The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [44]
Sometimes he coughed into his cupped hand, other times into the table, and we imagined microscopic life-forms teeming toward the tabletop and ricocheting into breathable space. Those seated nearest him ducked away with a wince that was also a smile, half apologetic. The shy girl’s shoulders quivered, even though she was sitting at some distance from the man. We didn’t expect Ilgauskas to excuse himself. He was Ilgauskas. We were the ones at fault, for being there to witness the coughing, or for not being adequate to the seismic scale of it, or for other reasons not yet known to us.
“Can we ask this question?” he said.
We waited for the question. We wondered whether the question he’d asked was the question we were waiting for him to ask. In other words, could he ask the question he was asking? It was not a trick, not a game or a logical puzzle. Ilgauskas didn’t do that. We sat and waited. He stared into the wall at the far end of the room.
It felt good to be out in the weather, that wintry sting of approaching snow. I was walking down a street of older houses, some in serious need of repair, sad and handsome, bay window here, curved porch there, when he turned the corner and came toward me, slightly crouched, same coat, face nearly lost inside the hood. He was walking slowly, as before, hands behind his back, as before, and he seemed to pause when he saw me, almost imperceptibly, head lowered now, path not quite steady.
There was no one else on the street. As we approached each other, he veered away, and then so did I, just slightly, to reassure him, but I also sent a stealthy look his way. The face inside the hood was stubbled—gray old man, I thought, large nose, eyes on the sidewalk but also noting my presence. After we’d passed each other I waited a moment and then turned and looked. He wasn’t wearing gloves and this seemed fitting, I’m not sure why, no gloves, despite the unrelenting cold.
About an hour later, I was part of the mass movement of students going in opposite directions, in wind-whipped snow, two roughly parallel columns moving from old campus to new and vice versa, faces in ski masks, bodies shouldering into the wind or pushed along by it. I saw Todd, long-striding, and pointed. This was our standard sign of greeting or approval—we pointed. I shouted into the weather as he went by.
“Saw him again. Same coat, same hood, different street.”
He nodded and pointed back and two days later we were walking in the outlying parts of town. I gestured toward a pair of large trees, bare branches forking up fifty or sixty feet.
“Norway maple,” I said.
He said nothing. They meant nothing to him, trees, birds, baseball teams. He knew music, classical to serial, and the history of mathematics, and a hundred other things. I knew trees from summer camp, when I was twelve, and I was pretty sure the trees were maples. Norway was another matter. I could have said red maple or sugar maple but Norway sounded stronger, more informed.
We both played chess. We both believed in God.
Houses here loomed over the street and we saw a middle-aged woman get out of her car and take a baby stroller from the rear seat and unfold it. Then she took four grocery bags from the car, one at a time, and placed each in the stroller. We were talking and watching. We were talking about epidemics, pandemics and plagues, but we were watching the woman. She shut the car door and pulled the stroller backward over the hard-packed snow on the sidewalk and up the long flight of steps to her porch.
“What’s her name?”
“Isabel,” I said.
“Be serious. We’re serious people. What’s her name?”
“Okay, what’s her name?”
“Her name is Mary Frances. Listen to me,” he whispered. “Mar-y Fran-ces. Never just Mary.”
“Okay, maybe.”
“Where the hell do you get Isabel?”
He showed mock concern, placing a hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t know.