Free Mao II by Don DeLillo

you?”
    “Twenty-four.”
    “And you help out here.”
    “Scott does most of it. He manages the expenses, the cash flow, he does taxes, he deals with the utilities, he answers all Bill’s mail except the mentals, which we haughtily ignore lest they get encouraged. We share the cooking and shopping except he probably does more than I do. He does all the filing, the organizing of papers. I clean like a little scrub lady, which I don’t half mind. I make believe I’m fat and walk with a waddle. We do the typing about fifty-fifty, with Scott doing the last spotless copy, and then we proofread together, which is probably our favorite time.”
    “And you think it’s a mistake, these pictures.”
    “We love Bill, that’s all.”
    “And you hate me for leaving here with all that film.”
    “It’s just a feeling of there’s something wrong. We have a life here that’s carefully balanced. There’s a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives and now there’s a crack all of a sudden. What’s it called, a fissure.”
    The car pulled up, door opened, then closed. Karen tapped the bowl end of the spoon with her index finger, over and over, making the handle go up and down.
    “What do you think of marriage for a professional woman?” she said.
    “I’m divorced many years. He lives in Belgium. We don’t talk at all.”
    “Do you have children that are still torn up over the divorce so that everybody’s tense around each other and you can see the resentment lurking far back in their eyes even after all this time?”
    “Sorry, no.”
    “I haven’t known many people with careers. It sounds so important. Having a career. Do you keep a bottle of vodka handy in your freezer?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Do people tell you they like your work? They come up to you at parties in New York and say, ‘I just wanted to tell you.’ Or, ‘You don’t know me but I just wanted.’ Or, ‘I really have to tell you this and I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion.’ Then you look at them and smile like shyly.”
    Scott came in with groceries. He poured a cup of coffee and told the story of his journey out of nonbeing. How he started writing letters to Bill care of his publisher. He wrote nine or ten letters, ambitious and self-searching, filled with things a luckless boy wants to say to a writer whose work has moved him. He hadn’t known he could summon these deep feelings or express them with reckless style and delight, certain cosmic words typed in caps and others spelled oddly to reveal second and third meanings. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things. How he finally got one letter back, two lines, handwritten in a hurry, saying there is never time to respond properly but thanks for writing. How Scott took this as encouragement and wrote five more letters, intense and sweeping, the last of them saying that he was setting out to find Bill, that he needed to see and meet and talk to Bill, that the urge to make a journey in search of the man who wrote these books could no longer be contained. How Bill did not reply. And how Scott took this as encouragement because Bill could have written and said, Forget it, stay away, do not even remotely approach. He had the envelope Bill’s note had come in, postmarked New York City, but Scott happened to know from reading a magazine piece about Lost Writers that Bill concealed his whereabouts by sending letters to his publisher for remailing.
    “And so you hitchhiked.”
    Yes. He set out thumbing rides at the edges of ripping interstates and the venture was so chancy it made him feel weightless, standing in the wind of rolling diesel rigs. He wore mirrored glasses and carried a timeless Eastern text and he told drivers he was setting out to find a famous writer. Some of them talked about famous people they wished they could meet and it was interesting how very few of