped off Matisse. And not only that, but his daughterâs jewelry designs for Tiffanyâs were just god-awful. There were, I said, innumerable Sunday painters who could paint better than shirtless old Pabloâand at some point weâd have to face that stark, appalling fact. I could see Polly flinch. I quickly apologized for being stupidly opinionated and said that I didnât know anything about art and that actually I liked Picassoâs flashlight painting and his steerâs head made of bicycle parts, although Duchamp, et cetera, and we got back on track. Later she said, âIâm having fun.â But I knew she was just being nice because the wine was red and she was so very pretty and such a kindly person and she didnât want me to know that she was never going to go out with me again because Iâm a rogue mastodon who dismisses Picasso with an annoying wave of his trunk. She wanted me to think that the world is a place in which somebody like me could go out with somebody like her. She
Learning to Kill: Stories