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17 | (continued) I shouldn’t suggest that we had nothing in common; he too enjoyed discussing “difficult” subjects, such as Human Evolution, but again without doing his homework. As we sat in his disheveled, littered, yet barren living room one night, he asked me what kind of “absolutes” an anthropologist would have available to work with, in estimating the maximum possible hunter-gatherer population density in a given area. He put it in a haughty tone, thinking, I suppose, that I would be stumped. Knowing that he worked in a plant nursery, I gave him an answer he would have no trouble grasping: “Calories per acre,” I replied. His expression became one of unnerved surprise, if not astonishment. “Calories per acre?” “Yes. It takes some doing, but it’s quite reliable.” The conversation naturally deteriorated from that point on, and I soon retired, as on virtually every other night, to my room and my books—leaving him to his beer, his television, his ankle-deep newspapers and his permanently half-formed ideas. Toward the end of June, he had had quite enough of my stolid indifference to his whole way of being, I had gotten a few good royalty cheques, had a steady job with Boss, and he ordered me to depart no later than June 30. Within days of this fateful moment, I was at my desk in Boss’s shop when a large, expensive car rolled to a stop in front of the entrance and a woman got out. I could hear the car, but how I knew the passenger was a woman I really don’t know, since I couldn’t see her from where I was sitting. Yet that was only the beginning of the strangeness of this encounter. She had ordered some items, they had been packaged for her, and she had come to pick them up. I could not help watching her walk across the broad, carpeted floor, over to the order desk. Nothing about her seemed ordinary, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, though she could in no way be described as strikingly beautiful. She was in her fifties, with silvery white hair, and was dressed entirely in black. (I learned later that she was a recent widow.) Yet there was a buoyant imperiousness in her stride and a self-contained hauteur in her demeanor that froze my attention. I knew she was wealthy even before I noticed that everything she wore fitted perfectly. While she waited for the final paperwork, she turned and glanced around the showroom; I hurriedly shifted some papers on my desk, but not before I realized that apart from her hair, her body didn’t seem to have aged a day since she was thirty. In truth, she was the sexiest woman of her age I had ever seen, and I had no trouble picturing her in her whites on the tennis courts much of the summer, when she wasn’t doing laps in her pool. What seemed to make her extraordinary beyond all this was the twinkling, attentive intelligence with which she surveyed everything within sight, including, to be sure, me. She was not the sort to allow anything to escape her notice. I felt vulnerable under that searching gaze, but the incipient smile, not of condescension, but of knowing, never left her face. It felt uncomfortable, but paradoxically, not unpleasant. I truly did not know what to make of her; I had never seen any other customers of her sort—I don’t believe we had any. When her packages were ready, she took the two lightest ones and headed for the door, while I sat waiting for her chauffeur to materialize to transport the remainder. But it turned out that she was alone, and Boss signaled me to take the bigger packages out to her car. When I got there with my arms full, I was met by the full force of her smile, no longer incipient, but beaming. In the sun, her skin shone like that of a young woman, and I thought, “my God, maybe the hair is a disguise!” But no. |
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