Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [47]
They were watching TV without the sound.
“My father shot himself so I would never have to face the day when he failed to know who I was.”
“You believe this.”
“Yes.”
“Then I believe it too,” he said.
“The fact that he would one day fail to recognize me.”
“I believe it,” he said.
“That’s absolutely why he did it.”
She was slightly drunk after an extra glass of wine. They were watching a late-night newscast and he thought of hitting the sound button when the commercials ended but then did not and they watched in silence as a correspondent in a desolate landscape, Afghanistan or Pakistan, pointed over his shoulder to mountains in the distance.
“We need to get him a book on birds.”
“Justin,” he said.
“They’re studying birds. Each kid gets to choose a bird and that’s the bird he or she studies. That’s his or her feathered vertebrate. His for boys. Hers for girls.”
There was stock footage on the screen of fighter planes lifting off the deck of a carrier. He waited for her to ask him to hit the sound button.
“He’s talking about a kestrel. What the hell’s a kestrel?” she said.
“It’s a small falcon. We saw them perched on power lines, mile after mile, when we were somewhere out west, back in the other life.”
“The other life,” she said, and laughed, and pushed up off the chair, headed for the bathroom.
“Come out wearing something,” he said, “so I can watch you take it off.”
Florence Givens stood looking at the mattresses, forty or fifty of them, arranged in rows at one end of the ninth floor. People tested the bedding, women mostly, bouncing lightly in seated positions or lying supine, checking for firmness or plushness. It took her a moment to realize that Keith was standing at her side, watching with her.
“Right on time,” she said.
“You’re the one who’s on time. I’ve been here for hours,” he said, “riding the escalators.”
They walked along the aisle and she stopped several times to check labels and prices and to press into the bedding with the heel of her hand.
He said, “Go on, lie down.”
“I don’t think I want to do that.”
“How else will you know if this is the mattress you want? Look around. They’re all doing it.”
“I’ll lie down if you’ll lie down.”
“I don’t need a mattress,” he said. “You need a mattress.”
She wandered along the aisle. He stood and watched and there were ten or eleven women lying on beds, bouncing on beds, and a man and a woman bouncing and rolling, middle-aged and purposeful, trying to determine if one person’s tossing would disturb the other’s sleep.
There were tentative women, bouncing once or twice, feet protruding from the end of the bed, and there were the others, women who’d shed their coats and shoes, falling backwards to the mattress, the Posturepedic or the Beautyrest, and bouncing with abandon, first one side of the bed, then the other, and he thought this was a remarkable thing to come upon, the mattress department at Macy’s, and he looked across the aisle and they were bouncing there as well, another eight or nine women, one man, one child, testing for comfort and sculptural soundness, for back support and foam sensation.
Florence was over there now, seated at the end of a bed, and she smiled at him and fell back. She bounced up, fell back, making a little game of her shyness in the midst of public intimacy. Two men stood not far from Keith and one of them said something to the other. It was a remark about Florence. He didn’t know what the man had said but it didn’t matter. It was clear from their stance and their vantage that Florence was the subject.
Keith stood ten paces away from them.
He said, “Hey fuckhead.”
The idea was that they’d meet here, have a quick lunch nearby and go their separate ways. He had to pick up the kid at school, she had a doctor’s appointment. It was a tryst