Role Models -

The poet paused, and took a sip of his wine. He looked around the room, and his eyes met mine. I smiled, and he smiled back, a small, tired smile. Then he went on.

The poet stopped again, and this time he did not go on. He looked into his glass, as if the wine held a vision, and then he looked up and said, “I have spent my entire life trying to get that innocence back. And I have failed.”

He poured himself another glass of wine, and then he walked away, leaving me standing by the bar. I watched him go, and I thought about what he had said. I thought about innocence, and about the loss of it, and about the way we spend our lives trying to get it back. I thought about the famous actress, dead of cancer, and about the poet, old and alone, and about Gertrude Stein, sitting in her armchair in Paris, talking about the war. I thought about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and about the clean white lines and the beautiful sad parties. And then I thought about myself. Role Models

And then I went inside, and I went to bed, and I fell asleep. And I dreamed that I was young again, and that I was standing in a field of wildflowers, and that the sun was warm on my face, and that a woman was walking toward me, a woman I had never seen before, and she was smiling, and she was holding out her hand. And I reached out to take it, and then I woke up.

The room was dark. The house was silent. My wife was breathing softly beside me. And I lay there, listening to the sound of her breath, and I thought about the dream. I thought about the field of wildflowers, and the sun, and the woman with her hand outstretched. And I knew that I would never see her again. I knew that she was gone, that she had never been there at all, that she was just a story I had told myself in the dark. And I knew that this was the truth. This was the only truth there was. The poet paused, and took a sip of his wine

“I asked her what she meant by ‘innocence.’ She looked at me for a long time, and then she said, ‘Innocence is the belief that something is true because you want it to be true. It is the belief that the world is good because you are good. It is the belief that the people you love will never hurt you, and that the people you hate will never win. It is a beautiful belief, and it is always wrong.’”

“That I used to be young,” he said. “And that I used to believe in things. Now I’m old, and I don’t believe in anything. Not in God, not in love, not in art, not in myself. I don’t even believe in the truth. I just tell stories.” Then he went on

“She was a large woman,” he said, “with a large head and large hands. She wore a brown corduroy suit and a brown felt hat, and she sat in a large armchair, and she talked. She talked about the war, the First World War, which she had lived through, and about the way the young men had come back from it, changed. She said they had lost their innocence, and that this loss was the only thing that mattered, the only thing worth writing about. She said that Hemingway had lost his innocence, but that he had found a way to write about it that was like a clean, white line on a blank page. She said that Fitzgerald had lost his innocence, but that he had found a way to write about it that was like a beautiful, sad party that went on too long. She said that she herself had never lost her innocence, because she had never had any to lose. She said that innocence was a luxury of the young, and that she had never been young.”