Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [21]
She was going through it again and he was ready to listen again. He listened carefully, noting every detail, trying to find himself in the crowd.
Her mother had said it clearly, years earlier.
“There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.”
This is the man she marries.
He was a hovering presence now. There drifted through the rooms a sense of someone who has earned respectful attention. He was not quite returned to his body yet. Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice. He spent time with Justin, taking him to school and picking him up, advising on homework. He wore a splint for a while, then stopped. He took the kid to the park to play catch. The kid could toss a baseball all day and be purely and inexhaustibly happy, unmarked by sin, anyone’s, down the ages. Throw and catch. She watched them in a field not far from the museum, into the sinking sun. When Keith did a kind of ball trick, using the right hand, the undamaged one, to flip the ball onto the back of the hand and then jerk the arm forward propelling the ball backwards along the forearm before knocking it into the air with his elbow and then catching it backhanded, she saw a man she’d never known before.
She stopped at Harold Apter’s office in the East 80s on her way to 116th Street. She did this periodically, dropping off photocopies of her group’s written pieces and discussing their situations in general. This is where Dr. Apter saw people for consultation, Alzheimer patients and others.
Apter was a slight man with frizzed hair who seemed formulated to say funny things but never did. They talked about the fade of Rosellen S., the aloof bearing of Curtis B. She told him she would like to increase the frequency of the meetings to twice a week. He told her this would be a mistake.
“From this point on, you understand, it’s all about loss. We’re dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns. Their situation will grow increasingly delicate. These encounters need space around them. You don’t want them to feel there’s an urgency to write everything, say everything before it’s too late. You want them to look forward to this, not feel pressed or threatened. The writing is sweet music up to a point. Then other things will take over.”
He looked at her searchingly.
“What I’m saying is simple. This is for them,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s theirs,” he said. “Don’t make it yours.”
They wrote about the planes. They wrote about where they were when it happened. They wrote about people they knew who were in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God.
How could God let this happen? Where was God when this happened?
Benny T. was glad he was not a man of faith because he would lose it after this.
I am closer to God than ever, Rosellen wrote.
This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell.
Omar H. was afraid to go out on the street in the days after. They were looking at him, he thought.
I didn’t see them holding hands. I wanted to see that, Rosellen wrote.
Carmen G. wanted to know whether everything that happens to us has to be part of God’s plan.
I am closer to God than ever, am closer, will be closer, shall be closer.
Eugene A., in a rare appearance, wrote that God knows things we don’t know.
Ashes and bones. That’s what’s left of God’s plan.
But when the towers fell, Omar wrote.
I keep hearing they were holding hands when they jumped.
If God