Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [82]
He used to think about Florence Givens every day. He still did, most days, today, in a taxi, staring at a billboard. He’d never called. He’d never thought of crossing the park again to see her, talk a while, find out how she was doing. He’d thought of it in a remote way, like landscape, like thinking of going back to the house where you grew up and walking along the back lanes and across the high meadow, the kind of thing you know you’ll never do.
It was finally who he was that counted, not luck or naked skill. It was strength of mind, mental edge, but not just that. There was something harder to name, a narrowness of need or wish, or how a man’s character determines his line of sight. These things would make him win but not too much, not winnings of such proportions that he’d slip into someone else’s skin.
The dwarf is back, Carlo, and he is happy to see this, watching the man take a seat two tables away. But he doesn’t look around the room for a sign of Terry Cheng so they might trade wry smiles.
Men in stylized yawns with arms raised, men staring into dead space.
Terry might be in Santa Fe or Sydney or Dallas. Terry might be in his room dead. It took Terry two weeks to understand that the fixture on the wall at one end of the long room, marked SHEER and BULK, was designed to operate the curtains at the other end of the room, to open and close the sheer inner curtain or the bulky outer. Terry had tried to open the curtains once by hand and then realized it didn’t matter, open or closed. There was nothing out there he needed to know.
He’d never told Lianne about the walks across the park. His experience with Florence was brief, maybe four or five encounters over a period of fifteen days. Is that possible, only that? He tried counting the times, sitting in a taxi at a stoplight, staring at a billboard. It all ran together now, with only the faint grain of something felt and held. He saw her in the tower as she’d described it, in forced march down the stairwell, and thought he saw himself at times, in split instants, unshaped, a false memory or too warped and fleeting to be false.
The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next. He wasn’t playing for the money. He was playing for the chips. The value of each chip had only hazy meaning. It was the disk itself that mattered, the color itself. There was the laughing man at the far end of the room. There was the fact that they would all be dead one day. He wanted to rake in chips and stack them. The game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye. He was identical with these things.
He set the resistance level way up. He stroked hard, arms and legs but mostly legs, trying not to collapse his shoulders, hating every stroke. Sometimes there was no one else in the place, maybe somebody on a treadmill watching TV. He always used the rowing machine. He rowed and showered and the showers smelled of mildew. He stopped going after a while but then went back, setting the level higher still, wondering only once why this was a thing he had to do.
He was looking at five-deuce off-suit. He thought for a moment he might get up and leave. He thought he might walk out and get the first plane, pack and go, get a window seat and lower the shade and fall asleep. He folded his cards and sat back. By the time a fresh deck floated up he was ready to play again.
Forty tables, nine players a table, others waiting at the rail, screens high on three walls showing soccer and baseball, strictly atmospheric.
SHEER and BULK.
He didn’t want to listen to Terry Cheng at his conversational ease, in his new persona, chatting away by the blue waterfall, three years after the planes.
Older men with chapped faces, eyelids drawn down. Would he know them if he saw