Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [54]
But she didn’t leave the room. She assumed the load in the dryer was nearly done or why would the woman be standing here waiting. She assumed the woman had come down only minutes ago, saw the load was not yet done and decided to wait rather than go up and down and up again. She couldn’t see the time dial clearly from this position and preferred not to make a show of looking. But she had no intention of leaving the room. She stood against the wall adjacent to the wall the woman was leaning on, half slouched. Their straitened lanes of vision possibly crossed somewhere near the middle of the room. She kept her back erect, feeling the impress of the old pocked wall against her shoulder blades.
The washer began to rumble, the dryer tossed and clicked, shirt buttons hitting the drum. There was no question that she would outwait the other woman. The question was what the woman would do with the cigarette if she finished smoking it before the load was done. The question was whether they’d look at each other before the woman left the room. The room was like a monk’s cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany. The question was whether a look would lead to words and then what.
It was a rainy Monday in the world and she walked over to Godzilla Apartments, where the kid was spending an after-school hour with the Siblings, playing video games.
She used to write poetry on days like this when she was in school. There was something about rain and poetry. Later there would be something about rain and sex. The poems were usually about the rain, how it felt to be indoors watching the lonely drops slide down the windowpane.
Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous. This was the weather everywhere, the state of mind, generic Monday, and she walked very close to buildings and ran across streets and felt the wind hit straight down when she reached the redbrick heights of Godzilla.
She had a quick cup of coffee with the mother, Isabel, and then peeled her son off the computer screen and muscled him into his jacket. He wanted to stay, they wanted him to stay. She told them she was a villain too real for video games.
Katie followed them to the door. She wore red jeans rolled up and a pair of suede ankle boots that glowed neon along the welt when she walked. Her brother Robert hung back, a dark-eyed boy who looked too shy to speak, eat, walk a dog.
The telephone rang.
Lianne said to the girl, “You’re not still sky-watching, are you? Searching the skies day and night? No. Or are you?”
The girl looked at Justin and smiled in sly connivance, saying nothing.
“He won’t tell me,” Lianne said. “I ask and ask.”
He said, “No, you don’t.”
“But if I did, you wouldn’t tell me.”
Katie’s eyes went brighter. She was enjoying this, alert to the prospect of a crafty reply. Her mother was talking on the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen.
Lianne said to the girl, “Still waiting for word? Still watching for planes? Day and night at the window? No. I don’t believe it.”
She leaned toward the girl, speaking in a stage whisper.
“Still talking to that person? The man whose name some of us are not supposed to know.”
The brother looked stricken. He stood fifteen feet behind Katie, dead still, looking at the parquet floor between his sister’s boots.
“Is he still out there, somewhere, making you search the skies? The man whose name maybe we all know even if some of us are not supposed to know.”
Justin plucked her jacket away from her elbow, which meant let’s go home now.
“Maybe just