Free Americana by Don DeLillo

the same name as the big guy. You make me feel guilty because I drink. Where do you live, by the way?”
    “I stay with Lee, Jemmy and Kit.”
    I reached over and unzipped the jacket. My hand touched her cool breast. I was aware of a small movement behind the bar and I knew that one of Zack’s shotglass eyes had lifted from the newspaper. I edged in closer, wedging her knee between my legs. My hand went up from her breast to herneck and face and when I kissed her there was a message returned from that humid mechanical mouth which let me know that whatever we did, here or later, was a matter of the vastest indifference. I did not bother drawing the jacket together and she did not bother noticing.
    “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We’ll go to my place.”
    “We have to take him home.”
    “He’ll be all right. He gets like this all the time. I have almost a thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment.”
    “When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.”
    “Let’s go,” I said. “We’ll get some dinner if you like and then go to my place.”
    “Can he come?”
    “He can take care of himself.”
    “We painted a circle in the middle of our room. We all sit in there when we smoke. It’s real great.”
    “What else do you do?”
    “Whatever we want,” she said.
    “But what?”
    “You can do whatever you want.”
    “But can’t you be more exact? I want to know exactly what you’re talking about.”
    “It’s simple. It’s so simple. You can come back with me if you want. We have some stuff. But first we have to take him home.”
    I moved back away from her and finished my drink. Heaving slab of cougar-meat. Would I have to help undress him? Pluck off his weary socks with fastidious fingers and tuck him snoring into his army cot? Few things are more depressing than the sight of a drunken friend who happens to be twice your age; so many illusions are tested. He made a noise, then another, small dogs barking in his throat. His head rested on his left forearm. The hair at the back of his neck was light brown and gray. I put my arm over his shoulder.
    “What color is the circle?” I said.
    “It’s red. It’s a big red circle and we all sit inside it. Youcan come if you want. Anybody can come who wants to. You and me and him. We can all go.”
    I leaned across and zipped up the jacket. I liked her. I had no desire to trample her. She was delicate and trusting, beautiful in her blank way, and my words could not reach the spaces she felt between sounds. But these facts did not give me the right to trample her. Communications theorist and emperor of stereo. I gave her fifteen dollars—for food, I said.
    “No, I can’t go,” I told her. “We’ll take him home and that’ll be it for the night.”
    Then I smiled at her foolishly and she answered with the unembellished look of a feeble nun who has begged successfully for money and found no hand quite willing to touch her own.
    * * *
    You can tell something about a woman by listening to her footsteps on a flight of stairs. As she climbs toward your landing and takes the level walk past your door and then begins to climb again, you can say with some assurance whether she is shapely, impulsive, churlish, simpering, tired, witty or unloved. It is interesting to speculate on the curve of her ankles, how her apartment is furnished, whether or not she believes in a supreme being.
    The footsteps I heard that night, that early morning, were those of my ex-wife, Meredith, who lived one floor above me and across the hall. As she went by my door I thought I detected a slight hesitation in her stride. I did not move from the chair nor lower the book I was reading. She climbed the next flight slowly, and in the absolute stillness of the building at that late hour the sound of her key in the lock was enough to break one mood and bring on another, and the soft closing of her door was not unlike that breath of sensuality heard between the silences of