Players

by Don DeLillo

  He was sandy-haired and tall, his firm’s youngest partner. Although he’d never worn glasses, someone or other was always asking what had happened to them. A quality of self-possession, maybe, of near-effeteness, implied the suitability of glasses. Some of the same people, and others, watching him shake a cigarette out of the pack, asked him when he’d started smoking. Lyle was secretly hurt by these defects of focus or memory on the part of acquaintances. The real deficiency, somehow, he took to be his.

  There was a formality about his movements, a tiller-distinct precision. He rarely seemed to hurry, even on the trading floor, but this was deceptive, a result of steady pace, the driftless way he maneuvered through a room. His body was devoid of excess. He had no chest hair, nothing but downy growth on his arms and legs. His eyes were grayish and mild, conjuring distances. This pale stare, the spareness of his face, its lack of stark lines, the spaces in his manner made people feel he would be hard to know.

  The old man was outside Federal Hall again, leaky-eyed and grizzled, holding his sign up over his head—the banks, the tanks, the corporations. The sign had narrow wooden slats fastened to each vertical border, making it relatively steady in the breeze, when there was a breeze. Lyle crossed diagonally toward the Exchange. The air was smothering already. By the close of trading, people would be looking for places to hide. In the financial district everything tended to edge beyond acceptability. The tight high buildings held things in, cross-reflecting heat, channeling oceanic gusts all winter long. It was a test environment for extreme states of mind as well. Every day the outcasts were in the streets, women with junk carts, a man dragging a mattress, ordinary drunks slipping in from the dock areas, from construction craters near the Hudson, people without shoes, amputees and freaks, men splitting off from groups sleeping in fish crates under the highway and limping down past the slips and lanes, the helicopter pad, onto Broad Street, living rags. Lyle thought of these people as infiltrators in the district. Elements filtering in. Nameless arrays of existence. The use of madness and squalor as texts in the denunciation of capitalism did not strike him as fitting here, despite appearances. It was something else these men and women had come to mean, shouting, trailing vomit on their feet. The sign-holder outside Federal Hall was not part of this. He was in context here, professing clearly his opposition.

  Lyle made small talk with the others at his booth. The chart for a baseball pool was taped to the wall above a telephone. The floor began to fill. People generally were cheerful. There was sanity here, even at the wildest times. It was all worked out. There were rules, standards and customs. In the electronic clatter it was possible to feel you were part of a breath-takingly intricate quest for order and elucidation, for identity among the constituents of a system. Everyone reconnoitered toward a balance. After the cries of the floor brokers, the quotes, the bids, the cadence and peal of an auction market, there was always a final price, good or bad, a leveling out of the world’s creaturely desires. Floor members were down-to-earth. They played practical jokes. They didn’t drift beyond the margins of things. Lyle wondered how much of the world, the place they shared a lucid view of, was still his to live in.

  Moments before noon something happened near post 12. To Lyle it seemed at first an indistinct warp, a collapse in pattern. He perceived a rush, unusual turbulence, people crowding and looking around. He realized the sharp noise he’d heard seconds earlier was gunfire. He thought: small arms. There was another burst of activity, this one more ragged, at post 4, nearer Lyle, not far from the entrance to the blue room annex. People were shouting, a few individuals, uncertainly, their voices caught in a hail of polite surprise. He saw the first clear action, men moving quickly through the crowd, sideways, skipping between people, trying to hand-force a path. They were chasing someone. He approached the entrance to the blue room. Total confusion in there. A guard brushed by him. It was not possible to run in this gathering. Everyone moving quickly went sideways or three-quarters, in little hop-steps. The electronic gong sounded. At the far end of the room he saw heads bobbing above the crowd, a line of them, the chasers. The people in the blue room didn’t know where to look. A young woman, a messenger in a blue smock, covered her mouth with the piece of paper she’d been taking somewhere. Lyle turned and went over to post 12. There was a body. Someone was giving mouth-to-mouth. Blood spread over the victim’s chest. Lyle saw a man step back from a small inching trickle on the floor. Everyone here was attentive. A stillness had washed up. It was the calmest pocket on the floor right now.

  Later that afternoon he had a drink with Frank McKechnie in a bar not far from the Exchange. McKechnie was beginning to look like some crime czar’s personal chauffeur. He was stocky, grayer by the day, and his clothing could barely resist the surge of firmness and girth that had been taking place these past few years. They smoked quietly for a moment, looking into rows of bottles. McKechnie had ordered two cold draft beers, stressing cold, almost belligerent about it.

  “What do we know?”

  “George Sedbauer.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar,” Lyle said.

  “I knew George. George was an interesting guy. He could charm people. Charm the ass off anybody. But he had this thing, this almost gift for complications. He would find ways to get into trouble. If a way didn’t exist, he’d invent one. He was in trouble with the Board more than once. George was likable but you never knew where he was.”

  “Until now.”

  “You know now.”

  “I heard they caught up to the guy down on Bridge Street or somewhere?”

  “They got him in the bond room. He never made it out to the street.”

  “I heard street.”

  “He made it no further than the bond room,” McKechnie said. “Whoever told you Bridge Street, tell him he’s spinning a web of lies.”

  “I heard he made it out.”

  “Sheer fantasy.”

  “A trail of deceit, is that it?”

  “What did you hear about his identity?”

  “Nothing,” Lyle said.

  “That’s good, because there’s nothing to hear. That anybody’s heard of, he never existed before today. Hey, when the hell are you coming up to have dinner with us with your goddamn spouse and all?”

  “We never seem to get out.”

  “My wife is still with the tests.”

  “We seem to have trouble getting out. We’re not organized. She’s as bad as I am. One of these days we’ll get organized enough.”

  “You sure you’re married, Lyle? There’s talk you got something going with so many women in so many places, you couldn’t possibly have a wife too. I hear talk.”

  Lyle blinked into his beer, smiling lightly.

  “He had a visitor’s badge, I understand.”

  “Correct,” McKechnie said.

  “Well whose visitor? Obviously that’s the thing.”

  “He was George Sedbauer’s visitor.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “George got him on the floor.”

  “Well you have to wonder if they knew each other why the guy would shoot him right there instead of some side street.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t planned, to shoot him.”

  “They had an argument,” Lyle said.

  “They had an argument and the guy whips out a handgun. Which they recovered, incidentally. A starter’s pistol with the barrel bored out to take twenty-two-caliber ammunition.”

  “How do you have an argument with an outsider on the floor? Who on the floor has time to get into an argument with someone who’s his own guest?”

  “Not everybody with a guest badge is your sister-in-law from East Hartford. Maybe George had interesting friends.”

  With his index finger McKechnie made a wigwag motion over the glasses. The bartender moved their way, talking to someone over his shoulder.

  “You know what it all means, don’t you?”

  “Tell me, Frank.”

  “It means they’ll install
one of those metal detection devices and we’ll all have to walk through it every time we go on the floor. I hate those goddamn things. They can damage your bone marrow. My life is crud enough as it is.”

  3

  Lyle sat by a window at home, in T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, drinking Irish lager.

  Pammy bought fruit at a sidewalk stand. She loved the look of fruit in crates, outdoors, tiers of peaches and grapes. Buying fresh fruit made her feel good. It was an act of moral excellence. She looked forward to taking the grapes home, putting them in a bowl and letting cold water run over the bunches. It gave her such pleasure, hefting one of the bunches in her hand, feeling the water come cooling through. Then there were peaches. The earthly merit of peaches.

  Lyle remembered having seen some pennies in the bedroom. He went in there. Ten minutes later he found them, three, sitting on a copper-and-brown Kleenex box. He heard Pam take the keys out of her purse. He stacked the pennies on the dresser. Transit tokens on the right side of the dresser. Pennies on the left. He went back to the window.

  Pammy had to put down the bag of fruit before she could get the door opened. She remembered what had been bothering her, the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother. She tended to forget about it. When she recalled what it was that had been on her mind, she felt satisfied at having remembered and relieved that it was nothing worse. She pushed into the apartment.

  “There she is.”

  “Hi, you’re home.”

  “What’s in that big wet funny bag?”

  “I may not show you.”

  “Fruit.”

  “I got you some cantaloupe.”

  “Do I like cantaloupe, he asked,” Lyle said.

  “And these plums, can you believe them?”

  “Who’ll eat all that? You never eat any. You eat a little bit when you take it out of the bag and then that’s it, Chiquita. In the fruit thing to shrivel.”

  “You like plums.”

  “Then you say it’s for me, look what I got you, world’s greatest tangerine, glom glom.”

  “Well I think fruit’s pretty.”

  “In the fruit bin to shrivel up like fetuses.”

  “Where’s my beer?” she said.

  He had a look on his face, supposedly an imitation of her virtuous-fruit look, that made her laugh. She moved through the apartment, taking off clothes, putting the fruit away, getting cheese and crackers. There were pieces of her everywhere. Lyle watched, humming something.

  “A guy got killed today on the floor, shot.”

  “What, at the Exchange?”

  “Somebody shot him, out of nowhere.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Ping.”

  “Christ, who? Puerto Ricans again?”

  He reached out when she went by. She moved into him as he rose from the chair. She felt his thumb at the small of her back, slipping inside elastic. She reached behind him to draw the curtains. He sat back down, humming something, arms raised, as she lifted the T-shirt off him.

  “I wouldn’t want to say porta rickens. I wouldn’t want to say coloreds or any of the well-meaning white folks who have taken up the struggle against the struggle, not knowing, you see, that the capitalist system and the power structure and the pattern of repression are themselves a struggle. It’s not an easy matter, being the oppressor. A lot of work involved. Hard dogged unglamorous day-to-day toil. Pounding the pavement. Checking records and files. Making phone call after phone call. Successful oppression depends on this. So I would say in conclusion that they are struggling against the struggle. But I wouldn’t want to say porta rickens, commanists, what-have-you. It be no bomb, remember. It be a gun, ping.”

  Pammy and Lyle, undressed, were face to face on the white bed, kneeling, hands on each other’s shoulders, in flat light, dimming in tenths of seconds. The room was closed off to the street’s sparse evening, the hour of thoughtful noises, when everything is interim. The air conditioner labored, an uphill tone. There were intermittent lights in the distance, high-tension streaks. With each discharge a neutral tint, a residue, as of cooled ash, penetrated the room. Pammy and Lyle began to touch. They knew the shifting images of physical similarity. It was an unspoken bond, part of their shared consciousness, the mined silence between people who live together. Curling across each other’s limbs and silhouettes they seemed repeatable, daughter cells of some precise division. Their tongues drifted over wetter flesh. It was this divining of moisture, an intuition of nature submerged, that set them at each other, nipping, in eager searches. He tasted vinegar in her spinning hair. They parted a moment, touched from a studied distance, testing introspectively, a complex exchange. He left the bed to turn off the air conditioner and raise the window. Evening was recharged and fragrant. Thunder sounded right over them. The best things about summer were these storms, filling a room, almost medicinally, with weather, with variable light. Rain struck the window in pellets. They could see trees out back take the stiff winds. Lyle had gotten wet, opening the window, his hands and belly, and they waited for him to dry, talking in foreign accents about a storm they’d driven through in the Alps somewhere, laughing in “Portuguese” and “Dutch.” She twisted into him, their solitude become a sheltering in this rain. They lost contact for a moment. She brought him back, needing that conflict of surfaces, the palpable logic of his cock inside her. Then she was gripping hard, released to the contagion of recurring motion, rising, as they ached and played, sunny as young tigers.

  It is time to “perform,” he thought. She would have to be “satisfied.” He would have to “service” her. They would make efforts to “interact.”

  When he was sure they were finished he moved away, feeling the barest spray of rain after it hit the window ledge. On their backs they reorganized their breathing. She wanted pizza. It made her feel guilty not to want fruit. But she’d worked all day, taken elevators and trains. She couldn’t deal with the consequences of fruit, its perishability, the duty involved in eating it. She wanted to sit in a corner, alone, and stuff herself with junk.

  She is padding to the bathroom, he thought.

  It grew darker. She sat at the foot of the bed, dressing. The rain slackened. She heard the Mister Softee truck down in the street. It announced itself with recorded music, a sound she hated, the same cranked-out mechanical whine every night. She couldn’t hear that noise without feeling severe mental oppression. To indicate this, she made a low droning sound, the tremulous m that meant she was on the edge of something.

  “There really is a Mister Softee.”

  “I believe,” she said.

  “He sits in the back of the truck. That’s him making the noise. It’s not music on a record or tape. That’s his mouth. It’s coming out of his mouth. That’s his language. They speak that way in the back of ice cream trucks all over the city. I won’t say nation yet. It hasn’t spread.”

  “A local phenomenon.”

  “He sits back there dribbling. He’s very fat and pastelike. He can’t get up. His flesh doesn’t have the right consistency.”

  “He has no genitals.”

  “They’re in there somewhere.”

  “Kidding aside, let’s talk,” she said.

  She crawled along the bed, wearing a shirt and jeans, and settled next to him, pressing contentedly. He made a sound, then started to bite her head. She scratched lightly at his ribs.

  “Better watch.”

  “I bite heads for a living.”

  “Better watch, you. I know where and how to strike.”

  He made gulping sounds. This seemed to interest him more than most noises he made. He evolved chokes and gasps out of the original sound. He began to drown or suffocate, making convulsive attempts to breathe. Pammy answered the phone on the fourth or fifth ring, as she always did, either, he thought, because she considered it chic, or just to annoy him. It was Ethan Segal. He and Jack were dropping over. What do we have to drink?

  Lyle called
Dial-a-Steak. By the time the food arrived, everyone was a little drunk. Ethan shuffled to the table, a chess-playing smile on his face. They sat down, having brought their drinks with them, and began to strip aluminum foil from the steak, the salad, the potatoes, the bread, the salt and pepper.

  “It’s Jack’s birthday.”

  No one said anything.

  “I’m thirty.”

  “Welcome to Death Valley,” Lyle said.

  “I feel different.”

  “But none the wiser,” Ethan said.

  “I used to think thirty was so old. I’d meet people who were thirty and I’d think God, thirty.”

  “Wait till you’re fortyish,” Ethan said. “All hell breaks loose for about ten minutes. Then you begin to grow old quietly. It’s not bad, really. You begin wearing house slippers to the theater and people think you’re some unbelievably interesting man about to get written up in What’s Happening, you know, or People Are Talking About, in Vogue or some such.”

  “We forgot to open the wine,” Jack said.

  “At what specific time,” Pammy said, “does one become fortyish?”

  “Wine, Lyle.”

  “We’re out. There is no wine. Our cellar was auctioned off to pay taxes on the estate.”

  “We brought wine,” Jack said. “We came with wine.”

  “There is no wine, Jack. You’re free to look around.”

  “It’s in the cab,” Ethan said.

  Jack said: “The cab.”

  “We left it in the cab. I remember distinctly that we had it when we got in the cab and I don’t recall seeing it after that.”

  “Because you drank it,” Pammy said.

  “Because I drank the wine in the cab.”

  “Do I hear diet cola?” Jack said.

  They were talking quickly and getting laughs on intonation alone, the prospect of wit. This isn’t really funny, Lyle thought. It seems funny because we’re getting half smashed. But nobody’s really saying funny things. Tomorrow she’ll say what a funny night and I’ll say it just seemed funny and she’ll give me a look. She’ll give me a look—he saw the look but did not express it in verbal form, going on to the next spaceless array, a semi-coherent framework of atomic “words.” But I’ll know I’m right because I’m making this mental note right now to remind myself tomorrow that we’re not really being funny.