Free Americana by Don DeLillo Page A

sleepless nights in rain falling, in voices on the street, in darkness vibrating to the resonance of every small sound. I waited fifteen minutes, then went upstairs. Meredith squinted out at me through the peephole,then opened the door. She was wearing the parrot-colored housedress her parents had sent from Turkey, where her father was now stationed, tending an undisclosed number of tumescent missiles. She had a wonderful tan.
    “How was Puerto Rico?”
    “I had a marvelous time, David. You really should go down there for a week or two. Sit down. I’ll get you something.”
    “I heard you go by my door. I was having trouble sleeping so I thought I’d come up for a minute or two.”
    “I went out with the most awful man in the world tonight. All he could talk about was his eight-speaker stereo system and E-type Jaguar.”
    She brought the drinks over to the sofa and sat next to me. Even though I saw her often during those years I was continually surprised by some of the changes in her outlook and personality since our divorce. She was much more the New York woman now, informed, purposeful, hard to impress. Gone were the cute enthusiasms of the teen-age bride, those sudden flings into space which seemed, so I thought, to be the outer extensions of a childhood marked by wandering. But with the new sophistication there was a concomitant nameless threat. Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women. She worked as a secretary to the art editor of a newsmagazine. It was a simple enough job, requiring typing and dictation skills, no more than rudimentary intelligence, and yet it prompted her to explore all the museums and art galleries of the city and to spend most of her vacations, and almost all her money, rummaging through the abbeys and chateaus of Europe, all those tourist bins patrolled by guards who look as though they have just deflowered their own daughters. One summer Merry and I had met by prearrangement in Florence, in some bell-swinging piazza, and sipped our orange drinks, so curiously reminiscent of an Eighth Avenue Nedick’s, as the tiny invertebrate cars raced by our table, each driver pursuinghis private Grand Prix. Meredith’s eyes blazed; her arm swept across that vista of stone warriors, philosophers, noblemen and extras. “What meaning!” she cried. “What stupendous meaning!”
    “What do you hear from your folks? It’s hard to believe they spent four full years in Germany. It went by like that.”
    “They’re both fine,” she said. “They want me to come over in the spring and if I can manage it I’d love to go. All those mosques.”
    “Turkey is a blending of several cultures, I understand.”
    “So mother says. Incidentally, I dreamed about you last night, David.”
    “Did you? Did you really?”
    “We were sitting in the living room of the house in London where I stayed with my cousin Edwina that time.”
    “What were we talking about? Do you remember what I said?”
    “I don’t think we were talking about anything.”
    “I take it we were fully dressed. Or you would have mentioned something.”
    “Yes.”
    “What were we wearing?” I said.
    “I don’t remember.”
    “And we were sitting, not standing or walking around.”
    “I’m sure we were sitting. I was near the window. I was looking out on Lennox Gardens. And you were on the other side of the room.”
    “What was I doing?”
    “You were just sitting there,” she said.
    “We must have been doing something. We must have said something to each other.”
    “I don’t remember, David.”
    “Try to remember. It’s important.”
    “Why?”
    “Because there might be some kind of clue there. I mean it’s not as though I strayed into a labyrinth. It’s all part ofsome design. You put me in your dream and it’s important for me to know what mission I was assigned. It’s a kind of reprieve to enter