The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [72]
She remained in her seat when they reached Eighty-sixth Street. This made him nervous and he began to count the stops now. When he reached an even dozen the train made a leap into daylight and he found himself scanning a scene of tenements, housing projects, jagged streaks of rooftop graffiti and a river or inlet he could not identify.
She is also erratic, possibly self-destructive. There are times when she flings herself against the wall. It occurred to him that what he was doing made complete sense, to define her as someone who has taken this life, their life, to its predetermined limit. She has no recourse to sensible measures. She is pure, he is not. Does she forget her name? Is it possible for her to imagine the slightest semblance of well-being?
He checked the street names on the electronic route map across the aisle, dots blinking off, one by one, Whitlock, Elder, Morrison, and he began to understand where he was. He was in the Bronx, which meant he’d strayed outside the known borders. Sunlight filled the car, making him feel exposed, deprived of the cover, the protective aura he’d experienced beneath street level.
Across from him a tiny brown woman held a half-smoked cigarette, unlit. On the platform, finally, he followed the other woman, the one he was following, down to street level and along a broad avenue lined with shops, storefront offices, a Bangladeshi grocery, a Chino-Latino restaurant. He stopped noticing things and watched her walk. She seemed to be thinking each stride into physical being. They crossed the overpass of an expressway and she turned into a street of row houses with aluminum awnings. He stopped and waited for her to enter one of the houses and now the street was empty except for him.
He walked slowly back toward the train station, not knowing what to make of this. Did it contradict everything he’d come to believe about her? This street, these family homes, the difficulty she faced in getting to theaters clustered in Manhattan. In a way it made her a more compelling figure. It confirmed her determination, the depth of her calling.
She lived here because she had to live somewhere. She could not manage alone. She is staying with an older sister and her family. They are the only white family left on the block. She is the strange one, the one who never says where she is going, who rarely takes meals with the others, the one who will never marry.
Maybe there was no technical term or medical name for what she did or what she was. She just wandered on past, free of all that.
He felt the heat, Bangladeshi heat, West Indian heat. He read the names on the windows of local enterprises. This is what she sees every day, Tattoo Mayhem, Metropolitan Brace and Limb. He decided to wait within sight of the stairway to the elevated tracks. If there was a movie to come, she would show up eventually to get on the train. He ate something in Kabir’s Bakery and waited, then went to Dunkin’ Donuts and ate something else and waited, looking out the window. Was this the first food he’d eaten all day? Was she eating while he was eating? Did the Starveling eat?
He stood in the shadows on the corner, under the el, trains arriving and leaving, people everywhere, and he watched them, he so seldom did this, evening slowly unfolding. There was nothing here that was not ordinary but he felt compelled to examine the scene, searching for something he could not identify. Then he saw her, across the street. She was born to be unseen, he thought, except by him. She willed it, she carried it with her, the wary look and taut body, the inwardness, the void of touch. Who touched her, ever?
She wore a dark sweater now, V-neck, and there was an umbrella handle jutting from the shoulder bag.
Take the umbrella, her sister had said. Just in case.
He followed her up the stairs to the platform, same track as before, uptown, and this was another reality to absorb, that they were not headed