Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [25]
Knock on the door. Mention the noise. Don’t call it music, call it noise.
They’re the ones who think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time. She knew this wasn’t true. Say the same prayers, word for word, in the same prayer stance, day and night, following the arc of sun and moon.
She needed to sleep now. She needed to stop the noise in her head and turn on her right side, toward her husband, and breathe his air and sleep his sleep.
Elena was either an office manager or a restaurant manager, and divorced, and living with a large dog, and who knew what else.
She liked his facial hair, the hair was okay, but she didn’t say anything. She said one thing, uninteresting, and watched him run his thumb over the stubble, marking its presence for himself.
They said, Leave the city? For what? To go where? It was the locally honed cosmocentric idiom of New York, loud and blunt, but she felt it in her heart no less than they did.
Do this. Knock on the door. Adopt a posture. Mention the noise as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, use the open pretense of civility and calm, the parody of fellow-tenant courtesy that every tenant sees as such, and gently mention the noise. But mention the noise only as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, adopt a posture of suave calm, openly phony, and do not allude to the underlying theme of a certain kind of music as a certain form of political and religious statement, now of all times. Work gradually into the language of aggrieved tenancy. Ask her if she rents or owns.
She turned on her right side, toward her husband, and opened her eyes.
Thoughts from nowhere, elsewhere, someone else’s.
She opened her eyes and was surprised, even now, to see him there in bed, next to her, a flat surprise by this time, fifteen days after the planes. They’d made love in the night, earlier, she wasn’t sure when, two or three hours ago. It was back there somewhere, a laying open of bodies but also of time, the only interval she’d known in these days and nights that was not forced or distorted, hemmed in by the press of events. It was the tenderest sex she’d known with him. She felt some drool at the corner of her mouth, the part that was mashed into the pillow, and she watched him, faceup, head in distinct profile against the wan light from the streetlamp.
She’d never felt easy with that term. My husband. He wasn’t a husband. The word spouse had seemed comical, applied to him, and husband simply didn’t fit. He was something else somewhere else. But now she uses the term. She believes he is growing into it, a husbandman, even though she knows this is another word completely.
What is already in the air, in the bodies of the young, and what is next to come.
The music included moments of what sounded like forced breathing. She heard it on the stairs one day, an interlude consisting of men breathing in urgent rhythmic pattern, a liturgy of inhale-exhale, and other voices at other times, trance voices, voices in recitation, women in devotional lament, mingled village voices behind hand drums and hand claps.
She watched her husband, face empty of expression, neutral, not very different from his waking aspect.
All right the music is beautiful but why now, what’s the particular point of this, and what’s the name of the thing like a lute that’s played with an eagle’s quill.
She reached a hand to his beating chest.
Time, finally, to go to sleep, following the arc of sun and moon.
She was back from an early-morning run and stood sweating by the kitchen window, drinking water from a one-liter bottle and watching Keith eat breakfast.
“You’re one of those madwomen running in the streets. Run around the reservoir.”
“You think we look crazier than men.”
“Only in the streets.”
“I like the streets. This time of morning, there’s something about the city, down by the river, streets nearly empty, cars blasting by on the Drive.”
“Breathe