by Don DeLillo
He waited for her after work in front of her house. They went inside and drank for several hours. He held her hand, occasionally putting his lips to the ends of her fingers. He realized this was an endearment.
In the kitchen he took another look at the picture of her with Sedbauer and Vilar. He studied Vilar’s face. It was shiny and lean, a high forehead, tapered jaw. He heard her in the bedroom, Rosemary’s clothes coming off.
Curled into herself she waited, an animal void, white body, deep stillness, the thing he tried to hand-grip and eat. He wouldn’t urge her toward some vast shuddering fuck or recollect the touch of her hands at the end of a passive afternoon, some months off, paper sailing as his soul wandered from the floor. She extended her limbs. He could see breasts now, her face and neck, her arms and small hands, half cupped, and the wrinkled sheet between her thighs. He’d never before seen how different a woman’s body was from his own. This fact, somehow, had been hidden from him. Am I drunk, he wondered. Supine she seemed enormous, nearly outsizing the small bed. That was good, that was right, deep stillness, organic void. Her breathing caused a perceptible cadence, body’s periodic rise and fall, a metronome of his calculated lust. Slightly misshapen feet. Small bumps, flesh points, at the rims of her nipples. He undressed slowly, knowing neither of them would reach an interval of fulfilling labor, or whistle a bit, breathing nasally, and cry a name, all perspective burnt from their faces. She touched her ribs where a fly had landed. This automatic motion revealed her, briefly. In a haze he understood at last. But what? Understood, at last, what? The fly settled on a window sill. He watched it, trying to retrace its connection to the huge body on the bed, the bone and muscle structure of a dream. There were pale veins on her legs, sun lines and natural indentations. Knees up, head way back over the curve of the pillow, she might have been half yielding to, half defending against, some clumsy lover. He crawled, literally crawled between her legs. Then he rested his forearms on her raised knees and watched the way her throat lightly pulsed.
“Tell me some more about George,” he said. “What did he do besides make you laugh?”
He crossed the street to the candy store tucked in at 77 Water, red and yellow awning, a homey footnote to the mass of steel and anodized aluminum. There was gray everywhere, wetness suspended, a day the color of the district itself. He bought cigarettes and chewing gum and then stood outside the candy store, under the bulk of the skyscraper, and unwrapped a stick of gum, listening for foghorns, a sound he associated with foreign cities and sex with other men’s wives. It didn’t take him long to realize he was being stared at. Man near the entrance to the lobby. Checked sportcoat, solid tie. Lyle had the impression the man wanted him to walk that way. He was stocky and boyish, a frozen jaw, wisps of hair curled down over his forehead. Lyle decided to go in the other direction. About two blocks away the man came alongside. Lyle stopped, waiting for a light to change. The man looked at him again, clearly intent on conveying some tacit information, a connection or message he expected Lyle to perceive. They walked another half block. Two women up ahead raised umbrellas simultaneously.
“You’re McKechnie’s friend, aren’t you?”
“Is life that simple?” the man said.
“I kept waiting for you people to contact me. I talked to Frank McKechnie about the situation. About what certain people knew. Frank talked to someone to pass the word along. I expected earlier contact. In the meantime I decided to find out what I could.”
“That was outstanding, Lyle.”
“What’s your name?”
“Burks.”
“Burks, your tone of voice isn’t encouraging.”
“We do what we can.”
“They have contacts on the West Coast. I know that. They use Ohio plates, at least at the moment. I know the number if you want it. A green Volkswagen, or do you have all this?”
“What can you tell us about A. J. Kinnear?”
“It’s J. Kinnear at present.”
“We have A. J.”
“It’s just J. now.”
“Just J.,” Burks said.
“I don’t know how many people are involved. If they have units or teams or whatever, I couldn’t tell you how they’re set up. Kinnear is a complex individual, I think. They’re out in Queens. I know the street name and house number.”
“Is Kinnear tall, short, what?”
They walked up and down the streets near the river. Lyle described Kinnear, speaking slowly and then listening with care, trying to memorize his own remarks and what Burks said in reply. It was like a conversation with a doctor who was reporting the results of significant tests. Questions and answers floated through each other. One’s life seemed to hinge on syntax, inflection, points of grammar. He thought Burks said something about a voiceprint but wasn’t sure of the context, whether it applied to Kinnear or not. It was also a little like his early conversations with Rosemary Moore, photographs of his own mouth, the sense of her remarks eluding him not only as they were uttered but later as well, in his attempts to narrate to himself the particulars of each encounter. He saw a barge in the haze, perhaps midriver, sliding toward the harbor. Burks’ shoes gleamed. He was young, probably younger than Lyle.
“They may take another crack at the Exchange.”
“We’d be interested.”
“What else?”
“What else—what do you mean?”
“Is there anything else you want to know?” Lyle said. “They have a basement full of retread weapons. I can describe them if you want. I have this annoying faculty.”
“What’s that?”
“Compulsive information-gathering.”
“It must be a burden.”
“Tone of voice,” Lyle said.
“Fuck you, cookie.”
“Are you McKechnie’s friend or not?”
“You talked to Frank McKechnie. He said he’d talk to a friend of his. If you want to believe my presence here is a direct result of McKechnie’s communication, feel free, Lyle. But there’s a question I’d like to pose.”
“What’s that?”
“Is life ever that simple?”
“Nice.”
“We do what we can.”
“No, nice, really, I like it.”
“Good, Lyle.”
“What can you tell me about Vilar?”
“I can tell you to eat shit off a wooden stick,” Burks said.
Just another Fordham or Marquette lad. Studied languages and history. Played intramural sports. Revered the Jesuits for their sophistication and analytical skills. Voted for moderates of either party. Knows how to strangle a German shepherd with rosary beads.
Lyle walked crosstown to busier areas. It was getting dark. He moved to one side to avoid some people stepping off a bus. One of them made momentary contact, putting an arm out to ward off a collision, a man with a mustache and wiry hair, muttering something, his head large and squarish. Keep yer distance, mon. Lyle looked around for a public phone as he walked on. It started raining hard and the streets gradually emptied out. Don’t be settin’ yer hands on honest folk. He found a bar, ordered a drink and went back to the phone booth. One of McKechnie’s daughters answered, saying she’d get her father.
“That friend of yours.”
“What about him?”
“Burks,” Lyle said. “Is that his name?”
“No.”
“Call him up, Frank, and find out if he knows who Burks is.”
“I made my call.”
“You can do that.”
“I made my call. That was it.”
“Call him. I’ll get right back to you.”
“Sure, get right back.”
“I’ll call you in fifteen minutes.”
“Sure, call, Lyle, anytime.”
He went to the bar and sipped his drink. A man with crutches stood nearby, a near derelict, it seemed. It wasn’t much of a place. Two elderly women sat at a far corner of the bar, sharing a cigarette. Lyle finished his drink.
It was too soon to call McKechnie again. He ordered another Scotch and went back to phone J. Kinnear, realizing, with profound surprise, that he didn’t know how to get in touch with Kinnear. The listing would be in another name, obviously, and Lyle had never thought to check the number on the telephone in the frame house in Queens. Dumb, very dumb. When he got back to the bar he saw someone walk past the front door, hurrying through the rain, a man holding a newspaper over his head. Just a glimpse was all. Wee glimpse o’ the laddie’s mustache. A little later a woman came in and greeted the man on crutches, asking what had happened.
“I got runned over by a learner driver.”
“Did you sue his ass?”
“What sue?” he said. “I was like on the brink.”
“You could collect, Mikey. People do it. You could make a nice little something for yourself.”
“I was like seeing cherubs.”
Or an M.A. in economics, he thought. Big Ten fencing titles. Square head, wiry hair. Author of a study on trade regulations in Eastern Europe. Does push-ups with his knuckles.
Lyle walked down Nassau Street. The district was a locked sector. Through wavering layers of rain he saw it that way for the first time. It was sealed off from the rest of the city, as the city itself had been planned to conceal what lay around it, the rough country’s assent to unceremonious decay. The district grew repeatedly inward, more secret, an occult theology of money, extending ever deeper into its own veined marble. Unit managers accrued and stockpiled. Engineers shampooed the vaults. At the inmost crypt might be heard the amplitude pulse of history, a system and rite to outshadow the evidence of men’s senses. He stepped out of a doorway and hailed the first free cab he saw, feeling intelligent again.
At home he heard from Kinnear almost immediately. He stood holding the phone, concentrating intently, determined to understand what was being said, the implications, the shadings, whatever petalous subtleties might be contained in the modulations of J.’s voice.
“I’m not where I usually am.”
“Right.”
“I’ll be sort of transient—I would say indefinitely.”
“Before that, there’s something that happened. I talked to a Burks, if you know the name. He asked about you.”
“Not unsurprisingly.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“I may have talked to him on the phone. I talked to several of them. I wasn’t given names. I had a number to call. We did our talking exclusively over the phone.”
“I told him everything I know.”
“That was clever, Lyle, actually.”
“I thought I should tell you.”
“I’m one of those people you’ve read about who’s constantly being described as ‘dropping out of sight,’ or ‘resurfacing.’ As in: ‘He resurfaced in Bogotá four years later.’ Right now it’s the former condition that prevails.”
Lyle tried to imagine Kinnear in some specific locale, an airport (but there was no background of amplified voices) or remote house (where, what room) in a well-defined landscape. But he remained a voice, no more, a vibratory hum, coming from nowhere in particular.
“I asked him about Vilar,” Lyle said. “He outright refused to tell me anything.”
“Makes sense.”
“They don’t like me.”
“Well, I talked to them, you know. We had talks about this and that.”
“My name came up.”
“I was very selective. That was part of the appeal of the whole experiment, from my viewpoint. It was interesting, very much so. I told them only certain things. They’re quite a group—quite, let’s say, adaptable, I guess is the word.”
“They know my recent history.”
“They know your recent history.”
“And they didn’t contact me earlier because they had someone inside.”
“Now that I’ve severed all connections, Lyle, they’ve become very interested in you. You’re their remaining means of tying into the little terror seminar.”
“Can’t they just go in and seize weapons and arrest people for that, if nothing else?”
“They’ll find nothing there but weapons. I was the only person who spent any appreciable time in that house. Won’t be anybody there, now or later.”
“I thought Marina.”
“Marina was out there maybe half a dozen times, never for longer than a couple of hours.”
“Why pick now to travel, J.?”
“I was getting bricked in, old man. The element you think of in the person of Marina was clearly aware that information was trickling. The element you think of in the person of Burks was getting a touch possessive. It was time to do a one-eighty out the door.”
Lyle suspected J. was getting ready to hang up.
“How long have you been giving information?”
“Matter of a few months.”
“Get paid?”
“That was to come, eventually. Extremely doubtful I’ll ever see it.”
“Fair amount, I assume.”
“Pittance.”
“Why all the risk then?”
“People make experiments, Lyle. They’re very adept at certain things, so aware of shadings, our secret police. I wanted to get inside that particular apparatus, just a step or two.”
“They got your name slightly wrong.”
“I didn’t know they had it at all. That’s interesting. See what I mean? Techniques. I wonder how they managed it. They must have spent a great deal of time on me. I used to wonder about that. Are they really interested in what they’re getting? Do they know who I am? Their secrets are worse than ours, by far, which goes a long way toward explaining why their techniques are so well developed.”
“What happens now?”
“I continue to ask for your trust.”
“Don’t go just yet, J.”
“God bless,” he said.
Lyle put down the phone, then dialed McKechnie’s number. The little girl said her daddy didn’t want to talk to him.
5
They discussed the sunset awhile, sitting on the deck with junk food and drinks. It was better than the previous day’s sunset but lacked the faint mauve tones, according to Ethan, of the day before yesterday. They went inside and ate dinner, slowly, an uncoordinated effort. Jack complained that they were talking about the food while eating it, that they talked about sunsets while looking at them, so on, so forth. It was beginning to get on his nerves, he said. He used his semihysterical voice, that exaggerated whine of urban discontent. They sat by the fire after dinner, looking at magazines. Jack found a six-month-old New York Times. He read aloud from a list of restaurants cited for health code violations, chanting the names and addresses.
“We need wood,” Ethan said.
“Wood.”
“Bring in wood.”
“Wood,” Jack said.
“In bring,” Pammy said. “Put pile.”
“Wood, wood.”
“Fire come,” she said. “Make big for heat the body.”
In the morning they drove over the causeway, their hair flattening in the wind, and then across the bridge to the mainland. The sky was everywhere. Pammy sat behind the men, smiling at the backs of their heads. Weathering had given the houses a second, deeper life, more private, a beauty that was skillfully spare, that had been won. Boulders in brown fields. The kids here, on bikes, barefoot. She scanned carefully for traces of water, eager to be surprised by it, to have it come up suddenly, an avenue of hard blue between stands of pine, sunlight bouncing on the surface. The kids on bikes were lean and blond, a little less than well-fed, a certain edge, she thought, to the way they returned her smile, looking hard at the car and the travelers, eyes narrow in the sun.
In Blue Hill they visited a married couple Ethan knew, three children, a dog. Leaving, she and Jack waited by the car while Ethan exchanged prolonged goodbyes with his friends. Jack was looking at her.
“I’m not really gay,” he said.
“If you
say so, Jack.”
“I’m not, it’s true.”
“It’s your mind and body.”
“I should know, right?”
Late that afternoon she stepped out of the shower and felt pain, momentary pressure, at the side of her head. She would be dead within weeks. They’d force her to go through a series of horrible tests but the results would be the same every time. She was depressed, standing in a towel, her body slowly drying, dying. Waste, what a waste. She felt awful about Lyle. It would be easier for her to accept if she weren’t leaving someone behind. Thank God no kids. She dressed and went outside.
After dinner they took the remaining wine and some brandy out to the deck. It was the mildest night they’d had. Jack was restless and decided to take the garbage over to the dump instead of waiting for morning. He got a flashlight and went up the path to the car, dragging two large plastic bags.
“He’s right,” Ethan said. “We can’t seem to do anything without discussing it at the same time.”
“Vacation,” she said. “That’s what people do.”
“I hadn’t realized we were doing it to the extent we were.”
“Your German mouth is so serious.”
“Maybe that’s the secret meaning of new places.”
“What is?”
“Quiet, I’m working it out.”
“I don’t want to hear.”
“It concerns self-awareness,” he said. “I’ll give you the rest later.”
“God, stars.”
“The clearer everything is. That has something to do with it too.”
“Look at them, millions.”
“I am.”
“Talk about them,” she said. “Quick, before Jack comes back.”
Much later there were long silences between periods of conversation. Jack brought out extra sweaters, then three blankets. When the wind rolled through the tops of trees, Pammy had trouble understanding the sound in its early stages, that building insistence of surf.