Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [41]
“It’s not much of a beard.”
“But that’s the art of it,” Nina said.
“The art of looking unkempt.”
“Unkempt but deeply sensitive.”
“This is American kidding. Am I right?” he said.
“The beard’s a nice device.”
“He speaks to it,” Nina said. “Every morning, in the mirror.”
“What does he say?”
“He speaks in German. The beard is German.”
“I am flattered, right?” he said. “To be the subject of such kidding.”
“The nose is Austro-Hungarian.”
He leaned toward Nina, still standing behind her, touching the back of his hand to her face. Then he took the empty glass to the kitchen and the two women sat quietly for a moment. Lianne wanted to go home and sleep. Her mother wanted to sleep, she wanted to sleep. She wanted to go home and talk to Keith for a while and then fall into bed, fall asleep. Talk to Keith or not talk at all. But she wanted him to be there when she got home.
Martin spoke from the far end of the room, surprising them.
“They want their place in the world, their own global union, not ours. It’s an old dead war, you say. But it’s everywhere and it’s rational.”
“Fooled me.”
“Don’t be fooled. Don’t think people will die only for God,” he said.
His cell phone buzzed and he altered his stance, turning toward the wall and seeming to speak into his chest. These fragments of conversation, which Lianne had heard before, from a distance, included English, French and German phrases, depending on the caller, and sometimes a small jeweled syllable such as Braque or Johns.
He finished quickly and put the phone away.
“Travel, yes, it’s a thing you ought to consider,” he said. “Get your knee back to normal and we’ll go, quite seriously.”
“Far away.”
“Far away.”
“Ruins,” she said.
“Ruins.”
“We have our own ruins. But I don’t think I want to see them.”
He moved along the wall toward the door.
“But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.”
Then he opened the door and was gone.
He watched poker on television, pained faces in a casino complex in the desert. He watched without interest. It wasn’t poker, it was television. Justin came in and watched with him and he outlined the game to the kid, in snatches, as the players paused and raised and the strategies unfolded. Then Lianne came in and sat on the floor, watching her son. He was seated at a radical slant, barely in contact with the chair and staring helplessly into the glow, a victim of alien abduction.
She looked at the screen, faces in close-up. The game itself faded into anesthesia, the tedium of a hundred thousand dollars won or lost on the flip of a card. It meant nothing. It was outside her interest or sympathy. But the players were interesting. She watched the players, they drew her in, deadpan, drowsy, slouched, men in misfortune, she thought, making a leap to Kierkegaard, somehow, and recalling the long nights she’d spent with her head in a text. She watched the screen and imagined a northern bleakness, faces misplaced in the desert. Wasn’t there a soul struggle, a sense of continuing dilemma, even in the winner’s little blink of winning?
She said nothing about this to Keith, who would have turned half toward her, gazing into space in mock contemplation, mouth open, eyelids slowly closing and head sinking finally to his chest.
He was thinking of being here, Keith was, and not thinking of it but only feeling it, alive to it. He saw her face reflected in a corner of the screen. He was watching the cardplayers and noting the details of move and countermove but also watching her and feeling this, the sense of being here with them. He had a single-malt scotch in his fist. He heard a car alarm sounding down the street. He reached over and knocked on Justin’s head, knock knock,