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The Clockers ended in the mysteriously abrupt way that such things do, and most of the people at our table had already risen and were making befuddled attempts to organise themselves for departure when Polly fairly sprang to her feet, thinking of Little Pip, I imagine—Polly's father and her addled mother were supposedly minding the child—but then paused a second and did a curious, shivery little flounce, surprisedly smiling with eyebrows raised and her hands held out from her sides with the palms flat on the air, like a toddler attempting a curtsy. It may have been nothing more than the effect of her bum detaching itself from the seat of her chair—it was very hot and humid in the room—but to me it seemed that she had been lifted, suddenly, lightly, by the action of some invisible and buoyant medium: that she was, literally, and for a second, walking on air. This was hardly the result of the fervid harangue I had been subjecting her to in the absence of her husband, yet I was moved, to hot tears, almost, feeling I had somehow been allowed to share with her in this brief and secret exaltation. She took up her velvet purse, still with a trace of that faintly surprised smile—was she even blushing a little?—and made a show of looking about for Marcus, who was fetching their coats. Then I too rose, my heart fluttering and my poor knees gone to rubber.
In love! Again!
When we came outside the night seemed unwontedly huge under a skyful of glistening stars. After the noise within, the silence out here rang thrillingly in the frosty air. At first Marcus's car wouldn't start because, being a cheapskate, he had filled the fuel tank with an inferior sort of fluid and the pipes were clogged with salt. While he was under the bonnet, sighing and softly cursing, Polly and I stood waiting on the pavement, side by side but not touching. Gloria had moved a little way off to smoke a furtive cigarette. Polly had her coat wrapped tightly round her and her chin was sunk in its fur collar, and when she looked at me she did not turn her head but swivelled her eyes sideways comically, with a clown's hapless, downturned grin. We said nothing. I thought of taking hold of her and drawing her to me while Gloria wasn't looking and kissing her quickly, if only on the cheek, or even the forehead, as an old friend might at such a moment; but I didn't dare. What I really wanted to do was to kiss her lips, to lick her eyelids, to dart the tip of my tongue into the pink and secret volutes of her ear. I was in a state of heady amazement, at myself, at Polly, at what we were, at what we had all at once become. It was as if a god had reached down from that sky of stars and scooped us up in his hand and made a little constellation of us on the spot.
It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I'm gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do. Don't misunderstand me, I have no illusions about my significance in the torrid scheme of things. Others will register other versions of the world, countless billions of them, a welter of worlds particular each to each, but the one that I shall have made merely by my brief presence in it will be lost for ever. That's a harrowing thought, I find, more so in a way even than the prospect of the loss of self itself. Consider me there that night, under that strew of gems on their cloth of purple plush, having been set upon out of nowhere by love and gazing all about me with my mouth open, noting how the starlight laid sharp shadows diagonally down the sides of the houses, how the roof of Marcus's car gleamed as if under a fine skim of oil, how the fox fur of Polly's collar bristled in burning tips, how the roadway darkly shone with frosted grit and the outlines of everything glimmered—all that, the known and common world made singular by my just looking at it. Polly smiling, Marcus vexed, Gloria with her fag, the parcel of people behind me coming out of the Clockers in a burst of drunken hilarity, their breath forming globes of ectoplasm on the air— they would all see what I saw, but not as I did, with my eyes, from my particular angle, in my own way that is as feeble and imperceptive as everyone else's but that is mine, all the same: mine, and hence unique.
Excerpted from The Blue Guitar by John Banville. Copyright © 2015 by John Banville. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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