How I longed to be over there instead.
Well, why not?
I was serving no useful purpose here and could serve none until he was gone.
—
I cast myself out through the wall, looped over the neighboring yard, had a look down.
A wedding.
An evening wedding by torchlight.
I hovered above at that exact breathless moment before the service was to begin. A crowd of two hundred or more sat in chairs organized into rows, flaring torches forming the aisle. The bride, awaiting the first notes of the march, standing beside her father, gave their joined hands a nervous, confirmatory shake, eliciting a ringing of sympathetic laughter from the congregants.
Adorable.
She was a beauty. As for the groom, he was nervous, attentive, awash in an undisguised reverence for his bride, clearly feeling himself the most fortunate of men.
I landed softly among the congregants, finding much that was familiar, even dear:
The impatient flick of a program that one had already read three times.
Thetap tap tapof one’s shoetip against the metal chair just in front but one must immediately stop tapping if the fellow sitting there turned his head even slightly.
The urge one sometimes got, for no reason at all, to scrunch up one’s toes inside one’s pumps.
The sudden cessation, just then, of all talk (all chitchat, all gossip; no more leaning over to say to so-and-so, Wow, what adress, or, Hat doesn’t quite work, or, Can’t believe that homely kid grew into such a looker, or, The mom’s fresh out of the drunk tank but based on the look of her you’d think she just shot over from the beauty spa).
The wedding march began, played by a string quartet.
Oh gosh, goodness.
This wasn’t—this wasn’t good for me.
I burst up and into the bedroom of my charge, cheeks aglow with the joy of it all.
Welcome back, the Frenchman said dryly.
The last of his pages had just been read. He leapt down from the bed as if made spry by this discharge of his duty. The towering stack, reconstituted on the floor, ascended up through the ceiling.
Rather than comforting him, he said, I advise you to lead him, as quickly as possible, to contrition, shame, and self-loathing.
Well, thanks for the advice, I said.
Or do nothing, he said. Simply leave. Any comfort you give will only serve to confirm him in his current state of delusion.C’est exact?How is it said? You let him off a hook.
Off the hook, I said.
You let him off the hook, he said.
Are you finished? I said curtly. I have no idea what you’re even talking about.
I am not, alas, he said. I have failed to make the thing clear. To you, or to him. For all its enormity. I seem—I seem to lack the necessary skill.
His evident frustration touched me.
Ours is not an easy road, I said.
