Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [2]
She sat thinking about this. Her mind drifted in and out of this, the early times, eight years ago, of the eventual extended grimness called their marriage. The day’s mail was in her lap. There were matters to attend to and there were events that crowded out such matters but she was looking past the lamp into the wall, where they seemed to be projected, the man and woman, bodies incomplete but bright and real.
It was the postcard that snapped her back, on top of the cluster of bills and other mail. She glanced at the message, a standard scrawled greeting, sent by a friend staying in Rome, then looked again at the face of the card. It was a reproduction of the cover of Shelley’s poem in twelve cantos, first edition, called Revolt of Islam. Even in postcard format, it was clear that the cover was beautifully designed, with a large illustrated R that included creatural flourishes, a ram’s head and what may have been a fanciful fish with a tusk and a trunk. Revolt of Islam. The card was from the Keats-Shelley House in Piazza di Spagna and she’d understood in the first taut seconds that the card had been sent a week or two earlier. It was a matter of simple coincidence, or not so simple, that a card might arrive at this particular time bearing the title of that specific book.
This was all, a lost moment on the Friday of that lifelong week, three days after the planes.
She said to her mother, “It was not possible, up from the dead, there he was in the doorway. It’s so lucky Justin was here with you. Because it would have been awful for him to see his father like that. Like gray soot head to toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes.”
“We did a puzzle, an animal puzzle, horses in a field.”
Her mother’s apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves. Today the living room was in a state of happy disarray. Justin’s toys and games were scattered across the floor, subverting the timeless quality of the room, and this was nice, Lianne thought, because it was otherwise hard not to whisper in such a setting.
“I didn’t know what to do. I mean with the phones out. Finally we walked to the hospital. Walked, step by step, like walking a child.”
“Why was he there in the first place, in your apartment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t he go straight to a hospital? Down there, downtown. Why didn’t he go to a friend’s place?”
Friend meant girlfriend, an unavoidable thrust, she had to do it, couldn’t help it.
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t discussed this. Where is he now?”
“He’s all right. Done with doctors for a while.”
“What have you discussed?”
“No major problems, physical.”
“What have you discussed?” she said.
Her mother, Nina Bartos, had taught at universities in California and New York, retiring two years earlier, the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such, as Keith said once. She was pale and thin, her mother, following knee-replacement surgery. She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed, to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it. There were the canes, there were the medications, there were the afternoon naps, the dietary restrictions, the doctors’ appointments.
“There’s nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions.”
“Reticent.”
“You know Keith.”
“I’ve always admired that about him. He gives the impression there’s something deeper than hiking and skiing, or playing cards. But what?”
“Rock climbing. Don’t forget.”
“And you went with him. I did forget.”
Her mother stirred in the chair, feet propped on the matching stool, late morning, still in her robe, dying for a cigarette.
“I like his reticence, or whatever it is,” she said. “But be careful.”
“He’s reticent around you, or was, the