Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [31]
“Gave myself a year. I thought it would be interesting. Cut it to six months. I thought, What else can I do? I played two sports in college. That was over. Six months, what the hell. Cut it to four, was gone in two.”
She studied him, she sat there and stared, and there was something about this, such frank and innocent openness of manner that he stopped feeling unnerved after a while. She looked, they talked, here in a room he would not have been able to describe a minute after leaving.
“Didn’t work out. Things don’t work out,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Went to law school.”
She whispered, “Why?”
“What else? Where else?”
She sat back and put the cigarette to her lips, thinking about something. There were small brown specks on her face spilling from the lower forehead down onto the bridge of the nose.
“You’re married, I guess. Not that I care.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I don’t care,” she said, and it was the first time he’d heard resentment in her voice.
“We were apart, now we’re back, or beginning to be back.”
“Of course,” she said.
This was the second time he’d walked across the park. He knew why he was here but could not have explained it to someone and did not have to explain it to her. It didn’t matter whether they spoke or not. It would be fine, not speaking, breathing the same air, or she speaks, he listens, or day is night.
She said, “I went to St. Paul’s yesterday. I wanted to be with people, down there in particular. I knew there would be people there. I looked at the flowers and the personal things people left, the homemade memorials. I didn’t look at the photographs of the missing. I couldn’t do that. I sat in the chapel for an hour and people came in and prayed or just walked around, only looking, reading the marble plaques. In memory of, in memory of. Rescue workers came in, three of them, and I tried not to stare, and then two more came in.”
She’d been married for a brief time, ten years earlier, a mistake so fleeting it left few marks. That’s what she said. The man died some months after the marriage ended, in a car crash, and his mother blamed Florence. That was the mark it left.
“I say to myself dying is ordinary.”
“Not when it’s you. Not when it’s someone you know.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t grieve. Just, why don’t we put it in God’s hands?” she said. “Why haven’t we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We’re supposed to believe in God but then why don’t we obey the laws of God’s universe, which teach us how small we are and where we’re all going to end up?”
“Can’t be that simple.”
“Those men who did this thing. They’re anti everything we stand for. But they believe in God,” she said.
“Whose God? Which God? I don’t even know what it means, to believe in God. I never think about it.”
“Never think about it.”
“Does that upset you?”
“It frightens me,” she said. “I’ve always felt the presence of God. I talk to God sometimes. I don’t have to be in church to talk to God. I go to church but not, you know, week in, week out—what’s the word I’m thinking of?”
“Religiously,” he said.
He could make her laugh. She seemed to look into him when she laughed, eyes alive, seeing something he could not guess at. There was an element in Florence that was always close to some emotional distress, a memory of bearing injury or sustaining loss, possibly lifelong, and the laughter was a kind of shedding, a physical deliverance from old woe, dead skin, if only for a moment.
There was music coming from a back room, something classical and familiar but he didn’t know the name of the piece or the composer. He never knew these things. They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he’d lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the