by Don DeLillo
“Our whole division moves to London in March.”
“Sudden.”
“Hostile oil, both sides.”
“Not that many options.”
“We had to facilitate,” Hardeman said.
Janet wore a skirt, blouse and cardigan but her makeup was intact, shadows, penciled outlines, arcs and bands of color, a little eerie in the muted light, on a face that was a clear work of household prose. She was happy in a certain way, as someone is happy who learns that her motives are not complicated after all.
“It was unexpected,” Lindsay said. “I never thought it would get this far.”
“I know, it’s crazy. I saw an opening and just went for it.”
“You were good.”
“My bellywork isn’t very advanced. I have a lot of work to do on what we call hip isolation. I’m way too conscious of what I’m doing.”
“What a surprise,” Lindsay said, “to walk in like that and look who’s up there dancing.”
“People are kind,” Janet said. “It’s sort of an extended tryout.”
“Haven’t seen jack,” David said, looking at the woman with carefully measured concern.
“Jack’s in the Emirates.”
“The budget problem. Right, correct.”
“I do things by rote,” she said to Lindsay. “That’s the only way I can do things. People seem to understand.”
“Well you were good. I thought you were good.”
Lindsay and I listened to her analyze her body in objective terms. I tried to work up a salacious interest, I schemed at it in fact, but she was artless, open and bland, so detached from the murmurous subcurrents, the system of images, that I gave it up. In the end this would become her appeal, her arousing power, this very deadness of intent.
A waiter brought drinks, the musicians returned. I liked the noise, the need to talk loud, to lean into people’s faces and enunciate. This was the true party, just beginning, a shouted dialogue lacking sense and purpose. I huddled next to Janet, asking questions about her life, easing my way into her consciousness. Slowly we evolved a mood of curious intimacy, a sympathetic exchange made of misunderstood remarks, our heads nodding in the painted smoke.
I was aware of Lindsay’s amused disapproval. It spurred me on, it was sexy, the Mainland wives protecting each other from public shame. The two men played a game with Tunisian coins.
“I have to get to know you, Janet.”
“I’m not even sure who you are. I don’t think I have it quite straight, who belongs to what at this table.”
“I like it when women call me James.”
“I don’t do this,” she said.
“You don’t do what? I love the way you move.”
“You know what I mean.”
“We’re only talking.” Moving my lips, soundlessly.
“Only talking?”
“It’s those wavelike ripples across your belly when you dance. Say belly. I want to watch your lips.”
“No, honest, I don’t do this.”
“I know you don’t, I know you don’t.”
“Do you really because it’s important to me. And with people here I don’t want to give the wrong impression.”
“Lindsay is special. She’s good people.”
“I like Lindsay, I really do.”
“They’ll leave soon. Then you and I can really talk.”
“I don’t want to really talk. It’s the last thing I want to do.”
Folk dancers linking hands across their bodies moved sideways on the small stage.
“Your lipstick is cracked in places, which only heightens the effect. I could hardly breathe while you were up there. You were imperfect, even deeply flawed, but what a heartrending American body, how acutely moving. Say thighs. I want to watch your tongue curl up in your painted mouth.”
“I don’t do this, James.”
“When women call me James, it gives me an image of myself. It affords me an image. Grown-up. At last, I think, I am grown up. She is calling me James. You have gorgeous long legs, Janet. That’s rare today. The way your legs emerged from that silky garment, one at a time, bent ever so slightly. Sheer. A sheer garment.”
“I really have to leave.”
“Because at heart, down deep, I’m still twenty-two years old.”
“Honest, I can’t stay.”
“How old are you, down deep?”
“Lindsay’s going to think whatever.”
“One more drink. We’ll talk about your body. It’s supple, for starters. It has a married poignancy that single carefree bodies can’t even begin to suggest. The suppleness is hard-won. I love your ass.”
“This means nothing to me.”
“I know.”
“If I thought you were serious I’d probably laugh in your face.”
“You’re shielding yourself from the truth. Because you know I’m serious. And I know you know it. I have to have you, Janet. Don’t you see how you affect me?”
“No. I totally do not.”
“Say breasts. Say tongue.”
“We were two years in Brussels, three and a half years in Rome, a year back in New York and now a year and a half so far in Greece and no one has ever talked to me this way.”
“I want you. It’s no longer a question of choice, a question of actual wanting. We’ve gone beyond that. You know it, I know it. I want what’s inside that cardigan, that skirt. What kind of panties are you wearing? If you don’t tell me, I’ll reach right under there and pull them off your legs. Then I’ll put them in my pocket. They’l1 be mine. That vivid and intimate thing, that object.”
Lindsay, turned away from us toward the stage, was still our listener, our auditor, and in everything we said there was acknowledgment of this, although she couldn’t hear a word, of course, through the flutes and bouzoukis. A dancer leaped, struck his black boot with the palm of his hand, in midair, slapped it hard.
“Here’s what I want to say about your makeup.”
“No, please.”
“It’s compelling without being sexy or lurid. That’s the odd thing. It’s a statement of some sort, isn’t it? The body is supple, open, airy and free. The face is masked, almost bitterly masked. I’m not the kind of man who tells women who they are or what they mean, so we’ll just let it lay, we’ll let it rest, the face, the mask, the cracked scarlet.”
“I don’t do this. What am I doing listening to this? Not to mention I have to go to the ladies room.”
“Let me go with you. I want to. Please.”
“I’m not so indecisive I can’t get up and go home. It’s just a sleepiness that keeps me here.”
“I know. I know exactly.”
“Are you sleepy too?”
“That’s it exactly. A sleepiness.”
She put a hand to my face, briefly, and looked at me with a strange sympathy, an understanding of something that applied to us both. Then she went downstairs, where the toilets were.
I looked diagonally across the table to see the great Balkan head of Andreas Eliades. He sat talking to Hardeman. Remember. We’d sat with four glasses of brandy in that seaside taverna, waiting for David and Lindsay to come up from the beach. Hardeman’s name, Hardeman’s plane, a sandstorm in Cairo. In the passing of time, that night seemed to deepen its weave. It was like a mingled reminiscence I carried with me, the selective memories of those who were there. Moments kept coming back to me, precise textures, the brand names of cigarettes, the old guitarist’s eyes, his seamed brown hand, and what the Bordens said, and who plucked a grape from the wet bunch, and where people sat, how we rearranged ourselves around the table as the evening passed through its own solid objects to become what it is now. Eliades seemed more and more the means of some connection.
We nodded to each other and I made a scattered gesture to indicate I didn’t know what I was doing in a place like this. I realized Lindsay was looking at me. She sat straight across from me, an empty chair on either side of her. Andreas was at t
he far end, facing Hardeman, who had moved.
I said to Andreas, “We keep running into each other.”
He shrugged, I shrugged.
David was between Hardeman and me. Janet’s chair was to my left. Where people sat seemed important to me, although I didn’t know why.
“Don’t stare,” I said to Lindsay. “It makes me feel you’re making up your mind about something.”
“About going home,” she said. “Whose idea was this anyway?”
“Somebody wanted to see Greek dancing.”
Andreas asked her whether she was learning verbs. Another memory, a fragment of that summer night. They tried to chat politely through the amplified sound. David leaned my way to fix me with a sad-eyed look.
“We haven’t talked,” he said.
“I know.”
“I wanted to talk. We never get to talk.”
“We’ll talk soon. We’ll talk tomorrow. We’ll have lunch.”
When he and Lindsay were gone I didn’t move closer to the two men and when Janet Ruffing came back to the table she sat in Lindsay’s chair. It was like a board game. Two sets of people facing each other, two sets of empty chairs. Hardeman ordered another round.
“They’re talking business,” I said to her. “Shipments, tonnage.”
“Who is the bearded man?”
“Business. A businessman.”
“He looks like one of those priests.”
“He’s having an affair with Ann Maitland, probably. Do you know her?”
“Why would you tell me something like that?”
“I’d tell you anything tonight. There are no strategies. I mean it. I’d tell you anything, I’d do anything for you.”
“But why?”
“The way you danced.”
“But you said I wasn’t very good.”
“The way you moved, your legs, your breasts, what you are. Never mind technique. What you are, how pleased you were with yourself.”
“But I don’t think that’s true.”
“How pleased you were. I insist on that.”
“I almost think in a roundabout way you’re trying to bring out my vanity.”
“You’re not vain, you’re hopeful. Vanity is a defensive quality. It contains an element of fear. It’s a look into the future, into wasting away and death.” Another dancer leaped. “I’m at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space. I know things. I know what we’re going to say before we say it.”
“What did Lindsay say?”
“She only looked at me.”
“Are these bank people?”
“Refrigerators.”
“They’re going to wonder what we’re saying.”
“I’d like to walk out of here with your panties in my back pocket. You’d have to follow me, wouldn’t you? I’d like to slip my hand under your blouse and detach your bra. I want to sit here and talk to you knowing I’ve got your bra and panties in my pocket. That’s all I ask. The knowledge of a bareness under your clothes. Knowing that, sitting here talking to you and knowing you were naked under your clothes, this would enable me to live another ten years, this knowledge alone, independent of food and drink. Are you wearing a bra in fact? I’m not one of those men who can tell at a glance. I’ve never had the self-assured powers of observation that would allow me to say that this or that woman was or was not wearing a bra. As a kid I never stood on street corners and estimated cup measurements. There goes a C cup, like that, with total self-assurance.”
“Please. I think I ought to go.”
“Only to put my hands under your clothes. No more than that. What we did as kids, adolescent sex, how happy that would make me. A back room in your family’s summer bungalow. A mildewed room, a darkening, a sudden rain. Move against me, push me off, pull me onto you again. Worried about someone coming back, back from the lake, the yard sale. Worried about everything we’re doing. The rain loosens every fresh smell in the country side. It comes in on us from outdoors, rain-fresh, rain-washed, lovely, sweet-smelling, a chill in the summer air. It’s nature, it’s sex. And you pull me onto you and worry and tell me not to, not to. See how sentimental I am. How cheap and indecent. They’re coming back from the lakeside bar, the one on stilts called Mickey’s Landing, where you wait on tables when you’re feeling bored.”
“But the dancing isn’t sexy to me. It’s not that at all.”
“I know that, I know, it’s part of the point, part of the reason I want you so badly, your long, white and well-meaning body.”
“Oh thanks.”
“Your body has won out over marriage. It’s better for the experience. It’s wildly beautiful. How old are you, thirty-five?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Wearing a cardigan. Is a cardigan what women wear when they don’t want to talk about themselves?”
“How can I talk? This isn’t real to me.”
“You danced. That was real.”
“I don’t do this.”
“You danced. This talk we’re having means nothing to you and everything to me. You danced, I didn’t. I’m trying to return to you some idea of how deeply you affected me, dancing, barefoot, in arm-length gloves, in filmy things, and of how you affect me right now, sitting here, so hard to find under the eyeshadow, the mascara, the lip gloss, the lipstick. The way you sit here unmoved by our talking excites hell out of me.”
“I’m not unmoved.”
“I want to reach you in the most direct of ways. I want you to say to yourself, ‘He is going to do something and I don’t know what it is but I want him to do it.’ Janet.”
We were all drinking Scotch. Andreas still in his raincoat. “Your voice, when you were telling us about your body, about the lessons, the practices, the hips do this, the belly does that, your voice was four inches outside your body, it began at a point about four inches beyond your lips.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“There’s a lack of connection between your words and the physical action they describe, the parts of the body they describe. This is what draws me to you so intensely. I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.”
“How do you do that?” A half smile, skeptical and tired. “By making you see yourself in a different way, I guess. By making you see me, making you feel the heat of my wanting. Do you feel it? Tell me if you do. I want to hear you say it. Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.”
“I can sit and listen to you and I can tell myself this is real and I can tell myself he means it. But it’s just so foreign to me. I don’t know the responses.”
“James. Call me James.”
“Oh shit please.”
“Use names,” I said.
“No more drinks. I don’t do this.”
“Neither one of us wants to go home. We want to put off going home. We want to stay here awhile longer. I’d forgotten what it was like, not wanting to go home. Of course I don’t have to go home. That worrisome small force isn’t pulling at me, as it pulls at you. What is waiting there that you don’t want to face?” We sat awhile, thinking about this. “I’m trying to express what you’re feeling, what we’re both feeling. If I can do that, you may begin to trust me in the deepest way. The way that complicates, that envelops. So that when you want to stop what we’re doing, the shove and force and direction of the whole night, you won’t be able to.”
“I wonder if you would recognize me on the street, tomorrow, without this makeup I’m wearing. Even stranger, I wonder if I would recognize you.”
“The glare would be immense, the broad sunlight. We’d want to run from each other.”
Greeks from the audience were on stage now, dancing, and soon tourists began approaching the edges of the platform, carrying purses with them and shoulder bags and wearing sea captain’s hats, looking back at friends—looks that begged en
couragement for some stupidity they thought they were about to invent.
“They’ll be closing soon,” she said. “l think it’s really time.”
She went upstairs to get her coat. I stood listening to Hardeman talk about maintenance feasibility. Andreas, attending to these remarks, took a card out of some inner pocket and extended it to me without looking up. A simple business card. I offered Hardeman some money, which he waved off, and then Janet and I went into the street.
There wasn’t space to hold the sound. It crowded the night, dense waves of it, heavy with electrified force. It came out of the walls and pavement and wooden doors, the pulse of some undefined event, and we walked up the stepped street, into it, her arm linked with mine.
A man with cowhide bagpipes stood playing in the window of a small taverna. This music was a condition of the air, the weather of these old streets at half past one in the morning, and I edged her into a wall and kissed her. She looked away, her mouth smeared, saying we had to go down the other way, to the bottom of the steps, where the taxis were, if there were any. I pulled her up higher past the cabarets, the last of the Cretan dancers, the last of the singers in open shirts, and held her against the second of the old walls of falling buildings. She looked at me in a near grimace of wondering, a speculation that had the shock of waking about it, of trying to recall a somber dream. Who was he, what were we doing there? I pressed her against the wall, trying to open her coat. She said we had to get a taxi, she had to get home. I put my hand between her legs, over the skirt, and she seemed to sink a little, her head turned against the wall. I tried to get her to hold the edges of my coat to keep us covered, keep us out of the cold, while I worked at my pants. She broke away, running down some steps past a scaffold set against an old building. She ran holding her handbag by the strap and well away from her body as if it held something she thought might spill on her. She turned a corner and went uphill now, into an empty street. When I reached her and put my arms around her from behind she stood motionless. I moved my hands down her belly over the skirt and placed my knees behind hers, making her bend slightly, dip into me. She said something, then shook away and walked out of the dim light toward the wall. I pressed her against the wall. The music was far away and fading by degrees as places closed. I kissed her, lifted her skirt. Voices below us, a laughing man.