by Don DeLillo
PART TWO
ERNST HECHINGER
6
When he appeared at the door it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burnt matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face. He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no focus in it. He carried a briefcase and stood slowly nodding. She thought he might be in shock but didn’t know what this meant in precise terms, medical terms. He walked past her toward the kitchen and she tried calling her doctor, then 911, then the nearest hospital, but all she heard was the drone of overloaded lines. She turned off the TV set, not sure why, protecting him from the news he’d just walked out of, that’s why, and then went into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table and she poured him a glass of water and told him that Justin was with his grandmother, released early from school and also being protected from the news, at least as it concerned his father.
He said, “Everybody’s giving me water.”
She thought he could not have traveled all this distance or even climbed the stairs if he’d suffered serious injury, grievous blood loss.
Then he said something else. The briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. He said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky.
She poured water on a dishcloth and wiped dust and ash from his hands, face and head, careful not to disturb the glass fragments. There was more blood than she’d realized at first and then she began to realize something else, that his cuts and abrasions were not severe enough or numerous enough to account for all this blood. It was not his blood. Most of it came from somebody else.
The windows were open so Florence could smoke. They sat where they’d sat last time, one on either side of the coffee table, positioned diagonally.
“I gave myself a year,” he said.
“An actor. I can see you as an actor.”
“Acting student. Never got beyond the student part.”
“Because there’s something about you, in the way you hold a space. I’m not sure what that means.”
“Sounds good.”
“I think I heard it somewhere. What does it mean?” she said.
“Gave myself a year. I thought it would be interesting. Cut it to six months. I thought, What else can I do? I played two sports in college. That was over. Six months, what the hell. Cut it to four, was gone in two.”
She studied him, she sat there and stared, and there was something about this, such frank and innocent openness of manner that he stopped feeling unnerved after a while. She looked, they talked, here in a room he would not have been able to describe a minute after leaving.
“Didn’t work out. Things don’t work out,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Went to law school.”
She whispered, “Why?”
“What else? Where else?”
She sat back and put the cigarette to her lips, thinking about something. There were small brown specks on her face spilling from the lower forehead down onto the bridge of the nose.
“You’re married, I guess. Not that I care.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I don’t care,” she said, and it was the first time he’d heard resentment in her voice.
“We were apart, now we’re back, or beginning to be back.”
“Of course,” she said.
This was the second time he’d walked across the park. He knew why he was here but could not have explained it to someone and did not have to explain it to her. It didn’t matter whether they spoke or not. It would be fine, not speaking, breathing the same air, or she speaks, he listens, or day is night.
She said, “I went to St. Paul’s yesterday. I wanted to be with people, down there in particular. I knew there would be people there. I looked at the flowers and the personal things people left, the homemade memorials. I didn’t look at the photographs of the missing. I couldn’t do that. I sat in the chapel for an hour and people came in and prayed or just walked around, only looking, reading the marble plaques. In memory of, in memory of. Rescue workers came in, three of them, and I tried not to stare, and then two more came in.”
She’d been married for a brief time, ten years earlier, a mistake so fleeting it left few marks. That’s what she said. The man died some months after the marriage ended, in a car crash, and his mother blamed Florence. That was the mark it left.
“I say to myself dying is ordinary.”
“Not when it’s you. Not when it’s someone you know.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t grieve. Just, why don’t we put it in God’s hands?” she said. “Why haven’t we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We’re supposed to believe in God but then why don’t we obey the laws of God’s universe, which teach us how small we are and where we’re all going to end up?”
“Can’t be that simple.”
“Those men who did this thing. They’re anti everything we stand for. But they believe in God,” she said.
“Whose God? Which God? I don’t even know what it means, to believe in God. I never think about it.”
“Never think about it.”
“Does that upset you?”
“It frightens me,” she said. “I’ve always felt the presence of God. I talk to God sometimes. I don’t have to be in church to talk to God. I go to church but not, you know, week in, week out—what’s the word I’m thinking of?”
“Religiously,” he said.
He could make her laugh. She seemed to look into him when she laughed, eyes alive, seeing something he could not guess at. There was an element in Florence that was always close to some emotional distress, a memory of bearing injury or sustaining loss, possibly lifelong, and the laughter was a kind of shedding, a physical deliverance from old woe, dead skin, if only for a moment.
There was music coming from a back room, something classical and familiar but he didn’t know the name of the piece or the composer. He never knew these things. They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he’d lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women.
The talk continued, touching on marriage, friendship, the future. He was an amateur at this but spoke willingly enough. Mostly he listened.
“What we carry. This is the story in the end,” she said remotely.
His car hit a wall. His mother blamed Florence because if they’d still been married he wouldn’t have been in that car on that road and since she was the one who’d ended the marriage the blame was hers, the mark was hers.
“He was an older man by seventeen years. It sounds so tragic. An older man. He had an engineering degree but worked in the post office.”
“He drank.”
“Yes.”
“He was drinking the night of the crash.”
“Yes. It was afternoon. Broad daylight. No other cars involved.”
He told her it was time for him to leave.
“Of course. You have to. That’s the way these things happen. Everybody knows that.”
She seemed to be blaming him for this, the fact of leaving, the fact of marrying, the thoughtless gesture of reuniting, and at the same time did not seem to be talking to him at all. She was talking to the room, to herself, he thought, talking back in time to some version of herself, a person who might confirm the grim familiarity of the moment. She wanted her feelings to register, officially, and needed to say the actual words, if not necessarily to him.
But he remained in the chair.
He said, “What is that music?”
“I think I need to make it go away. It’s like movie music in those old movies when the man and woman run through the h
eather.”
“Tell the truth. You love those movies.”
“I love the music too. But only when it’s playing in the movie.”
She looked at him and got up. She went past the front door and down the hall. She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.
Light-skinned black woman. One of those odd embodyings of doubtful language and unwavering race but the only words that meant anything to him were the ones she’d spoken and would speak.
She talked to God. Maybe Lianne had these conversations as well. He wasn’t sure. Or long troubled monologues. Or shy thoughts. When she raised the subject or spoke the name he went blank. The matter was too abstract. Here, with a woman he barely knew, the matter seemed unavoidable, and other matters, other questions.
He heard the music change to something that had a buzz and drive, voices in Portuguese rapping, singing, whistling, with guitars and drums behind them, manic saxophones.
First she’d looked at him and then he’d watched her walk past the door and down the hall and now he knew that he was supposed to follow.
She stood by the window, clapping her hands to the music. It was a small bedroom, without a chair, and he sat on the floor and watched her.
“I’ve never been to Brazil,” she said. “A place I think about sometimes.”
“I’m talking to somebody. Very early in the talks. About a job involving Brazilian investors. I may need some Portuguese.”
“We all need some Portuguese. We all need to go to Brazil. This is the disc that was in the player that you carried out of there.”
He said, “Go ahead.”
“What?”
“Dance.”
“What?”
“Dance,” he said. “You want to dance. I want to watch.”
She stepped out of her shoes and began to dance, clapping hands softly to the beat and beginning to move toward him. She reached out a hand and he shook his head, smiling, and pushed back toward the wall. She was not practiced at this. This was not something she’d allow herself to do alone, he thought, or with someone else, or for someone else, not until now. She moved back across the room, seeming to lose herself in the music, eyes closed. She danced in slow motion for a time, no longer clapping, arms up and away from her body, nearly trancelike, and began to whirl in place, ever slower, facing him now, mouth open, eyes coming open.
Sitting there, watching, he began to crawl out of his clothes.
It happened to Rosellen S., an elemental fear out of deepest childhood. She could not remember where she lived. She stood alone on a corner near the elevated tracks, becoming desperate, separated from everything. She looked for a storefront, a street sign that might give her a clue. The world was receding, the simplest recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter. Nothing lay around her but silence and distance. She wandered back the way she’d come, or thought she’d come, and went into a building and stood in the entranceway, listening. She followed the sound of voices and came to a room where a dozen people sat reading books, or one book, the Bible. When they saw her, they stopped reciting and waited. She tried to tell them what was wrong and one of them looked in her handbag and found numbers to call and finally got someone, a sister in Brooklyn, it turned out, listed as Billie, to come to East Harlem and take Rosellen home.
Lianne learned this from Dr. Apter the day after it happened. She’d seen the slow waning, over months. Rosellen still laughed at times, irony intact, a small woman of delicate features and chestnut skin. They approached what was impending, each of them, with a little space remaining, at this point, to stand and watch it happen.
Benny T. said he had trouble some mornings getting his pants on. Carmen said, “That’s better than off.” She said, “Long as you can get them off, sweetheart, you’re the original sexy Benny.” He laughed and stomped a little, battering himself on the head for effect, and said it wasn’t really that kind of problem. He could not convince himself that the pants were on right. He put them on, took them off. He made certain the zipper was in front. He checked the length in the mirror, cuffs more or less on shoetops, except there were no cuffs. He remembered cuffs. These pants had cuffs yesterday so how come not today.
He said he knew how this sounded. It sounded peculiar to him too. He used this word, peculiar, avoiding more expressive terms. But when it was happening, he said, he could not get outside it. He was in a mind and body that were not his, looking at the fit. The pants did not seem to fit right. He took them off and put them on. He shook them out. He looked inside them. He began to think they were someone else’s pants, in his house, draped over his chair.
They waited for Carmen to say something. Lianne waited for her to mention the fact that Benny wasn’t married. Good thing you’re not married, Benny, with some guy’s pants on your chair. Your wife would have some explaining.
But Carmen said nothing this time.
Omar H. talked about the trip uptown. He was the only member of the group who lived out of the area, on the Lower East Side, and there was the subway, and the plastic card he had to swipe through the slot, swipe six times, change turnstiles,
PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN, and the long ride uptown, and the time he landed somewhere on a raw corner in the Bronx, not knowing what had happened to the missing station stops.
Curtis B. could not find his wristwatch. When he found it, finally, in the medicine cabinet, he could not seem to attach it to his wrist. There it was, the watch. He said this gravely. There it was, in my right hand. But the right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist. There was a spatial void, or a visual gap, a rift in his field of vision, and it took him some time to make the connection, hand to wrist, pointed end of wristband into buckle. To Curtis this was a moral flaw, a sin of self-betrayal. Once at an earlier session he read a piece he’d written about an event fifty years earlier when he killed a man with a broken bottle in a bar fight, gouging the face and eyes and then severing the jugular. He looked up from the page when he spoke these words: severing the jugular.
He used the same deliberate tone, dark and fated, in his account of the lost watch.
Coming down the stairs she said something and it was only seconds after Keith did what he did that she made the connection. He kicked the door they were walking past. He stopped walking, eased back and kicked hard, striking the door with the bottom of his shoe.
Once she made the connection between what she’d said and what he did, the first thing she understood was that his anger was not directed at the music or at the woman who played the music. It was directed at her, for the remark, the complaint she’d made, the persistence of it, the vexing repetition.
The second thing she understood was that there was no anger. He was completely calm. He was playing out an emotion, hers, on her behalf, to her discredit. It was almost, she thought, a little Zenlike, a gesture to shock and stimulate one’s meditations or reverse their direction.
No one came to the door. The music did not stop, a slowly circling figure of reeds and drums. They looked at each other and laughed, hard and loud, husband and wife, walking down the stairs and out the front door.
The poker games were at Keith’s place, where the poker table was. There were six players, the regulars, Wednesday nights, the business writer, the adman, the mortgage broker and so on, men rolling their shoulders, hoisting their balls, ready to sit and play, game-faced, testing the forces that govern events.
In the beginning they played poker in a number of shapes and variations but over time they began to reduce the dealer’s options. The banning of certain games started as a joke in the name of tradition and self-discipline but became effective over time, with arguments made against the shabbier aberrations. Finally the senior player, Dockery, pushing fifty, advocat
ed straight poker only, the classical retro-format, five-card draw, five-card stud, seven-card stud, and with the shrinking of choice came the raising of stakes, which intensified the ceremony of check-writing for the long night’s losers.
They played each hand in a glazed frenzy. All the action was somewhere behind the eyes, in naive expectation and calculated deceit. Each man tried to entrap the others and fix limits to his own false dreams, the bond trader, the lawyer, the other lawyer, and these games were the funneled essence, the clear and intimate extract of their daytime initiatives. The cards skimmed across the green baize surface of the round table. They used intuition and cold-war risk analysis. They used cunning and blind luck. They waited for the prescient moment, the time to make the bet based on the card they knew was coming. Felt the queen and there it was. They tossed in the chips and watched the eyes across the table. They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead. There were elements of healthy challenge and outright mockery. There were elements of one’s intent to shred the other’s gauzy manhood.
Hovanis, dead now, decided at some point that they didn’t need seven-card stud. The sheer number of cards and odds and options seemed excessive and the others laughed and made the rule, reducing the dealer’s choice to five-card stud and five-card draw.
There was a corresponding elevation of stakes.
Then someone raised the question of food. This was a joke. There was food in casual platters on a counter in the kitchen. How disciplined can we be, Demetrius said, if we are taking time to leave the table and stuff our jaws with chemically treated breads, meats and cheeses. This was a joke they took seriously because leaving the table ought to be allowed only as a matter of severest bladder-racked urgency or the kind of running bad luck that requires a player to stand at the window looking out on the deep abiding tide of night.
So food was out. No food. They dealt the cards, they called or folded. Then they talked about liquor. They knew how stupid this was but they wondered, two or three of them, whether it might be advisable to narrow their intake to darkish liquors, to scotch, bourbon, brandy, the manlier tones and deeper and more intense distillations. No gin, no vodka, no wan liqueurs.