Falling Man (6 page)

“I like Keith. I told him a story once that he enjoyed. About cardplayers. He’s a cardplayer of course. About cardplayers I used to know and about the seating arrangement they maintained at their weekly game, for nearly half a century. Longer actually. He enjoyed this story.”

Her mother came in, Nina, in a dark skirt and white blouse, leaning on her cane. Martin held her briefly and then watched her settle into the chair, slowly, in segmental movements.

“What old dead wars we fight. I think in these past days we’ve lost a thousand years,” she said.

Martin had been away for a month. He was seeing the last stage of the transformation, her embrace of age, the studied attitude that weaves easily through the fact itself. Lianne felt a sadness on his behalf. Has her mother’s hair gone whiter? Is she taking too much pain medication? Did she have a minor stroke at that conference in Chicago? And, finally, was he lying about their sexual activity? Her mind is fine. She is not so forgiving of the normal erosions, the names she now and then forgets, the location of an object she has just, seconds ago, put somewhere. But she is alert to what is important, the broad surround, to other states of being.

“Tell us what they’re doing in Europe.”

“They’re being kind to Americans,” he said.

“Tell us what you’ve bought and sold.”

“What I can tell you is that the art market will stagnate. Activity here and there in modern masters. Otherwise dismal prospects.”

“Modern masters. I’m relieved,” Nina said.

“Trophy art.”

“People need their trophies.”

He seemed heartened by her sarcasm.

“I’ve just barely set foot in the door. In the country in fact. What does she do? She gives me grief.”

“This is her job,” Lianne said.

They’d known each other for twenty years, Martin and Nina, lovers for much of that time, New York, Berkeley, somewhere in Europe. Lianne knew that the defensive stance he took at times was an aspect of their private manner of address, not the stain of something deeper. He was not the shapeless man he claimed to be or physically mimicked. He was unflinching in fact, and smart in his work, and gracious to her, and generous to her mother. The two beautiful Morandi still lifes were gifts from Martin. The passport photos on the opposite wall, Martin also, from his collection, aged documents, stamped and faded, history measured in inches, and also beautiful.

Lianne said, “Who wants to eat?”

Nina wanted to smoke. The bamboo end table stood next to the armchair now and held an ashtray, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.

Her mother lit up. She watched, Lianne did, feeling something familiar and a little painful, how Nina at a certain point began to consider her invisible. The memory was located there, in the way she snapped shut the lighter and put it down, in the hand gesture and the drifting smoke.

“Dead wars, holy wars. God could appear in the sky tomorrow.”

“Whose God would it be?” Martin said.

“God used to be an urban Jew. He’s back in the desert now.”

Lianne’s studies were meant to take her into deeper scholarship, into serious work in languages or art history. She’d traveled through Europe and much of the Middle East but it was tourism in the end, with shallow friends, not determined inquiry into beliefs, institutions, languages, art, or so said Nina Bartos.

“It’s sheer panic. They attack out of panic.”

“This much, yes, it may be true. Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that’s spreading,” he said.

“There are no goals they can hope to achieve. They’re not liberating a people or casting out a dictator. Kill the innocent, only that.”

“They strike a blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies.”

He spoke softly, looking into the carpet.

“One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die.”

“God is great,” she said.

“Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics and economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness.”

“It’s not the history of Western interference that pulls down these societies. It’s their own history, their mentality. They live in a closed world, of choice, of necessity. They haven’t advanced because they haven’t wanted to or tried to.”

“They use the language of religion, okay, but this is not what drives them.”

“Panic, this is what drives them.”

Her mother’s anger submerged her own. She deferred to it. She saw the hard tight fury in Nina’s face and felt, herself, only a sadness, hearing these two people, joined in spirit, take strongly opposing positions.

Then Martin eased off, voice going soft again.

“All right, yes, it may be true.”

“Blame us. Blame us for their failures.”

“All right, yes. But this is not an attack on one country, one or two cities. All of us, we are targets now.”

They were still talking ten minutes later when Lianne left the room. She stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The moment seemed false to her, a scene in a movie when a character tries to understand what is going on in her life by looking in the mirror.

She was thinking, Keith is alive.

Keith had been alive for six days now, ever since he appeared at the door, and what would this mean to her, what would this do to her and to her son?

She washed her hands and face. Then she went to the cabinet and got a fresh towel and dried herself. After she tossed the towel in the hamper she flushed the toilet. She didn’t flush the toilet to make the others think she’d left the living room for a compelling reason. The flushing toilet wasn’t audible in the living room. This was for her own pointless benefit, flushing. Maybe it was meant to mark the end of the interval, to get her out of here.

What was she doing here? She was being a child, she thought.

The talk had begun to fade by the time she returned. He had more to say, Martin, but possibly thought this was not the moment, not now, too soon, and he wandered over to the Morandi paintings on the wall.

It was only seconds later that Nina dropped into a light sleep. She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers. Lianne watched her. It was difficult to see her fitted so steadfastly to a piece of furniture, resigned and unstirring, the energetic arbiter of her daughter’s life, ever discerning, the woman who’d given birth to the word
beautiful,
for what excites admiration in art, ideas, objects, in the faces of men and women, the mind of a child. All this dwindling to a human breath.

Her mother wasn’t dying, was she? Lighten up, she thought.

She opened her eyes, finally, and the two women looked at each other. It was a sustained moment and Lianne did not know, could not have put into words what it was they were sharing. Or she knew but could not name the overlapping emotions. It was what there was between them, meaning every minute together and apart, what they’d known and felt and what would come next, in the minutes, days and years.

Martin stood before the paintings.

“I’m looking at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning. And I must be back in another time zone. I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight,” he said, pausing. “Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life.”

Lianne joined him at the wall. The painting in question showed seven or eight objects, the taller ones set against a brushy slate background. The other items were huddled boxes and biscuit tins, grouped before a darker background. The full array, in unfixed perspective and mostly muted colors, carried an odd spare power.

They looked together.

Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white. The two dark objects, too obscure to name, were the things that Martin was referring to.

“What do you see?” he said.

She saw what he saw. She saw the towers.

5

He entered the park at the Engineers’ Gate, where runners stretched and bent before going out on the track. The day was warm and still and he walked along the road that ran parallel to the bridle path. There was somewhere to go but he was in no hurry to get there. He watched an elderly woman on a bench who was thinking distantly of something, holding a pale green apple pressed to her cheek. The road was closed to traffic and he thought you come to the park to see people, the ones who are shadows in the street. There were runners up to the left, on the track around the reservoir, and others on the bridle path just above him and still more runners on the roadway, men with handweights, running, and women running behind baby strollers, pushing babies, and runners with dogs on leashes. You come to the park to see dogs, he thought.

The road bent west and three girls wearing headsets went rollerblading past. The ordinariness, so normally unnoticeable, fell upon him oddly, with almost dreamlike effect. He was carrying the briefcase and wanted to turn back. He crossed up the slope and walked past the tennis courts. There were three horses hitched to the fence, police helmets clipped to their saddlebags. A woman ran past, talking to someone, miserably, on her cell phone, and he wanted to toss the briefcase in the reservoir and go back home.

She lived in a building just off Amsterdam Avenue and he climbed the six flights to her apartment. She seemed tentative, letting him in, even, strangely, a little wary, and he started to explain, as he had on the telephone the day before, that he hadn’t meant to delay returning the briefcase. She was saying something about the credit cards in the wallet, that she hadn’t canceled them because, well, everything was gone, she thought everything was buried, it was lost and gone, and they stopped talking and then started again, simultaneously, until she made a small gesture of futility. He left the briefcase on a chair by the door and went over to the sofa, saying he could not stay very long.

She was a light-skinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side.

He said, “When I found your name in the briefcase, after I found your name and checked the phone directory and saw you were listed and I’m actually dialing the number, that’s when it occurred to me.”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“I thought why am I doing this without checking further because is this person even alive?”

There was a pause and he realized how softly she’d spoken inside his jumpy commentary.

“I have some herbal tea,” she said. “Sparkling water if you like.”

“Sparkling water. Spring water. There’s a small bottle in the briefcase. Let me think. Poland Spring.”

“Poland Spring,” she said.

“Anyway if you’d like to check what’s in there.”

“Of course not. No,” she said quietly.

She stood in the entranceway to the kitchen. The small boom of traffic sounded outside the windows.

He said, “See, what happened is I didn’t know I had it. It wasn’t even a case of forgetting. I don’t think I knew.”

“I don’t think I know your name.”

He said, “Keith?”

“Did you tell me this?”

“I think so, yes.”

“The phone call was so out of the blue.”

“It’s Keith,” he said.

“Did you work for Preston Webb?”

“No, one floor up. Small outfit called Royer Properties.”

He was on his feet now, ready to leave.

“Preston’s so sprawling. I thought maybe we just hadn’t run into each other.”

“No, Royer. We’re just about decimated,” he said.

“We’re waiting to see what happens, where we relocate. I don’t think about it much.”

There was a silence.

He said, “We were Royer and Stans. Then Stans got indicted.”

Finally he moved toward the door and then picked up the briefcase. He paused, reaching for the doorknob, and looked at her, across the room, and she was smiling.

“Why did I do that?”

“Habit,” she said.

“I was ready to walk out the door with your property. All over again. Your priceless family heritage. Your cell phone.”

“That thing. I stopped needing it when I didn’t have it.”

“Your toothbrush,” he said. “Your pack of cigarettes.”

“God, no, my guilty secret. But I’m down to four a day.”

She waved him back to the sofa with a broad arc of the arm, a traffic cop’s sweeping command to get things going.

She served tea and a plate of sugar cookies. Her name was Florence Givens. She placed a kitchen chair on the other side of the coffee table and sat at a diagonal.

He said, “I know everything about you. A sonic toothbrush. You brush your teeth with sound waves.”

“I’m gadget crazy. I love those things.”

“Why do you have a better voice recorder than I had?”

“I think I’ve used it twice.”

“I used mine but then never listened. I liked to talk into it.”

“What did you say when you talked into it?”

“I don’t know. My fellow Americans,” he said.

“I thought everything was lost and gone. I didn’t report a lost driver’s license. I didn’t do anything, basically, but sit in this room.”

An hour later they were still talking. The cookies were small and awful but he kept nipping into them, unthinkingly, eating only the first baby bite and leaving the mutilated remains to litter the plate.

“I was at my screen and heard the plane approach but only after I was thrown down. That’s how fast,” she said.

“Are you sure you heard the plane?”

“The impact sent me to the floor and then I heard the plane. I think the sprinklers, I’m trying to recall the sprinklers. I know I was wet at some point, all through.”

He understood that she hadn’t meant to say this. It sounded intimate, to be wet all through, and she had to pause a moment.