I was sitting in the easy chair in Natalie’s living room, Montaigne’s Essays unopened in my hand.
“Read to me,” Randy said, and flew through the air to land in my out-of-practice lap.
I was startled more by his request than by the impact. But I went ahead and opened to the part I loved the best, the passage where I always knew my communication with Monsieur Montaigne was still open whenever I read it.
“He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave,” I said, reading from the page.
But – just as had happened every time I’d tried to read it since checking it out from the library – my head immediately hurt from trying to read with one eye.
I closed the book and quoted from memory: “Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an evil.”
“What does that mean?” Randy asked.
“It means that this world will crush us like bugs in the end,” I said. “But that is no tragedy.”
Randy lost interest at that, and climbed off my lap to wander outside.
Natalie entered the room, picked up the Essays and riffled its pages. “You actually enjoy reading these old books?”
“I do,” I said, a little irritably from the pain. I closed my eye and rubbed my temples against the growing headache. “I owe everything to them, they’re my fuel.”
But how was I to read anymore? Had that day at the school cost me the Canon?
“Would you like me to rub your head?” she asked, finally seeming to notice my sourness.
I nodded without looking at her, not wanting to impose with any kind of request. She stood behind me, her cool strong fingers stroking my temples in a circular motion.
The headache immediately faded. My pain in my missing left eye even turned down a hefty notch for the first time since I left the hospital.
“I still miss Wayne,” Natalie said. “I miss him in the morning, and in the evenings too. All I had to do was touch his cheek, you know?” she said, brushing the side of my face with the back of her fingers.
“I think my headache is gone now,” I managed to choke out, hoping I wouldn’t have to stand up any time soon.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her chin raised slightly as she leaned around to look me in the face sideways. Her breasts rested easy on my shoulder. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
The living room felt several dozen degrees warmer, probably from the incandescent lamp my face felt to be. And then Natalie said the words that made me smile as she breathed them in my ear; the sweetest words I’d heard coming from a woman’s mouth in a long time:
“You know you can get all those books on tape, right?”