Libra - Don Delillo [63]
It is like the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path.
He watches them at dinner in the officers’ mess and he thinks he knows why they look so satisfied with themselves. They have begun to feel the bond of being American. They almost glow with self-awareness, headed for foreign shores, surrounded and attended by a partly foreign and mainly dark-skinned crew, delighting in their own straightforward and affirmative ways, their democratic values, their moral strength, the way they hold their knife and fork, smiling over the glitter, and this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation.
The spiral rind of a tangerine sits in a white saucer in front of him. He thinks of the nine months he spent at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in California, after Japan. He continued his Russian studies, learned some Spanish (it was the time of Fidel Castro) and developed a neat little deception for the venture he was now engaged in.
At the base library he found a catalogue listing the names of colleges abroad. He scanned the list for obscure schools in certain locations, then wrote away for an application. Albert Schweitzer College. Churwalden, Switzerland. He needed to invent a reason to travel abroad because a Marine has two years in the reserve after active duty.
On the application form he listed under special interests: Philosophy, Psychology, Ideology, Football, baseball, tennis, Stamp collecting.
Vocational interest (if decided upon): To be a short story writer on contemporary American life.
In certain light the sea goes green, a slow dullish tumble he watches from the deck. When he goes below again he lies on his bunk, aware of the great slow creaking of the ship, like a mind stirring around him. Hawsers are ropes for mooring.
On the Albert Schweitzer application he made it a point to mention that after the term was completed he planned to attend the summer session of the University of Turku—Turku, Finland.
Hidell creeps closer to the East.
19 June
Mary Frances parked under an oak tree on the circular drive outside the College of Education Building, or Old Main. It pleased her that Win’s office was in the oldest building on campus. The building pleased her with its arched entranceways and two-story columns. Denton had its hidden streets, its sense of languorous history, an old American stillness, wistful and unchanged, and these older traces too, older ideas and values scored in limestone and marble, in scroll ornaments atop a column or in the banknote details of a frieze. The Old Main, the county courthouse, the broad-fronted homes, the homes with deep shady porches, the trees, the streets named for trees—all this pleased her, made her think that happiness lived minute by minute in the things she saw and heard. Being happy was a small awareness, the sum of small awarenesses, day by day, minute by minute, and you knew it now, in the hair and skin as much’ as in the heart.
Suzanne sat next to her mother, arms at her sides, slim white legs pointed straight out, a show’ of mock obedience. They were not talking to each other.
You could be happy now. It did not have to be experienced in retrospect, as Win believed, as he liked to explain in his mild way, with the face he called a failed professor’s tipped slightly right. It was not a slow-working glow or meditation. You could feel it now, collect it in the names of things around you, in chinaberry, oak and slippery elm. It pleased her to live here, after Miami, Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala City, temporary housing in southeast Virginia (ISOLATION), dusty tracts of identical homes near the Carolina coast (ISOLATION