Gentlemen

We ate the lobsters warm with a couple of pats of butter and toast. We ate in silent reverence, because warm lobster, perfectly prepared, is one of the best things this world has to offer. Afterwards we had coffee in the sitting room, each of us dozing in an armchair by the fire. The idea was that we would recharge and then go out on the townwe had been living a miserly and dreary existence for some time nowbut the delicacies took their toll on our strength, and the Italian wine didn't make us nearly as Italian as we had hoped. Henry put on an old jazz record, but that didn't make us any livelier either. I longed more than ever for an old rock albumit didn't matter which one as long as it rocked and got me going again. But all my records had been stolen, and for Henry rock and pop had never existed. It might be something he would sit and sing along with in a pub, but that was all. I had now been living in his flat for a month, and I was starting to miss my music. Henry claimed that I was going through withdrawal. He was going to get me to listen to real music. He suggested that we write a song together. It would be about two gentlemen, a showy and peppy little tune with a refrain that stayed with you, a perfect hit. If the girls leave you flat And the girls don't have a five or a ten Then forget about that We'll dream ourselves fat, we are gentlemen That's what Henry dictated in his best Karl Gerhard form, because he was no stranger to that type of handiwork. It's what the average serious composer prefers to regard as a type of prostitution. But with his great art, which he regularly talked about, Henry was absolutely uncompromising. He wasn't about to sell out. But we didn't get very far with "Gentlemen" that evening. Nor did we behave like gentlemen. A cool saxophone brought all our impulses down to the ground, and we sank even deeper into our armchairs, if that were possible. It was raining outside, and neither of us had any further desire to lay waste to the town. "I don't even feel like this is a celebration," I yawned. "Me too," said Henry drowsily in English, using incorrect grammar. "I think we ate a little too fast. Lobster has to be eaten slowly. And we should have invited some women over, then we would have pulled ourselves together." "I've got nothing left in me," I said. "Me too," Henry repeated, still just as incorrectly. "Sometimes life is just so incomparably tedious." It remained a mystery how two lively and talented boxers could fade so easily on an evening after a lobster dinner and a few bottles of dry Italian white wine. But at least it wasn't work that had worn us out.Ostergren, Klas is the author of 'Gentlemen ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781596922068 and ISBN 1596922060.