the last book I ever read (A Horse Walks into a Bar: A Novel by David Grossman, excerpt nine)

from A Horse Walks into a Bar: A Novel by David Grossman:

A group of five young men and women sitting close to the stage look at one another, get up, and leave. They don’t say a word. I don’t know why they stayed this long, or what made them leave at this particular moment. Dovaleh walks over to the blackboard and stands there. I sense that this abandonment is more hurtful to him than the other. Shoulders hunched, he slams the chalk down on the board: line, line, line, line, line.

But then right at the exit door, one of the women stops, the one without a boyfriend, and despite her friends’ cajoling, she says goodbye to them and sits down at an empty table. The manager signals for the waitress to go over to her. She asks for a glass of water. Dovaleh lopes back to the board like a camel—a flicker of Groucho Marx—and makes a big show of erasing one of the lines. As he does so he turns his head back and gives her a big openmouthed grin.