Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [32]
The talk continued, touching on marriage, friendship, the future. He was an amateur at this but spoke willingly enough. Mostly he listened.
“What we carry. This is the story in the end,” she said remotely.
His car hit a wall. His mother blamed Florence because if they’d still been married he wouldn’t have been in that car on that road and since she was the one who’d ended the marriage the blame was hers, the mark was hers.
“He was an older man by seventeen years. It sounds so tragic. An older man. He had an engineering degree but worked in the post office.”
“He drank.”
“Yes.”
“He was drinking the night of the crash.”
“Yes. It was afternoon. Broad daylight. No other cars involved.”
He told her it was time for him to leave.
“Of course. You have to. That’s the way these things happen. Everybody knows that.”
She seemed to be blaming him for this, the fact of leaving, the fact of marrying, the thoughtless gesture of reuniting, and at the same time did not seem to be talking to him at all. She was talking to the room, to herself, he thought, talking back in time to some version of herself, a person who might confirm the grim familiarity of the moment. She wanted her feelings to register, officially, and needed to say the actual words, if not necessarily to him.
But he remained in the chair.
He said, “What is that music?”
“I think I need to make it go away. It’s like movie music in those old movies when the man and woman run through the heather.”
“Tell the truth. You love those movies.”
“I love the music too. But only when it’s playing in the movie.”
She looked at him and got up. She went past the front door and down the hall. She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.
Light-skinned black woman. One of those odd embodyings of doubtful language and unwavering race but the only words that meant anything to him were the ones she’d spoken and would speak.
She talked to God. Maybe Lianne had these conversations as well. He wasn’t sure. Or long troubled monologues. Or shy thoughts. When she raised the subject or spoke the name he went blank. The matter was too abstract. Here, with a woman he barely knew, the matter seemed unavoidable, and other matters, other questions.
He heard the music change to something that had a buzz and drive, voices in Portuguese rapping, singing, whistling, with guitars and drums behind them, manic saxophones.
First she’d looked at him and then he’d watched her walk past the door and down the hall and now he knew that he was supposed to follow.
She stood by the window, clapping her hands to the music. It was a small bedroom, without a chair, and he sat on the floor and watched her.
“I’ve never been to Brazil,” she said. “A place I think about sometimes.”
“I’m talking to somebody. Very early in the talks. About a job involving Brazilian investors. I may need some Portuguese.”
“We all need some Portuguese. We all need to go to Brazil. This is the disc that was in the player that you carried out of there.”
He said, “Go ahead.”
“What?”
“Dance.”
“What?”
“Dance,” he said. “You want to dance. I want to watch.”
She stepped out of her shoes and began to dance, clapping hands softly to the beat and beginning to move toward him. She reached out a hand and he shook his head, smiling, and pushed back toward the wall. She was not practiced at this. This was not something she’d allow herself to do alone, he thought, or with someone else, or for someone else, not until now. She moved back across the room, seeming to lose herself in the music, eyes closed. She danced in slow motion for a time, no longer clapping, arms up and away from her body, nearly trancelike, and began to whirl in place, ever slower, facing him now, mouth open, eyes coming open.
Sitting there, watching, he began to crawl out of his clothes.
It happened to Rosellen S.,