Point Omega - Don Delillo [17]
“No serious boyfriends.”
“I don’t think so, no, absolutely.”
“Her mother sent her. This has to mean something.”
“Her mother’s a gorgeous woman, even today, but bad blood persists between us and when she sends the girl in my direction, yes, it means something. But she’s also crazy. She’s a completely manic individual who exaggerates everything.”
“The guy’s not a stalker. Nothing like that.”
“Christ, no, not a stalker, I hate that word. Maybe persistent, that’s all. Or stutters. Or has one brown eye and one blue eye.”
“Wives. What a subject,” I said.
“Wives, yes.”
“How many?”
“How many. Two,” he said.
“Just two. I thought maybe more.”
“Just two,” he said. “Feels like more.”
“Both crazy. I’m only guessing.”
“Both crazy. Over the years it ripens.”
“What, being crazy?”
“You don’t see it at first. Either they conceal it or it just needed to ripen. Once it does, it’s unmistakable.”
“But Jessie’s the treasure, the blessing.”
“That’s right. And you?”
“No kids.”
“Your wife. The separated wife. Is she crazy?”
“She thinks I’m crazy.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“What are you protecting? She’s crazy. Say it.”
We were still whispering, we were bonding in whispers, but I wouldn’t say it. I sat back and closed my eyes for a moment, seeing my apartment, clear and still and empty, four in the afternoon, local time, and there seemed more of me there in that dusty light than there was here, in the house or under open sky, but I wondered if I really wanted to go back to being the man who lives in the two rooms that are surrounded by the city that was built to measure time, in Elster’s formulation, the slinking time of watches, calendars, minutes left to live.
Then I looked at him and asked if there was a pair of binoculars in the house. We’ll need binoculars for the expedition, I said. He seemed puzzled by this. The bighorn sheep, I said. If we don’t get swept away in a flash flood. If the heat doesn’t kill us. We’ll want to have binoculars handy to see detail. The male is the one with the horns, big and curved.
She said something funny at dinner about her eyes being closer together in New York, caused by serial congestion in the streets. Out here the eyes move apart, the eyes adapt to conditions, like wings or beaks.
Other times she seemed deadened to anything that might bring a response. Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn’t reaching the wall or window. I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn’t feel watched. Where was she? She wasn’t lost in thought or memory, wasn’t gauging the course of the next hour or minute. She was missing, fixed tightly within.
Her father tried hard not to notice these times. He sat across the room with his poets, moving his lips as he read.
I approached Richard Elster after a talk he gave at The New School and wasted no time, telling him about my idea for a film, simple and strong, I said, man and war, and he wasted no time either, leaving me rooted to a mid-sentence gesture but only momentarily. I followed him down the hall, speaking less rapidly, and then onto the elevator, still talking, and when we were out on the street he looked at me and commented on my appearance, saying that I looked like him when he was much younger, an underfed overworked student. I took this as encouragement, gave him my card and listened to him read it aloud, Jim Finley, Deadbeat Films. But he wasn’t interested in being in a movie, mine or anyone’s.
The second encounter was longer and stranger. Museum of Modern Art. No matter how many times I go to the museum, walking east to west, it’s always farther down the street than it was last time. I was wandering through an exhibition on Dada and there was Elster, alone, stooped over a display case. I knew he’d written about the meanings of baby talk and so he’d clearly be interested in a major show of objects created in the name of demolished logic. I followed him for half an hour. I looked at the things he looked at. At times he leaned on his cane, other times simply carried it, haphazardly, horizontally,