When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,79

I won’t have anything to talk about that now, before leaving home, I’ll comb the papers and jot down a half-dozen topics that might keep a conversation going at least through the entrees. The last time we ate out, I prepared by reading both the Herald Tribune and The Animal Finder’s Guide, a quarterly publication devoted to exotic pets and the nuts who keep them. The waiter took our orders, and as he walked away I turned to Hugh, saying, “So, anyway, I hear that monkeys can really become surly once they reach breeding age.”

“Well, I could have told you that,” he said. “It happened with my own monkey.”

I tried to draw him out, but it saddens Hugh to discuss his childhood monkey. “Oh, Maxwell,” he’ll sigh, and within a minute he’ll have started crying. Next on my list were the five warning signs of depression among captive camels, but I couldn’t read my handwriting, and the topic crashed and burned after sign number two: an unwillingness to cush. At a nearby table an elderly woman arranged and rearranged the napkin in her lap. Her husband stared at a potted plant, and I resorted to the Herald Tribune. “Did you hear about those three Indian women who were burned as witches?”

“What?”

“Neighbors accused them of casting spells and burned them alive.”

“Well, that’s horrible,” he said, slightly accusatory, as if I myself had had a hand in it. “You can’t go around burning people alive, not in this day and age.”

“I know it, but —”

“It’s sick is what it is. I remember once when I was living in Somalia there was this woman . . .”

“Yes!” I whispered, and then I looked over at the elderly couple, thinking, See, we’re talking witch burnings! It’s work, though, and it’s always my work. If I left it up to Hugh, we’d just sit there acting like what we are: two people so familiar with each other they could scream. Sometimes, when I find it hard to sleep, I’ll think of when we first met, of the newness of each other’s body, and my impatience to know everything about this person. Looking back, I should have taken it more slowly, measured him out over the course of fifty years rather than cramming him in so quickly. By the end of our first month together, he’d been so thoroughly interrogated that all I had left was breaking news — what little had happened in the few hours since I’d last seen him. Were he a cop or an emergency room doctor, there might have been a lot to catch up on, but like me Hugh works alone, so there was never much to report. “I ate some potato chips,” he might say, to which I’d reply, “What kind?” or “That’s funny, so did I!” More often than not, we’d just breathe into our separate receivers.

“Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Good. Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t.”

In New York we slept on a futon. I took the left side and would lie awake at night, looking at the closet door. In Paris we got a real bed in a room just big enough to contain it. Hugh would fall asleep immediately, the way he’s always done, and I’d stare at the blank wall, wondering about all the people who’d slept in this room before us. The building dated from the seventeenth century, and I envisioned musketeers in tall, soft boots, pleasuring the sorts of women who wouldn’t complain when sword tips tore the sheets. I saw gentlemen in top hats and sleeping caps, women in bonnets and berets and beaded headbands, a swarm of phantom copulators all looking down and comparing my life with theirs.

After Paris came London, and a bedroom on the sixth floor with windows looking onto neat rows of Edwardian chimney tops. A friend characterized it as a “Peter Pan view,” and now I can’t see it any other way. I lie awake thinking of someone with a hook for a hand, and then, inevitably, of youth, and whether I have wasted it. Twenty-five years ago I was a young man with his whole sexual life ahead of him. How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly, and how can I keep it from happening again? In another twenty-five years I’ll be doddering, and twenty-five years after that I’ll be one of the figures haunting my Paris bedroom. Is it morally permissible, I wonder, to cheat after death? Is it even called cheating at that point?