Libra - Don Delillo [9]
He was thinking about secrets. Why do we need them and what do they mean? His wife was reaching for the sugar.
He had important thoughts at breakfast. He had thoughts at lunch in his office in the Old Main Building. In the evening he sat on the porch, thinking. He believed it was a natural law that men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted—a respite from the other life, from the eerie realness of living with people who do not keep secrets as a profession or duty, or a business fixed to one’s existence.
Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other; deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion, without meaning or need.
She knew how to worry reasonably. She knew how to use the sound of her own voice to bring him back to what was safe and plain, among the breakfast dishes, on the tenth straight sunny day.
“One of the nicest things to watch? And I’ve never really noticed till we moved here? People coming out of church. Just gathering near the steps and talking. Isn’t it one of the best things to watch?”
“You thought you’d find outlaws down here.”
“I like it here. You’re the one.”
“Men swaggering into saloons. Thirsty from cattle drives.”
“I mean churches anywhere. I just never paid attention before.”
“I like to watch people come out of motels.”
“No but I’m serious. There’s something lovely about a church lawn or church steps with the service just ended and people slowly coming out and forming little groups. They look so nice.”
“That’s what I didn’t like about Sundays when I was growing up. All the frumpy people in their starchy clothes. Depressed the hell out of me.”
“What’s wrong with frumpy? I like being a middle-aged frump.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
He reached across the table and touched her arm as he always did when he thought he might have said something wrong or cut her off. Don’t listen to what I say. Trust my hands, my touch.
“It’s so comfortable,” she said.
We tend to draw together to seek mutual solace for our disease. This is what he thought at the breakfast table in the sweet old house, turn-of-the-century, with the curved porch, the oak posts furled in trumpet vines. He had time to think, time to become an old man in aspic, in sculptured soap, quaint and white. It was not unusual for men in the clandestine service to retire at age fifty-one. A pension plan had been approved by some committee and a statement had been issued about the onerous and dangerous lives led by such people; the family problems; the transient nature of assignments. But Win Everett’s retirement wasn’t exactly voluntary. There was the business in Coral Gables. There were visits to the polygraph machine. And from three levels of specialists he heard the term “motivational exhaustion.” Two were CIA psychiatrists, the other a cleared contact in the outside world, the place he found so eerie and real.
They called it semiretirement. A semantic kindness. They set him up in a teaching post here and paid him a retainer to recruit likely students as junior officer trainees. In a college for women, this was a broad comic