Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [16]
Martin had been away for a month. He was seeing the last stage of the transformation, her embrace of age, the studied attitude that weaves easily through the fact itself. Lianne felt a sadness on his behalf. Has her mother’s hair gone whiter? Is she taking too much pain medication? Did she have a minor stroke at that conference in Chicago? And, finally, was he lying about their sexual activity? Her mind is fine. She is not so forgiving of the normal erosions, the names she now and then forgets, the location of an object she has just, seconds ago, put somewhere. But she is alert to what is important, the broad surround, to other states of being.
“Tell us what they’re doing in Europe.”
“They’re being kind to Americans,” he said.
“Tell us what you’ve bought and sold.”
“What I can tell you is that the art market will stagnate. Activity here and there in modern masters. Otherwise dismal prospects.”
“Modern masters. I’m relieved,” Nina said.
“Trophy art.”
“People need their trophies.”
He seemed heartened by her sarcasm.
“I’ve just barely set foot in the door. In the country in fact. What does she do? She gives me grief.”
“This is her job,” Lianne said.
They’d known each other for twenty years, Martin and Nina, lovers for much of that time, New York, Berkeley, somewhere in Europe. Lianne knew that the defensive stance he took at times was an aspect of their private manner of address, not the stain of something deeper. He was not the shapeless man he claimed to be or physically mimicked. He was unflinching in fact, and smart in his work, and gracious to her, and generous to her mother. The two beautiful Morandi still lifes were gifts from Martin. The passport photos on the opposite wall, Martin also, from his collection, aged documents, stamped and faded, history measured in inches, and also beautiful.
Lianne said, “Who wants to eat?”
Nina wanted to smoke. The bamboo end table stood next to the armchair now and held an ashtray, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.
Her mother lit up. She watched, Lianne did, feeling something familiar and a little painful, how Nina at a certain point began to consider her invisible. The memory was located there, in the way she snapped shut the lighter and put it down, in the hand gesture and the drifting smoke.
“Dead wars, holy wars. God could appear in the sky tomorrow.”
“Whose God would it be?” Martin said.
“God used to be an urban Jew. He’s back in the desert now.”
Lianne’s studies were meant to take her into deeper scholarship, into serious work in languages or art history. She’d traveled through Europe and much of the Middle East but it was tourism in the end, with shallow friends, not determined inquiry into beliefs, institutions, languages, art, or so said Nina Bartos.
“It’s sheer panic. They attack out of panic.”
“This much, yes, it may be true. Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that’s spreading,” he said.
“There are no goals they can hope to achieve. They’re not liberating a people or casting out a dictator. Kill the innocent, only that.”
“They strike a blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies.”
He spoke softly, looking into the carpet.
“One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die.”
“God is great,” she said.
“Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics and economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness.”
“It’s not the history of Western interference that pulls down these societies. It’s their own history, their mentality. They live in a closed world, of choice, of necessity. They haven’t advanced because they haven’t wanted to or tried to.”
“They use the language of religion, okay, but this is not what drives them.”
“Panic, this is what drives them.”
Her