White Noise - Don Delillo [113]
Babette wore her sweatsuit almost all the time. It was a plain gray outfit, loose and drooping. She cooked in it, drove the kids to school, wore it to the hardware store and the stationer’s. I thought about it for a while, decided there was nothing excessively odd in this, nothing to worry about, no reason to believe she was sinking into apathy and despair.
“How do you feel?” I said. “Tell the truth.”
“What is the truth? I’m spending more time with Wilder. Wilder helps me get by.”
“I depend on you to be the healthy outgoing former Babette. I need this as badly as you do, if not more.”
“What is need? We all need. Where is the uniqueness in this?”
“Are you feeling basically the same?”
“You mean am I sick unto death? The fear hasn’t gone, Jack.”
“We have to stay active.”
“Active helps but Wilder helps more.”
“Is it my imagination,” I said, “or is he talking less than ever?”
“There’s enough talk. What is talk? I don’t want him to talk. The less he talks, the better.”
“Denise worries about you.”
“Who?”
“Denise.”
“Talk is radio,” she said.
Denise would not let her mother go running unless she promised to apply layers of sunscreen gel. The girl would follow her out of the house to dash a final glob of lotion across the back of Babette’s neck, then stand on her toes to stroke it evenly in. She tried to cover every exposed spot. The brows, the lids. They had bitter arguments about the need for this. Denise said the sun was a risk to a fair-skinned person. Her mother claimed the whole business was publicity for disease.
“Besides, I’m a runner,” she said. “A runner by definition is less likely to be struck by damaging rays than a standing or walking figure.”
Denise spun in my direction, arms flung out, her body beseeching me to set the woman straight.
“The worst rays are direct,” Babette said. “This means the faster a person is moving, the more likely she is to receive only partial hits, glancing rays, deflections.”
Denise let her mouth fall open, bent her body at the knees. In truth I wasn’t sure her mother was wrong.
“It is all a corporate tie-in,” Babette said in summary. “The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can’t have one without the other.”
I took Heinrich and his snake-handling buddy, Orest Mercator, out to the commercial strip for dinner. It was four in the afternoon, the time of day when Orest’s training schedule called for his main meal. At his request we went to Vincent’s Casa Mario, a blockhouse structure with slit windows that seemed part of some coastal defense system.
I’d found myself thinking of Orest and his snakes and wanted a chance to talk to him further.
We sat in a blood-red booth. Orest gripped the tasseled menu with his chunky hands. His shoulders seemed broader than ever, the serious head partly submerged between them.
“How’s the training going?” I said.
“I’m slowing it down a little. I don’t want to peak too soon. I know how to take care of my body.”
“Heinrich told me you sleep sitting up, to prepare for the cage.”
“I perfected that. I’m doing different stuff now.”
“Like what?”
“Loading up on carbohydrates.”
“That’s why we came here,” Heinrich said.
“I load up a little more each day.”
“It’s because of the huge energy he’ll be burning up in the cage, being alert, tensing himself when a mamba approaches, whatever.”
We ordered pasta and water.
“Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time, are you beginning to feel anxious?”
“What anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the