Don DeLillo: The Body Artist

It's such a stupid thing to do, read the newspaper and eat.

She saw him standing in the doorway.

"Have you seen my keys?"

She said, "What?"

He waited for the question to register.

"Which keys?" she said.

He looked at her.

She said, "I bought some lotion yesterday. Which I meant to tell you. It's a muscle rub. It's in a green and white tube on the shelf in the big bathroom upstairs. It's greaseless. It's a muscle rub. Rub it in, my love. Or ask me nice, I'll do it for you."

"All my keys are on one ring," he said.

She almost said, Is that smart? But then she didn't. Because what a needless thing. Because how petty it would be to say such a thing, in the morning or any time, on a strong bright day after a storm.

REY ROBLES, 64, CINEMA'S POET OF LONELY PLACES

Rey Robles, who directed two world-renowned movies of the late 1970s, was found dead Sunday morning in the Manhattan apartment of his first wife, the fashion consultant Isabel Corrales.

The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police who were called to the scene.

Mr. Robles's accounts of his early life were inconsistent but the most persuasive independent versions suggest he was 64 at his death.

He was born Alejandro Alquezar, in Barcelona. A biographical sketch in the journal Cahiers du Cinema asserted that his father, a worker in a textile plant and a militant antifascist, was killed in that city during the fiercest street fighting of the civil war. The article cites evidence that Alejandro, still a small boy, was among the "war children" of Spain who were sent to the Soviet Union by their families when the dictatorship of the right became an impending reality.

It isn't clear how many years he spent in the USSR or whether he was ever reunited with his mother. It is known that he lived in Paris as a young man, hauling trash, performing as a street juggler and playing bit parts in several movies, cast as a thief or pimp. This is when he adopted the name Rey Robles, after a minor character he played in an obscure film noir.

He spent a few years in New York writing subtitles for a trickle of Spanish-language and Russian films and then went west, finding work as a uniformed chauffeur in Los Angeles, where he continued a fringe relationship with the movies, appearing as an extra in half a dozen films. He got a start on the other side of the camera after he became the personal driver of a multimillionaire cement manufacturer from Liechtenstein, a man who was a heavy investor in international film projects. By his own account, Mr. Robles had an affair with the man's wife and persuaded her to arrange a job for him as a second-unit director on a spaghetti western scheduled to be shot in Spain.

Ten years later, at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Robles told an appreciative audience, "The answer to life is the movies."

He directed eight features in all. The third of these, My Life for Yours, a French-Italian co-production about a wealthy woman kidnapped by Corsican bandits, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It was followed by Polaris, a tense American crime drama with an undercurrent of Spanish surrealism. The film developed a cult following and ran for extended periods in a number of art houses in this country and abroad.

"His work at its best extends the language of film," Wrote the critic Philip Stansky. "His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement. He found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments."

His subsequent movies failed commercially and were largely dismissed by critics. Friends of Mr. Robles attribute his decline to alcoholism and intermittent depression. He married the stage actress Anna Langdon during this period. They separated shortly afterward amid lurid headlines in the British tabloids and were eventually divorced.

He is survived by his third wife, Lauren Hartke, the body artist.

It's a hazy white day and the highway lifts to a drained sky. There are four northbound lanes and you are driving in the third lane and there are cars ahead and behind and to both sides, although not too many and not too close. When you reach the top of the incline, something happens and the cars begin to move unhurriedly now, seemingly self-propelled, coasting smoothly on the level surface. Everything is slow and hazy and drained and it all happens around the word seem. All the cars including yours seem to flow in dissociated motion, giving the impression of or presenting the appearance of, and the highway runs in a white hum.

Then the mood passes. The noise and rush and blur are back and you slide into your life again, feeling the painful weight in your chest.

She thought of these days as the first days back.

In the first days back she restocked the pantry and sprayed chemicals on the bathroom tile. There was a full-size pantry, a dark musty room off the kitchen, and it didn't need restocking. She cleaned and filled the bird feeders, shaping the day around a major thing with all its wrinkles and twists, its array of swarming variations. She sprayed the tile and porcelain with pine-scent chemicals, half addicted to the fumes. There were two months left on the rental agreement. They'd rented for six and now there were two. One person, two months. She used a bottle with a pistol-grip attachment.

It felt like home, being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous «allow, uncentered, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached.

She looked at the pages she'd been working on with Rey, his bullshit autobiography. The hard copy sat there, stark against her sense of his spoken recollections, the tapestried lies and contrivances, stories shaped out of desperations not always clear to her. She hand-patted through the clothes he'd left in the bedroom closet. She was not undone by the things that people leave behind when they die and she put the clothes in a box for the needy.

When she was downstairs she felt him in the rooms on the second floor. He used to prowl these rooms talking into a tiny tape recorder, smoke in his face, reciting ideas about some weary script to a writer somewhere whose name he could never recall. Now he was the smoke, Rey was, the thing in the air, vaporous, drifting into every space sooner or later, unshaped, but with a face that was somehow part of the presence, specific to the prowling man.

She climbed the stairs, hearing the sound a person makes who is climbing stairs, and she touched the oak grain of the newel when she reached the landing.

It was okay. She wanted to be here and she'd be okay. All their marriage, all the time they'd lived together they'd lived right here.

Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn't know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar. Different, thinner, didn't matter.

There was a package of bread crumbs on one of the shelves in the pantry. She knew she'd seen wax paper somewhere in a blue and something box. These were the things that were important now. Meals, tasks, errands.

She stepped slowly through the rooms. She felt him behind her when she was getting undressed, standing barefoot on the cold floor, throwing off a grubby sweater, and she half turned toward the bed.

In the first days back she got out of the car once and nearly collapsed – not the major breakdown of every significant function but a small helpless sinking toward the ground, a kind of forgetting how to stand.

She thought about broiling a cutlet, self-consciously alone, more or less seeing herself from the edge of the room or standing precisely where she was and being who she was and seeing a smaller hovering her in the air somewhere, already thinking it's tomorrow.