Libra - Don Delillo [109]
“This is how friends communicate,” she said.
“Everything is public for you.”
“I trust friends, that they understand how things are. Who else do I talk to? I need these friends.”
“You don’t need to tell our private life. I don’t want them coming here. Keep them out.”
“I must keep your mother out. I must keep my friends out.”
“My own brother told the FBI.”
“It’s no secret where we live. What did he tell? People know where we live. We can’t hide where we live.”
He read the book. She turned on the tap and watched water swirl into the drain. The baby was crying.
“You like your wine,” he said, not really talking to her.
“Teach me English.”
“You wait for them to refill your wine.”
“I never loved you. I took pity on a foreigner.”
“Meanwhile cigarettes.”
“I tell my friends how you hit me. He doesn’t hit so hard. It’s just that I have soft skin. That’s why they see the marks.”
She was standing at the sink with her back to the room. She heard him get up and come toward her. She picked up a sponge and began cleaning the edges of the sink. He hit her in the side of the face. He stood there a moment, deciding whether one was enough. Then he went and sat down and she wet the sponge and worked a stain out of the countertop.
They were unloading across the street. She heard truck engines, men’s voices. She had another bite of leftovers and cleaned the windowsill behind the sink.
“I tell them he is careful of my well-being. He hits very lightly. It’s only my fair skin that makes it look so bad.”
He came over and started pummeling her on both arms. She turned off the tap. He hit her high on the arms, using open hands.
“I tell them it isn’t his fault if I bruise so easily.”
She put her hands to the sides of her head for protection. He kept hitting her on the upper arms like some kid’s game of slap-the-arm. He hit in rhythm, hitting with the right hand, then the left. He worked quietly behind her, one and a-two, breathing through his nose. She could feel the labor of his concentration.
She lay in the dark and thought of the paper she’d crumpled and thrown. It was lesson number seven. An elderly man in the Russian colony sent her pages in the mail to improve her English. At the top of the first page he wrote in large, large letters, in Russian, My name is Marina. She was supposed to write the English words below. Lesson number two, I live in Fort Worth. Lesson number three, We buy groceries on Tuesday. Each lesson had its own page. She mailed him the finished pages and he corrected them and mailed them back, with new lessons for her to work on. Now lesson seven was crumpled and he would wonder how it happened.
Lee came out of the bathroom and got into bed. She felt how he carefully eased into bed so he wouldn’t disturb her if she was asleep. She was facing away from him, of course.
She thought of Holland again. This was a recent thing, out of nowhere, thinking of Holland, of their train journey across Europe and her surprise at seeing Dutch villages and hearing church bells ring. It is the cleanest country in the world, unbelievably clean, with cozy houses and spotless streets and fences in the meadows that are perfectly straight.
She didn’t want her baby sucking nervous milk.
She thought they would have a life that was not unusual in any way. Simple moments adding up. They had matching scars on the arm, which meant they were marked by fate to meet and fall in love.
She thought of walking the aisles of Montgomery Ward. She went in out of the heat to piped-in music and little ringing bells. The floors were polished. The aisles were immensely long, bordered with cosmetics in display cases and counters full of shiny handbags, with dresses spreading into other rooms. Fragrances drifting everywhere.
He wanted to go to college at night and take courses in politics and economics. But there was the need to make a living which interfered.
She saw him from a distance even when he was hitting her. He was never fully there.
Mamochka bought her modest shorts, pleated, with deep pockets. This was a difference