Point Omega - Don Delillo [16]
I wondered if we were becoming a family, no more strange than most families except that we had nothing to do, nowhere to go, but that’s not so strange either, father, daughter and whatever-I-was.
There was another thing she said, my wife, sympathetically, referring to the way I regarded life on the one hand and film on the other.
“Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”
The bathroom door was open, midday, and Jessie was in there, barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and briefs, head over the basin, washing her face. I paused at the door. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted her to see me there. I didn’t imagine walking in and standing behind her and leaning into her, didn’t see this clearly, my hands slipping under the T-shirt, my knees moving her legs apart so I could press more tightly, fit myself up and in, but it was there in some tenuous stroke of the moment, the idea of it, and when I moved away from the door I made no special effort to leave quietly.
The caretaker drove up, a squat man wearing a tractor cap and a stud in one ear. He looked after the house when Elster wasn’t here, which was roughly ten months of the year, most years. I watched him go around to the side where the propane tank was located. When he came back this way I nodded as he went past me into the house. He showed no sign that he’d registered my presence. I thought he probably lived in one of the eccentric sprawls of shacks, trailers and cars on blocks, small crouched settlements sometimes visible from the paved roads.
Elster followed him into the kitchen speaking about a problem with the stove and I looked out toward the chalk hills and framed myself from that distance, clinically, man in landscape across the long day, barely seen.
Lunch was movable, flexible, eat when and where you want. I found myself at the table with Elster, who examined the processed cheese that Jessie had bought on our last trip to town. He said it was colored with spent uranium and then he ate it, slopped with mustard, between slices of prison bread, and so did I.
She was her father’s dream thing. He didn’t seem baffled by her stunted response to his love. It was natural for him not to notice. I’m not sure he understood the fact that she was not him.
When he finished the sandwich he moved forward in his chair, elbows on the table, voice lower now.
“I don’t have to see a bighorn sheep before I die.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But I want Jessie to see one.”
“Okay. We’ll take a drive.”
“We’ll take a drive,” he said.
“At some point we may have to get out of the car and climb. I think they spend time on rock ledges. I’d like to see one myself. I don’t know why exactly.”
He leaned in closer now.
“You know why she’s here.”
“I assume you wanted to see her.”
“I always want to see her. Her mother, this was her mother’s idea. There’s a man Jessie sees.”
“Okay.”
“And her mother has certain ideas concerning his designs or just his general manner or his appearance or something. And she stated in her authoritarian way that possibly Jessie ought to put some distance between them, for now, temporarily, as a test of her attachment.”
“So here she is. And you’ve talked to her about this.”
“Tried to. She doesn’t say much. There’s no problem, that’s what she says. Seems to like the guy. They see each other. They talk.”
“How close are they?”
“They talk.”
“Do they have sex?”
“They talk,” he said.
We were both hunched over the table now, facing each other, speaking in uneasy whispers.
“Has she ever had an affair?”
“I admit I’ve