Chapter 8 Summary
Keith is not walking through the park in breathless anticipation of his time with Florence. Though they enjoy one another’s bodies, he keeps returning because of what they know together, their shared experience of that timeless spiral drift as they exited the tower that day. He goes back because of that, even though these meetings contradict what he now knows to be true for his life: it is meant to be lived in a serious and responsible manner, not snatched in segments. As he leaves each time, Florence wonders if she can stay who she is or if she has to become one of those people who watches people walk out the door. Florence wonders if they are still themselves, but Keith feels like someone else when she looks at him sometimes.
Carol Shoup sits with Lianne at lunch and they are arguing. Carol’s company is publishing a significant and timely book by a retired aeronautical engineer who appears to have predicted the events of that day. It details a series of connected global events that converge in an explosive moment, and it is eerily reminiscent of a late-summer day in Boston, Washington, and New York. Lianne is upset that she was not asked to be the freelance editor for the project; Carol is trying to explain she thought it was too close, too personal to even ask. Any editor would have to be immersed in the immense, tedious detail, and she tried to spare her friend that experience. Lianne does not care how demanding or how, ultimately, unprophetic the work is—this is exactly what she wants but does not know it until Carol derisively mentions the book. All Carol wants to talk about is Keith and how wonderful it must be to have him back as a husband and a father; Lianne tells Carol it is just a beginning and she obviously knows nothing. Carol promises to call her if the book’s editor finds it is too much or too heavy or is ruining her life. Lianne tells her to call for that or not to call at all.
After the day Rosellen could not remember where she lived, she does not return to the group. Today the members want to write about their former friend. Lianne ponders the beauty of faded lives and watches as members write about Rosellen. For the first time, she is afraid to hear what they have written.
Keith is going to begin his job in a few days, but today he is touring a fitness center. It is throbbing with energy and movement and regimen, and Keith feels as if these are the people he knows. Once he spends eight or ten hours a day in an office, he knows he will need an “offsetting discipline,” a voluntary and controlled activity to keep his hatred and anger at bay.
Martin left just five minutes ago, and Nina is again asleep. When Nina wakes up and asks about her grandson, Lianne tells her she is taking too much pain medication. The medication is for when Nina does her physical therapy, but she is not doing it. Lianne wants to talk about Martin and the intensity of their arguments. Nina tells her daughter she has never seen Martin when he is really intense, and it is something that goes back more than twenty years to when he was an activist in Germany’s politics. Martin Ridnour is not his real name; he is an art dealer with nearly bare walls and a wife tucked away somewhere. Lianne has more questions, but Nina is not interested in...
(This entire section contains 1428 words.)
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knowing more about him than she already knows—or telling her daughter any more about him than she already has—but Lianne keeps pressing. Nina suspects the first works of art Martin sold were stolen. He keeps waiting for the police to show up at his door, but not for art theft. He was part of a German antigovernment terrorist group in the late sixties, though he was not one of the primary activists. He still has a poster of the nineteen people wanted for bank robberies, murders, and bombings. Nina has seen the wanted poster and he is not one of them. Martin believes the current terrorists, the jihadists, have “visions of world brotherhood” similar to that of the group with which he was involved. Wryly, Lianne asks if they make Martin feel nostalgic, and Nina says she certainly plans to bring that up the next time she and Martin argue.
Lianne says the bare walls may be part of the “old longing”—of seclusion and hiding and renouncing material comforts. Perhaps Martin has killed someone, she adds. Nina is sure he would be in prison or dead if that were true, and he is not in hiding. Lianne reminds her that he is operating under a false name, and she presses her mother more than ever before about not knowing and, even worse, not caring about the life of a man she has been with for the past twenty years. There is a price to pay for living in ignorance, but Nina tells her daughter it is her price to pay. There is silence as Nina smokes a cigarette. Then she tells Lianne about the one object hanging on his wall. In his apartment in Berlin is a photo of the two of them, taken the day after they met in front of a church in Umbria. And his real name is Ernst Hechinger. Lianne wants to punish her mother both for her willing ignorance regarding Martin and for having been defeated by the events of that day. She seems to believe that the hijackers, the jihadists, are just like Martin’s nineteen, but her “slackness of will” in doing her exercises and continuing her painkillers is evidence of her defeat.
Dockery, Hovanis, and Rumsey were always called by their last names; Demetrius and Keith were always called by their first names; Terry Cheng was just Terry Cheng when they played poker. Terry Cheng always told Rumsey his entire life had been shaped by the u in his name; if he had been born Ramsey, his life would have been less slumped and slouched in every way.
Lianne walks into the dank basement laundry room in her apartment building and sees Elena standing against one wall, smoking a cigarette. Lianne is still for a moment and Elena does not look up at her. When Lianne opens the washer, she sees the lint trap is full from Elena’s laundry. Without speaking, she hands the lint tray to Elena, who slowly taps it against the wall where she is standing and hands it back, all without eye contact and in silence. Lianne assumes Elena’s clothes are nearly dry because she is standing and waiting, and Lianne determines to wait as well. They lean against adjacent walls in silence except for the rumble of the washer and the clicking of shirt buttons in the dryer. There is no doubt in Lianne’s mind that she will outwait the other woman, but she wonders what the other woman will do with her cigarette when she is finished and whether they will make eye contact before Elena leaves the room—and whether that eye contact might lead to something else.
It is a rainy day, and Lianne walks over to the Godzilla building to retrieve her son. After a brief visit with Isabel, she “peels” Justin away from the computer screen and they prepare to leave. Isabel takes a phone call, and Lianne takes the opportunity to talk to Katie. She asks the young girl if they are still watching for planes and listening for the man to speak, the man whose name the adults are not supposed to know. Robert looks stricken, but Lianne cups Katie’s face in her hands and tells her perhaps it is time for the man to disappear, perhaps she is no longer interested in the waiting and watching. It is time to quit watching the skies and talking about this man, whose name they all know but is supposed to be a secret, who says the planes are coming back. Katie does not reply but does not look happy, either. Lianne is ready to leave. Justin walks four paces behind her on the way home, refusing to share her umbrella. She tries to remember the man’s name but cannot; she knows it is an easy name, but the “easy names are the ones that killed her.”
