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Authors: Paul Auster
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he decides to make the journey on foot. He therefore rises from the chair, pleased to note as he does so that his equilibrium is steady, with no signs of the vertigo that plagued him earlier. What Mr. Blank has forgotten, however, is that he is no longer wearing the white tennis shoes, not to speak of no longer wearing the black slippers, and that there is nothing on his feet anymore but the white nylon socks. In that the material of those socks is exceedingly thin, and in that the wooden floor is exceedingly smooth, Mr. Blank discovers after the first step that it is possible to slide his way forward – not with the rasping shuffle of the slippers, but as if he were moving along on ice skates.
A new form of pleasure has become available to him, and after two or three experimental glides between the desk and the bed, he concludes that it is no less enjoyable than rocking back and forth and spinning around in the chair – perhaps even more so. The pressure in his bladder is mounting, but Mr. Blank delays his trip to the bathroom in order to prolong his turn on the imaginary ice by a few moments, and as he skates around the room, now lifting one foot into the air, now the other, or else floating along with both feet on the floor, he again returns to the distant past, not as far back as the era of Whitey the rocking horse or the mornings when he would sit in his mother’s lap as she dressed him on the bed, but a long while ago just the same: Mr. Blank in his high middle boyhood, roughly ten years old, perhaps eleven, but on no account as advanced as twelve. It’s a cold Saturday afternoon in January or February. The pond in the little town where he grew up has frozen over, and there is the young Mr. Blank, who was then referred to as Master Blank, skating hand in hand with his first love, a girl with green eyes and reddish brown hair, long reddish brown hair tousled by the wind, her cheeks red from the cold, her name now forgotten, but beginning with the letter S Mr. Blank says to himself, he is certain of that – perhaps Susie, he thinks, or Samantha or Sally or Serena, but no, none of those, and yet no matter, for in that it was the first time he ever held a girl’s hand, what he remembers most keenly now is the sensation of having entered a new world, a world in which holding a girl’s hand was a good to be desired above all others, and such was his ardor for this young creature whose name began with the letter S that once they stopped skating and sat down on a tree stump at the edge of the pond, Master Blank was bold enough to lean forward and kiss her on the lips. For reasons that both baffled and wounded him at the time, Miss S. burst out laughing, turned away her head, and rebuked him with a sentence that has stayed with him ever since – even now, in his present abject circumstances, when all is not right in his head and so many other things have vanished: Don’t be silly. For the object of his affections understood nothing of such matters, being but ten or eleven years old and not yet ripened to the point where amorous advances from a member of the opposite sex would have any meaning for her. And so, rather than respond to Master Blank’s kiss with a kiss of her own, she laughed.
The rebuff lingered for days afterward, causing such pain in his soul that one morning, noticing her son’s grim demeanor, his mother asked him what was wrong. Mr. Blank was still young enough to feel no compunctions about confiding in his mother, and therefore he told her the full story. To which she replied: Don’t worry, there are other pebbles on the shore. It was the first time Mr. Blank had heard the expression, and he found it curious that girls should be compared to pebbles, which they in no way resembled, he felt, at least not in his experience. Nevertheless, he grasped the metaphor, but in spite of understanding what his mother was trying to tell him, he disagreed with her, since passion is and always will be blind to all
A new form of pleasure has become available to him, and after two or three experimental glides between the desk and the bed, he concludes that it is no less enjoyable than rocking back and forth and spinning around in the chair – perhaps even more so. The pressure in his bladder is mounting, but Mr. Blank delays his trip to the bathroom in order to prolong his turn on the imaginary ice by a few moments, and as he skates around the room, now lifting one foot into the air, now the other, or else floating along with both feet on the floor, he again returns to the distant past, not as far back as the era of Whitey the rocking horse or the mornings when he would sit in his mother’s lap as she dressed him on the bed, but a long while ago just the same: Mr. Blank in his high middle boyhood, roughly ten years old, perhaps eleven, but on no account as advanced as twelve. It’s a cold Saturday afternoon in January or February. The pond in the little town where he grew up has frozen over, and there is the young Mr. Blank, who was then referred to as Master Blank, skating hand in hand with his first love, a girl with green eyes and reddish brown hair, long reddish brown hair tousled by the wind, her cheeks red from the cold, her name now forgotten, but beginning with the letter S Mr. Blank says to himself, he is certain of that – perhaps Susie, he thinks, or Samantha or Sally or Serena, but no, none of those, and yet no matter, for in that it was the first time he ever held a girl’s hand, what he remembers most keenly now is the sensation of having entered a new world, a world in which holding a girl’s hand was a good to be desired above all others, and such was his ardor for this young creature whose name began with the letter S that once they stopped skating and sat down on a tree stump at the edge of the pond, Master Blank was bold enough to lean forward and kiss her on the lips. For reasons that both baffled and wounded him at the time, Miss S. burst out laughing, turned away her head, and rebuked him with a sentence that has stayed with him ever since – even now, in his present abject circumstances, when all is not right in his head and so many other things have vanished: Don’t be silly. For the object of his affections understood nothing of such matters, being but ten or eleven years old and not yet ripened to the point where amorous advances from a member of the opposite sex would have any meaning for her. And so, rather than respond to Master Blank’s kiss with a kiss of her own, she laughed.
The rebuff lingered for days afterward, causing such pain in his soul that one morning, noticing her son’s grim demeanor, his mother asked him what was wrong. Mr. Blank was still young enough to feel no compunctions about confiding in his mother, and therefore he told her the full story. To which she replied: Don’t worry, there are other pebbles on the shore. It was the first time Mr. Blank had heard the expression, and he found it curious that girls should be compared to pebbles, which they in no way resembled, he felt, at least not in his experience. Nevertheless, he grasped the metaphor, but in spite of understanding what his mother was trying to tell him, he disagreed with her, since passion is and always will be blind to all
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