Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [39]
“And you’ll find a place to live somewhere nearby.”
She looked at him.
“Can you mean that? I don’t believe you said that. Do you think I’d put that much space between us?”
“Bridge or tunnel doesn’t matter. It’s hell on earth, that commute.”
“I don’t care. Do you think I care? They’ll resume train service. If they don’t, I’ll drive.”
“Okay.”
“It’s only Jersey.”
“Okay,” he said.
He thought she might cry. He thought this kind of conversation was for other people. People have these conversations all the time, he thought, in rooms like this one, sitting, looking.
Then she said, “You saved my life. Don’t you know that?”
He sat back, looking at her.
“I saved your briefcase.”
And waited for her to laugh.
“I can’t explain it but no, you saved my life. After what happened, so many gone, friends gone, people I worked with, I was nearly gone, nearly dead, in another way. I couldn’t see people, talk to people, go from here to there without forcing myself up off the chair. Then you walked in the door. I kept calling the number of a friend, missing, she’s one of the photographs on the walls and windows everywhere, Davia, officially missing, I can barely say her name, in the middle of the night, dial the number, let it ring. I was afraid, in the daytime, other people would be there to pick up the phone, somebody who knew something I didn’t want to hear. Then you walked in the door. You ask yourself why you took the briefcase out of the building. That’s why. So you could bring it here. So we could get to know each other. That’s why you took it and that’s why you brought it here, to keep me alive.”
He didn’t believe this but he believed her. She felt it and meant it.
“You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,” she said.
7
The two dark objects, the white bottle, the huddled boxes. Lianne turned away from the painting and saw the room itself as a still life, briefly. Then the human figures appear, Mother and Lover, with Nina still in the armchair, thinking remotely of something, and Martin hunched on the sofa now, facing her.
Finally her mother said, “Architecture, yes, maybe, but coming out of another time entirely, another century. Office towers, no. These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things.”
Lianne knew, in a pinprick of light, what her mother was going to say.
She said, “It’s all about mortality, isn’t it?”
“Being human,” Lianne said.
“Being human, being mortal. I think these pictures are what I’ll look at when I’ve stopped looking at everything else. I’ll look at bottles and jars. I’ll sit here looking.”
“You’ll need to move the chair a little closer.”
“I’ll push the chair up to the wall. I’ll call the maintenance man and have him push the chair for me. I’ll be too frail to do it myself. I’ll look and I’ll muse. Or I’ll just look. After a while I won’t need the paintings to look at. The paintings will be excess. I’ll look at the wall.”
Lianne crossed to the sofa, where she gave Martin a light poke in the arm.
“What about your walls? What’s on your walls?”
“My walls are bare. Home and office. I keep bare walls,” he said.
“Not completely,” Nina said.
“All right, not completely.”
She was looking at him.
“You tell us to forget God.”
The argument had been here all this time, in the air and on the skin, but the shift in tone was abrupt.
“You tell us this is history.”
Nina looked at him, she stared hard at Martin, her voice marked by accusation.
“But we can’t forget God. They invoke God constantly. This is their oldest source, their oldest word. Yes, there’s something else but it’s not history or economics. It’s what men feel. It’s the thing that happens among men, the blood that happens when an idea begins to travel, whatever’s behind it, whatever blind force or blunt