The Angel Esmeralda - By Don DeLillo Page 0,58
three or four directions. I listened to the air blast as they passed beneath me, car after car, drivers making instantaneous decisions, news and weather on their radios, unknown worlds in their minds.
Why don’t they crash all the time? The question seemed profound to me, with the first touch of dawn showing to the east. Why don’t they get backended or sideswiped? It seemed inevitable from my elevated perspective—cars forced into the guardrails, nudged into lethal spins. But they just kept coming, seemingly out of nowhere, headlights, taillights, and they would be coming and going all through the budding day and into the following night.
I closed my eyes and listened. Soon I’d be going back to the camp, sinking into the everydayness of that life. Minimum security. It sounded childlike, a term of condescension and chagrin. I wanted to open my eyes to empty roads and blazing light, apocalypse, the thundering approach of something unimaginable. But minimum security was where I belonged, wasn’t it? The least possible quantity, the lowest degree of restriction. Here I was, a truant, but one who would return. When I looked, finally, the mist was lifting, traffic heavier now, motorcycles, flatbeds, family cars, SUVs, drivers down there peering, the noise and rush, the compelling sense of necessity.
Who are they? Where are they going?
It occurred to me then that I was visible from the high- way, a man on the bridge, at this hour, in silhouette, a man standing and watching, and it would be a natural response for the drivers, some of them, to glance up and wonder.
Who is he? What is he doing there?
He is Jerold Bradway, I thought, and he is breathing the fumes of free enterprise forever.
THE STARVELING
When it started, long before the woman, he lived in one room. He did not hope for improved circumstances. This was where he belonged, single window, shower, hotplate, a squat refrigerator parked in the bathroom, a makeshift closet for scant possessions. There is a kind of uneventfulness that resembles meditation. One morning he sat drinking coffee and staring into space when the lamp that extended from the wall rustled into flame. Faulty wiring, he thought calmly, and put out his cigarette. He watched the flames rise, the lampshade begin to bubble and melt. The memory ended here.
Now, decades later, he sat watching another woman, the one he lived with. She was at the kitchen sink, washing her cereal bowl, using a soapy bare hand to scour the edges. They were divorced now, after five or six years of marriage, still sharing an apartment, hers, a third-floor walk-up, sufficient space, sort of, tiny barking dog next door.
She was still lean, Flory, and a little lopsided, the soft brownish blond tones only now beginning to fade from her hair. One of her brassieres hung from the doorknob on the closet. He looked at it, wondering how long it had been there. It was a life that had slowly grown around them, unfailingly familiar, and there was nothing much to see that had not been seen in previous hours, days, weeks and months. The brassiere on the doorknob was a matter of months, he thought.
He sat on his cot at the other end of the narrow flat, listening to her talk idly about her new job, temporary, doing traffic reports on the radio. She was an actor, occupationally out of work, and took what came her way. Hers was the only living voice he attended to in the course of most days, an easy sort of liquid cadence with a trace of Deep South. But her broadcast voice was a power tool, all bursts and breathless medleys, and when it was possible, when he happened to be here, which was rare, during the daylight hours, he turned on the radio and listened to the all-news station where she had a narrow slot every eleven minutes, reporting on the routine havoc out there.
She spoke fantastically fast, words and key phrases expertly compressed into coded format, the accidents, road repairs, bridges and tunnels, the delays measured in geologic time. The BQE, the FDR, always the biblical Cross Bronx, ten thousand drivers with deadened eyes waiting for the gates to open, the seas to part.
He watched her approach now, slantwise, her body language of determined inquiry, head flopped left, eyes advancing through levels of scrutiny. She stopped at a distance of five feet.
“Did you get a haircut?”
He sat thinking, then reached back to run his thumb over the back of his