Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [75]
The gallery was in an old industrial building with a cage elevator that required a living human, full-time, to crank the lever on a rotary control, bouncing visitors up and down the shaft.
She went down a long dim corridor and found the gallery. There was no one there. She stood at the first canvas, looking. The show was small, the paintings were small. She stepped back, moved close. She liked this, alone in a room, looking.
She looked at the third painting for a long time. It was a variation on one of the paintings her mother had owned. She noted the nature and shape of each object, the placement of objects, the tall dark oblongs, the white bottle. She could not stop looking. There was something hidden in the painting. Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. In time she moved on to the next painting and the next, fixing each in her mind, and then there were the drawings. She hadn’t approached the drawings yet.
A man came in. He was interested in looking at her before he looked at the paintings. Maybe he expected certain freedoms to be in effect because they were like-minded people in a rundown building, here to look at art.
She moved through the open doorway into the office area, where the drawings hung. At the desk a young man leaned over a laptop. She examined the drawings. She wasn’t sure why she was looking so intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are.
She went back to the main room but could not look at the work the same way with the man there, watching her or not. He wasn’t watching her but he was there, fifty and leathery, a mug-shot monochrome, probably a painter, and she went out of the room and down the corridor, where she hit the elevator button.
She realized she hadn’t picked up a catalog but didn’t go back. She didn’t need a catalog. The elevator came rattling up the shaft. Nothing detached in this work, nothing free of personal resonance. All the paintings and drawings carried the same title. Natura Morta. Even this, the term for still life, yielded her mother’s last days.
There were times, in the sports book, when he glanced at one of the screens and wasn’t sure whether he was seeing a fragment of live action or of slow-motion replay. It was a lapse that should have unsettled him, an issue of basic brain function, one reality versus another, but it all seemed a matter of false distinctions, fast, slow, now, then, and he drank his beer and listened to the mingled sounds.
He never bet on these events. It was the effect on the senses that drew him here. Everything happened remotely, even the nearest noise. The high room was dimly lit, men seated heads up, or standing, or walking through, and out of the stealthy tension in the air come the shouts, a horse breaking out of the pack, a runner rounding second, and the action moves to the foreground, there to here, life or death. He liked listening to the visceral burst, men on their feet, calling out, a rough salvo of voices that brought heat and open emotion to the soft pall of the room. Then it was over, gone in seconds, and he liked that too.
He showed his money in the poker room. The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to affect events. He had memory, judgment, the ability to decide what is true, what is alleged, when to strike, when to fade. He had a measure of calm, of calculated isolation, and there was a certain logic he might draw on. Terry