Role Models -

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

He poured himself another glass of wine, and then he walked away, leaving me standing by the bar. I watched him go, and I thought about what he had said. I thought about innocence, and about the loss of it, and about the way we spend our lives trying to get it back. I thought about the famous actress, dead of cancer, and about the poet, old and alone, and about Gertrude Stein, sitting in her armchair in Paris, talking about the war. I thought about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and about the clean white lines and the beautiful sad parties. And then I thought about myself.

I closed my eyes, and I waited for morning. End of text. Role Models

“You didn’t offend me,” he said. “You just reminded me of something I’d rather forget.”

I left the party early. I drove home through the dark streets, past the houses with their lighted windows, past the trees with their bare branches, past the stars with their cold, distant light. I parked the car in the driveway, and I sat there for a long time, looking at my house. The lights were off. My wife and children were asleep. The dog was asleep. The cat was asleep. Everything was quiet. Everything was still. And I thought, This is my life. This is the only life I will ever have. And I felt nothing. Not sadness, not joy, not gratitude, not regret. Just nothing. A great, empty, peaceful nothing. “I’m sorry,” I said

“What’s that?”

“She was a large woman,” he said, “with a large head and large hands. She wore a brown corduroy suit and a brown felt hat, and she sat in a large armchair, and she talked. She talked about the war, the First World War, which she had lived through, and about the way the young men had come back from it, changed. She said they had lost their innocence, and that this loss was the only thing that mattered, the only thing worth writing about. She said that Hemingway had lost his innocence, but that he had found a way to write about it that was like a clean, white line on a blank page. She said that Fitzgerald had lost his innocence, but that he had found a way to write about it that was like a beautiful, sad party that went on too long. She said that she herself had never lost her innocence, because she had never had any to lose. She said that innocence was a luxury of the young, and that she had never been young.” I thought about innocence, and about the loss

“That I used to be young,” he said. “And that I used to believe in things. Now I’m old, and I don’t believe in anything. Not in God, not in love, not in art, not in myself. I don’t even believe in the truth. I just tell stories.”