Libra - Don Delillo [146]
He had nosebleeds in the night. Once she watched his body shake for half an hour.
She made him translate magazine stories about the Kennedys. He didn’t mind doing it and sometimes added details not’ in the stories.
In pictures taken near the sea, with the wind ruffling his hair, the President looked like her old boyfriend Anatoly, who had unruly hair and kissed her in a way that made her dizzy.
Lee didn’t wash for days at a time. He wore the same clothes and told her not to mend his socks or patch the elbows of threadbare sweaters. This was a complete turnabout. Here I am, he seemed to say. Look at what the system stamps out.
She knew, she was absolutely certain that Mrs. Kennedy would give birth to a boy. It was sure to be a boy, she told Lee, and then they would have a boy themselves, soon after.
She was ashamed to confess she was a woman of moods.
She was pregnant like Mrs. Kennedy but had not been examined by a doctor yet. Lee took her to Charity Hospital, a massive gray building that looked like a place you entered only once, never to emerge. In the marble lobby were enormous portraits of doctors in robes, doctors with the sky behind them, men with more important things on their mind than the gall bladder and kidneys. The trouble started at the information booth. A woman told Lee this was a state hospital and people could be treated free only if they’d been Louisiana residents for a certain period. Marina had not been living here long enough.
All that marble. It made her feel like a refugee. Lee followed a doctor down the corridor, almost begging. He picked up another doctor coming back this way, pleading and arguing at the same time, his face twisted and pale.
They were turned away.
Lee prowled the lobby, talking to people who walked in unaware, telling them the story. It’s just another business. They make a business out of pain and suffering. No one knew what to say to him and finally he just paced the floor in silence, walking off his anger.
It was an anger that Marina did not try to soothe or wish away because she believed in her heart it was correct.
She pushed the stroller past some shops with large signs out front. She sounded the words in her mind. Washateria. One-hour Martinizing. She saw fewer people as they strayed a little north, a little east.
She wondered how many women had visions and dreams of the President. What must it be like to know you are the object of a thousand longings? It’s as though he floats over the landscape at night, entering dreams and fantasies, entering the act of love between husbands and wives. He floats through television screens into bedrooms at night. He floats from the radio into Marina’s bed. There were times when she waited for him, actually listened late at night for a few words of a speech or a news conference recorded earlier in the day, waited for the, voice of the President, the radio on a table near the bed.
They had matching scars on the arm, Marina and Lee.
This was the basic question that didn’t leave her day or night. Would he force her to go back to Russia?
She said to him, “A gloomy spirit rules the house.” “I am not receiving happiness,” she said.
He talked to June about little Cuba. Do you love little Cuba? Do you have sympathy for Uncle Fidel? There was a photograph of Castro on the wall ,that he’d clipped from a Soviet magazine. What do you think of Uncle Fidel? Do you love and support little Cuba?
She thought of the President sometimes, in pictures taken near the sea, while Lee was making love to her.
He kept after her to write to the Soviet embassy in Washington, teary-eyed letters, requesting visas, requesting travel expenses. She knew he was confused about the future.
She was a blind kitten who always returned to the person who caressed her, no matter if he also treated her cruelly.
She took Junie out of the stroller now and let her walk alongside. Junie didn’t like to walk holding anyone’s hand.. She walked along on her own, endless joy and endless toil.
Sitting on the porch at 2:00 A.M. with the rifle