“But I’ll tell you something,” he said.
She looked at him. He had the same thirteen-day beard, the drooping lids of chronic jet lag. He wore the standard unpressed suit, his uniform, shirt looking slept-in, no tie. Someone displaced or deeply distracted, lost in time. But he was heavier now, his face went east and west, there were signs of bloat and sag that the beard could not conceal. He had the pressured look of a man whose eyes have gone smaller in his head.
“For all the careless power of this country, let me say this, for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to become irrelevant. Do you believe this?”
She wasn’t sure why she’d stayed in touch with him. The disincentives were strong. There was what she knew about him, even if incomplete, and there was, more tellingly, how her mother had come to feel about him. It was guilt by association, his, when the towers fell.
“There is a word in German. Gedankenübertragung. This is the broadcasting of thoughts. We are all beginning to have this thought, of American irrelevance. It’s a little like telepathy. Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center. It becomes the center of its own shit. This is the only center it occupies.”
She wasn’t sure what had brought this on, maybe something that someone had said, passingly, at an earlier point. Maybe Martin was having an argument with the dead, with Nina. They were clearly wishing they’d gone home, the colleagues, before the coffee and biscuits. This was not the occasion, the woman said, to argue global politics. Nina could have done it better than any of us, she said, but Nina isn’t here and the talk dishonors her memory.
Martin waved a hand in dismissal, rejecting the narrow terms of discourse. He was a link to her mother, Lianne thought. That’s why she’d stayed in touch. Even when her mother was alive, fadingly, he helped Lianne think of her in clearer outline. Ten or fifteen minutes on the phone with him, a man etched in regret but also love and reminiscence, or longer conversations that wandered toward an hour, and she’d feel both sadder and better, seeing Nina in a kind of freeze-frame, vivid and alert. She’d tell her mother about these calls and watch her face, looking hard for a sign of light.
Now she watched him.
The colleagues insisted on picking up the check. Martin did not contest the matter. He was done with them. They embodied a form of cautionary tact better left to state funerals in autocratic countries. Before leaving, the library director took a sunflower from the bud vase at the center of the table and placed it in the breast pocket of Martin’s jacket. He did this with a smile, possibly hostile, maybe not. Then he finally spoke, standing over the table and fitting his long body into a raincoat.
“If we occupy the center, it’s because you put us there. This is your true dilemma,” he said. “Despite everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe. You go to our movies, read our books, listen to our music, speak our language. How can you stop thinking about us? You see us and hear us all the time. Ask yourself. What comes after America?”
Martin spoke quietly, almost idly, to himself.
“I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it,” he said. “There’s an empty space where America used to be.”
They stayed, she and Martin, the only patrons left in the long room, below street level, and talked for some time. She told him about the last hard months of her mother’s life, ruptured blood vessels, loss of muscle control, the smeared speech and empty gaze. He bent low over the table, breathing audibly. She wanted to hear him talk about Nina and he did. It seemed all she’d known of her mother for an extended time was Nina in a chair, Nina in a bed. He lifted her into artists’ lofts, Byzantine ruins, into halls where she’d lectured, Barcelona to Tokyo.
“I used to imagine, when I was a girl, that I was her. I stood sometimes in the middle of the room and spoke to a chair or sofa. I said very smart things about painters. I knew how to pronounce every name, all the hard names, and I knew their paintings from books and museum visits.”
“You were frequently alone.”
“I couldn’t understand why my mother and father split up. My mother never cooked. My father never seemed to eat. What could go wrong?”
“You will always be a daughter, I think. First and always, this is what you are.”
“And you are always what?”
“I am always your mother’s lover. Long before I knew her. Always that. It was waiting to happen.”
“You almost make me believe it.”
The other thing she wanted to believe was that his physical bearing was not evidence of illness or some steep financial setback affecting his morale. It was the end of the long story, he and Nina, that had brought him to this dispirited point. Nothing more or less than that. This is what she believed and this is what stirred her sympathy.
“Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be,” he said. “This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.”
“Even at the end of things.”
“Even when we no longer found agreeable things to say or anything at all to say. The conversation never ended.”
“I believe you.”
“From the first day.”
“In Italy,” she said.
“Yes. This is true.”
“And the second day. In front of a church,” she said. “The two of you. And someone took your picture.”
He looked up and seemed to study her, wondering what else she knew. She would not tell him what she knew or that she’d made no effort to find out more. She had not gone to libraries to examine the histories of underground movements in those years and she had not searched the Internet for traces of the man called Ernst Hechinger. Her mother hadn’t, she hadn’t.
“There’s a plane to catch.”
“What would you do without your planes?”
“There’s always a plane to catch.”
“Where would you be?” she said. “One city, which one?”
He’d come for the day, without a suitcase or carry-on. He’d sold his New York apartment and had reduced the number of his commitments here.
“I don’t think I’m ready to face that question. One city,” he said, “and I am trapped.”
They knew him here and the waiter brought complimentary brandies. They lingered a while longer, into twilight. She realized she would never see him again.
She’d respected his secret, yielded to his mystery. Whatever it was he’d done, it was not outside the lines of response. She could imagine his life, then and now, detect the slurred pulse of an earlier consciousness. Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her-one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white.
He stood and lifted the flower out of his breast pocket. Then he smelled it and tossed it on the table, smiling at her. They touched hands briefly and went out to the street, where she watched him walk to the corner, arm raised to the tide of passing cabs.
11
The dealer touched the green button, a fresh deck rose to the tabletop.
In these months of mastering the game he was spending most of his time on the Strip now, sitting in leather recliners in the sports-book parlors, hunched under shade canopies in the poker rooms. He was finally making money, quiet amounts that began to show consistency. He was also going home periodically, three or four days, love, sex, fatherhood, home-cooked food, but was lost at times for something to say. There was no language, it seemed, to tell them how he spent his days and nights.