Chapter 10 Summary
Half a million people are on the streets of New York protesting the war, the President, and government policies. Lianne and Justin walk the entire route amid the burning paper mâché floats, people distributing leaflets for all kinds of causes, and hovering police helicopters. She would rather not be here, but she wants Justin to feel as if he is part of a movement, a dissent. Since the event three years ago, all of life has become public, and Lianne wishes she were anywhere but here.
Justin has collected leaflets all along the route. They tell him to mourn the dead, heal the wounded, end the war, and seek Allah, among other things. He leans against a wall, squatting, to read the pamphlets, asking her to pronounce or explain the words he does not know. As she stands still in the middle of this crowd, Lianne remembers her long-ago trip to Cairo, a graduation gift for her and a friend. She remembers being among thousands of people, “orderly but all-enclosing.” To them, she was a white stereotype: educated, scared, naïve, detached, self-involved, privileged. Now she feels as if she is in both places at once and needs to flee from both crowds. Lianne and Justin rejoin the crowd and work their way to a bookstore.
Keith will be coming home in eight or nine days, and Lianne is acting as both mother and father until then. When she asks her son the best thing he has ever learned, he is quick to answer her: the sun is a star. As Lianne ponders Justin’s statement, she is struck by the vastness of this truth. There is neither up nor down, just here or there. The sun is out there, and mankind is out here.
Lianne is forty-one years old and healthy. After reviewing all her tests, the doctor tells her she is unremarkable in every way. She passed all the tests, including the ability to count backwards from one hundred by sevens. Now she counts like that all the time; it has become a kind of poetry she recites while walking or preparing to sleep. It is one of the tests for the condition the doctor euphemistically calls retrogenesis.
The casino is a lonely place, observes Keith. There are horse races on the screens, “acres of neon slots,” and cigarette smoke wafting nearby. He is entered in a poker tournament taking place on three tables. When they are seventy-seven games into the tourney, Keith is finally aware of the same horses replaying on the screens around him.
Lianne misses nights spent with friends, when the food runs out but the wine does not, when they talk about everything. This is not something Keith is good at or enjoys. He is uncomfortable in social settings, and people do not connect with him on the simplest level. What she really misses is her mother. The memorial service was held four months ago. In a gathering afterward, Martin and two of Nina’s former colleagues—a female biographer and a male art and architecture librarian—sat at a table and told stories about their friend. Then Martin said Europeans were all “sick of America and Americans. The subject nauseates” them. He continued his tirade by stating that America will soon become irrelevant, despite its power and the trouble it causes around the world. In the past two and a half years, Nina and Martin only saw each other rarely; now Lianne wondered why she has stayed in touch with him. Because of what she knows about his past and because of what Nina came to feel...
(This entire section contains 929 words.)
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about him, Lianne considers him guilty by association for the event. He was not finished, claiming that America’s center is collapsing and the world views this country as irrelevant.
Perhaps Martin was having one last argument with Nina, but the biographer suggested that this was not the time to discuss global politics because it dishonored their friend’s memory; Martin dismissed the idea. Lianne realizes she has stayed in contact with him simply because he is a link to her mother. The two American guests picked up the check and Martin was happy to let them do so. As he left the restaurant, the librarian took the sunflower out of the bud vase on the table, put it in Martin’s breast pocket, and finally spoke. He told the arrogant European that if America is in the center, it is because others have put it there. He said Europe goes to our movies, listens to our music, reads our books, speaks our language—in short, cannot stop thinking about us. He said they see and hear us constantly, and he asked, “What comes after America?” Unabashed, Martin said he no longer recognizes this country; there is, he said, an empty space where it used to be. With that, Lianne was left alone with her mother’s former lover.
She told him about the last difficult months of her mother’s life; and when Martin talked about their life together Nina was transported to better places, loftier places, exotic places for Lianne. Martin explained that he became who he was supposed to be when he was with Nina. Lianne knew this man may well have been a terrorist, but he is “one of ours”—godless, Western, and white. It was a chilling, shameful thought, and she knew she would never see him again. As he rose to leave, Martin took the flower out of his pocket, smelled it, and tossed it on the table.
