ON RARE occasions a man, even one whose hair is greying and whose features are slackening, sees himself in a light that stands in shining contrast to the momentary depression he feels when he catches an unexpected glimpse of his drab self in some department-store mirror, and this moment, when his life seems almost blessed, can occur in such ordinary circumstances as, for instance, the moment when his partner leaves him to go to the bathroom in a restaurant and he looks around at that part of the room he has not been able to see as he has been absorbed in eating antipasto misto, drinking red wine and conversing half-heartedly with the unwisely bare-shouldered redhead who is the love of his life, though he has not been completely absorbed in either the food or his partner, of course, because as well as listening to the two American college girls to his right, from the pale lips of the more vivacious and prettier of whom the words “Henry James” have just issued, he has been registering snatches of dialogue from unseen tables, he has been either subconsciously drawing conclusions about these invisible people or, if the evening is flat and his relationship has been punctured by time or something sharper, consciously doing so or perhaps even composing a narrative based on the scraps of dialogue, a narrative which quickly gets out of control and detaches itself from its original source of inspiration, ramifying rapidly to the point where he excitedly imagines that this story, which he knows already will involve water and betrayal and the American girl, has, almost miraculously, been gifted to him and he feels, as always at the birth of these things, that if he can just write it down he will have found the perfect medium for his unique apprehension of the world, but even as ideas for this story are multiplying in his brain like bacteria or cancer cells or subordinate clauses in a sentence written by the aforementioned Henry James, he is surveying the previously unseen customers and his eyes are drawn especially to an ageing, Mediterranean hippy who is is gesticulating expansively with elongated hands and fingers stolen from an El Greco painting or possibly a Modigliani as he speaks to a worn, wistful-looking blonde, and the sight of this couple is immediately suggesting another narrative which is beginning to interfere with the man’s previous story or just possibly, and thrillingly, to coalesce with it so that he knows he has to turn away from the hippy, and it is as he does so that he catches sight of himself in a large mirror on the opposite wall where, due undoubtedly to the combination of subdued lighting and the hint of elation visible in his face, itself a symptom of the teeming stories in his brain, he becomes for the briefest of instants that most ludicrous and seemingly impossible of beings – a romantic figure in his own eyes.

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