Point Omega - Don Delillo [11]
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I never asked the old woman what the reason was. I’d see her coming down the stairs backwards, clutching the handrail. I’d pause and watch, I’d offer to help, but never asked, never inquired into the problem, an injury, a matter of balance, a condition of mind. Just stood on the landing and watched her come down, step by step, a Latvian, this is all I knew, and New York City, this too, where people do not ask.
2
A great rain came sweeping off the mountains, too strong to think into, leaving us with nothing to say. We stood in the covered entrance to the deck, we three, watching and listening, world awash. Jessie held herself tightly, each flung hand clutching the opposite shoulder. The air was sharp and charged and when the rain stopped, in minutes, we went back to the living room and talked about what we were talking about when the sky broke open.
In those first days I thought of her as the Daughter. Elster’s possessiveness, his enclosing space, made it hard for me to set her apart, to find some semblance of an independent being. He wanted her near him all the time. When he said something meant for me, he always included her, drew her in through look or gesture. His eyes showed an eager glow that was not so rare, father regarding child, but it seemed to have the effect of smothering a response, or maybe she wasn’t interested in making one.
She was pale and thin, mid-twenties, awkward, with a soft face, not fleshy but roundish and calm, and she seemed attentive to some interior presence. Her father said she heard words from inside them. I didn’t ask what he meant by this. It was his job to say such things.
She wore jeans and sneakers, same as I did, and a loose shirt, and she was someone to talk to, which made the day pass. She said that she lived with her mother on the Upper East Side, an apartment she dismissed with a shrug. She did volunteer work with elderly people, shopping for food, taking them to their doctors. They had about five doctors each, she said, and she didn’t mind sitting in the waiting room, she liked waiting rooms, she liked doormen hailing cabs, men in uniforms, it was the one uniformed thing you might see on an average day because cops were mainly hunched in cars.
I waited for her to ask where I lived, how I lived, with whom, whatever. Maybe it made her interesting, the failure to ask.
I said, “I had a studio out in Queens somewhere. I could afford it, then I couldn’t. I work out of my apartment, which is more or less in Chinatown. I start projects, talk to people, think about other projects. Where will the money come from? I think about gap financing. I’m not sure what that means. I think about equity funding, foreign money, hedge funds. Every project becomes an obsession or what’s the point. This is the one right now, your father. I know he’s right for it and I have a feeling he knows it too. But I can’t get an answer out of him. Do it, don’t do it, maybe, never, some other time. I look at the sky and wonder. What the hell am I here for?”
“Company,” she said. “The man totally physically hates to be alone.”
“Hates to be alone but also comes here because there’s nothing here, no one here. Other people are conflict, he says.”
“Not the ones he chooses to be with him. A few students through the years, then there’s lucky me, then my mother once upon a time. He has two sons from his first wife. Wrack and Ruin, he calls them. Don’t even think of bringing up the subject of his sons.”
Most of the time we talked about nothing, she and I. We had nothing in common, it seemed, but subjects kept flying by. She said she got confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn’t functioning. This happened at the airport in San Diego, where her father was waiting to meet her. She stepped onto an up escalator that wasn’t moving and she couldn’t adjust to this, she had to self-consciously climb the steps and it was difficult because she kept expecting the steps to move and she’d sort of half walk but not seem to be going anywhere because the steps weren’t moving.
She didn’t drive a car because