My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [33]
Today’s meeting is different, however. As I’m waiting for it to start, someone asks me if I’ve noticed how changed George seems since his accident. “Accident?” I say. It turns out that the other night George fell at one of his private clubs and smashed his head. He spent the night in the hospital, and since then he’s been, well, with head injuries it’s hard to tell. He’s up and about, but definitely not himself.
When he walks into the meeting, he seems considerably frailer than the last time I saw him.
“As you may or may not have heard,” he begins by saying, while staring at the floor with uncharacteristic vagueness, “I’ve had a bit of a mishap. That blasted floor at the Colony Club is harder than it looks. I mean the Century Club—or was it the Brook? Anyway, that floor was marble, pure marble, I can tell you, and now I’m a bit of a mess, as you may or may not be able to tell.”
George is too modest to realize that right now he looks like a man who got yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, thrown in a van and dropped by the side of the road out in the country, but we won’t point it out for him.
“Are you feeling any better?” one of the editors asks.
Rotating his eyes but not his head (too painful, apparently), he says to her, “I can’t read or write. I can barely talk on the phone. I can’t even make sense of what I’m watching on TV. All I want to do is sleep and drink ginger ale.” He holds up one of those little green bottles of Schweppes.
The staff looks stricken, and George obviously notices. None of us have ever seen him in such awful condition.
“I’m sorry for being like this. It’s damn embarrassing.” At that point I wonder if the meeting will end right there. But George roused himself from bed for a reason—he wants to say something—and seems to find a reserve of strength.
“Listen all,” he says, perking up. “Being like this has gotten me to do a bit of thinking I wanted to share with you.”
The living room is silent.
“I will recover from this mishap,” he continues, “eventually. But who knows what could happen after that? I could have a stroke while playing tennis, or I could be run over by a bus while crossing York Avenue. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
The staff nods. We’ve heard this speech before. After the bus-on–York Avenue scenario—in case that wasn’t vivid enough—he’d come up with a half-dozen more. (“I could be crushed by a falling bridge. I could fall into the polar bear den at the Central Park Zoo. I could be mortally wounded in a freak trampoline accident.”) Talking this way revealed that even George worried about death and, in particular, the future, which is only natural in a seventy-five-year-old. It wasn’t quite as morbid as it sounds, however: part of him, the bon vivant, the seeker of fun, clearly looked forward to adding death to his repertoire of experiences and the stories he would be able to tell about it afterward.
“I think we get the picture,” one of the editors says after George starts going down his usual path.
“Good, good,” says George. “Excellent. Because what I’m trying to say is that you mustn’t take anything for granted. The cornerstones of reality shift overnight, and things are forever different. Life makes sudden turns without warning, do you hear?”
He looks around the room, to see if we’re all listening.
“Very well, that’s all I’m going to say. Now, has anyone seen Page Six today? I hear there’s an item …”
At this moment I realize that in a funny way, the Paris Review is like a deli: it’s a throwback, an institution that doesn’t quite fit in the modern world. It’s not big or corporate. It doesn’t have a lot of swagger or muscle. There’s no marketing director, IT manager or human resources department.