Point Omega - Don Delillo [34]
Maybe we could get a bite nearby, he would say.
I don’t know, she’d say. I might have to be somewhere in half an hour.
He imagined turning and pinning her to the wall with the room emptied out except for the guard who is looking straight ahead, nowhere, motionless, the film still running, the woman pinned, also motionless, watching the film over his shoulder. Museum guards should wear sidearms, he thought. There is priceless art to protect and a man with a gun would clarify the act of seeing for the benefit of everyone in the room.
“Okay,” she said, “gotta go now.”
He said, “You’re leaving.”
It was a flat statement, you’re leaving, spoken reflexively, stripped of disappointment. He hadn’t had time to feel disappointed. He checked his watch for no reason. It was something to do rather than stand there dumbly. In theory it gave him time to think. She was already moving toward the door and he hurried after her, but quietly, eyes averted from anyone who might be watching. The door slid open and he was behind her, out into the light and onto the escalator, floor to floor, and then across the lobby and through the revolving door to the street.
He caught up to her, careful not to smile or touch, and said, “What about doing this sometime at a real movie with seats to sit on and people on the screen who laugh and cry and shout?”
She paused to listen, half turning toward him, middle of the sidewalk, bodies pushing past.
She said, “Would that be an improvement?”
“Probably not,” he said, and this time he smiled. Then he said, “Do you want to know something about me?”
She shrugged.
“I used to multiply numbers in my head when I was a kid. A six-digit number times a five-digit number. Eight digits times seven digits, day and night. I was a pseudo genius.”
She said, “I used to read what people were saying on their lips. I watched their lips and knew what they were saying before they said it. I didn’t listen, I just looked. That was the thing. I could block out the sound of their voices as they said what they were saying.”
“As a kid.”
“As a kid,” she said.
He looked directly at her.
“If you’ll give me your phone number, I could call you sometime.”
She shrugged okay. That was the meaning of the shrug, okay, sure, maybe. Although if she saw him on the street an hour from now, she probably wouldn’t know who he was or where she’d met him. She recited the number quickly and then turned and walked east into the midtown glut.
He went into the crowded lobby and found a cramped space on one of the benches. He put his head down to think, to duck away from it all, the sustained pitch of voices, languages, accents, people in motion carrying noise with them, lifetimes of noise, a clamor bouncing off the walls and ceiling and it was loud and surrounding, making him cower down. But he had her phone number, this is what mattered, the number was securely in mind. Call her when, two days, three days. In the meantime sit and think about what they’d said, what she looked like, where she might live, how she might spend her time.
That’s when the question came to mind. Did he ask her name? He didn’t ask her name. He made the inner gesture of reproving himself, a finger-wagging cartoon of teacher and child. Okay, this is another matter he would be able to think about. Think about names. Write down names. See if you can guess the name from the face. The face had brightened slightly when he talked about the numbers he did in his head as a kid. Not brightened but sort of loosened, her eyes showing interest. But the story wasn’t true. He did not multiply large numbers in his head, ever. This was something he said sometimes because he thought it would help explain him to others.
He sneaked a look at his watch and did not hesitate, crossing to the ticket area and paying full price. Should be half adult, considering the hour, or free, should be free. He blinked at the ticket in his hand and hurried to the sixth floor, two steps at a time on the escalator, everybody going the other way. He entered the dark