Don DeLillo - Zero K

“Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”

We watched tennis and drank beer in tall glasses that she kept on their sides in the freezer compartment of her squat refrigerator. Frosted glasses, dark lager, point, game, match, one woman flipping her racket in the air, the other woman walking out of the frame, the first woman falling backwards to the grass court in glad abandon, arms stretched wide like the woman on my roof, whoever she was.

“Define a tennis racket. This is something I might have said to myself when I was in my early teens.”

“Then you would do it,” she said.

“Or try to.”

“Tennis racket.”

“Early teens.”

I told her that I used to stand in a dark room, eyes shut, mind immersed in the situation. I told her that I still do it, although rarely, and that I never know that I’m about to do it. Just stand in the dark. The lamp sits on the bureau next to the bed. There I am, eyes shut. Sort of Staklike.

She said, “It sounds like a kind of formal meditation.”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you’re trying to empty the mind.”

“You haven’t done it yourself.”

“Who, me, no.”

“I’m shutting my eyes against the dark.”

“And you’re wondering who you are.”

“Maybe in a blank way, if that’s possible.”

“What’s the difference between eyes closed in a lighted room and eyes closed in a dark room?”

“All the difference in the world.”

“I’m trying not to say something funny.”

She said this in an even tone, with a serious face.

Know the moment, feel the gliding hand, gather all the forgettable fragments, fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed, her bed, our blue sheets. This was all I needed to take me day to day and I tried to think of these days and nights as the hushed countermand, ours, to the widespread belief that the future, everybody’s, will be worse than the past.

• • •

One of my father’s people called with the details. Time, place, manner of dress. This was lunch — but why. I didn’t need lunch in a midtown temple of cuisine art where jackets are required and the food and flower arrangements are said to be exquisite and the staff more competent than pallbearers at a state funeral. It was the weekend and my dress shirts were at the laundry being readied for the next wave of interviews. I had to wear a used and reused shirt, first spitting on my finger to wash the inside of the collar.

I’m always the first to arrive, I always get there first. I chose to wait at the table and when Ross showed up I was struck by the sight of him. The vested gray suit and bright tie set off his wildman beard and halting stride and I wasn’t sure whether he resembled an impressive ruin or a famous stage actor currently living the role that defines his long career.

He slid inchingly into our velvet banquette.

“You didn’t want the job. Turned it down.”

“It wasn’t right. I’m talking to an important person in an investment strategy group. It’s a definite possibility.”

“People out of work. You were offered a job in a strong company.”

“Set of companies. But I was not dismissive. I considered every aspect.”

“Nobody cares that you’re my son. There are sons and daughters everywhere, in solid positions, doing productive work.”

“Okay.”

“You make too much of it. Father and son. You would have become your own man in a matter of days.”

“Okay.”

“People out of work,” he said again, reasonably.

We talked and ordered and I kept looking into his face, thinking of a certain word. I think of words that lead me into dense realities, clarifying a situation or a circumstance, at least in theory. Here was Ross, eyes tired and shoulders hunched, right hand trembling slightly, and the word was desuetude . The word had a stylish quality suited to the environment. But what did it mean? A state of inaction, I thought, maybe a lost energy. I was looking at Ross Lockhart, handsomely outfitted but minus the relentlessness and craft that had shaped the man.

“Last time I was here about five years ago I talked Artis into coming along. Her health was not yet approaching drastic decline. I don’t recall all that much. But there was one point, one interval. It’s very clear. One particular moment. She looked at a woman being led past us to a nearby table. She waited for the woman to be seated and looked a while longer. Then she said, ‘If she were wearing any more makeup she would burst into flames.’ ”

I laughed at that and noted how the memory remained alive in his eyes. He was seeing Artis across the table, across the years, a kind of waveform, barely discernible. The wine arrived and he managed to look at the label and then to perform the ceremonial swirl and taste but he hadn’t sniffed the cork and did not indicate approval of the wine. He was still remembering. The waiter took a while to decide that it was permissible to pour. I watched all this, innocently, as an adolescent might.

I said, “They’re called Selected Assets Inc.”

“Who’s that?”

“The people I’m talking to.”

“Buy yourself another shirt. That may help them make up their mind,” he said.

When does a man become his father? I was nowhere near the time but it occurred to me that it could happen one day while I sat staring at a wall, all my defenses assimilated into the matching moment.

Food arrived and he began to eat at once while I looked and thought. Then I told him a story that made him pause.

I told him how his wife, the first, my mother, had died, at home, in her bed, unable to talk or listen or to see me sitting there. I’d never told him this and I didn’t know why I was telling him now, the hours I’d spent at her bedside, Madeline, with the neighbor in the doorway leaning on her cane. I found myself going into some detail, recalling whatever I could, speaking softly, describing the scene. The neighbor, the cane, the bed, the bedspread. I described the bedspread. I mentioned the old oak bureau with carved wings for handles. He would remember that. I think I wanted him to be touched. I wanted him to see the last hours as they happened. There was no dark motive. I wanted us to be joined in this. And how curious it was to be speaking about it here, amid the tiptoe waiters and the stalks of white amaryllis set along the walls, funereally, and the single white orchid in the small vase at the center of our table. There was no bitter theme running through these remarks. The scene itself, in Madeline’s room, would not permit it. The table, the lamp, the bed, the woman in the bed, the cane with the splayed legs.

We sat thinking and after a time one of us took a bite of food and a sip of wine and then the other did too. Everywhere in the room a vibrant tide of conversation, something I hadn’t noticed until now.

“Where was I when this happened?”

“You were on the cover of Newsweek .”

I watched him try to make sense of this and then explained that I’d seen the magazine with my father on the cover just before learning that my mother was in critical condition.

He leaned farther down toward the table, the back of his hand propping his chin.

“Do you know why we’re here?”

“You said you were last here with Artis.”

“And she is forever part of what we are here to discuss.”

“It seems too soon.”

“It’s all I think about,” he said.

All he thinks about. Artis in the chamber. I think about her also, now and then, shaved and naked, standing and waiting. Does she know she’s waiting? ls she wait-listed? Or is she simply dead and gone, beyond the smallest tremor of self-awareness?

“It’s time to be going back,” he said. “And I want you to come with me.”