Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [50]
“Do you want dessert?”
“No.”
Stand apart. See things clinically, unemotionally. This is what Martin had told her. Measure the elements. Work the elements together. Learn something from the event. Make yourself equal to it.
Carol wanted to talk about Keith, hear about Keith. She wanted the man’s story, their story, back together, moment by moment. The blouse she was wearing belonged to another body type, another skin color, a knockoff of a Persian or Moroccan robe. Lianne noticed this. She had nothing interesting to tell this woman about Keith because nothing interesting had happened that was not too intimate for telling.
“Do you want coffee?”
“I hit a woman in the face the other day.”
“What for?”
“What do you hit people for?”
“Wait. You hit a woman?”
“They make you mad. That’s what for.”
Carol was looking at her.
“Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
“You have your husband back. Your son has a father full-time.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Show some happiness, some relief, something. Show something.”
“It’s only beginning. Don’t you know that?”
“You have him back.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said.
The waiter stood nearby, waiting for someone to ask for the check.
“All right, look. If something happens,” Carol said. “Like the editor can’t deal with the material. The editor can’t work fast enough. She feels this book is destroying the life she has carefully built over the last twenty-seven years. I’ll call you.”
“Call me,” Lianne said. “Otherwise don’t call me.”
After that day, when she could not remember where she lived, Rosellen S. did not come back to the group.
The members wanted to write about her and Lianne watched them at work, folded over their legal pads. Now and then a head would lift, someone staring into a memory or a word. All the words for what is inevitable seemed to crowd the room and she found herself thinking of the old passport photos on the wall of her mother’s apartment, from Martin’s collection, faces looking out of a sepia distance, lost in time.
The agent’s circular stamp at the corner of a photo.
The bearer’s status and port of embarkation.
Royaume de Bulgarie.
Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom.
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti.
She’d begun to see the people before her, Omar, Carmen and the others, in the same isolated setting, with the signature of the bearer sometimes written across the photo itself, a woman in a cloche, a younger woman who looked Jewish, Staatsange-hörigkeit, her face and eyes showing deeper meaning than an ocean crossing alone might account for, and the woman’s face that’s almost lost in shadow, the printed word Napoli curled around the border of a circular stamp.
Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects. Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state. She saw people fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame. Thumbprints, emblems with tilted crosses, man with handlebar mustache, girl in braids. She thought she was probably inventing a context. She didn’t know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs. This is where she found innocence and vulnerability, in the nature of old passports, in the deep texture of the past itself, people on long journeys, people now dead. Such beauty in faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories.
Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese.
Dati e connotati del Titolare.
Les Pays Etrangers.
She watches the members write about Rosellen S. A head lifts, then drops, and they sit and write. She knows they are not looking out of a tinted mist, as the passport bearers are, but receding into one. Another