Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

It was only midmorning but she had the feeling he'd been here a week. They sat and looked at last night's fire.

Then she realized who it was, the man he made her think of.

It was a science teacher in high school, semi-bumbling, who looked pale-haired in uncertain light and bald on brighter days and who scotch-taped a split seam in his loafers once and spoke in unmeasured hesitations that made the students feel embarrassed on his behalf, the few sensitive ones, or openly restless, the restless, which was everybody else.

She named the visitor in his honor. Mr. Tuttle. She thought it would make him easier to see.

She whispered, "Tell me something."

He uncrossed his legs and sat with a hand on each knee, a dummy in a red club chair, his head turned toward her.

"I know how much." He said, "I know how much this house. Alone by the sea."

He looked not pleased exactly but otherwise satisfied, technically satisfied to have managed the last cluster of words. And it was in fact, coming from Mr. Tuttle, a formulation she heard in its echoing depths. Four words only. But he'd placed her in a set of counter-surroundings, of simultaneous insides and outsides. The house, the sea-planet outside it, and how the word alone referred to her and to the house and how the word sea reinforced the idea of solitude but suggested a vigorous release as well, a means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self.

She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases.

She said, "I like the house. Yes, I want to be here. But it's only a rental. I am renting. I will be out of here in six or seven weeks. Less maybe. It's a house we rented. Five or six weeks. Less," she said.

She wasn't watching him now. She was looking at the backs of her hands, fingers stretched, looking and thinking, recalling moments with Rey, not moments exactly but times, or moments flowing into composite time, an erotic of see and touch, and she curled one hand over and into the other, missing him in her body and feeling sexually and abysmally alone and staring at the points where her knuckles shone bloodless from the pressure of her grip.

He said, "But you did not leave."

She looked at him.

"I will leave. In a few weeks. When it's time," she said. "When the lease is up. Or earlier. I will leave."

"But you do not," he said.

This shift from past tense to present had the sound of something overcome, an obstacle or restriction. He had to extend himself to get it out. And she heard something in his voice. She didn't know what it was but it made her get up and go to the window.

She stood there looking at the rain. She thought he might belong in one of the trailer homes scattered at the edge of the woods outside town, near but wholly remote, with cars on blocks and a wacko dog convoluted in the dirt and leaves, trying to scratch an itch somewhere, and he is the grown son who has always been this way, inaccessible, ever dependent, living matter-of-fact in an oblong box with his drained and aging parents, who never use each other's name, and he wanders off for days sometimes and goes wherever he goes, muttering and unharmed, into the bubble world.

Maybe not, she thought. That's not what she'd heard in his voice. There was something at the edge, unconnected to income levels or verb tenses or what his parents watch on TV

She turned from the window and got him to talk a little. He seemed agreeable to the idea of talking. He talked about objects in the room, stumblingly, and she wondered what he saw, or failed to see, or saw so differently she could never begin to conjure its outlines.

He talked. After a while she began to understand what she was hearing. It took many levels of perception. It took whole social histories of how people listen to what other people say. There was a peculiarity in his voice, a trait developing even as he spoke, that she was able to follow to its source.

She watched him. He was the same hapless man she'd come upon earlier, without a visible sense of the effect he was having.

It wasn't outright impersonation but she heard elements of her voice, the clipped delivery, the slight buzz deep in the throat, her pitch, her sound, and how difficult at first, unearthly almost, to detect her own voice coming from someone else, from him, and then how deeply disturbing.

She wasn't sure it was her voice. Then she was. By this time he wasn't talking about chairs, lamps or patterns in the carpet. He seemed to be assuming her part in a conversation with someone.

She tried to understand what she was hearing.

He gestured as he spoke, moving his hand to the words, and she began to realize she'd said these things to Rey, here in the house, or things similar. They were routine remarks about a call she'd had from friends who wanted to visit. She remembered, she recalled dimly that she'd been standing at the foot of the stairs and that he'd been on the second floor, Rey had, walking up and down the hall, doing scriptwork.

She stood by the window now. The voice began to waver and fade but his hand remained in motion, marking the feeble beat.

She grabbed a coat from the rack and went out in the rain. She draped the coat over her bent arm, which she held above her, and walked across the grass to the dirt driveway, where the car was parked. The door was unlocked and she got in and sat there because why would you lock the door in a place so isolated. Rain washed down the windshield in overlapping tides. She sat there in a brief fit of shivering and it was hard to stop hearing the sound of that voice. One of the rear windows was lowered an inch and the smell of wet meadow, the fragrance of country rain, the effects of sea and breeze and memory all mixed in the air but she kept hearing the voice and seeing the hand gesture, unmistakably Rey's, two fingers joined and wagging.

She didn't know how long she was there. Maybe a long time. The rain beat hard on the roof and hood. How much time is a long time? Could be this, could be that. Finally she pushed open the door and walked back to the house, holding the coat aloft.

There were five birds on the feeder and they all faced outward, away from the food and identically still. She watched them. They weren't looking or listening so much as feeling something, intent and sensing.

All these words are wrong, she thought.

This was the feeder that hung outside the sunporch and she stood in the mostly white room, by the broad window, waiting for Mr. Tuttle.

She'd been putting up feeders since her return. This was the basic range of her worldly surround, the breadth of nature that bordered the house. But it feels like she's feeding the birds of Earth, a different seed for each receptacle, sometimes two seeds layered light and dark in a single feeder, and they come and peck, or don't, and the feeders are different as well, cages, ringed cylinders, hanging saucers, mounted trays, and maybe it's a hawk, she doesn't know, that keeps the birds away sometimes, or a jay that mimics a hawk, or they read a message in some event outside the visible spectrum.

When he walked in he didn't look at her but went straight to the glass-top table with the curlicued legs.

Rey's tape recorder lay blinking in the middle of the table.

She sat and began to speak, describing his appearance. Face and hair and so forth. Wakeful or not. Fairly neat or mostly unkempt. What else? Good, bad or indifferent night.

Not that she knew what his nights were like. One night only. She hadn't been able to sleep and had stood for a while at his door past midnight, listening to the raspy nasal intake and finding herself moved in an unusual way. In sleep he was no more unknowable than anyone else. Look. The shrouded body feebly beating. This is what you feel, looking at the hushed and vulnerable body, almost anyone's, or you lie next to your husband after you've made love and breathe the heat of his merciless dreams and wonder who he is, tenderly ponder the truth you'll never know, because this is the secret that sleep protects in its neural depths, in its stages, layers and folds.