Point Omega - Don Delillo [20]
When the light in Elster’s bedroom went out I realized what an innocent reversion the moment was, teenage boy and girl from another era waiting for her parents to go to bed, except that her parents were divorced and bitter and her mother had gone to bed three hours ago, eastern standard time, and possibly not alone.
I asked her to come over and sit with me. I used that phrase, sit with me. She crossed the deck and we sat for a time. She said she’d been thinking about an elderly couple she took to doctors and helped at home sometimes. They all watched daytime TV and the woman kept looking at her husband to check his reaction to whatever the people on the screen were saying or doing. But he didn’t have a reaction, he never had a reaction, he never even noticed that she was looking, and Jessie thought this was the whole long spectacle of a marriage sort of drop by drop, one head turning, the other head oblivious. They lost things all the time and spent hours and then days trying to find them, the mystery of disappearing objects, eyeglasses, fountain pens, tax documents, keys of course, shoes, one shoe, both shoes, and Jessie liked looking, she was good at it, all three of them moving through the apartment talking, looking, trying to reconstruct. The couple used old-fashioned fountain pens fed by actual ink. They were nice people, unfilthily rich, losing, misplacing, dropping all the time. They dropped spoons, dropped books, lost toothbrushes. They lost a painting, by a famous living American, that Jessie found at the back of a closet. Then she watched the wife look at the husband to note his response and she realized that she’d become part of the ritual, one watching the other watch the other.
They were as normal as people could be and still be normal, she said. A little more normal, they might be dangerous.
I reached over and took her hand, not sure why. I liked thinking of her with those old people, three innocents searching rooms for hours. She let me do it, giving no sign that she’d noticed. It was part of her asymmetry, the limp hand, blank face, and it did not necessarily make me think the moment might be extended to include other gestures, more intimate. She was sitting next to anyone, talking through me to the woman in a sari on the crosstown bus, to the receptionist in the doctor’s office.
None of this mattered when her father’s light went on. I didn’t know how to disengage my hand without feeling ridiculous. The move had to be strategic, not tactical, had to be full-bodied, and I got up and walked over to the rail, the hand an incidental detail. He came out shuffling and moved past me, pajamas smelling old, body old, the bedroom, the bedsheets, his dependable stink trailing the man to his chair.
“Want a drink?”
“Scotch, neat,” he said.
Inside I heard the screen door open and shut and watched her cross the living room and head down the hall, night over, one of a hundred times I’d caught a glimpse of her or moved past her or walked in the door as she was walking out, a small lifetime of nonencounters, like with your sister growing up, only carrying static now, a random agitation in the air.
I took his scotch out to the deck, vodka for me, one cube, vast night, moon in transit. When she was a child, he said, and I waited while he sipped his drink. She had to touch her arm or face to know who she was. Happened rarely but happened, he said. She’d put her hand to her face. This is Jessica. Her body was not there until she touched it. She doesn’t remember this now, she was small, doctors, tests, her mother would pinch her, barest response. She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.
We talked about nothing special then, household matters, a trip to town, but certain themes whispered at the margins. The father’s love, that was one, and