Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [43]
She twisted her open hand in Elena’s face, under the left eye, and pushed her back into the entranceway.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
Marko backed into the apartment, barking. Lianne mashed the hand into the eye and the woman took a swing at her, a blind right that caught the edge of the door. Lianne knew she was going crazy even as she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her and hearing the dog bark over the sound of a solo lute from Turkey or Egypt or Kurdistan.
Rumsey sat in a cubicle not far from the north facade, a hockey stick propped in a corner. He and Keith played in pickup games at Chelsea Piers at two in the morning. In warmer months they wandered the streets and plazas at lunchtime, in the rippling shadows of the towers, looking at women, talking about women, telling stories, taking comfort.
Keith separated, living nearby for convenience, eating for convenience, checking the running time of rented movies before he took them out of the store. Rumsey single, in an affair with a married woman, recently arrived from Malaysia, who sold T-shirts and postcards on Canal Street.
Rumsey had compulsions. He admitted this to his friend. He admitted everything, concealed nothing. He counted parked cars in the street, windows in a building a block away. He counted the steps he took, here to there. He memorized things that crossed his consciousness, streams of information, more or less unwillingly. He could recite the personal data of a couple of dozen friends and acquaintances, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays. Months after the file of a random client crossed his desk, he could tell you the man’s mother’s maiden name.
This was not cute stuff. There was an open pathos in the man. At the hockey rink, in poker games, they shared a recognition, he and Keith, an intuitive sense of the other’s methodology as teammate or opponent. He was ordinary in many ways, Rumsey, a broad and squarish body, an even temperament, but he took his ordinariness to the deep end at times. He was forty-one, in a suit and tie, walking through promenades, in waves of beating heat, looking for women in open-toed sandals.
All right. He was compelled to count things including the digits that constitute the foreparts of a woman’s foot. He admitted this. Keith did not laugh. He tried to see it as routine human business, unfathomable, something people do, all of us, in one form or another, in the off moments of living the lives others think we are living. He did not laugh, then he did. But he understood that the fixation was not directed toward sexual ends. It was the counting that mattered, even if the outcome was established in advance. Toes on one foot, toes on the other. Always totaling ten.
Keith tall, five or six inches taller than his friend. He saw male pattern baldness develop in Rumsey, seemingly week by week, on their noontime walks, or Rumsey slumped in his cubicle, or holding a sandwich with both hands, head lowered to eat. He carried bottled water everywhere. He memorized the numbers on license plates even as he drove.
Keith seeing a woman with two kids, goddamn. She lived in Far fucking Rockaway.
Women on benches or steps, reading or doing crosswords, sunning themselves, heads thrown back, or scooping yogurt with blue spoons, sandaled women, some of them, toes exposed.
Rumsey eyes down, following the puck across the ice, body crashing the boards, free of aberrant need for a couple of happy shattering hours.
Keith running in place, on a treadmill at the gym, voices in his head, mostly his own, even when he wore a headset, listening to books on tape, science or history.
The counting always led to ten. This was not a discouragement or impediment. Ten is the beauty of it. Ten is probably why I do it. To get that sameness, Rumsey said. Something holds, something stays in place.
Rumsey’s girlfriend wanted him to invest in the business she ran with three relatives including her husband. They wanted to add stock, add running shoes and personal electronics.
The toes meant nothing if they were not defined