Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

This morning she talked about his name, or tried to. They did it together, start and stop. But the more they talked – they talked a while and changed the subject and he turned off the recorder and she turned it back on and maybe he'd had one, yes, a name, but he'd forgotten it or lost it and could not get it back. She said, "I am Lauren."

She said this a number of times, pointing at herself, because she thought it would be helpful to both of them if he called her by her name.

She said, "If you had a name. Just suppose now. Is there anyone who would know what it is? Where is your mother? When I say mother, the woman who gives birth to a child, the parent, the female parent, does this word? Tell me. What?"

He knew what a chair is called and a window and a wall but not the tape recorder, although he knew how to turn it off, and not, it seemed, who his mother was or where she might be found.

"If there is another language you speak," she told him, "say some words."

"Say some words."

"Say some words. Doesn't matter if I can't understand."

"Say some words to say some words."

"All right. Be a Zen master, you little creep. How do you know what I said to my husband? Where were you? Were you here, somewhere, listening? My voice. It sounded word for word. Tell me about this."

When there was a pause in the conversation, the recorder stopped hissing. She watched him. She tried to press him on the matter but got nowhere arid changed the subject again.

"What did you mean earlier yesterday when you said, when you seemed to say what? I don't recall the words exactly. It was yesterday. The day before today. You said I'd still be here, I think, when the lease. Do you remember this? When I'm supposed to leave. You said I do not."

"I said this what I said."

"You said this. That you somehow."

"Somehow. What is somehow?"

"Shut up. That you somehow but never mind. When the lease ends. Or something else completely."

He turned off the recorder. She turned it on, he turned it off. Just curious, she thought, or aimlessly playing. But she felt like hitting him. No, she didn't. She didn't know what she felt. It was time to call the hospitals and other institutions. That's what she felt. It was way past the time and she was making a mistake not to inquire, not to take him to someone in a position of authority, a doctor or administrator, the nun who runs an assisted-living shelter, gracious and able, but she knew she would not do it. '

She spent an hour in a makeshift office on the second floor, transcribing selected remarks from the tape she'd made with him.

She heard herself say, "I am Lauren," like a character in black spandex in a science-fiction film.

It occurred to her finally. She began to understand that he'd heard her voice on the tape recorder. At some point before she'd inserted a blank tape, he'd hit the play button and heard her talking to Rey, who was up on the second floor with the tape machine in his hand, communicating script ideas.

That's how he reproduced her voice.

What about the hand gesture? She rejected the hand gesture. The gesture was coincidental, circumstantial, partly her own fabrication.

She felt better now.

Over the days she worked her body hard. There were always states to reach that surpassed previous extremes. She could take a thing to an unendurable extreme as measured by breath or strength or length of time or force of will and then resolve to extend the limit.

I think you are making your own little totalitarian society, Rey told her once, where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people, he said, perhaps admiringly, one artist to another.

Her bodywork made everything transparent. She saw and thought clearly, which might only mean there was little that needed seeing and not a lot to think about. But maybe it went deeper, the poses she assumed and held for prolonged periods, the gyrate exaggerations, the snake shapes and flower bends, the prayerful spans of systematic breathing, life lived irreducibly as sheer respiration. First breathe, then pant, then gasp. It made her go taut and saucer-eyed, arteries flaring in her neck, these hours of breathing so urgent and absurd that she came out the other end in a kind of pristine light, feeling what it means to be alive.

She began to work naked in a cold room. She did her crossovers on the bare floor, and her pelvic stretches, which were mockingly erotic and erotic both, and her slow-motion repetitions of everyday gestures, checking the time on your wrist or turning to hail a cab, actions quoted by rote in another conceptual frame, many times over and now slower and over, with your mouth open in astonishment and your eyes shut tight against the intensity of passing awareness.

Isabel called, Rey's first wife.

"At the funeral we barely talked. So you avoided me a little, which I understand it, believe me, and can sympathize. I also accept what he did because I know him forever. But for you it's different. I feel bad we didn't talk. I could see it coming for years. This is a thing that was going to happen. We all knew this about him. For years he was going to do this thing. It was a thing he carried with him. It was his way out. He wasn't a man in despair. This thing was a plan in his mind. It was his trick that he knew he could do when he needed it. He even made me see him in the chair." "But don't you understand?"

"Please. Who understands but me? He was an impossible man. From Paris already he was very difficult. Nearly eleven years we were married. I went through things with him I could not begin to tell you. Don't think I am not sparing you. I am sparing you everything. This man, it was not a question of chemicals in his brain. It was him who he was. Frankly you didn't have time to find out. Because I will tell you something. We were two people with one life and it was his life. I stayed with him until it ruined my health, which I am still paying the price. I had to leave in the middle of the night. Because why do you think? He threatened he would kill me. And in this room where I'm standing I look at the empty space where the chair used to be. For one whole day it was here until they removed it out of my sight and took it to the medical examiner, with his blood and what else, I won't even describe, okay, for evidence. So I buy another chair. No problem. In the meantime there is the empty space. Of course he wanted to spare you the actual moment. So he comes to New York and sits in my chair."

"It was your chair. Was it your gun? Whose gun did he use?"

"Are you crazy my gun? This is another thing you didn't know. He always owned a gun. Wherever he lived he had a gun. This gun or that gun. I didn't keep count."

"No. Don't you understand? I don't want to hear this."

"But I want to say it. I insist to say it. This man hated who he was. Because how long do I know this man and how long do you know him? I never left. Did I ever leave? Were we ever really separated? I knew him in my sleep. And I know exactly how his mind was working. He said to himself two things. This is a woman I know forever. And maybe she will not mind the mess."

She went looking for Mr. Tuttle. She had no idea where he went or what he did when he was out of her sight. He made more sense to her sleeping than he did across the table, eyes slightly bulging, or in her imagination for that matter. It was hard for her to think him into being, even momentarily, in the shallowest sort of conjecture, a figure by a window in the dusty light.

She stood in the front hall and called, "Where are you?"

That night they sat in the panelled room and she read to him from a book about the human body. There were photographs of blood cells magnified many thousands of times and there was a section of text on the biology of childbirth and this is what she was reading to him, slowly, inserting comments of her own, and asking questions, and drinking tea, and about forty minutes into the session, reading a passage about the embryo, half an inch long, afloat in body fluid, she realized he was talking to her.