Don DeLillo - Zero K

Then we looked at each other, still without a word, one of those looks that says who the hell are you anyway. This was her look. Women own this look. What am I doing here and who am I with, some fool who bubbles up out of nowhere. We were still in the early times and even if the romance endured it would continue to resemble the early times. We needed nothing further to discover and this is not the cold contractual reckoning it may seem. It is only who we were and how we talked and felt. We resumed our walk, casually now, seeing a barechested old man in rolled-up pajama bottoms sunbathing in a wet beach chair on a tenement fire escape. This was everything. We understood that the grain of our shared awareness, the print, the scheme, would remain stamped as in the first days and nights.

We wandered slowly back to the street where we’d started and I realized we were walking into a certain kind of mood, Emma’s, a subdued disposition that took its shape from the imminent presence of her son. We reached the loft building and when he appeared he was carrying his gear in a knotted bundle, which he would take with him to Denver. We walked north and west and I found myself imagining that the man at the wheel of the taxi we hailed would have a Ukrainian name and accent and would be glad to speak the language with Stak, giving the boy another chance to turn a stranger’s scant life into lavish fiction.

I keep checking the stove after turning off the burners. At night I make sure the door is locked and then go back to whatever I was doing but eventually sneak back to the door, inspect the lock, twist the door handle in order to verify, confirm, test the truth of, before going to bed. When did this begin? I walk down the street checking my wallet and then my keys. Wallet in left rear pocket, keys in right front pocket. I feel and pat the wallet from outside the pocket and sometimes stick my thumb in the pocket to touch the wallet itself. I don’t do this for the keys. It’s enough for me to make contact from outside the pocket, clutching the ring of keys within the doubled fabric of trouser pocket and handkerchief. I don’t find it necessary to wrap the keys in the handkerchief. The keys are under the handkerchief. I tell myself that this arrangement is less unsanitary than the scenario of keys wrapped in handkerchief, if and when I blow my nose.

• • •

I visited Ross in his room of monochrome paintings, where he sat thinking and I sat waiting. He had asked me to come, saying there was an idea he wanted to propose. It occurred to me that this was his isolation cell, the formal site of every enshrined memory. He closed his eyes, let his head fall forward and then, as if in prescribed order, he watched his hand begin to tremble.

When it stopped he turned my way.

“Yesterday after I washed my face I looked in the mirror, seriously and deliberately looked. And I found myself becoming disoriented,” he said, “because in a mirror left is right and right is left. But this wasn’t the case. What was supposed to be my false right ear was my true right ear.”

“That’s how it seemed.”

“That’s how it was.”

“There ought to be a discipline called the physics of illusions.”

“There is but they call it something else.”

“That was yesterday. What happened today?” I said.

He had no answer for this.

Then he said, “We had a cat for a time. I don’t think you knew this. The cat would come down here and curl on the rug and there was a certain kind of stillness, a special grace, Artis said, that the cat brought to the room. The cat became inseparable from the paintings, the cat belonged to the art. When the cat was here we spoke softly and tried not to make an abrupt or unnecessary movement. It would betray the cat. I think we were serious about this. It would betray the cat, Artis said, and she had that smile she used when she was being a character in an old English movie. It would betray the cat.”

His beard came spilling out of his face, freer and whiter than the architectural models of the past. He spent much of his time in this room, growing old. I think he came here to grow old. He told me that he was in the process of donating some of his art to institutions and giving a few smaller pieces to friends. This is why he’d asked me to come here. He knew that I admired the art on these walls, paintings variously subdued, oil on canvas, all five. Then there was the sparely furnished room itself bearing a measure of such express intent that a person might feel his presence was a violation. I was not that sensitive.

We discussed the paintings. He had learned the language, I had not, but our way of seeing was not so different, it turned out. Light, balance, color, rigor. He wanted to give me a painting. Select one, it’s yours, and possibly more than one, he said, and beyond that, there is the subject of where you want to live eventually.

I let this final remark linger. It surprised me, his belief that I might want to live here at some unspecified future time. He spoke of the possibility in a practical way, a matter of family business, but he was not thinking about the dollar value of the place. I heard a tentative note, a hint of innocent curiosity in his voice. He may have been asking me who I was.

He was leaning forward, I was sitting back.

I told him that I didn’t know how to live here. This was a handsome brownstone with a front door of carved oak, a wood-paneled interior sedately furnished. My remark was not delivered purely for effect. I would be a tourist here, bound to a temporary arrangement. It was Artis who had brought him down from his penthouse duplex with lush decor, sun-drenched gardens and sweeping views of atomic sunsets. These were the things that suited his global ego in those earlier years. You have two majestic balconies, she’d told him, one more than the Pope. Here, some of his art, all of his books, whatever he’d managed to learn, love and acquire.

I knew how to live where I was living, in an old building on the upper west side with a small sad inner courtyard in perennial shadow, a once grand lobby, a laundry room that needed flood insurance — in an apartment of traditional fittings, high ceilings, quiet neighbors, say hello to familiar faces on the elevator, stand with Emma on the hot tarred surface of the roof, at the western ledge, watching a storm come whipping across the river in our direction.

This is what I told him. But wasn’t it more complicated than that? There was a punishing cut to these remarks, a cheap rejection dredged from the past. All these levels, these spiral binds of involvement, so integral to the condition we shared.

I told him that I was touched and suggested that we both think further. But I wasn’t touched and didn’t expect to think further. I told him that the room was impressive, with or without the cat. What I didn’t tell him was that there were several photographs of Madeline in my apartment. Schoolgirl, young woman, mother with adolescent son. And how could I ever display these pictures in the hostile setting of my father’s townhouse.

• • •

Emma had studied dance for a time, years earlier, and there was something streamlined about her, face and body, the walk, the stride, even the trimmed sentences. There were occasions when I imagined that she subjected the most ordinary moments to a detailed plan. These were the idle speculations of a man whose plotless days and nights had begun to define the way the world was folding up around him.

But she kept me free of total disaffection. She was my lover. The idea alone consoled me, the word itself, lover , the beautiful musical note, the hovering letter v . How I slipped into dumb reverie, examining the word, seeing it as woman-shaped, feeling like a teenager anticipating the day when he might tell himself that he has a lover.