by Don DeLillo
I touched the screen for the receipt and then for account activity and account summary and I wrapped the bills inside the flimsy slips of toxic paper and left the booth, the stall, receipts and money clutched in my hand. I didn’t look at the people in line. No one ever looks at anyone in the ATM area. And I tried not to think about the security cameras but here I was in my mind’s self-surveillance device, body crabbed tight as I removed the money from the slot, counted it, organized it and then recounted it.
But was this really so introspective, so abnormally cautious? The handling of the bills, the heightened awareness, isn’t this something people do, check the wallet, check the keys, it’s just another level of the commonplace.
I sit at home with transaction registers, withdrawal slips, records of account details, my outdated smartphone, my credit card statement, new balance, late payment, additional charges all spread before me on Madeline’s old walnut desk and I try to determine the source of what appear to be several small persistent errors, deviations from the logic of the number concept, the pure thrust of reliable numbers that determine one’s worth, even as totals diminish week by week.
• • •
I described the details of several job interviews to Emma, who enjoyed my accounts of the proceedings—voice imitations, sometimes verbatim, of interviewers’ remarks. She understood that I was not ridiculing these men and women. This was a documentary approach to a special kind of dialogue and we both knew that the performer himself, still jobless, was the subject of the piece.
The sun was shining now and I thought of the woman spread-eagled on my roof. There are women everywhere, Emma in a director’s chair a handclasp away from me and the Latvian woman and her opponent on the TV screen, sweating, groaning, swatting a tennis ball in patterns that might be subject to advanced study by behavioral scientists.
We hadn’t had a serious discussion for an hour or so. I deferred to Emma at such times. She had an adopted son, a failed marriage, a job involving damaged children and I had what—access to a breezy rooftop with an interrupted view of the river.
She said, “I think you look forward to the job interviews. Shave the face, shine the shoes.”
“I’m down to one decent pair of shoes. This is not rank neglect but a kind of day-to-day carelessness.”
“Do you feel a certain affection for these decent shoes?”
“Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”
We watched tennis and drank beer in tall glasses that she kept on their sides in the freezer compartment of her squat refrigerator. Frosted glasses, dark lager, point, game, match, one woman flipping her racket in the air, the other woman walking out of the frame, the first woman falling backwards to the grass court in glad abandon, arms stretched wide like the woman on my roof, whoever she was.
“Define a tennis racket. This is something I might have said to myself when I was in my early teens.”
“Then you would do it,” she said.
“Or try to.”
“Tennis racket.”
“Early teens.”
I told her that I used to stand in a dark room, eyes shut, mind immersed in the situation. I told her that I still do it, although rarely, and that I never know that I’m about to do it. Just stand in the dark. The lamp sits on the bureau next to the bed. There I am, eyes shut. Sort of Staklike.
She said, “It sounds like a kind of formal meditation.”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you’re trying to empty the mind.”
“You haven’t done it yourself.”
“Who, me, no.”
“I’m shutting my eyes against the dark.”
“And you’re wondering who you are.”
“Maybe in a blank way, if that’s possible.”
“What’s the difference between eyes closed in a lighted room and eyes closed in a dark room?”
“All the difference in the world.”
“I’m trying not to say something funny.”
She said this in an even tone, with a serious face.
Know the moment, feel the gliding hand, gather all the forgettable fragments, fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed, her bed, our blue sheets. This was all I needed to take me day to day and I tried to think of these days and nights as the hushed countermand, ours, to the widespread belief that the future, everybody’s, will be worse than the past.
• • •
One of my father’s people called with the details. Time, place, manner of dress. This was lunch—but why. I didn’t need lunch in a midtown temple of cuisine art where jackets are required and the food and flower arrangements are said to be exquisite and the staff more competent than pallbearers at a state funeral. It was the weekend and my dress shirts were at the laundry being readied for the next wave of interviews. I had to wear a used and reused shirt, first spitting on my finger to wash the inside of the collar.
I’m always the first to arrive, I always get there first. I chose to wait at the table and when Ross showed up I was struck by the sight of him. The vested gray suit and bright tie set off his wildman beard and halting stride and I wasn’t sure whether he resembled an impressive ruin or a famous stage actor currently living the role that defines his long career.
He slid inchingly into our velvet banquette.
“You didn’t want the job. Turned it down.”
“It wasn’t right. I’m talking to an important person in an investment strategy group. It’s a definite possibility.”
“People out of work. You were offered a job in a strong company.”
“Set of companies. But I was not dismissive. I considered every aspect.”
“Nobody cares that you’re my son. There are sons and daughters everywhere, in solid positions, doing productive work.”
“Okay.”
“You make too much of it. Father and son. You would have become your own man in a matter of days.”
“Okay.”
“People out of work,” he said again, reasonably.
We talked and ordered and I kept looking into his face, thinking of a certain word. I think of words that lead me into dense realities, clarifying a situation or a circumstance, at least in theory. Here was Ross, eyes tired and shoulders hunched, right hand trembling slightly, and the word was desuetude. The word had a stylish quality suited to the environment. But what did it mean? A state of inaction, I thought, maybe a lost energy. I was looking at Ross Lockhart, handsomely outfitted but minus the relentlessness and craft that had shaped the man.
“Last time I was here about five years ago I talked Artis into coming along. Her health was not yet approaching drastic decline. I don’t recall all that much. But there was one point, one interval. It’s very clear. One particular moment. She looked at a woman being led past us to a nearby table. She waited for the woman to be seated and looked a while longer. Then she said, ‘If she were wearing any more makeup she would burst into flames.’ ”
I laughed at that and noted how the memory remained alive in his eyes. He was seeing Artis across the table, across the years, a kind of waveform, barely discernible. The wine arrived and he managed to look at the label and then to perform the ceremonial swirl and taste but he hadn’t sniffed the cork and did not indicate approval of the wine. He was still remembering. The waiter took a while to decide that it was permissible to pour. I watched all this, innocently, as an adolescent might.
I said, “They’re called Selected Assets Inc.”
“Who’s that?”
“The people I’m talking to.”
“Buy yourself another shirt. That may help them make up their mind,” he said.
When does a man become his father? I was nowhere near the time but it occurred to me that it could happen one day while I sat staring at a wall, all my defenses assimilated into the matching moment.
Food arrived and he began to eat at once while I looked and thought. Then I told him a story that made him pause.
I told him how his wife, the first, my mother, had died, at home, in her bed, unable to talk or listen or to see me sitting there. I’d never told him this and I didn’t know why I was telling him now, the hours I’d spent at her bedside, Madeline, with the neighbor in the doorway leaning on her cane. I found myself going into some detail, recalling whatever I could, speaking softly, describing the scene. The neighbor, the cane, the bed, the bedspread. I described the bedspread. I mentioned the old oak bureau with carved wings for handles. He would remember that. I think I wanted him to be touched. I wanted him to see the last hours as they happened. There was no dark motive. I wanted us to be joined in this. And how curious it was to be speaking about it here, amid the tiptoe waiters and the stalks of white amaryllis set along the walls, funereally, and the single white orchid in the small vase at the center of our table. There was no bitter theme running through these remarks. The scene itself, in Madeline’s room, would not permit it. The table, the lamp, the bed, the woman in the bed, the cane with the splayed legs.
We sat thinking and after a time one of us took a bite of food and a sip of wine and then the other did too. Everywhere in the room a vibrant tide of conversation, something I hadn’t noticed until now.
“Where was I when this happened?”
“You were on the cover of Newsweek.”
I watched him try to make sense of this and then explained that I’d seen the magazine with my father on the cover just before learning that my mother was in critical condition.
He leaned farther down toward the table, the back of his hand propping his chin.
“Do you know why we’re here?”
“You said you were last here with Artis.”
“And she is forever part of what we are here to discuss.”
“It seems too soon.”
“It’s all I think about,” he said.
All he thinks about. Artis in the chamber. I think about her also, now and then, shaved and naked, standing and waiting. Does she know she’s waiting? ls she wait-listed? Or is she simply dead and gone, beyond the smallest tremor of self-awareness?
“It’s time to be going back,” he said. “And I want you to come with me.”
“You want a witness.”
“I want a companion.”
“I understand.”
“One person only. No one else,” he said. “I’m in the process of making arrangements.”
He would empty out his years on the long plane journey. I imagined him losing all his Lockhartness, becoming Nicholas Satterswaite. How a tired life collapses into its origins. Thousands of air miles, all those amorphous hours of day-night numbness. Are we the Satterswaites, he and I? Desuetude. It occurred to me that the word might be applied more surely to the son than to the father. Disuse, misuse. Wasted time as a life pursuit.
“You still believe in the idea.”
“Heart and mind,” he said.
“But isn’t it an idea that no longer carries the inner conviction it used to have?”
“The idea continues to gain strength in the only place that matters.”
“Back to the numbered levels,” I said.
“We’ve been through all this.”
“A long time ago. Doesn’t it feel that way? Two years. Feels like half a lifetime.”
“I’m making arrangements.”
“You just said that. The ass-end of civilization. We’ll go, why not, you and I. Make the arrangements.”
I waited for what was coming next.
“And you’ll think about the other matters.”
“I don’t want a painting. I don’t want what people are supposed to want. It’s not that I’ve renounced material things. I’m not an ascetic. I live comfortably enough. But I want to keep it small.”
He said, “I need to leave clear instructions.”
“I don’t chase after money. I think of money as something to count. It’s something I put in my wallet and take out of my wallet. Money is numbers. You say that you need to leave clear instructions. Clear instructions sound intimidating. I like to drift into things.”
Plates and cutlery were gone and we were drinking an aged Madeira. Maybe all Madeiras are aged. The restaurant was emptying out and I liked watching them, all these people striding decisively back to their situations, their endeavors. They had to return to office suites and conference rooms and I did not. It gave me a free sense of being outside the established course of executive routine when in fact what I was out of was a job.
We did not speak, Ross and I. The waiter was at the far end of the room, a still figure framed by bunched flowers in hanging baskets, and he was waiting to be summoned for the check. I wanted to believe it was raining so we could walk out the door into the rain. In the meantime we thought about the journey ahead and we drank our fortified wine.
- 5 -
I watch Emma stand before the full-length mirror. She is seeing that everything is in place before she leaves for school, for the eager or somber or intractable children. Shirt and vest, tailored slacks, casual shoes. On an impulse I walk into the image and stand next to her. We look for a number of seconds, the pair of us, without comment or self-consciousness or any sign of amusement, and I understand that this is a telling moment.
Here we are, the woman smart, determined, not detached so much as measuring every occasion, including this one, brown hair swept back, a face that is not interested in being pretty, and this gives her a quality I can’t quite name, a kind of undividedness. We are seeing each other as never before, two sets of eyes, the meandering man, taller, bushy-haired, narrow face, slightly recessed chin, faded jeans and so on.
He is a man on line for tickets to a ballet that a woman wants to see and he is willing to wait for hours while she tends her schoolchildren. She is the woman, rigid in her seat, watching a dancer splice the air, fingertips to toes.
Here we are, all this and more, things that normally escape the inquiring eye, a single searching look, so much to see, each of us looking at both of us, and then we shake it all off and walk down four flights into the pitch of street noise that tells us we’re back among the others, in unsparing space.
• • •
Nearly a week went by before we spoke again, on the telephone.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“If you want me to come by.”
“I’ll mention it to him. We’ll see. Things have tightened up,” she said.
“What happened?”
“He doesn’t want to go back to school. They resume in August. He’s saying it’s a waste of time. It’s all dead time. There’s nothing they can say that means anything to him.”
I stood by the window holding the phone and looking down at my shoes, which I’d just shined.
“Does he have some kind of alternative?”
“I’ve asked that question repeatedly. The boy is noncommittal. His father sounds helpless.”
I was not unhappy to hear that his father was helpless. Then, again, I felt awful knowing that Emma was apparently in the same state.
“Offhand I don’t know how I can help. But I’ll think about it. I’ll think about myself at that age. And if he’s agreeable maybe we’ll repeat the cab ride to the dojo.”
“He doesn’t want to go to the dojo. He’s done with jujitsu. He agreed to this visit only because I insisted.”
I pictured her grimly insisting, standing straight, speaking rapidly, cellphone gripped tight. She said she’d talk to him and give me a call.
It was unnerving to hear this, that she’d give me a call. This is what I heard at the end of job interviews. There was an appointment coming up in less than an hour and I’d shined my shoes with the traditional polish, the horsehair brush and the flannel cloth, rejecting an instant shine with the all-color sponge. Then I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror, double-checking the effectiveness of the close shave I’d given myself twenty minutes earlier. I recalled something Ross had said about his right ear in the mirror being his real right ear instead of t
he mirror-image left ear. I had to concentrate hard to convince myself that this was not the case.
• • •
Things people do, ordinarily, forgettably, things that breathe just under the surface of what we acknowledge having in common. I want these gestures, these moments to have meaning, check the wallet, check the keys, something that draws us together, implicitly, lock and relock the front door, inspect the burners on the stove for dwindling blue flame or seeping gas.
These are the soporifics of normalcy, my days in middling drift.
• • •
I saw her again one morning, the woman in the stylized pose, this time alone, no small boy at her side. She stood on a corner near Lincoln Center and I was certain it was the same woman, eyes closed as before, arms this time down near her sides but held away from her body in a stance of sudden alarm. She was frozen in place. But maybe that’s wrong. She had simply pledged herself into a mental depth, facing in toward the sidewalk and the people hurrying past. A teenage girl stopped just long enough to aim her device and take a picture. A disturbance building all around us, air thick and dark, sky ready to crack open, and I wondered if she would remain in place when the rain hit.
Again I noted that there was no indication of her cause, her mission. She stood in open space, an unexplained presence. I wanted to see a small table with leaflets or a poster in a foreign language. I wanted a language in a non-Roman alphabet. Give me something to go on. There was a quality, a tone, the cast of her features that suggested she was from another culture. I wanted a sign in Mandarin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, a plea from a woman who belongs to a group or a faction that is somehow threatened by forces here or abroad.
Foreign, yes, but I assumed she spoke English. I told myself that I could see it in her face, a kind of transnational bearing, an adaptation.
If this were a man, I thought, would I stop and watch?
