Petite Histoire

And then there is that sweet-sad feeling that, already 2000 miles behind and six hours into the future, life is going on without you—that somewhere even, in some two-digit arrondissement, he is sitting down to dinner with his wife and younger son (one is assuming, perhaps wrongly, that they are even one of them sons, this "younger" implying only two, which is true—somehow getting one downgraded from a certain size of hook to another, while all the while one struggles to, for example, remember the word for "shoe size"), looking slightly more lost than usual, and she asks what's the matter and he says he's tired, which also is true, and she sets her mouth a second, then sighs in that way they all do (Parisians in general, not only wives) and passes the asparagus, which, like everything else (the look, the sigh—above all the time), quietly allows itself to be passed.