Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [15]
“People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock and pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language,” she said, “to bring comfort or composure. I don’t read poems. I read newspapers. I put my head in the pages and get angry and crazy.”
“There’s another approach, which is to study the matter. Stand apart and think about the elements,” he said. “Coldly, clearly if you’re able to. Do not let it tear you down. See it, measure it.”
“Measure it,” she said.
“There’s the event, there’s the individual. Measure it. Let it teach you something. See it. Make yourself equal to it.”
Martin Ridnour was an art dealer, a collector, an investor perhaps. She wasn’t sure what he did exactly or how he did it but suspected that he bought art and then flipped it, quickly, for large profit. She liked him. He spoke with an accent and had an apartment here and an office in Basel. He spent time in Berlin. He did or did not have a wife in Paris.
They were back in the living room, he with the glass in one hand, bottle in the other.
“Probably I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “You talk, I will drink.”
Martin was overweight but did not appear ripe with good living. He was usually jet-lagged, more or less unwashed, in a well-worn suit, trying to resemble an old poet in exile, her mother said. He was not quite bald, with a shadow of gray bristle on his head and a beard that looked about two weeks old, mostly gray and never groomed.
“I called Nina when I got in this morning. We’re going away for a week or two.”
“Good idea.”
“Handsome old house in Connecticut, by the shore.”
“You arrange things.”
“This is something I do, yes.”
“I have a question, unrelated. You can ignore it,” she said. “A question from nowhere.”
She looked at him, standing behind the armchair across the room, draining his glass.
“Do the two of you have sex? It’s none of my business. But can you have sex? I mean considering the knee replacement. She’s not doing the exercises.”
He took the bottle and glass toward the kitchen, responding over his shoulder with some amusement.
“She doesn’t have sex with her knee. We bypass the knee. The knee is damn tender. But we work around it.”
She waited for him to return.
“None of my business. But she seems to be entering a kind of withdrawal. And I just wondered.”
“And you,” he said. “And Keith. He’s back with you now. This is true?”
“Could leave tomorrow. Nobody knows.”
“But he’s staying in your flat.”
“It’s early. I don’t know what will happen. We sleep together, yes, if that’s what you’re asking. But only technically.”
He showed quizzical interest.
“Share a bed. Innocently,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I like this. How many nights?”
“He spent the first night in the hospital for observation. Since then, whatever it is. This is Monday. Six days, five nights.”
“I will be asking for progress reports,” he said.
He’d talked to Keith a couple of times only. This was an American, not a New Yorker, not one of the Manhattan elect, a group maintained by controlled propagation. He tried to gain a sense of the younger man’s feelings about politics and religion, the voice and manner of the heartland. All he learned was that Keith had once owned a pit bull. This, at least, seemed to mean something, a dog that was all skull and jaws, an American breed, developed originally to fight and kill.
“One of these days maybe you and Keith will have a chance to talk again.”
“About women, I think.”
“Mother and daughter. All the sordid details,” she said.
“I like Keith. I told him a story once that he enjoyed. About cardplayers. He’s a cardplayer of course. About cardplayers I used to know and about the seating arrangement they maintained at their weekly game, for nearly half a century. Longer actually. He enjoyed this story.”
Her mother came in, Nina, in a dark skirt and white blouse, leaning on her cane. Martin held her briefly and then watched her settle into the chair, slowly, in segmental movements.
“What old dead wars we fight. I think