The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [59]
There was a name for the outfit she was wearing and I nearly knew it, nearly had it, then it slipped away. But the woman was there, still, in pale sandals, the tunic slit on the sides, with a faint floral design front and back.
The ceiling fan turned slowly in the heavy heat, a thought I didn’t want or need, but there it was, more thought than image, going back years.
Who was the man she was here to see? I was expecting no visitors, didn’t want them, not even my daughters, not right for them to see me here. They were two thousand miles away in any case, and otherwise engaged. Could I place the woman in my immediate presence, face to face across a table in the large open space that would soon be filled with inmates, wives and kids, a guard at an elevated desk, keeping watch?
One thing I knew. The name of her outfit was two words, brief words, and it would make me feel the day was worthwhile, the full week, if I could remember those words. What else was there to do? What else could I think about that might yield a decent measure of completion?
Vietnamese—the words, the tunic, the trousers, the woman.
Then I thought of Sylvan Telfair. He was the inmate she was here to see, a man of worldwide address. They’d met in Paris or Bangkok. They’d stood on a terrace in the evening, sipping wine and speaking French. He was refined and assured and at the same time somewhat reticent, a man to whom she might be attracted, even if she was my idea, my secret silken vision.
I stood watching, thinking.
By the time the words came to me, much later in the day, ao dai, I’d lost all interest in the matter.
We were grouped, clustered, massed, paired, men everywhere, living in swarms, filling every space, arrayed across the limits of vision. I liked to think of us as men in Maoist self-correction, perfecting our social being through repetition. We worked, ate and slept in mechanized routine, weekly, daily, hourly, advancing from practice to knowledge. But these were the musings of idle time. Maybe we were just tons of assimilated meat, our collected flesh built into cubicles, containered in dormitories and dining halls, zippered into jumpsuits in five colors, classified, catalogued, this color for that level of offense. The colors struck me as a kind of comic pathos, always there, brightly clashing, jutting, crisscrossing. I tried not to think of us as circus clowns who’d forgotten their face paint.
“You consider her your enemy,” Norman said. “You and her, blood enemies.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It’s only natural. You think she’s using the girls against you. This is what you believe, down deep, whether you admit it or not.”
“I don’t think that’s the case.”
“That has to be the case. She’s attacking you for the mistakes you made in business. What was your business? How did it get you here? I don’t think you ever said.”
“It’s not interesting.”
“We’re not here to be interesting.”
“I ran a company for a man who acquired companies. Information got passed back and forth. Money changed hands. Lawyers, traders, consultants, senior partners.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was my father,” I said.
“What’s his name?”
“He died quietly before the fact.”
“What fact?”
“The fact of my conviction.”
“What’s his name?”
“Walter Bradway.”
“Do I know that name?”
“You know his brother’s name. Howard Bradway.”
“One of the hedge-fund musketeers,” he said.
Norman was searching his memory for visual confirmation. I pictured what he was picturing. He was picturing my uncle Howie, a large ruddy man, barechested, in aviator glasses, with a miniature poodle huddled in the crook of his arm. A fairly famous image.
“A family tradition.