The Body Artist

by Don DeLillo

  "Tell me anyway."

  "It's too early. It's an effort. It's boring."

  "You're sitting there talking. Tell me," she said.

  She took a bite of cereal and read the paper.

  "It's an effort. It's like what. It's like pushing a boulder."

  "You're sitting there talking."

  "Here," he said.

  "You said the house. Nothing about the house is boring. I like the house."

  "You like everything. You love everything. You're my happy home. Here," he said.

  He handed her what remained of his toast and she chewed it mingled with cereal and berries. Suddenly she knew what he'd meant to tell her. She heard the crows in large numbers now, clamorous in the trees, probably mobbing a hawk.

  "Just tell me. Takes only a second," she said, knowing absolutely what it was.

  She saw him move his hand to his breast pocket and then pause and lower it to the cup. It was his coffee, his cup and his cigarette. How an incident described in the paper seemed to rise out of the inky lines of print and gather her into it. You separate the Sunday sections. "Just tell me okay. Because I know anyway." He said, "What? You insist you will drag this thing out of me. Lucky we don't normally have breakfast together. Because my mornings." "I know anyway. So tell me." He was looking at the paper. "You know. Then fine. I don't have to tell you." He was reading, getting ready to go for his cigarettes. She said, "The noise."

  He looked at her. He looked. Then he gave her the great smile, the gold teeth in the great olive-dark face. She hadn't seen this in a while, the amplified smile, Rev emergent, his eyes clear and lit, deep lines etched about his mouth.

  "The noises in the walls. Yes. You've read my mind." "It was one noise. It was one noise," she said. "And it wasn't in the walls."

  "One noise. Okay. I haven't heard it lately. This is what I wanted to say. It's gone. Finished. End of conversation." "True. Except I heard it yesterday, I think." "Then it's not gone. Good. I'm happy for you." "It's an old house. There's always a noise. But this is different. Not those damn scampering animals we hear at night. Or the house settling. I don't know," she said, not wanting to sound concerned. "Like there's something."

  She read the paper, voice trailing off.

  "Good. I'm glad," he said. "You need the company."

  You separate the Sunday sections and there are endless identical lines of print with people living somewhere in the words and the strange contained reality of paper and ink seeps through the house for a week and when you look at a page and distinguish one line from another it begins to gather you into it and there are people being tortured halfway around the world, who speak another language, and you have conversations with them more or less uncontrollably until you become aware you are doing it and then you stop, seeing whatever is in front of you at the time, like half a glass of juice in your husband's hand.

  She took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it. She lost the taste somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it.

  He put down the juice glass. He took the pack out of his shirt and lit up a cigarette, the cigarette he'd been smoking with his coffee since he was twelve years old, he'd told her, and he let the match bum down a bit before he shook it out in meditative slow motion and put it at the edge of his plate. It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not.

  But it wasn't one of his, the hair she'd found in her mouth. Employees must wash hands before leaving toilet. It was his toast but she'd eaten nearly half of it. It was his coffee and cup. Touch his cup and he looks at you edgewise, with the formal one-eyed glare of a boxer touching gloves. But she knew she was making this up because he didn't give a damn what you did with his cup. There were plenty of cups he could use. The phone was his. The birds were hers, the sparrows pecking at sunflower seeds. The hair was somebody else's.

  He said something about his car, the mileage, gesturing. He liked to conduct, to guide an extended remark with his hand, a couple of fingers jutting. 'All day yesterday I thought it was Friday." He said, "What?"

  Or you become someone else, one of the people in the story, doing dialogue of your own devising. You become a man at times, living between the lines, doing another version of the story.

  She thought and read. She groped for the soya box and her hand struck the juice container. She looked up and understood he wasn't reading the paper. He was looking at it but not reading it and she understood this retroactively, that he'd been looking at it all this time but not absorbing the words on the page.

  The container remained upright. She poured a little more soya into the bowl, for grainy texture and long life.

  "All day yesterday I thought it was Friday."

  He said, "Was it?"

  She remembered to smile.

  He said, "What does it matter anyway?"

  She'd put a hand on his shoulder and then nearly moved it up along the back of his neck and into his hair, caressingly, but hadn't.

  "I'm only saying. How does it happen that Thursday seems like Friday? We're out of the city. We're off the calendar. Friday shouldn't have an identity here. Who wants more coffee?"

  She went to pour water for her tea and paused at the stove, waiting for him to say yes or no to coffee. When she started back she saw a blue jay perched atop the feeder. She stopped dead and held her breath. It stood large and polished and looked royally remote from the other birds busy feeding and she could nearly believe she'd never seen a jay before. It stood enormous, looking in at her, seeing whatever it saw, and she wanted to tell Rey to look up.

  She watched it, black-barred across the wings and tail, and she thought she'd somehow only now learned how to look. She'd never seen a thing so clearly and it was not simply because the jay was posted where it was, close enough for her to note the details of cresting and color. There was also the clean shock of its appearance among the smaller brownish birds, its mineral blue and muted blue and broad dark neckband. But if Rev looked up, the bird would fly.

  She tried to work past the details to the bird itself, nest thief and skilled mimic, to the fixed interest in those eyes, a kind of inquisitive chill that felt a little like a challenge.

  When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer. This must be what it means to see if you've been near blind all your life. She said something to Rey, who lifted his head slightly, chasing the jay but leaving the sparrows unstartled. "Did you see it?" He half turned to answer. "Don't we see them all the time?" "Not all the time. And never so close." "Never so close. Okay." "It was looking at me." "It was looking at you."

  She was standing in place, off his left shoulder. When she moved toward her chair the sparrows flew.

  "It was watching me."

  "Did it make your day?"

  "It made my day. My week. What else?"

  She drank her tea and read. Nearly everything she read sent her into reverie.

  She turned on the radio and tracked slowly along the dial, reading the paper, trying to find the weather on the radio.

  He finished his coffee and smoked.

  She sat over the bowl of cereal. She looked past the bowl into a space inside her head that was also here in front of her.

  She folded a section of newspaper and read a line or two and read some more or d
idn't, sipping tea and drifting.

  The radio reported news about a missile exploding mysteriously, underground, in Montana, and she didn't catch if it was armed or not.

  He smoked and looked out the window to his right, where an untended meadow tumbled to the rutted dirt road that led to a gravel road.

  She read and drifted. She was here and there.

  The tea had no honey in it. She'd left the honey jar unopened by the stove.

  He looked around for an ashtray.

  She had a conversation with a doctor in a news story.

  There were two miles of gravel before you reached the paved road that led to town.

  She took the fig off his plate and put a finger down into it and reamed around inside for flesh.

  A voice reported the weather but she missed it. She didn't know it was the weather until it was gone.

  He eased his head well back and rolled it slowly side to side to lessen the tension in his neck.

  She sucked the finger on her fig-dipping hand and thought of things they needed from the store. He turned off the radio.

  She sipped her tea and read. She more or less saw herself talking to a doctor in the bush somewhere, with people hungry in the dust.

  The cigarette was burning down in his hand. She picked up the soya box and tipped it toward her face and smelled inside.

  When he walked out of the room, she realized there was something she wanted to tell him.

  Sometimes she doesn't think of what she wants to say to him until he walks out of whatever room they're in. Then she thinks of it. Then she either calls after him or doesn't and he responds or doesn't.

  She sat there and finished her tea and thought of what she thought of, memory traces and flary images and a friend she missed and all the shadow-dappled stuff of an undividable moment on a normal morning going crazy in ways so humanly routine you can't even stop and take note except for the Ajax she needs to buy and the birds behind her, rattling the metal frame of the feeder.

  It's such a stupid thing to do, read the newspaper and eat.

  She saw him standing in the doorway.

  "Have you seen my keys?"

  She said, "What?"

  He waited for the question to register.

  "Which keys?" she said.

  He looked at her.

  She said, "I bought some lotion yesterday. Which I meant to tell you. It's a muscle rub. It's in a green and white tube on the shelf in the big bathroom upstairs. It's greaseless. It's a muscle rub. Rub it in, my love. Or ask me nice, I'll do it for you."

  "All my keys are on one ring," he said.

  She almost said, Is that smart? But then she didn't. Because what a needless thing. Because how petty it would be to say such a thing, in the morning or any time, on a strong bright day after a storm.

  REY ROBLES, 64, CINEMA'S POET OF LONELY PLACES

  Rey Robles, who directed two world-renowned movies of the late 1970s, was found dead Sunday morning in the Manhattan apartment of his first wife, the fashion consultant Isabel Corrales.

  The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police who were called to the scene.

  Mr. Robles's accounts of his early life were inconsistent but the most persuasive independent versions suggest he was 64 at his death.

  He was born Alejandro Alquezar, in Barcelona. A biographical sketch in the journal Cahiers du Cinema asserted that his father, a worker in a textile plant and a militant antifascist, was killed in that city during the fiercest street fighting of the civil war. The article cites evidence that Alejandro, still a small boy, was among the "war children" of Spain who were sent to the Soviet Union by their families when the dictatorship of the right became an impending reality.

  It isn't clear how many years he spent in the USSR or whether he was ever reunited with his mother. It is known that he lived in Paris as a young man, hauling trash, performing as a street juggler and playing bit parts in several movies, cast as a thief or pimp. This is when he adopted the name Rey Robles, after a minor character he played in an obscure film noir.

  He spent a few years in New York writing subtitles for a trickle of Spanish-language and Russian films and then went west, finding work as a uniformed chauffeur in Los Angeles, where he continued a fringe relationship with the movies, appearing as an extra in half a dozen films. He got a start on the other side of the camera after he became the personal driver of a multimillionaire cement manufacturer from Liechtenstein, a man who was a heavy investor in international film projects. By his own account, Mr. Robles had an affair with the man's wife and persuaded her to arrange a job for him as a second-unit director on a spaghetti western scheduled to be shot in Spain.

  Ten years later, at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Robles told an appreciative audience, "The answer to life is the movies."

  He directed eight features in all. The third of these, My Life for Yours, a French-Italian co-production about a wealthy woman kidnapped by Corsican bandits, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It was followed by Polaris, a tense American crime drama with an undercurrent of Spanish surrealism. The film developed a cult following and ran for extended periods in a number of art houses in this country and abroad.

  "His work at its best extends the language of film," Wrote the critic Philip Stansky. "His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement. He found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments."

  His subsequent movies failed commercially and were largely dismissed by critics. Friends of Mr. Robles attribute his decline to alcoholism and intermittent depression. He married the stage actress Anna Langdon during this period. They separated shortly afterward amid lurid headlines in the British tabloids and were eventually divorced.

  He is survived by his third wife, Lauren Hartke, the body artist.

  CHAPTER 2

  It's a hazy white day and the highway lifts to a drained sky. There are four northbound lanes and you are driving in the third lane and there are cars ahead and behind and to both sides, although not too many and not too close. When you reach the top of the incline, something happens and the cars begin to move unhurriedly now, seemingly self-propelled, coasting smoothly on the level surface. Everything is slow and hazy and drained and it all happens around the word seem. All the cars including yours seem to flow in dissociated motion, giving the impression of or presenting the appearance of, and the highway runs in a white hum.

  Then the mood passes. The noise and rush and blur are back and you slide into your life again, feeling the painful weight in your chest.

  She thought of these days as the first days back.

  In the first days back she restocked the pantry and sprayed chemicals on the bathroom tile. There was a full-size pantry, a dark musty room off the kitchen, and it didn't need restocking. She cleaned and filled the bird feeders, shaping the day around a major thing with all its wrinkles and twists, its array of swarming variations. She sprayed the tile and porcelain with pine-scent chemicals, half addicted to the fumes. There were two months left on the rental agreement. They'd rented for six and now there were two. One person, two months. She used a bottle with a pistol-grip attachment.

  It felt like home, being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous «allow, uncentered, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached.

  She looked at the pages she'd been working on with Rey, his bullshit autobiography. The hard copy sat there, stark against her sense of his spoken recollections, the tapestried lies and contrivances, stories shaped out of desperations not always clear to her. She hand-patted through the clothes he'd left in the bedroom closet. She was not undone by the things that people leave behind when they die and she put the clothes in a box for the needy.

  When she was downstairs she felt him in the rooms on the second floor. He used to prowl these rooms talking into a tiny t
ape recorder, smoke in his face, reciting ideas about some weary script to a writer somewhere whose name he could never recall. Now he was the smoke, Rey was, the thing in the air, vaporous, drifting into every space sooner or later, unshaped, but with a face that was somehow part of the presence, specific to the prowling man.

  She climbed the stairs, hearing the sound a person makes who is climbing stairs, and she touched the oak grain of the newel when she reached the landing.

  It was okay. She wanted to be here and she'd be okay. All their marriage, all the time they'd lived together they'd lived right here.

  Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn't know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar. Different, thinner, didn't matter.

  There was a package of bread crumbs on one of the shelves in the pantry. She knew she'd seen wax paper somewhere in a blue and something box. These were the things that were important now. Meals, tasks, errands.

  She stepped slowly through the rooms. She felt him behind her when she was getting undressed, standing barefoot on the cold floor, throwing off a grubby sweater, and she half turned toward the bed.

  In the first days back she got out of the car once and nearly collapsed – not the major breakdown of every significant function but a small helpless sinking toward the ground, a kind of forgetting how to stand.

  She thought about broiling a cutlet, self-consciously alone, more or less seeing herself from the edge of the room or standing precisely where she was and being who she was and seeing a smaller hovering her in the air somewhere, already thinking it's tomorrow.

  She wanted to disappear in Rey's smoke, be dead, be him, and she tore the wax paper along the serrated edge of the box and reached for the carton of bread crumbs. When the phone rang she did not look at it the way they do in the movies. Real people don't look at ringing phones.

  The wax paper separated from the roll in rat-a-tat sequence, advancing along the notched edge of the box, and she heard it along her spine, she thought.