Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [3]
“Be careful. He was in grave danger, I know. He had friends in there. I know that too,” her mother said. “But if you let your sympathy and goodwill affect your judgment.”
There were the conversations with friends and former colleagues about knee replacements, hip replacements, about the atrocities of short-term memory and long-term health insurance. All of this was so alien to Lianne’s sense of her mother that she thought there might be an element of performance. Nina was trying to accommodate the true encroachments of age by making drama of them, giving herself a certain degree of ironic distance.
“And Justin. Having a father around the house again.”
“The kid is fine. Who knows how the kid is? He’s fine, he’s back in school,” she said. “They reopened.”
“But you worry. I know this. You like to nourish your fear.”
“What’s next? Don’t you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.”
“Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now.”
Lianne stood by the window.
“But when the towers fell.”
“I know.”
“When this happened.”
“I know.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“So did I,” Nina said. “So many watching.”
“Thinking he’s dead, she’s dead.”
“I know.”
“Watching those buildings fall.”
“First one, then the other. I know,” her mother said.
She had several canes to choose from and sometimes, on the off-hours and the rainy days, she walked up the street to the Metropolitan Museum and looked at pictures. She looked at three or four pictures in an hour and a half of looking. She looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity. Then she came home and read. She read and slept.
“Of course the child is a blessing but otherwise, you know better than I, marrying the man was a huge mistake, and you willed it, you went looking for it. You wanted to live a certain way, never mind the consequences. You wanted a certain thing and you thought Keith.”
“What did I want?”
“You thought Keith would get you there.”
“What did I want?”
“To feel dangerously alive. This was a quality you associated with your father. But that wasn’t the case. Your father was at heart a careful man. And your son is a beautiful and sensitive child,” she said. “But otherwise.”
In truth she loved this room, Lianne did, in its most composed form, without the games and scattered toys. Her mother had been living here for a few years only and Lianne tended to see it as a visitor might, a space that was serenely self-possessed, and so what if it’s a little intimidating. What she loved most were the two still lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous, even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.
“You liked asking questions as a child. Insistently digging. But you were curious about the wrong things.”
“They were my things, not yours.”
“Keith wanted a woman who’d regret what she did with him. This is his style, to get a woman to do something she’ll be sorry for. And the thing you did wasn’t just a night or a weekend. He was built for weekends. The thing you did.”
“This isn’t the time.”
“You actually married the man.”
“And then I threw him out. I had strong objections, building up over time. What you object to is very different. He’s not a scholar, not an artist. Doesn’t paint, doesn’t write poetry. If