White Noise - Don Delillo [105]
“So what the hell. Here I am. Big deal.”
“What are you doing these days?”
“Shingling here, rustproofing there. I moonlight, except there’s nothing I’m moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that’s out there.”
I noticed his hands. Scarred, busted, notched, permanently seamed with grease and mud. He glanced around the room, trying to spot something that needed replacing or repair. Such flaws were mainly an occasion for discourse. It put Vernon at an advantage to talk about gaskets and washers, about grouting, caulking, spackling. There were times when he seemed to attack me with terms like ratchet drill and whipsaw. He saw my shakiness in such matters as a sign of some deeper incompetence or stupidity. These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn’t fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn’t sure I disagreed.
“I was saying to Babette the other day. ‘If there’s one thing your father doesn’t resemble, it’s a widower.’ ”
“What did she say to that?”
“She thinks you’re a danger to yourself. ‘He’ll fall asleep smoking. He’ll die in a burning bed with a missing woman at his side. An official missing person. Some poor lost unidentified multidivorced woman.’ ”
Vernon coughed in appreciation of the insight. A series of pulmonary gasps. I could hear the stringy mucus whipping back and forth in his chest. I poured his coffee and waited.
“Just so you know where I’m at, Jack, there’s a woman that wants to marry my ass. She goes to church in a mobile home. Don’t tell Babette.”
“That’s the last thing I’d do.”
“She’d get real exercised. Start in with the discount calls.”
“She thinks you’ve gotten too lawless for marriage.”
“The thing about marriage today is you don’t have to go outside the home to get those little extras. You can get whatever you want in the recesses of the American home. These are the times we live in, for better or worse. Wives will do things. They want to do things. You don’t have to drop little looks. It used to be the only thing available in the American home was the basic natural act. Now you get the options too. The action is thick, let me tell you. It’s an amazing comment on our times that the more options you get in the home, the more prostitutes you see in the streets. How do you figure it, Jack? You’re the professor. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wives wear edible panties. They know the words, the usages. Meanwhile the prostitutes are standing in the streets in all kinds of weather, day and night. Who are they waiting for? Tourists? Businessmen? Men who’ve been turned into stalkers of flesh? It’s like the lid’s blown off. Didn’t I read somewhere the Japanese go to Singapore? Whole planeloads of males. A remarkable people.”
“Are you seriously thinking of getting married?”
“I’d have to be crazy to marry a woman that worships in a mobile home.”
There was an astuteness about Vernon, a deadpan quality of alert and searching intelligence, a shrewdness waiting for a shapely occasion. This made Babette nervous. She’d seen him sidle up to women in public places to ask some delving question in his blank-faced canny way. She refused to go into restaurants with him, fearing his offhand remarks to waitresses, intimate remarks, technically accomplished asides and observations, delivered in the late-night voice of some radio ancient. He’d given her some jittery moments, periods of anger and embarrassment, in a number of leatherette booths.
She came in now, wearing her sweatsuit, ready for an early morning dash up the stadium steps. When she saw her father at the table, her body seemed to lose its motive force. She stood there bent at the knees. Nothing remained but her ability to gape. She appeared to be doing an imitation of a gaping person. She was the picture of gaping-ness, the bright ideal, no less confused and alarmed than I had been when I saw him sitting in the yard,