Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

She sat down and picked through sections of newspaper and realized she had no spoon. She had no spoon. She looked at him and saw he was sporting a band-aid at the side of his jaw.

She used the old dented kettle instead of the new one she'd just bought because – she didn't know why. It was an old frame house that had many rooms and working fireplaces and animals in the walls and mildew everywhere, a place they'd rented unseen, a relic of the boom years of the lumbering and shipbuilding trades, way too big, and there were creaking floorboards and a number of bent utensils dating to god knows.

She half fell out of her chair in a gesture of self-ridicule and went to the counter to get a spoon. She took the soya granules back to the table as well. The soya had a smell that didn't seem to belong to the sandy stuff in the box. It was a faint wheaty stink with feet mixed in. Every time she used the soya she smelled it. She smelled it two or three times.

"Cut yourself again."

"What?" He put his hand to his jaw, head sunk in the newspaper. "Just a nick."

She started to read a story in her part of the paper. It was an old newspaper, Sunday's, from town, because there were no deliveries here.

"That's lately, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't shave first thing. Wake up first. Why shave at all? Let your mustache grow back. Grow a beard."

"Why shave at all? There must be a reason," he said. "I want God to see my face."

He looked up from the paper and laughed in the empty way she didn't like. She took a bite of cereal and looked at another story. She tended lately to place herself, to insert herself into certain stories in the newspaper. Some kind of daydream variation. She did it and then became aware she was doing it and then sometimes did it again a few minutes later with the same or a different story and then became aware again.

She reached for the soya box without looking up from the paper and poured some granules into the bowl and the radio played traffic and talk.

The idea seemed to be that she'd have to wear out the old kettle, use it and use it until it developed rust bubbles and then and only then would it be okay for her to switch to the kettle she'd just bought.

"Do you have to listen to the radio?"

"No," she said and read the paper. "What?"

"It is such astonishing shit."

The way he stressed the t in shit, dignifying the word.

"I didn't turn on the radio. You turned on the radio," she said.

He went to the fridge and came back with a large dark fig and turned off the radio.

"Give me some of that," she said, reading the paper.

"I was not blaming. Who turned it on, who turned it off. Someone's a little edgy this morning. I'm the one, what do 1 say, who should be defensive. Not the young woman who eats and sleeps and lives forever."

"What? Hey, Rey. Shut up."

He bit off the stem and tossed it toward the sink. Then he split the fig open with his thumbnails and took the spoon out of her hand and licked it off and used it to scoop a measure of claret flesh out of the gaping fig skin. He dropped this stuff on his toast – the flesh, the mash, the pulp – and then spread it with the bottom of the spoon, blood-buttery swirls that popped with seedlife.

"I'm the one to be touchy in the morning. I'm the one to moan. The terror of another ordinary day," he said slyly. "You don't know this yet."

"Give us all a break," she told him.

She leaned forward, he extended the bread. There were crows in the trees near the house, taking up a raucous call. She took a bite and closed her eyes so she could think about the taste.

He gave back her spoon. Then he turned on the radio and remembered he'd just turned it off and he turned it off again.

She poured granules into the bowl. The smell of the soya was somewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded. But that didn't describe it. She read a story in the paper about a child abandoned in some godforsaken. Nothing described it. It was pure smell. It was the thing that smell is, apart from all sources. It was as though and she nearly said something to this effect because it might amuse him but then she let it drop – it was as though some, maybe, medieval scholastic had attempted to classify all known odors and had found something that did not fit into his system and had called it soya, which could easily be part of a lofty Latin term, but no it couldn't, and she sat thinking of something, she wasn't sure what, with the spoon an inch from her mouth.

He said, "What?"

"I didn't say anything."

She got up to get something. She looked at the kettle and realized that wasn't it. She knew it would come to her because it always did and then it did. She wanted honey for her tea even though the water wasn't boiling yet. She had a hyper-preparedness, or haywire, or hair-trigger, and Rey was always saying, or said once, and she carried a voice in her head that was hers and it was dialogue or monologue and she went to the cabinet where she got the honey and the tea bags – a voice that flowed from a story in the paper.

"Weren't you going to tell me something?"

He said, "What?"

She put a hand on his shoulder and moved past to her side of the table. The birds broke off the feeder in a wing-whir that was all b's and r's, the letter b followed by a series of vibrato r's. But that wasn't it at all. That wasn't anything like it.

"You said something. I don't know. The house."

"It's not interesting. Forget it."

"I don't want to forget it."

"It's not interesting. Let me put it another way. It's boring."

"Tell me anyway."

"It's too early. It's an effort. It's boring."

"You're sitting there talking. Tell me," she said.

She took a bite of cereal and read the paper.

"It's an effort. It's like what. It's like pushing a boulder."

"You're sitting there talking."

"Here," he said.

"You said the house. Nothing about the house is boring. I like the house."

"You like everything. You love everything. You're my happy home. Here," he said.

He handed her what remained of his toast and she chewed it mingled with cereal and berries. Suddenly she knew what he'd meant to tell her. She heard the crows in large numbers now, clamorous in the trees, probably mobbing a hawk.

"Just tell me. Takes only a second," she said, knowing absolutely what it was.

She saw him move his hand to his breast pocket and then pause and lower it to the cup. It was his coffee, his cup and his cigarette. How an incident described in the paper seemed to rise out of the inky lines of print and gather her into it. You separate the Sunday sections. "Just tell me okay. Because I know anyway." He said, "What? You insist you will drag this thing out of me. Lucky we don't normally have breakfast together. Because my mornings." "I know anyway. So tell me." He was looking at the paper. "You know. Then fine. I don't have to tell you." He was reading, getting ready to go for his cigarettes. She said, "The noise."

He looked at her. He looked. Then he gave her the great smile, the gold teeth in the great olive-dark face. She hadn't seen this in a while, the amplified smile, Rev emergent, his eyes clear and lit, deep lines etched about his mouth.

"The noises in the walls. Yes. You've read my mind." "It was one noise. It was one noise," she said. "And it wasn't in the walls."

"One noise. Okay. I haven't heard it lately. This is what I wanted to say. It's gone. Finished. End of conversation." "True. Except I heard it yesterday, I think." "Then it's not gone. Good. I'm happy for you." "It's an old house. There's always a noise. But this is different. Not those damn scampering animals we hear at night. Or the house settling. I don't know," she said, not wanting to sound concerned. "Like there's something."