Falling Man by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online

observation. Since then, whatever it is. This is Monday. Six days, five nights.”
    “I will be asking for progress reports,” he said.
    He’d talked to Keith a couple of times only. This was an American, not a New Yorker, not one of the Manhattan elect, a group maintained by controlled propagation. He tried to gain a sense of the younger man’s feelings about politics and religion, the voice and manner of the heartland. All he learned was that Keith had once owned a pit bull. This, at least, seemed to mean something, a dog that was all skull and jaws, an American breed, developed originally to fight and kill.
    “One of these days maybe you and Keith will have a chance to talk again.”
    “About women, I think.”
    “Mother and daughter. All the sordid details,” she said.
    “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.