Mao II - Don Delillo [16]
“I expected you to stand here a few minutes and then get restless and walk off.”
“One of my failings is that I say things to strangers, women passing by, that I’ve never said to a wife or child, a close friend.”
“You talk candidly to Scott.”
“I talk to Scott. But it becomes less necessary all the time. He already knows. He’s at my brainstem like a surgeon with a bright knife.”
She finished the roll and went to her case for another. Bill stood by the desk shaking a cigarette out of the pack. There was mud crust and bent weed stuck to his shoes. He didn’t seem to be putting across his own picture, his idea of what he wanted to look like or who he wanted to be for the next hour or two. It was clear he hadn’t bothered to think it out. She liked the feel of the room with him in it. It was his room in a way in which this wasn’t his house. She asked him to stand near one of the wall charts and when he didn’t object she moved the lamp and adjusted focus and started shooting. He smoked and talked. He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed too many brandies and little violet pills or placed the nozzle of a revolver just behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It’s what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That’s what this is all about.”
Space was closing in the way it did when a session went well. Time and light were narrowed to automatic choices. Bill stood before the odd notations on his chart and she knew she had everything she might want or need. Here was the old, marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist. And he was animated, leaning and jabbing as he talked. His hands were blunt and nicked. There was a doggedness to him, a sense of all the limits he’d needed to exceed, getting on top of work that always came hard. She was trying to place him in context, fit the voice and body to the books. The first thing she’d thought, entering the room, was wait a minute, no, this can’t be him. She’d expected someone lean and drawn, with eyes like hex signs on an Amish barn. But Bill was slowly beginning to make sense to her, to look reasonably like his work.
“I’m forced to steal one of your cigarettes,” she said. “I’ve been giving up cigarettes for twenty-five years and I’ve made a lot of progress in that time. Okay? But then I see the little glisten of the package.”
“Tell me about New York,” he said. “I don’t get there anymore. When I think of cities where I lived, I see great cubist paintings.”
“I’ll tell you what I see.”
“That edginess and density and those old brownish tones and how cities age and stain in the mind like Roman walls.”
“Where I live, okay, there’s a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it’s water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island—little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it’s all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers. ”
“Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time.”
“I’ll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop.”
“You’ll wonder what made you mad.”
“I already have the World Trade Center.”
“And it’s already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse.”
“What?” she said.
“If there was only one tower instead of two.”
“You mean they interact. There is a play of light.”
“Wouldn’t a single tower be much worse?”
“No, because my big complaint is only