Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [46]
She almost told them about the briefcase, the fact of its appearance and disappearance and what it meant if anything. Wanted to tell them but did not. Tell them everything, say everything. She needed them to listen.
Keith used to want more of the world than there was time and means to acquire. He didn’t want this anymore, whatever it was he’d wanted, in real terms, real things, because he’d never truly known.
Now he wondered whether he was born to be old, meant to be old and alone, content in lonely old age, and whether all the rest of it, all the glares and rants he had bounced off these walls, were simply meant to get him to that point.
This was his father seeping through, sitting home in western Pennsylvania, reading the morning paper, taking the walk in the afternoon, a man braided into sweet routine, a widower, eating the evening meal, unconfused, alive in his true skin.
There was a second level to the high-low games. Terry Cheng was the player who divided the chips, half to each winner, high and low. He’d do it in seconds, stacking chips of different colors and varying denominations in two columns or two sets of columns, depending on the size of the pot. He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike. The idea was to arrive at two allotments of equal monetary value but never of evenly distributed colors, or anything close to that. He’d stack six blue chips, four gold, three red and five white and then match this, with steel-trap speed, fingers flying, hands sometimes crossing, with sixteen white, four blue, two gold and thirteen red, building his columns and then folding his arms and looking into secret space, leaving each winner to rake in his chips, in unspoken respect and semi-awe.
No one doubted his skills of hand-eye-mind. No one tried to count along with Terry Cheng and no one ever harbored the thought, even in the brooding depths of the night, that Terry Cheng might be wrong in his high-low determinations, just this once.
Keith talked to him on the telephone, twice, briefly, after the planes. Then they stopped calling each other. There was nothing left, it seemed, to say about the others in the game, lost and injured, and there was no general subject they might comfortably summon. Poker was the one code they shared and that was over now.
Her schoolmates called her Gawk for a time. Then it was Scrawn. This was not necessarily a case of hateful naming, coming mostly from friends and often with her connivance. She liked to pose in parody of a model on a runway, only all elbows, knees and wired teeth. When she began to grow out of her angularity, there were the times her father rolled into town, sunburnt Jack, shooting out his arms when he saw her, a beautifully burgeoning creature he loved in muscle and blood, until he went away again. But she remembered these times, his stance and smile, the half crouch, the set of his jaw. He’d shoot out his arms and she’d fall shyly into the enclosing fold. This was ever Jack, hugging and shaking her, looking so deeply into her eyes it seemed at times he was trying to place her in proper context.
She was darkish, unlike him, with large eyes and wide mouth and with an eagerness that could be startling to others, a readiness to encounter an occasion or idea. Her mother was the template for this.
Her father used to say of her mother, “She’s a sexy woman except for her skinny ass.”
Lianne was thrilled by the chummy vulgarity, the invitation to share the man’s special perspective, his openness of reference and slant rhyme.
It was Jack’s perspective on architecture that had drawn Nina. They met on a small island in the northeast Aegean where Jack had designed a cluster of white stucco dwellings for an artists’ retreat. Set above a cove, the grouping, from offshore, was a piece of pure geometry gone slightly askew—Euclidean rigor in quantum space, Nina would write.
Here on a hard cot, on a second visit, was where Lianne was conceived. Jack told her this when she was twelve years old and would not refer to it again