The Body Artist

by Don DeLillo

  She was always thinking into tomorrow. She planned the days in advance. She sat in the panelled room. She stood in the tub and sprayed high on the tile walls until the depraved pine reek of acid and ether began to overwhelm her. It was hard to stop pressing the trigger.

  She burned her hand on the skillet and went right to the fridge and there was no ice in the fucking. She hadn't filled the fucking ice thing.

  People pick up ringing phones or don't. She listened to it ring. It sounded through the house, all the handsets jingling in their cradles.

  How completely strange it suddenly seemed that major corporations mass-produced bread crumbs and packaged and sold them everywhere in the world and she looked at the bread-crumb carton for the first true time, really seeing it and understanding what was in it, and it was bread crumbs.

  She sat in the panelled room and tried to read. First she'd build a fire. It was a room designed aspiringly for a brandy and a fire, a failed room, perversely furnished, and she drank tea and tried to read a book. But she'd make her way through a page and stare indifferently at objects fixed in space.

  In the first days back she ate a clam from hell and spent a number of subsequent hours scuttling to the toilet. But at least she had her body back. There's nothing like a raging crap, she thought, to make mind and body one.

  She climbed the stairs, hearing herself from other parts of the house somehow.

  She threw off a grubby sweater. She raised her arm out of the sweater and struck her hand lightly on something above, wondering what it was, although this had happened before, and then she remembered the hanging lamp, metal shade wobbling, the lamp that was totally wrong for the room, and she turned toward the bed and looked, half looked, not looked in expectation but something else – a meaning so thin she could not read it.

  There were too many things to understand and finally just one.

  In town she saw a white-haired woman, Japanese, alone on a stone path in front of her house. She held a garden hose and stood weightless under lowering skies, so flat and still she might be gift wrap, and she watered a border of scarlet phlox, a soft spray arching from the nozzle.

  Things she saw seemed doubtful – not doubtful but ever changing, plunged into metamorphosis, something that is also something else, but what, and what.

  She began to pick up the phone. She used a soft voice at first, not quite her own, a twisted tentative other's voice, to say hello, who is this, yes. Word had gotten around that she was here and the calls were from New York, where she lived, and from friends and colleagues in other cities. They called from the cities to tell her they didn't understand why she'd come back here. It was the last place she ought to be, alone in a large house on an empty coast, and she stepped through the rooms and climbed the stairs and planned the days in advance because there was more to do in less time as the light grew threatened. You looked and it was dark, always unexpected.

  She woke early every morning and this was the worst time, the first murderous instant of lying in bed and remembering something and knowing in the flow of the same breath what it was.

  They called five or six times a day and then a little less and she thought of the Japanese woman, a beautiful and problematic thing, if she is Japanese at all, watering her garden when the sky shows rain.

  She took the tin-can ferry to Little Moon, where there was nothing to do but walk along a muddy path to the other end of the island past wind-beaten houses and a church with a missing steeple, a forty-minute march to an abandoned crafts center, quilting and woodcarving maybe and pottery by all means, and then briskly back again. The ferry ran on a schedule and this was reason enough to make the trip now and then.

  The plan was to organize time until she could live again.

  After the first days back she began to do her breathing exercises. There was bodywork to resume, her regimen of cat stretch and methodical contortion. She worked from the spine outward, moving along the floor on all fours, and she felt her aorta recoil to every blood surge. There were headstands and neckrolls. She stuck out her tongue and panted in tightly timed sequence, internally timed, an exactitude she knew in the bones that were separated by the disks that went rat-a-tat down her back.

  But the world was lost inside her.

  At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

  She stopped listening to weather reports. She took the weather as it came, chill rain and blowy days and the great hunched boulders in the slant fields, like clan emblems, pulsing with stormlight and story and time. She chopped firewood. She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. It was the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering.and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were best.

  She sat and looked at the screen. It was compelling to her, real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on. It thrived on the circumstance. It was three in the morning in Kotka and she waited for a car to come along – not that she wondered who was in it. It was simply the fact of Kotka. It was the sense of organization, a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen. Kotka was another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds.

  She imagined that someone might masturbate to this, the appearance of a car on the road to Kotka in the middle of the night. It made her want to laugh. She chopped firewood. She set aside time every day for the webcam at Kotka. She didn't know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of floating poetry. It was best in the dead times. It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at once, and the numbers changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she sat and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway.

  Mariella called, her friend, a writer in New York.

  "Are you all right?"

  "What am I supposed to say?"

  "I don't know. But are you lonely?"

  "There ought to be another word for it. Everyone's lonely. This is something else."

  "But don't you think. I don't know. It would be easier."

  "This is the kind of conversation you ought to have with someone else. I don't know how to have these conversations."

  "If you didn't separate yourself. You need to be around familiar people and things. Alone is no good. I know how you felt about him. And how devastating. God. But you don't want to fold up into yourself. I also know you're determined. You're strong-willed in your creepy-crawly way. But you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into it. Don't fold up."

  "Tell me what you're doing."

  "Feeding my face. Looking out the window," Mariella said. "Talking to you."

  "What are you eating?"

  "Carrot sticks."

  "This is not feeding your face."

  "This is starving my body. I know. They're showing some of his early work at the Film Forum. You didn't know him that long. This could be a plus."

  In the morning she heard the noise. It had the same sort of distinctness she'd noted the first time, about three months ago, when she and Rey had gone upstairs to investigate. He said it was a squirrel or raccoon trapped somewhere. She thought it was a calculated stealth. It had a certain measured quality. She didn't think it was an animal noise. It carried an effect that was nearly intimate, like something's here and breathing the same air we breathe and it moves the way we move.
The noise had this quality, of a body shedding space, but there was no one there when they looked.

  She was in the kitchen when she heard it this time. She carried her tea upstairs. The rooms at the end of the second-story hall. The dim third story, bulbs blown and most of the furniture removed. The short stairway to the cupola. She looked into the stillness, head swiveling, her upper body projected into the structure, which was fairly broad and used as storage space. Her tea was cold by the time she stood on the floor of the cupola. She poked into old clothing layered in cardboard boxes and looked at documents gone brittle in leather folders. There was a stuffed owl and a stack of unframed watercolors, badly warped. She saw a twirling leaf just outside the window. It was a small amber leaf twirling in the air beneath a tree branch that extended over the roof. There was no sign of a larva web from which the leaf might be suspended, or a strand of some bird's nest-building material. Just the leaf in midair, turning.

  She found him the next day in a small bedroom off the large empty room at the far end of the hall on the third floor. He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe.

  He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear. In the first seconds she thought he was inevitable. She felt her way back in time to the earlier indications that there was someone in the house and she arrived at this instant, unerringly, with her perceptions all sorted and endorsed.

  CHAPTER 3

  She looked at him.

  "Tell me. You've been here how long?"

  He didn't raise his head. There was something so strange about him that she heard her words hang in the room, predictable and trite. She felt no fear. He had a foundling quality – lost and found – and she was, she guessed, the finder.

  "You have been here," she said, speaking clearly, pausing between words.

  He looked at her and seemed older now, the scant act of head-raising, a simple tilt of chin and eyes that was minutely crucial to his transformation – older and faintly moist, a sheen across his forehead and cheeks.

  He said something.

  She said, "What?"

  His underwear consisted of white trunks and a T-shirt that was too big and she studied him up and down, openly, everywhere.

  "It is not able," he said.

  "But why are you here? And have you been here for long?"

  He dropped his head and appeared to think about these matters as if working out the details of a complicated problem.

  They stood outside the house near the top of the sloped field and watched a lobsterboat pumping through the whitecaps. She'd fed him leftover soup and some bread, some toast. You had to flip the thing twice to get the bread to toast properly.

  "What do you see?" she said, gesturing toward the boat and the advancing cloudline.

  "The trees are some of them," he said. "Bending. Swaying in the wind. Those are birches. The white ones. Those are called paper birches." "The white ones."

  "The white ones. But beyond the trees." "Beyond the trees." "Out there," she said. He looked a while. "It rained very much." "It will rain. It is going to rain," she said. He wore a windbreaker and a pair of workpants and seemed unhappy out here. She tried not to press him for information. She found the distance interesting, the halting quality of his speech and actions, the self-taught quality, his seeming unconcern about what would happen to him now. Not apathy or indifference, she thought, but his limited ability to consider the implications. She wasn't sure what it meant to him, being found in someone else's house.

  The wind came harder now and they turned away from it. She amused herself by thinking he'd come from cyberspace, a man who'd emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night. He was from Kotka, in Finland.

  She said, "It did not rain. It will rain."

  He moved uneasily in space, indoors or out, as if the air had bends and warps. She watched him sidle into the house, walking with a slight shuffle. He feared levitation maybe. She could not stop watching him.

  It was always as if. He did this or that as if. She needed a reference elsewhere to get him placed.

  They sat in the grim panelled room under prints of sailing ships. The phone was ringing. He looked at the charred logs collapsed in the fireplace, last night's fire, and she watched him. The books on the low shelves were mostly summer reading you find in rented houses, books suited to the role, with faded jacket illustrations of other houses in other summers, or almanacs, or atlases, a sun stripe edging the tops of the taller books.

  His chin was sunken back, severely receded, giving his face an unfinished look, and his hair was wiry and snagged, with jutting clumps.

  She had to concentrate to note these features. She looked at him and had to look again. There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinness of physical address.

  She whispered, "Talk to me."

  He sat with his legs awkwardly crossed, one trouser leg riding up his calf, and she could see that he'd knotted a length of string around the top of his sock to keep it from sagging. It made her think of someone.

  "Talk to me. I am talking," he said.

  She thought she understood what he meant by this. There was a certain futility in his tone, an endlessness of effort, suggesting things he could not easily make clear to her no matter how much he said. Even his gestures seemed marked by struggle. She knew she would have to call hospitals and clinics, psychiatric facilities, to ask about a missing patient.

  The rain hit the windows in taps and spatters, small and countable, and then it was everywhere, banging the roof of the sunporch and filling the downspouts, and they sat and listened to it.

  She said, "What's your name?"

  He looked at her.

  She said, "I came here to be by myself. This is important to me. I am willing to wait. I will give you a chance to tell me who you are. But I don't want someone in my house. I will give you a chance," she said. "But 1 will not wait indefinitely."

  She didn't want it to sound like a formal warning but it probably did. She would have to call the nearest mission for the homeless, which wouldn't be near at all, and maybe the church in town or the church with the missing steeple on Little Moon and she would have to call the police, finally, if nothing else worked.

  "I am here because of Rey, who was my husband, who is dead. 1 don't know why I'm telling you this because it is surely unnecessary. But I need to live here alone for a time. Just tell me if you understand."

  He moved his hand in a manner that seemed to mean she didn't have to say anything further. Of course he understood. But maybe not.

  The storm rolled in and they sat and listened. The rain was so total they had to listen to it. She could call the real estate agent and make a complaint about a person on the premises. That was another thing she could do.

  It was only midmorning but she had the feeling he'd been here a week. They sat and looked at last night's fire.

  Then she realized who it was, the man he made her think of.

  It was a science teacher in high school, semi-bumbling, who looked pale-haired in uncertain light and bald on brighter days and who scotch-taped a split seam in his loafers once and spoke in unmeasured hesitations that made the students feel embarrassed on his behalf, the few sensitive ones, or openly restless, the restless, which was everybody else.

  She named the visitor in his honor. Mr. Tuttle. She thought it would make him easier to see.

  She whispered, "Tell me something."

  He uncrossed his legs and sat with a hand on each knee, a dummy in a red club chair, his head turned toward her.

  "I know how much." He said, "I know how much this house. Alone by the sea."

  He looked not pleased exactly but otherwise satisfied, technically satisfied to have managed the last cluster of words. And it was in fact, coming from Mr. Tuttle, a formulation she heard in its echoing depths. Four words only. But he'd placed her in a set of counter-surroundings, of simultaneous insides and outsides. The house, t
he sea-planet outside it, and how the word alone referred to her and to the house and how the word sea reinforced the idea of solitude but suggested a vigorous release as well, a means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self.

  She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases.

  She said, "I like the house. Yes, I want to be here. But it's only a rental. I am renting. I will be out of here in six or seven weeks. Less maybe. It's a house we rented. Five or six weeks. Less," she said.

  She wasn't watching him now. She was looking at the backs of her hands, fingers stretched, looking and thinking, recalling moments with Rey, not moments exactly but times, or moments flowing into composite time, an erotic of see and touch, and she curled one hand over and into the other, missing him in her body and feeling sexually and abysmally alone and staring at the points where her knuckles shone bloodless from the pressure of her grip.

  He said, "But you did not leave."

  She looked at him.

  "I will leave. In a few weeks. When it's time," she said. "When the lease is up. Or earlier. I will leave."

  "But you do not," he said.

  This shift from past tense to present had the sound of something overcome, an obstacle or restriction. He had to extend himself to get it out. And she heard something in his voice. She didn't know what it was but it made her get up and go to the window.

  She stood there looking at the rain. She thought he might belong in one of the trailer homes scattered at the edge of the woods outside town, near but wholly remote, with cars on blocks and a wacko dog convoluted in the dirt and leaves, trying to scratch an itch somewhere, and he is the grown son who has always been this way, inaccessible, ever dependent, living matter-of-fact in an oblong box with his drained and aging parents, who never use each other's name, and he wanders off for days sometimes and goes wherever he goes, muttering and unharmed, into the bubble world.