Mao II - Don Delillo [27]
“Hard up for sympathy. And I want to say things now but totally fail. I’ve forgotten how to talk in ordinary ways except to mumble at meals for the salt.”
“They shouldn’t give it to you.”
“I’m sixty-three and it hurts.”
“I’ll never make it to sixty. I see something coming and I see it complete. Slow, wasting, horrible, deep in the body. It’s something I’ve known for years.”
“Fear has its own ego, hasn’t it?”
“Do I sound awful?” she said.
“A little boastful maybe.”
“What is it you want to say but can’t?”
“I want to ask you to come back some time. Or tell me where you live. Or stay and talk.”
“I have no trouble talking. But in this house it’s not so easy. I think there’s an intensity that makes certain subjects a little dangerous. And we don’t have the camera between us. This changes everything, doesn’t it? Scott said six-thirty.”
“Then it must be true.”
“He told me how he found you.”
“I nearly stove in his head the first thirty seconds. He took over fast. Taught himself many wiles and skills. We talk and argue all the time. He gives me perspectives.”
“And Karen.”
“Scott says I invented her. But he’s the one who snatched her out of the air. She scares me sometimes. She can scare me and delight me in the space of five words. She’s smart about people. Looks right through us. Watches TV and knows what people are going to say next. Not only gets it right but does their voices.”
“She came here how long after Scott?”
“Maybe five years after. She does their voices with a trueness that’s startling. That’s our Karen.”
Brita lay nearly flat in the long tub, hearing someone chopping wood just below the window. Steam rose up around her. First the crack of the ax, then the soft topple of split logs. She felt a small dim misery stealing through her and wasn’t sure what it meant. If there was any day in her recent working life that might be called special, this was it. Not that she thought any longer of building a career. She had no career, only writers hunched in chairs from here to China. There was little income and only passing public mention of the scheme. Pictures of most of the writers would appear exactly nowhere, others in obscure journals and directories. She was the person who traveled compulsively to photograph the unknown, the untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced. So it was a form of validation, a rosy endorsement, when a writer like Bill offered to pose for her. Then why this strange off-balance mood? She ran more hot water. She knew it was him down there, breathing hard, chanting with the effort. First the crack, then the soft topple. Keep a distance. He is on some rocking edge. The temperature of the bath was perfect now, almost too hot to bear. She felt sweat break out on her face and she moved more deeply in. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? Steam hung in the room. The heat was profound, deep-going and dulling and close to stopping the heart. She knew he was strong, saw it in his hands and girth, that dockworker’s density of body. She reached for a towel and wiped her face and after a while she stepped out of the tub and went to the window, using the towel to rub vapor off the glass at face level. How could she keep a distance if she’d already taken his picture? This was the partnership, the little misery. Bill was tossing split logs toward the corded wood set under a sagging canopy at the side of the house. The announcement of my dying. She had to rub away vapor several times, standing by the window looking down.
Bill raised his glass.
“This place feels like home tonight. There’s a wholeness, isn’t there? A sense of extension and completion. And we all know why. Here’s to guests and what they mean to civilization.”
He drank and coughed.
He said, “It’s interesting how ‘guest’ and ‘host’ are words that intertwine. The etymologies are curious. Converging, mixing, reciprocating. Like the human groupings marked by the words. Guests bring ideas from outside.”
Scott sat facing Brita and spoke to her even when his remarks were meant for