by Don DeLillo
She didn’t know whether this was interesting or cruel but saw herself in the window wearing a grudging smile.
“I don’t teach art.”
“This is fast food that I’m trying to eat slow. I don’t have an appointment until three-thirty. Eat slow. And tell me what you teach.”
“I don’t teach.”
She didn’t tell him that she was also out of work. She’d grown tired of describing her job, administrative, with an educational publisher, so why make the effort, she thought, now that the job and the company no longer existed.
“Problem is, it’s against my nature to eat slow. I have to remind myself. But even then I can’t make the adjustment.”
But that wasn’t the reason. She didn’t tell him that she was out of work because it would give them a situation in common. She didn’t want that, an inflection of mutual sympathy, a comradeship. Let the tone stay scattered.
She drank her apple juice and looked at the crowds moving past, at faces that seemed completely knowable for half a second or so, then were forgotten forever in far less time than that.
He said, “We should have gone to a real restaurant. It’s hard to talk here. You’re not comfortable.”
“No, this is fine. I’m kind of in a rush right now.”
He seemed to consider this and then reject it, undiscouraged. She thought of going to the washroom and then thought no. She thought of the dead man’s shirt, Andreas Baader’s shirt, dirtier or more bloody in one picture than in the other.
“And you have a three o’clock,” she said.
“Three-thirty. But that’s a long way off. That’s another world, where I fix my tie and walk in and tell them who I am.” He paused a moment, then looked at her. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Who are you?’”
She saw herself smile. But she said nothing. She thought that maybe Ulrike’s rope burn wasn’t a burn but the rope itself, if it was a rope and not a wire or a belt or something else.
He said, “That’s your line. ‘Who are you?’ I set you up beautifully and you totally miss your cue.”
They’d finished eating but their paper cups were not empty yet. They talked about rents and leases, parts of town. She didn’t want to tell him where she lived. She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she’d come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day’s complaints.
Then she told him. They were talking about places to run and bike, and he told her where he lived and what his jogging route was, and she said that her bike had been stolen from the basement of her building, and when he asked her where she lived she told him, more or less nonchalantly, and he drank his diet soda and looked out the window, or into it, perhaps, at their faint reflections paired on the glass.
When she came out of the bathroom, he was standing at the kitchen window as if waiting for a view to materialize. There was nothing out there but dusty masonry and glass, the rear of the industrial loft building on the next street.
It was a studio apartment, with the kitchen only partly walled off and the bed in a corner of the room, smallish, without posts or headboard, covered in a bright Berber robe, the only object in the room of some slight distinction.
She knew she had to offer him a drink. She felt awkward, unskilled at this, at unexpected guests. Where to sit, what to say, these were matters to consider. She didn’t mention the gin she kept in the freezer.
“You’ve lived here, what?”
“Just under four months. I’ve been a nomad,” she said. “Sublets, staying with friends, always short-term. Ever since the marriage failed.”
“The marriage.”
He said this in a modified version of the baritone rumble he’d used earlier for “the state.”
“I’ve never been married. Believe that?” he said. “Most of my friends my age. All of them really. Married, children, divorced, children. You want kids someday?”
“When is someday? Yes, I think so.”
“I think of kids. It makes me feel selfish, to be so wary of having a family. Never mind do I have a job or not. I’ll have a job soon, a good one. That’s not it. I’m in awe of raising, basically, someone so tiny and soft.”
They drank seltzer with wedges of lemon, seated diagonally at the low wooden table, the coffee table where she ate her meals. The conversation surprised her a little. It was not difficult, even in the pauses. The pauses were unembarrassed and he seemed honest in his remarks.
His cell phone rang. He dug it out of his body and spoke briefly, then sat with the thing in his hand, looking thoughtful.
“I should remember to turn it off. But I think, If I turn it off, what will I miss? Something so incredible.”
“The call that changes everything.”
“Something so incredible. The total life-altering call. That’s why I respect my cell phone.”
She wanted to look at the clock.
“That wasn’t your interview just now, was it? Canceled?”
He said it wasn’t and she sneaked a look at the clock on the wall. She wondered whether she wanted him to miss his interview. That couldn’t be what she wanted.
“Maybe you’re like me,” he said. “You have to find yourself on the verge of something happening before you can begin to prepare for it. That’s when you get serious.”
“Are we talking about fatherhood?”
“Actually, I canceled the interview myself. When you were in there,” he said, nodding toward the bathroom.
She felt an odd panic. He finished his seltzer, tipping his head back until an ice cube slid into his mouth. They sat awhile, letting the ice melt. Then he looked directly at her, fingering one of the dangled ends of his necktie.
“Tell me what you want.”
She sat there.
“Because I sense you’re not ready and I don’t want to do something too soon. But, you know, we’re here.”
She didn’t look at him.
“I’m not one of those controlling men. I don’t need to control anyone. Tell me what you want.”
“Nothing.”
“Conversation, talk, whatever. Affection,” he said. “This is not a major moment in the world. It’ll come and go. But we’re here, so.”
“I want you to leave, please.”
He shrugged and said, “Whatever.” Then he sat there.
“You said, ‘Tell me what you want.’ I want you to leave.”
He sat there. He didn’t move. He said, “I canceled the thing for a reason. I don’t think this is the reason, this particular conversation. I’m looking at you. I’m saying to myself, You know what she’s like? She’s like someone convalescing.”
“I’m willing to say it was my mistake.”
“I mean we’re here. How did this happen? There was no mistake. Let’s be friends,” he said.
“I think we have to stop now.”
“Stop what? What are we doing?”
He was trying to speak softly, to take the edge off the moment.
“She’s like someone convalescing. Even in the museum, this is what I thought. All right. Fine. But now we’re here. This whole day, no matter what we say or do, it’ll come and go.”
“I don’t want to continue this.”
“Be friends.”
“This is not right.”
“No, be friends.”
His voice carried an intimacy so false it seemed a little threatening. She didn’t know why she was still sitting here. He leaned toward her then, placing a hand lightly on her forearm.
“I don’t try to control people. This is not me.”
She drew away and stood up and he was all around her then. She tucked her head into her shoulder. He didn’t exert pressure or try to caress her breasts or hips but held her in a kind of loose containment. For a moment she seemed to disappear, tucked and still, in breathless hiding. Then she pulled away. He let her do this and looked at her so levelly, with such measuring effect, that she barely rec
ognized him. He was ranking her, marking her in some awful and withering way.
“Be friends,” he said.
She found she was shaking her head, trying to disbelieve the moment, to make it reversible, a misunderstanding. He watched her. She was standing near the bed and this was precisely the information contained in his look, these two things, her and the bed. He shrugged as if to say, It’s only right. Because what’s the point of being here if we don’t do what we’re here to do? Then he took off his jacket, a set of unhurried movements that seemed to use up the room. In the rumpled white shirt he was bigger than ever, sweating, completely unknown to her. He held the jacket at his side, arm extended.
“See how easy. Now you. Start with the shoes,” he said. “First one, then the other.”
She went toward the bathroom. She didn’t know what to do. She walked along the wall, head down, a person marching blindly, and went into the bathroom. She closed the door but was afraid to lock it. She thought it would make him angry, provoke him to do something, wreck something, worse. She did not slide the bolt. She was determined not to do this unless she heard him approach the bathroom. She didn’t think he’d moved. She was certain, nearly certain that he was standing near the coffee table.
She said, “Please leave.”
Her voice was unnatural, so fluted and small it scared her further. Then she heard him move. It sounded almost leisurely. It was a saunter, almost, and it took him past the radiator, where the cover rattled slightly, and in the direction of the bed.
“You have to go,” she said, louder now.
He was sitting on the bed, unbuckling his belt. This is what she thought she heard, the tip of the belt sliding out of the loop and then a little flick of tongue and clasp. She heard the zipper coming down.
She stood against the bathroom door. After a while she heard him breathing, a sound of concentrated work, nasal and cadenced. She stood there and waited, head down, body on the door. There was nothing she could do but listen and wait.
When he was finished, there was a long pause, then some rustling and shifting. She thought she heard him put on his jacket. He came toward her now. She realized she could have locked the door earlier, when he was on the bed. She stood there and waited. Then she felt him lean against the door, the dead weight of him, an inch away, not pushing but sagging. She slid the bolt into the chamber, quietly. He was pressed there, breathing, sinking into the door.
He said, “Forgive me.”
His voice was barely audible, close to a moan. She stood there, and waited.
He said, “I’m so sorry. Please. I don’t know what to say.”
She waited for him to leave. When she heard him cross the room and close the door behind him, finally, she waited a full minute longer. Then she came out of the bathroom and locked the front door.
She saw everything twice now. She was where she wanted to be, and alone, but nothing was the same. Bastard. Nearly everything in the room had a double effect—what it was and the association it carried in her mind. She went out walking and when she came back the connection was still there, at the coffee table, on the bed, in the bathroom. Bastard. She had dinner in a small restaurant nearby and went to bed early.
When she went back to the museum the next morning he was alone in the gallery, seated on the bench in the middle of the room, his back to the entranceway, and he was looking at the last painting in the cycle, the largest by far and maybe most breathtaking, the one with the coffins and cross, called Funeral.
MIDNIGHT IN DOSTOEVSKY
We were two somber boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle-stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight.
We were walking parallel to the tracks when an old freight train approached and we stopped and watched. It seemed the kind of history that passes mostly unobserved, a diesel engine and a hundred boxcars rolling over remote country, and we shared an unspoken moment of respect, Todd and I, for times past, frontiers gone, and then walked on, talking about nothing much but making something of it. We heard the whistle sound as the train disappeared into late afternoon.
This was the day we saw the man in the hooded coat. We argued about the coat—loden coat, anorak, parka. It was our routine; we were ever ready to find a matter to contest. This was why the man had been born, to end up in this town wearing that coat. He was well ahead of us and walking slowly, hands clasped behind his back, a smallish figure turning now to enter a residential street and fade from view.
“A loden coat doesn’t have a hood. A hood isn’t part of the context,” Todd said. “It’s a parka or an anorak.”
“There’s others. There’s always others.”
“Name one.”
“Duffel coat.”
“There’s duffel bag.”
“There’s duffel coat.”
“Does the word imply a hood?”
“The word implies toggles.”
“The coat had a hood. We don’t know if the coat had toggles.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because the guy was wearing a parka.”
“Anorak is an Inuit word.”
“So what.”
“I say it’s an anorak,” he said.
I tried to invent an etymology for the word parka but couldn’t think fast enough. Todd was on another subject—the freight train, laws of motion, effects of force, sneaking in a question about the number of boxcars that trailed the locomotive. We hadn’t stated in advance that a tally would be taken, but each of us had known that the other would be counting, even as we spoke about other things. When I told him now what my number was, he did not respond, and I knew what this meant. It meant that he’d arrived at the same number. This was not supposed to happen—it unsettled us, it made the world flat—and we walked for a time in chagrined silence. Even in matters of pure physical reality, we depended on a friction between our basic faculties of sensation, his and mine, and we understood now that the rest of the afternoon would be spent in the marking of differences.
We headed back for a late class.
“An anorak is substantial. The thing he was wearing looked pretty flimsy,” I said. “And an anorak would have a fur-lined hood. Consider the origin of the word. You’re the one who brought up the Inuits. Wouldn’t an Inuit use fur to line his hood? They have polar bear. They have walrus. They need coats with bulk and substance top to bottom.”
“We saw the guy from behind,” he said. “How do you know what kind of hood it was? From behind and from a distance.”
Consider the origin of the word. I was using his Inuit lore against him, forcing him to respond reasonably, a rare sign of weakness on his part. Todd was a determined thinker who liked to work a fact or an idea to the seventh level of interpretation. He was tall and sprawling, all bony framework, the kind of body not always in sync with its hinges and joints. Somebody said that he resembled the love child of storks, others thought ostriches. He did not seem to taste food; he consumed it, absorbed it, ingestible matter of plant or animal origin. He spoke of distances in meters and kilometers and it took me a while to understand that this was not an affectation so much as a driving need to convert units of measurement more or less instantaneously. He liked to test himself on what he knew. He liked to stop walking to emphasize a point as I walked on. This was my counterpoint, to let him stand there talking to a tree. The shallower our arguments, the more intense we became.
I wanted to keep this one going, to stay in control, to press him hard. Did it matter what I said?
“Even from a distance the hood looked too small to be fur-lined. The hood was snug,” I said. “A true anorak would have a hood that’s
roomy enough to fit a woolen cap underneath. Isn’t that what the Inuits do?”
The campus appeared in fragments through ranks of tall trees on the other side of a country road. We lived in a series of energy-efficient structures with solar panels, turfed rooftops and red cedar walls. Classes were held in the original buildings, several massive concrete units known collectively as the Cellblock, a bike ride or long walk away from the dorms, and the flow of students back and forth in tribal swarms seemed part of the architecture of the place. This was my first year here and I was still trying to interpret the signs and adapt to the patterns.
“They have caribou,” I said. “They have seal meat and ice floes.”
At times abandon meaning to impulse. Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks—to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise.
The class was Logic, in Cellblock 2, thirteen of us seated along both sides of a long table, with Ilgauskas at the head, a stocky man, late forties, beset this day by periodic coughing. He spoke from a standing position, bent forward, hands set on the table, and often stared for long moments into the blank wall at the other end of the room.
“The causal nexus,” he said, and stared into the wall.
He stared, we glanced. We exchanged glances frequently, one side of the table with the other. We were fascinated by Ilgauskas. He seemed a man in a trance state. But he wasn’t simply absent from his remarks, another drained voice echoing down the tunnel of teaching years. We’d decided, some of us, that he was suffering from a neurological condition. He was not bored but simply unbound, speaking freely and erratically out of a kind of stricken insight. It was a question of neurochemistry. We’d decided that the condition was not understood well enough to have been given a name. And if it did not have a name, we said, paraphrasing a proposition in logic, then it could not be treated.
“The atomic fact,” he said.
Then he elaborated for ten minutes while we listened, glanced, made notes, riffled the textbook to find refuge in print, some semblance of meaning that might be roughly equivalent to what he was saying. There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. We sat and listened or sat and waited. We wrote with pens or pencils. Our notebooks had pages made of flexible sheets of paper.
