Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online

near the fireplace, over which hung an enormous blue-green fish. That’s all you need to know. She was my “date.” You don’t need to know anything more about her. We were not in any sense together, nothing like that—that beautiful word, “together.” We were talking about Marvin Gaye’s 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 Polly’s 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 we’re covering a lot of ground, and we’re ranging wide over the field of human aspirations, and this is what we’ve 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 didn’t 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, “Polly, let me ask you this. Do you think all of our selves are pointed at this moment right here in this restaurant?” 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, “Do you think that the bread in this breadbasket is the only thing in life right now?”
    She said, “In 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 isn’t the entire moment, but it’s difficult especially when I’m having fun and when I’m talking to a nice man in a restaurant.”
    Wow, I felt a glow when she said that. Then a little later she said how much she liked Philip Glass’s movie soundtracks. Well, all right, I thought, with some effort I can learn to like Philip Glass’s soundtracks. They’re 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 daughter’s jewelry designs for Tiffany’s were just god-awful. There were, I said, innumerable Sunday painters who could paint better than shirtless old Pablo—and at some point we’d have to face that stark, appalling fact. I could see Polly flinch. I quickly apologized for being stupidly opinionated and said that I didn’t know anything about art and that actually I liked Picasso’s flashlight painting and his steer’s head made of bicycle parts, although Duchamp, et cetera, and we got back on track. Later she said, “I’m having fun.” 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 didn’t want me to know that she was never going to go out with me again because I’m 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