Mao II - Don Delillo [89]
Scott did three or four more strokes with the scouring pad and glanced again and it was Karen, of course, looking not so different from the first time he’d ever seen her, a cloud dreamer on a summer’s day, someone drifting out of Bill’s own head, her tote bag dragging on the ground.
He remained at the sink. He ran the water over the skillet, then scoured some more, then ran the water, then scoured, then ran the water. He heard her come up the steps and open the door. She walked into the hallway and he ran the water, keeping his back to the room.
She said, “I took the taxi from the bus station instead of calling. I had just enough money left for the taxi and the tip and I wanted to arrive totally broke.”
“The wind blows the door and look what walks in.”
“Actually I have two dollars.”
He didn’t turn around. He would have to adjust to this. He’d naturally fitted himself to the role, for some years now, of friend abandoned or lover discarded. We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its own recurrence. He turned off the water and put the skillet in the drain basket and waited.
“Ask me if I’m glad to be back. I missed you. Are you all right?”
“Run into Bill?” he said.
“I sort of kept seeing him, you know? But not really. Did you hear anything?”
“All quiet.”
“I came back because I was afraid you wouldn’t be all right. And I missed you.”
“I’ve been keeping busy. I’ve done some things, some organizing.”
“You always put a premium on that.”
“Same old Scott,” he said.
His voice sounded unfamiliar. He thought it was because he hadn’t spoken aloud to anyone in some time. But maybe it was the situation. It was dangerous to speak because he didn’t know which way a sentence might tend to go, toward one thing or the logical opposite. He could go either way, one reaction as easy as the other. He was not completely connected to what he said and this put an odd and dicey calm in his remarks.
“Of course you might want to be alone,” she said. “I know that. I know I left at probably a bad time you were having. But I honestly thought.”
“I know.”
“We weren’t the old dependency.”
“It’s all right,” he said.
“I’m not very good at this type conversation.”
“I know. It’s all right. We’re embarrassed.”
“I didn’t call from New York and I didn’t call from the bus station.”
“It’s not a station. You always call it a station. It’s a little ticket booth inside a drugstore.”
“Because I don’t trust the telephone,” she said.
He turned and looked at her and she looked like hell. He walked over and put his arms around her. She began to shake and he held her tighter and then stepped back to look at her. She was crying, making the motion or taking the shape, but without tears, her mouth stretched flat, the animated light missing from her eyes, and he put his hand behind her head and drew it softly toward him.
They went for a long walk in the woods beyond the road, single-file along a path and then out into a glade of lady fern. She told Scott she’d brought the pictures with her, the contact sheets of Brita’s photographs of Bill. He said nothing but felt an ease, a redress, the partial payment for damage suffered. She said Brita would not publish the pictures without Bill‘s, or Scott’s, consent.
They held each other much of the night, or lay in wettish touch, haphazard, one prone and the other supine, two legs engaged, and talked and did not,