through the rectal wall. There was pain, probably just muscles tensing in the anal canal. But it hurt. It was pain. It traveled the circuitry of nerve cells. From his stooped position, Eric looked directly into Jane's face. He liked doing this, which surprised him. In the office she was an edgy presence, 20/91
Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis
skeptical, adversarial, aloof, with a gift for sustained complaint. Here, she was a single running mother in a foldout seat, knock-kneed and touchingly, somehow, gaunt. A splash of hair lay moist and flat on her forehead, showing the first faint veining of gray. The water bottle dangled from a lank hand.
She did not recede from his gaze. She made complete eye contact. Her clavicle showed knobby above the droop of her tank top. He wanted to lick the sweat off the inside of her wrist. She was wrists and shinbones and unbalmed lips.
"There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now,"
she said. "Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing."
When Nevius did the finger, it was in and out in seconds. Ingram was probing for some murky fact. Jane was the fact. She had the bottle in her crotch, knees flopped outward now, and watched him.
Her mouth was open, showing large gapped teeth. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings that also encompassed these meanings, pity, affinity, tenderness, the whole physiology of neural maneuver, of heartbeat and secretion, some vast sexus of arousal drawing him toward her, complicatedly, with Ingram's finger up his ass.
"So the whole economy convulses," she said, "because the man took a breath."
He felt these things. He felt the pain. It traveled the pathways. It informed the ganglion and spinal cord. He was here in his body, the structure he wanted to dismiss in theory even when he was shaping it under the measured effect of barbells and weights. He wanted to judge it redundant and transferable.
It was convertible to wave arrays of information. It was the thing he watched on the oval screen when he wasn't watching Jane.
"You grip the water bottle."
"It's that soft type plastic."
"You grip it. You choke it."
"It's a matter-of-fact thing."
"It's sexual tension."
"It's everyday nervousness in a life."
"It's sexual tension," he said.
He told Ingram to reach over with his free hand and fish the sunglasses out of the suit jacket on the hanger nearby. The associate managed to do this. Eric put on the glasses.
"Days like this."
"What?" she said.
"My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. That's why you have to run, to escape the drift of your basic nature. Tell me I'm making it up. You can't do that. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face. What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable."
"I'm comfortable with that."
21/91
Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis
"This is the woman you are inside the life. Looking at you, what? I'm more excited than I've been since the first burning nights of adolescent frenzy. Excited and confused. I look at you and feel an erection stirring even as the situation argues strenuously against it."
"It can't afford to be hard. It won't allow itself psychologically," she said. "It knows what's going on back there."
"All the same. Days like this. I look at you and feel electric. Tell me you don't feel it too. The minute you sat there in that whole tragic regalia of running. That whole sad
Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis
skeptical, adversarial, aloof, with a gift for sustained complaint. Here, she was a single running mother in a foldout seat, knock-kneed and touchingly, somehow, gaunt. A splash of hair lay moist and flat on her forehead, showing the first faint veining of gray. The water bottle dangled from a lank hand.
She did not recede from his gaze. She made complete eye contact. Her clavicle showed knobby above the droop of her tank top. He wanted to lick the sweat off the inside of her wrist. She was wrists and shinbones and unbalmed lips.
"There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now,"
she said. "Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing."
When Nevius did the finger, it was in and out in seconds. Ingram was probing for some murky fact. Jane was the fact. She had the bottle in her crotch, knees flopped outward now, and watched him.
Her mouth was open, showing large gapped teeth. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings that also encompassed these meanings, pity, affinity, tenderness, the whole physiology of neural maneuver, of heartbeat and secretion, some vast sexus of arousal drawing him toward her, complicatedly, with Ingram's finger up his ass.
"So the whole economy convulses," she said, "because the man took a breath."
He felt these things. He felt the pain. It traveled the pathways. It informed the ganglion and spinal cord. He was here in his body, the structure he wanted to dismiss in theory even when he was shaping it under the measured effect of barbells and weights. He wanted to judge it redundant and transferable.
It was convertible to wave arrays of information. It was the thing he watched on the oval screen when he wasn't watching Jane.
"You grip the water bottle."
"It's that soft type plastic."
"You grip it. You choke it."
"It's a matter-of-fact thing."
"It's sexual tension."
"It's everyday nervousness in a life."
"It's sexual tension," he said.
He told Ingram to reach over with his free hand and fish the sunglasses out of the suit jacket on the hanger nearby. The associate managed to do this. Eric put on the glasses.
"Days like this."
"What?" she said.
"My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. That's why you have to run, to escape the drift of your basic nature. Tell me I'm making it up. You can't do that. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face. What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable."
"I'm comfortable with that."
21/91
Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis
"This is the woman you are inside the life. Looking at you, what? I'm more excited than I've been since the first burning nights of adolescent frenzy. Excited and confused. I look at you and feel an erection stirring even as the situation argues strenuously against it."
"It can't afford to be hard. It won't allow itself psychologically," she said. "It knows what's going on back there."
"All the same. Days like this. I look at you and feel electric. Tell me you don't feel it too. The minute you sat there in that whole tragic regalia of running. That whole sad
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