“What do you want to see most?” Orrison asked, as they sat down.
Trimble considered.
“Well — the back of people’s heads,” he suggested. “Their necks — how their heads are joined to their bodies. I’d like to hear what those two little girls are saying to their father. Not exactly what they’re saying but whether the words float or submerge, how their mouths shut when they’ve finished speaking. Just a matter of rhythm — Cole Porter came back to the States in 1928 because he felt that there were new rhythms around.”
Orrison was sure he had his clue now, and with nice delicacy did not pursue it by a millimeter — even suppressing a sudden desire to say there was a fine concert in Carnegie Hall tonight.
“The weight of spoons,” said Trimble, “so light. A little bowl with a stick attached. The cast in that waiter’s eye. I knew him once but he wouldn’t remember me.”
But as they left the restaurant the same waiter looked at Trimble rather puzzled as if he almost knew him. When they were outside Orrison laughed:
“After ten years people will forget.”
“Oh, I had dinner there last May — ” He broke off in an abrupt manner.
This subtle, gently engrossing account of two hours company shared between a rookie reporter and his lunch guest where the gradual revelation about the ‘lost decade’ dawns as poiganantly fragile as the reemerging interest in being alive. Some blogs suggest that this is not one of Fiztgerald’s best stories. I disagree. It reads as an elegy to lost time and relationships and the above extract reveals the destructive perceptual losses wrought through alcohol.
How gently saddening to admit that you most want to ‘see’ the backs of peoples’ heads as, presmably, you have noticed nothing except the whereabouts of the next drink for years. it reads as a rebirth and even the gentle ironies around the new reporter being saddled with the lunch time company of a once famous ex drunk, do not lower the emotional repercussions of the story into mere cynicism. The aptly named Mr Trimble does not drink again in the story and he does find a non-invasive companion in Orrrison whose discretion allows the story to unfold naturally and without emotional excess or violation.
As soon as I finsihed the tale I began it again. A year after this story was created the author died, the victim of his own alcoholism. And reredaing this story, I am once again aware of the brilliance of Fitzgerald, his sublime capacity for elegaic expression and most of all his capacity to embrace wonder. a capacity movingly and famously represented at the end of The Great Gatsby and here, so naturally and delightfully expressed in Trimble’s causally magical note about the rhythm of words and how they float…
Wonderful.