Man Walks Into a Room
Page 24
One image that outlasts the others. One never knows what it will be. There was a day, six or seven months before he disappeared, one of those perfect days in late autumn, a championship of light. Already the leaves were almost gone, only a few stabs of color in the trees or scattered on the ground. We had borrowed a house for the weekend from one of Samson’s colleagues, a white clapboard cottage upstate with a view onto a lake. You could see it from the kitchen, a furrowed reflection of the sky. Samson poured himself a glass of orange juice and drank it down slowly, looking out the window. I came up and stood behind him. It was always, even then, a question of should I touch him. Something had to be crossed to get there. We watched one sturdy crow and then another land on the lawn. Otherwise there was nothing to disturb the stillness.
We took a drive and stopped by a path on the side of the road. There was a No Trespassing sign, but we ignored it. The sound of a hunter’s gunshots broke the distance. We ducked into a silo—you could see the sky through the gaps in the tin roof, and there were birds up there. Everything, parts I couldn’t have imagined would care, ached for some physical remark of his love. His mouth was cold and tasted metallic, like the season itself, if that’s possible. To me he always seemed like that, autumnal. Painfully earnest, with an awkward swiftness to the way he moved, a physical remoteness like he was already receding. I don’t remember who kissed whom. It was one of those lucid days in which you can see your whole life like a promise before you.
Later that afternoon we were lying in bed. We had just made love, him touching me as if he’d suddenly remembered that I existed and couldn’t get enough. The way he looked at me, his eyes as blue as I’d seen them. I remember feeling then that I would forgive him anything. Afterward we were lying wrapped in the sheets. He was holding me, his face turned to the window, and neither one of us had to say that the moment possessed the indelible weight of beauty. He said he wouldn’t mind always remembering this, lying with me and looking out at the lake. A wind had come up in the trees, and the branches were bending nervously.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Nicole Krauss
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows:
Krauss, Nicole.
Man walks into a room / Nicole Krauss.
p. cm.
1. Brain—Tumors—Patients—Fiction. 2. Human experimentation in medicine—
Fiction. 3. College teachers—Fiction. 4. Memory transfer—Fiction.
5. Atomic bomb—Fiction. 6. Amnesia—Fiction. 7. Nevada—Fiction. I. Title.
PS361.R38 M36 2002
813′.6—dc21 2001053699
Anchor eISBN: 978-1-4000-7626-0
www.anchorbooks.com
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