Players

by Don DeLillo

  The place was crowded. There were no empty tables and they couldn’t get near the bar. He didn’t know this area well. He didn’t know what was around. It had been there all day, this unfinished space, a negative awareness. He reached in for their drinks and worked his way toward her. She stood near the door, legs crossed at the ankles. He’d meant to put stamps on the envelopes. There were bills inside. He’d written the checks and wanted to get them in the mail. To pay a bill was to seal off the world. The pleasure here was inward-tending, an accumulation of self. Putting stamps on the envelopes was the decisive point. Stamps were emblems of authentication. Her hands were folded in front of her, purse dangling from her wrist. Wolodymyr Koltowski. Shut up, he told himself. The crowd at the bar continued to grow, pressing out toward them. Rosemary didn’t seem to mind.

  It was a challenge to something deeper than virility. To be recognized by this woman, accepted as a distinct and welcome presence in her murky ken, was the end toward which his passions were now directed.

  They rode out over the bridge and onto Queens Boulevard. They got out of the cab and walked north half a block. It was still light. She lived on the ground floor of a row house with a corrugated aluminum awning outside and webbed beach chairs stacked in the hallway.

  There were three small rooms and a large kitchen. Until he wandered into the kitchen he saw nothing he might identify with Rosemary as occupant of the place—Rosemary Moore as opposed to someone he’d never seen before, or talked to, or wanted to touch, another woman entirely, or a man dressed as a woman, snatching him out of a dark hallway into this square bag of space, these shades of gray and beige. There was no feeling of individual history, the narrative in things, habits intact in one’s belongings.

  In the kitchen he stood before a large corkboard. Pinned there were ticket stubs, menus, matchbook covers, photos of Rosemary with various people. The echoes of her self-absorption converged here, apparently. In one photo she sat on a sofa between two men. There was no one else in the picture but Lyle suspected that others (besides the photographer) were present in the room. One man’s sidelong glance, the other’s half-sheepish mien indicated the possibility of onlookers. The man being sheepish was George Sedbauer, heavy-set and balding. Lyle had seen news photos of him after the shooting. Of course he’d also seen him dead, although he wouldn’t have been able to identify Sedbauer from those scattered glimpses on the floor. Rosemary handed him a drink. It had only two ice cubes in it. It wouldn’t be cold enough. He wanted a cold drink. He realized, incredibly, that he’d forgotten what he was going to ask her. He had to work his way back to it.

  “That’s George, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s with him?”

  “That’s me in the middle. That’s somebody Vilas or Vilar. I think it was on a weekend. We went to Lake Placid? It was supposed to be to ski. That’s the lobby where we stayed. Or that’s the room. I think that was someone’s room.”

  “Who’s somebody Vilas?”

  “That’s the man who shot George.”

  “Interesting,” he remarked.

  “He was around a lot sometimes. Other times you never saw him for long periods.”

  “I think that’s interesting, said the wide-eyed young man.”

  “George didn’t ski. That was it. When we got all the way up there, George hated snow.”

  Unsure of something, she’d narrow her eyes and gaze into space. She gestured slowly. Her face betrayed the barest abandonment when she turned to find him staring. It was necessary, he knew, to talk to her about herself. She was tall, more pale than fair, walking in a somber frost.

  To be alone with her was to occupy the immediate center of things. There were no gradations to this kind of desire. Everything turned on the point of her chalk image. It would be essential to talk awhile. He would find his way to her through this process of filling in.

  “This drink needs about eleven more ice cubes.”

  “I don’t think you can stay too long.”

  “Let’s sit in the living room. I’m a living-room fanatic. I’m a buff, really. I have this thing. Without a living room around I’m dead, just about.”

  The sensual pleasure of banality was a subject worth the deepest investigation. He lingered in the kitchen to watch her walk into the next room. He sat facing her, ten feet away, knowing she would cross her legs. There were cigarettes and liquor, absolute necessities when he was with her. He tried to limit his remarks to tapered extensions of predictable types. He was working toward a pure state, some embryonic science of desire, perhaps to be known as reciprocal hypnotism. When she spoke he concentrated every effort on creating a face that would return to her not only a sense of what she’d said but of the person speaking, Rosemary Moore in a camisole dress. He moved to the sofa, settling in next to her. Together they would craft the branding instrument of character.

  “When I was flying,” she said, “I was always sleeping too little or too much. I used to sleep whole days sometimes. This is a little more regular. But I don’t know how interesting it’ll wind up being. There isn’t enough to do. I have to see if I’m going to stay. The people are pretty nice, though. Not like this job with buyers that I had. That was insane. They would shout into the phone. I don’t like when people do that.”

  He took the glass out of her hand and put it on the end table next to his own drink. She moved her head briefly, shaking hair out of her eyes or ending one sequence of encounter to begin another. The second he touched her, touch turned to grip.

  8

  Pammy put tap shoes and tights into her shoulder bag. The class was on West Fourteenth Street, two evenings a week, eight-thirty to ten. In charge was Nan Fryer, a woman with brittle hair and a scar across one side of her jaw. There were as many as forty people there some nights. The studio was rented from a theater group called Dynamic Tranquillity. Nan was a member of the group and she attributed her prowess in tap to ethical systems of discipline.

  “Hop, you’re not hopping. Shuf-ful, shuf-ful.”

  Pammy danced before a mirror at the back of the room. Her body was suited to tights, one of the few such bodies in evidence. She was practicing a routine that involved a precarious off-balance change. Pammy loved tap. She had dancing feet, it appeared. A born hoofer. Arms flung up, toes crackling, heels beating out a series of magnetic stresses, she repeatedly sought a particular cadence, the single instance of lucidity that would lift her into some dizzy sphere of ecstasy and sweat. Tap was so crisp when done correctly, so pleasing to one’s sense of the body as a coordinated organism able to make its own arithmetic.

  Nan Fryer clapped her hands, bringing the tapping to a halt. People drooped somewhat, bodies throbbing. The men in class were dressed variously, from track suits to routine casual wear. Most of the women wore tights or flared slacks. Nan walked among them, talking. She wore silver shoes, cut-off jeans and a Dynamic Tranquillity T-shirt. It was an outfit that made her facial scar appear all the more tragic.

  “I like your breathing. You’re all breathing so well. This is important in that we’re concerned with movement and the forces affecting movement. There are areas and awarenesses in you that tap makes accessible. You are accessible to yourself. Notice how calm you’re getting. Little by little, deeper and deeper. Unblock your nervous systems. Believe in your breathing. This is so essential to getting the most out of tap. When I first came to tap, I thought it was just a ticky tacky dance. It can be so much more. Movement and force. Force and energy. Energy and peace. You are a free person for the first time in that your whole body is aware of the physical and moral universe.”

  Pammy looked out a window at the back of the room. Traffic moved swiftly. There were flushes of sunset in a glass door across the street, a bargain shop. Her hands were over her ears.

  “Okay, kids, crossover time.”

  The rest of the session Pammy danced intently, cracking down on her heels, definitive contact. She worked awhile on the intermediate routine, step numbe
r two, moving sideways across the face of the mirror to confront a radiator and pipes. Nan played an old show tune on the phonograph and danced a set of advanced combinations. The students formed a circle around her. Soon they were all dancing, trying to duplicate the complex floor patterns, tapping, swaying, elbowing out into some private space to strut awhile, quietly, on the hardwood floor.

  “Do not tight-ten. Com-plete loose-ness. Re-lax ank-les, Arnold Mas-low, do not tight-ten.”

  Lyle stood in a phone booth in Grand Central waiting for McKechnie to pick up and watching people heading for their trains, skidding along, their shoulders collapsed—a day’s work, a drink or two causing subtle destruction, a rumpling beyond the physical, all moving through constant sourceless noise, mouths slightly open, the fish of cities.

  “You’re sure it’s not too late.”

  “Lyle, say what you want to say.”

  “The other day we talked about George Sedbauer. Who shot him, so on, so forth. Well remember you mentioned this secretary of Zeltner’s one time? She knows a little about this. I got to know her a little. She first of all knew Sedbauer. She knew the man or knows the man who shot him. That’s the key thing. There’s a photograph. I saw it. And she knows about the gun, what kind of gun, but the gun she could have read in the paper. The key thing is the man who did the shooting. She knows him. Should somebody be told about this? Or what, Frank?”

  “You saw this picture.”

  “They were in it. George, her, the guy. Unless she’s inventing. But why would she invent?”

  “I want you to talk to a friend of mine,” McKechnie said. “I’ll have him get in touch with you. Yeah, we’d better do that.”

  Ethan and Jack came over the next evening with meat loaf leftovers. They all went up to the roof, where management had laid slate over the tar and provided four picnic tables (chained to the walls) and several evergreen shrubs in large planters. Lyle arrived last, carrying drinks on a tray.

  “I didn’t know this was up here,” Jack said.

  “It’s to give Pammy a look at the World Trade Center whenever she’s depressed. That gets her going again.”

  “I want to drink something classic,” Ethan said. “None of this tequila business. What is that, tequila? I’ve decided to live after all. No more poison pinwheels.”

  “A bit of poetry, that,” Pammy said. “Here, somebody serve. Give me a small piece. Are we eating or drinking? I’m confused and we’re just getting started.”

  “What’s that?” Jack said. “Is that the Municipal Building? Is that, what, the Woolworth Building? You can’t see that far from here, can you?”

  “If you’d brought wine I could give you something classic. I could give you wine.”

  “We brought meat loaf. Who else brings meat loaf?”

  “You left the wine in the cab, I take it, from past experience.”

  “We had this cabdriver coming up here,” Jack said. “No spikka da English too good. Tried to come up here via Chinatown.”

  “Ah so.”

  “Threats of bodily harm,” Ethan said.

  “Who’s what here? I’d like some bread with this. No, I wouldn’t. Forget that. Cancel that order, waiter. I’m a dancer now. Austerity is my life. What’s it called—an austere regimen. I will accept a drink, however, if one of you turdnagels will pass me a glass, being careful at all times, these being new and extremely high-priced drinking vessels.”

  “This salad’s fabulous.”

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  “A salad among salads,” Ethan said.

  “Lyle tossed it.”

  “Loud and prolonged applause.”

  “I tossed it.”

  “Meaning to ask, Lyle, what’s happening on the street?”

  “The street of streets.”

  “Have you been declared officially antiquated or what? Are you viable, Lyle? We all want to know. Will there be a floor to trade on in the near future? Or does it all pass into the mists of history, ladies and gentlemen, and you are there.”

  “I vote for the mists of history. But who knows, really? There’s an awful strong argument for the membership’s point of view. But the current’s the other way.”

  “Really, you’d haul it all down?”

  “It’s not hauling it down. It’s opening it up. Of course you don’t know exactly what it is you’re opening up. That’s the trouble with currents.”

  “They can take you right over the falls.”

  “Right over the falls and your barrel too.”

  “Should we be worried?” Ethan said.

  “Pick an opening and move right in. That’s the only, you know, method of, whatever—maintaining some kind of self-determination, a specific presence. Out into the streets, clerks of history, package-wrappers. Freedom, freedom.”

  “You’ve learned your lesson well, Spartacus.”

  It was nearly dark. Lyle went down for more liquor and ice. He dialed Rosemary’s number. No one answered. In the kitchen he moved past a glass cabinet and realized there was a flaw in his likeness. Something unfamiliar in the middle of his face. At the same time he felt dampness there. He went into the bathroom. It was his nose, bleeding. He held some tissue there until the flow diminished. Then he put a box of Kleenex on the tray, along with tequila, vodka, bitter lemon and ice, and went back up to the roof. Someone was at one of the other tables. It was a small boy wearing a straw fedora. He stood against the chair, eyes averted. Lyle sensed that the others were watching him to measure the comic dimensions of his reaction to the boy. He walked toward them, looking out over the umbrella that was set into the table. Deliberately he placed the tray down, moving objects out of the way with calculated disdain. They waited for him to say something. He sat, moving slowly as possible. His nose started bleeding again. This became the joke, of course. It was funnier than anything he could have said. He inserted a tissue in his nostril and let it hang there, his expression one of weary forbearance.

  “His mother left him,” Jack said. “She’d come right back. You leave kids on roofs?”

  “He’s a forties kid,” Pammy said.

  “But that hat, I can’t believe.”

  “He’s a forties kid. He’s got a two-toned little suit. I bet he never grows up. He’ll stay three feet something. He’ll smoke a little pipe and never go anywhere without that hat and two-toned suit. His name will be Bert Follett and I’d like to marry him. I’d also like a white wine with club soda please.”

  “Where am I supposed to get it?”

  “Wherever it is. It exists, that’s all. Existentially you should be able to get it.”

  “She’s such a snarly nymphet,” Ethan said. “Isn’t she at times? In the office they fear her on sight.”

  “Oh, she’s a proper moll, she is.”

  “Take the Kleenex out of your nose.”

  “Nose, what, who … he trailed off.”

  They finished the meat loaf. Pammy went over to talk to the boy. They had a pleasant conversation about dogs in the neighborhood. Her attentions made him glow a little. She felt he was aware of the whole scene, not just their talk. He was enjoying himself as part of it. Child among adults. Cute suit. The ambiance. His mother came to take him away and Pammy rejoined the others.

  “I’m saying this is it,” Lyle said, “and we don’t know what it means. It’s collapsed right in on us. It’s ahead of schedule. Look who’s back looking a little sick about something. It’s backed into us. It’s here.”

  “Vales of time and space.”

  “If I had a mother like that,” Jack said, “I’d hang around on rooftops too. I do anyway, hubba hubba.”

  “What is this, tequila?” Ethan said. “I don’t want this. Take it away, someone. If this is tequila and if I’m drinking it, there’s something seriously amiss.”

  “That plane looks like it’s going to hit.”

  “I think I’m sick, guys.”

  “I wanted so very much for us to be brilliant together this evening.”

/>   “I think I may blow my cookies any minute.”

  “I was sure it would hit,” Jack said.

  “I don’t want to blame the meat loaf but there’s something happening in my stomach that’s not supposed to.”

  “She’s going to blow her cookies, Lyle. Get her out of here.”

  “If we had something brilliant to drink perhaps. Too long I’ve accepted second best.”

  “Lyle, you smoke? I didn’t know you smoked. When did you start smoking?”

  In the bathroom mirror he watched the blood seep out. It was pretty in a way. It came so slowly, an idealized flow, no sense at all of some impelling force. He watched it fill the indentation above his lip. The color of his blood intrigued him, its meaty bloom, a near sheen of the gayest sap imaginable. He held his head back, finally, until the bleeding stopped, then went into the kitchen, where Pammy stood before the steaming basin. He opened the refrigerator, pressing her against the sink as he did so, an offhand attempt to annoy, not even mildly riling, and lifted out a jar of olives.

  “How come no dishwasher?”

  “I want these glasses to know what it feels like to be washed by human hands,” she said. “I don’t want them to grow up thinking everything’s done the easy way, by machine, with impersonal detergent.”

  “It’s broke again?”

  “You call.”

  “You, for once.”

  “I called the other.”

  “I’m not calling. I don’t care. Let it be broke.”

  “Don’t call. We won’t call. I don’t care.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I don’t care.”

  “I won’t be here, so.”

  “Neither will I except in and out.”

  She made a prissy face and delivered a distorted version of his tone of voice.

  “Neither will I except in and out.”