“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. 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.