Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

Maybe she believed she could deliver herself into his reality, working out the logistics of word and thought, which is how he'd seemed to make his way through a statement or a room.

Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb.

This is what would happen. She played it through to a certain point, mentally, in the rooms and halls, and then it stopped.

She walked down the fire road past the ramshackle house with the freshly painted white cross rising from the point of the A-frame and the SAVED sign out front.

She cleaned the bathroom, using the spray-gun bottle of disinfectant. Then she held the nozzle of the spray gun to her head, seeing herself as doing what anyone might do, alone, without special reference to the person's circumstances. It was the pine-scent bottle, the pistol-grip bottle of tile-and-grout cleaner, killer of mildew, and she held the nozzle, the muzzle to her head, finger pressed to the plastic trigger, with her tongue hanging out for effect.

This is what people do, she thought, alone in their lives.

She was happy in a way; in many ways, folded in hope, having the house to come back to after long mornings rambling in stands of jack pine and spruce, where she named bog plants for him, spelling out the words, or whole afternoons when she crouched on the massive granite slabs out at the point, the promontory, and watched the weather build and the plumes of booming surf shoot higher, because this is what would happen when she returned, running her hand over shags of sea moss and knowing she would mount the stairs, touching the top of the newel at the landing, and walk down the hall into his time.

The stories she told herself did not seem hers exactly. She was in them so heedlessly they seemed to come from a deeper source, whatever that might mean, a thing that was overtaking her. Where did they come from? They did not come from the newspaper. She hadn't read a paper in some time. She looked at a paper in town, at the general store, front page only, and it seemed to be another framework altogether, a slick hysteria of picture and ink, the world so fleetingly easy to love and hate, so reliable and forgettable in its recipes and wars and typographical errors.

When she walked out of the store, she saw the Japanese woman coming toward her, the white-haired woman, and she wore a padded jacket and had her hands concealed. Her hands were fisted up inside the sleeves of her jacket, for warmth, and she watched the woman, sleeves seemingly empty, and cursed herself for not having thought of this for the piece, because it was fantastic, no hands, it was everything she needed to know about the woman and would have been perfect for the piece, inexplicably missing hands, and she tortured herself with the mystery of a gesturing figure, half lit, no hands, and smiled falsely at the woman when she passed.

Why not sink into it? Let death bring you down. Give death its sway.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

She held these ideas every way she was. Eyes, mind and body. She moved about the town's sloping streets unnoticed, holding these ideas, buying groceries and hardware and playing through these thoughts to a certain point, in the long hall, among the locks, tools and glassware.

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?

Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.

Sometimes she thought in these motive forms, addressing someone who wasn't quite her, and other times in other ways. She thought in faces, there in the air, the little missing man's when she could recall it, just outside the bony sockets of her eyes. I am Lauren. But less and less.

When she got out of the car, someone was there. She wasn't out of the car, she was still half in, beginning to unbend, and a figure loomed above her in the driveway.

She nearly fell back into the seat. It was a jolting moment. She looked up at him, a large man, middle-aged, talking to her.

When she rose to full height, she was able to glimpse his car, parked at the side of the house. She listened to him. She tried to listen to what he was saying and to read the situation, fix its limits accurately.

"Assure you I don't mean to intrude. Tried calling several times. No answer. I understand completely. You're here to get away from that."

"And you're here?"

She was angry now. The looming effect, the menace began to fade. The fear began to melt back into her body, into the bloodstream and nerve fibers, the ridges of her fingertips, and she shut the car door hard, she swung the door shut.

"To talk about the house." he sad in a tone of some detachment. "It seems this is my house, still. My wife's and mine."

He stepped back and eased аround to look at the house, bringing it materially into the dialogue – his house. Now that he'd looked, there could be no doubt.

"And there is something you want to discuss."

"Yes exactly," he said and seemed to burst into a kind of pinkness, pleased by her grasp of the moment.

There was a pause. The man had a slightly edgeworn air, a malaise perhaps shaped over many years.

She said, "Who invites who in?"

He put up his hands.

"Not necessary. Wouldn't think. No, no, absolutely."

Then he laughed at her remark. It hit him finally and he laughed, showing sepia teeth. She waited. She was getting interested in this. She began to feel she was fitting into something, becoming comfortable out here, in the driveway, with the owner of the house.

"Has it been satisfactory then?"

"Mostly, I think, yes."

"Because if there's anything."

"No, it's fine, I think. Rooms."

"Yes."

"Rooms and rooms."

It was cold. She wondered if it was supposed to be so cold.

"Yes," he said. "Been in the family. Let's see, forever. But the upkeep."

"I would imagine."

"The work, the attention. We have a history of large families, I'm afraid. The endless sort of, you know, repairing, repainting. Something always needs attending to."

She waited for him to mention Alma in this regard, his wife, and the fact that the children were grown and living elsewhere now.

"And what we were hoping in fact."

His body stretched, it strained upward and askant in a little epiphany of bright expectation. She saw him in this gesture as a man trying to unsnarl himself from a lifetime's shyness and constriction.

"Is that you wouldn't mind."

She listened, practically seeing the words, and liked him a bit more, and felt an easy alertness, a sense of being inside the moment.

"Yes."

"You see there's a chest of drawers. It's stored in a room somewhere upstairs. Wrapped, I think. Probably wrapped in that padded fabric they use. Maybe you've come across it. Because it was about to be moved, shipped, and then somehow, well, you know how these things don't always happen when they're supposed to. It's a delicate piece, in two parts, and fairly old."

This is not what he was supposed to say.

"One of the unused rooms on the top floor, wrapped in quilts. And what we'd like to do," he said.

She noted the tracery of blood vessels in his face, a large man, yes, and getting on, getting old, his skin beginning to stretch, eyelines deepening, and he was supposed to say something about Mr. Tuttle, why he'd left and where he'd gone and whatever else there was to say about the man, to clear up, to explain and analyze.