by Don DeLillo
“I had Mexican food for lunch,” Quincy said. “I have to go to a meeting in Livingston-that-son-of-a-bitch’s office in five minutes. Smell my breath, will you?”
He leaned over and exhaled.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Rose petals.”
“Tacos are hard to get off your breath. I brushed my teeth twice.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now you smell my breath.”
He leaned over again.
“No problem,” he said. “Not the slightest little inkling.”
We were both lying. Half an hour later Binky came in, hung her coat behind the door and went right out again. I dialed her extension.
“Miss Lister.”
“Welcome back to the animal farm,” I said. “Are you mad at me? Wait’ll you see what I’m getting you for Christmas. You’re the best secretary I’ve ever had. Cross my heart and piss in a ditch.”
“What was that all about?” she said. “I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. I went out and got stoned on bloody marys.”
“I’m sorry, Bink. I’ve been tense and neuralgic. I really have. I’ve been here seven years. It gets to you. Come in for a minute.”
“No.”
“You’re the only friend I have in this place.”
“I told Jody what happened. She thinks you’re cracking up.”
“My coat and yours, Binky. Hanging together behind the door. Thunderin’ jasus, a grand feeling it is to know our respective bearskins are huddling back there in the darkness. Darlin’, will you be coming in now for just a pop of the cork? I’ve been reading the Irish playwrights. C’mon, Bink.”
“No.”
“Bejasus, Binky. Your truly winning calf. That tiny secret grotto behind your knee.”
“Drop dead, David.”
I wanted to go home and sleep but it was too dangerous to leave this early. Although Weede had gone, Mrs. Kling had not, and it was her practice to make spot checks whenever he was out of the office. I closed the door. I got out the bottle of Cutty Sark I kept hidden in the cabinet, poured out half a glass and drank it neat in four swallows. Then I crumpled a piece of paper into a tight little ball and tossed it toward the wastebasket. Two points. I retrieved the ball and started practicing my hook shot. I moved slowly over the rug in a minstrel shuffle and as my right hand made dribbling motions I expelled air from my nose, synchronizing breath with dribble; and then, my back to the basket, I lifted the right leg, raised the left arm slightly for balance, and swung the right arm over my head and let loose a fifteen-footer.
“Swish,” I said.
I changed to foul shots for a while, then to left-hand hooks and finally to the breathtakingly intricate pattern of my double headfake turn-around jump shot. In that cloistered office I played my silent game. I experienced no sense of boyish self-amusement. No, I played quite seriously, my tie bellying out at each jump shot, sweat blossoming under my arms. No one, not even Binky, knew about these basketball games. I had been my team’s leading scorer in prep school; first in scoring, last in assists. Since then the game had followed me, the high amber shine of the gymnasium floor, the squeak of rubber sneakers, the crowd, the crowd, and at parties years later I would turn a cocktail peanut between my fingers and gaze at a distant fishbowl. Basketball has always seemed to me the most American of sports, a smalltown thing, two kids in a driveway and a daddy-built backboard. And now I jumped, released and missed. I picked up the paper ball, stepped back ten feet for an easy one-hander, and missed again. Six times I missed from that distance. The phone rang and I shot again and missed again. I knew I wouldn’t answer the phone until I had made that simple shot. I was perspiring heavily as I fired twice more and missed both times. Cursing, I picked up the ball again. The ringing stopped and I figured that Binky had answered on her phone. I went back to precisely the same spot. This time I hit. I stood there for a moment, trembling, then went to the sofa and dropped. The door opened and Binky came in.
“That was Warren Beasley again,” she said. “Why didn’t you answer your phone? You look rotten.”
“Smell my breath.”
“It stinks.”
“I knew it,” I said. “That bastard Quincy.”
“Mr. Beasley said to tell you he didn’t call.”
“What do you mean?”
“That was his message. He didn’t call. But he’ll call back.”
“I think I’ll have another drink,” I said. “Join me?”
“What do you have?”
“Scotch.”
“On top of bloody marys?” she said.
“Don’t be fastidious. These are urgent pleasure-grabbing times, or don’t you know there’s a war on.”
I got another glass from the cabinet and blew out the dust, a shoulder-holstered Sterling Hayden holed up in a rooming house. I poured the two drinks.
“I don’t think I could take it straight, David.”
“I think there’s some froggy water left in that carafe.”
“I’d better close the door,” she said.
We drank in silence. It was very warm in the office and sleet struck the window at intervals. I expected Mrs. Kling to walk in at any minute. I imagined her sitting now in Weede’s office, watching television, a cigarette planted in the center of her mouth, knees angled out, hands coupled on abdomen. During an office party several years before I had gone into Walter Faye’s office, pursuing a rumor of striptease and frolic, and there had stood Mrs. Kling, alone and unaware of me, standing rigid, shoeless and blouseless, brassiered like a bank vault almost neck to navel, her left foot forward, two clenched fists raised before her, left guarding the face, right lower, the classic Queensberry stance of the pier brawlers. It had been one of those moments for which an explanation evades the mind forever, an underwater moment tilted and warped by a rapture of the deep. Much later, shod and bloused again, she returned to the party. And then, as if to demonstrate the excellent craftsmanship of her digestive tract, its grinding and juicing abilities, she heaved all over a cluttered desk, thus creating, simultaneously, both a legend and a monument to that legend, the Thelma Kling Memorial Desk.
Binky curled up on the sofa and went to sleep, a rippling child-snore rolling off her lips. I finished my drink and saw that the bottle was empty. For a second, seriously, I thought of taking off my clothes and then undressing her as well. Instead I lifted her coat from its hanger and covered her with it, aware that the room was well heated but feeling an overwhelming need to display some tenderness, if only in this trite way. The phone rang.
“Hello, Tab. I was in Hollywood recently. I drove my car into a palm tree and twelve guys fell out. They all looked exactly like you. Norman Rockwell soda jerks.”
“Hello, Warren.”
“When I called before, your secretary said you were in the office committing suicide. I called back hoping I’d be the last person to speak to you alive. Warren Beasley, the controversial radio personality, was probably the last person to talk to the popular young television executive. Mr. Beasley said that Bell, twenty-eight, had been despondent over the loss of his old fielder’s glove. The deceased bore a strong facial resemblance to a number of Hollywood stars known for their interchangeability. His body will be sent airmail express to the West Coast for possible casting in a new movie spectacular based on the siege of Leningrad.”
“You sound as morbidly chipper as ever,” I said.
“I’m calling to invite you to my wedding. If all precedents hold, the honeymoon promises to be a veritable jubilee of ejaculatio praecox.”
Warren Beasley had his own radio program on a local station. It was called “Death Is Just Around the Corner,” and it was broadcast from two to five in the morning. I had listened to the program, or at least parts of it, close to a hundred times, and not once on all those occasions had I heard Warren repeat himself to any extensive degree. He invited no guests, played no records and gave no news bulletins, except of his own making. The show had ten or twelve steady sponsors and many
irregulars—hair restorers, makers of artificial limbs, ear-piercing shops, a metaphysician in Long Island City, an illuminator of manuscripts and scrolls, several dog kennels. Most of the sponsors wrote their own commercials and they were usually read by Warren in what can only be called a mounting orgasmic frenzy. Warren also delivered commercials for nonexistent products. He talked for three solid hours every morning but Monday, sometimes with style, humor and intelligence, sometimes with scatological glee, sometimes in the bitter self-pitying tone of a genuinely desperate man. Warren had a brilliant mind, I thought, but he was completely irresponsible and it wasn’t easy to characterize his audience. “Death” had more than its share of freak-appeal and it probably attracted most of the area’s neo-Nazis, transsexuals, interplanetary travelers, coprophiles, whip and chain collectors, astral seers, blood-drinkers and morgue attendants—all the caffeine dregs of a century of national insomnia. His frequent use of obscenity, both primitive and surreal, had drawn no comment from the FCC, either because they were not listening or because the time had finally come for the electrical transmission of wordsex into America’s silent bedrooms. Naturally Warren was considered a prophet by some, a menace by others. He encouraged neither view; nor did he encourage that sentiment of unity and common purpose, that sense of underground comradeship, which his listeners undoubtedly shared. Too much like the Masons, he said. Warren had started in broadcasting many years before as a weatherman on a Los Angeles TV station. He had managed to acquire a kinescope of what turned out to be his last program and he showed it to me one evening in a screening room at the network. What I recall most vividly are his eyes, relentlessly drilling, trying to pierce the prohibitive limbo so familiar to those who have stood before a camera in a small studio. He was able to speak for almost a full minute before somebody woke up and cut him off. He began by saying that there was no weather in Los Angeles and there never had been. The true weather was in ourselves; the true weather report had been concealed from the public all these years. Storm warnings up and down the subconscious. Ten-foot drifts along the outlying areas of the soul. Winds of gale force should reach the suburban psyche by midnight. There will be no flights in or out of the major idports. Then he had done a tapdance and sung a lyric that went “hey jig-a-jig go fuck a rubber pig.” He had come a long way since then. His total earnings were close to a hundred thousand a year. Several national magazines had done stories on him. He accepted invitations to appear on many television talk shows. He had written a nonbook. Educated by Jesuits for eight years, Warren was able to regard his money, his notoriety, his four ex-wives with a combination of dispassionate wit, profound distress and a monumental Thomistic sense of the divine logic behind it all.
“Not again,” I said.
“It’s the real thing this time, Tab. She’s got big pink Renoir tits and she can cook. But I fear her crotch is haunted by the ghost of Joan of Arc, that prissy little suffragette. We’re going to Dublin on our honeymoon, which may sound self-defeating, but I’ve always wanted to do something like that.”
“When’s the wedding? I wouldn’t think of missing it.”
“It’s on her lunch hour,” he said. “Tuesday, noon, Supreme Court Building. She’s a dental hygienist. She cleans your teeth before Dr. Dachau takes over with all his dangling pain-utensils. She has to be back in the office by one-thirty but he’s giving her a week off beginning the next day so I can fly her to old Dub and pretend she’s Molly Bloom, the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to scissor with. The fantasies are taking over my life.”
“Warren, isn’t this the third dental hygienist you’ve married?”
“Second,” he said. “The one you’re thinking of was a radiologist. Tried to zap my gonads once or twice. Tuesday then.”
I read two pages of a script about the melting of the polar ice caps and then called my father. His secretary said he would be with me in a minute. I tried to picture the soap beneath her fingernails.
“Hiya, pally. What’s new?”
“Stennis makes forty-five,” I said.
“That’s all? You’re sure?”
“Unimpeachable source.”
“God bless you, sport.”
A few minutes later the phone rang. As I lifted the receiver Binky shifted positions and the coat slipped onto the floor and her skirt moved up her leg, making that fine hushing sound, and twisted nicely around her thighs. The telephone was quacking and I plugged it into my head.
“Dave Bell’s my name; TV’s my game.”
“David, why didn’t you call me back? You are coming this evening, aren’t you?”
“What do you want for Christmas, Wendy?”
“I won’t say it over the phone. But if you were here, darling”
“You’re just lonely,” I said.
“Remember college, David? Wasn’t it wild? You’re one of my oldest and dearest friends. Please come to my dinner party tonight. You can leave early if you want to. Do you still have your T-Bird and those super poems you used to write? You have no idea how upset I was when you showed up with a wife that last year. Listen, I have to tell you this one final thing. Are you listening? I got a card from my ex today. You wouldn’t believe where he’s spending the holidays.”
There were thirty-six small holes in the mouthpiece of my telephone. They were arranged in three circles of six, twelve, and eighteen holes each. There were only six holes in the earpiece. This disparity seemed significant but I didn’t know exactly why. My eyes were on the sleeping girl on my sofa while my mouth and ear were engaged with the mouth and ear of Wendy Judd. I felt I was being sucked into the telephone. Only my eyes seemed to resist the whistling tunnel pressure of those forty-two holes. Wendy’s mouth, enormous and frenzied, was burning at my ear; as I listened, my hand moved to that part of my thigh which corresponded to the area below the hem of Binky’s skirt which my eyes had selected a moment before. My senses, it seemed, were scattering, eyes and hand allied, mouth and ears receding into the phone, drawn by the urgent voice, by the image I could not envision; and then, fiercely and strangely excited, I moved my hand across my lap and did a mad kind of loin dance, not moving from the chair, not taking my eyes from that land and sea arrangement of dress and leg, not resisting the tunneling lure of the telephone, the place where Wendy dwelt, unimaginably desirable, a victory of mouth and ear. It was my secretary who gave flesh to the disassembled words, who modeled for me the image on the other end of the wire, the picture I couldn’t see without her help. I closed my eyes, feeling it was all too much, too involving, and cut across Wendy in mid-sentence, an incivility I knew she would not mind.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
I hung up and immediately called Sullivan. She answered after the seventh ring. I felt a sudden chill, the vast white silence of my mother’s deathbed, candlewax and linen, her enormous eyes, the breathing shallow and bad. Beneath the blanket her body was little more than ash, crumbs of bone; her hands were dry kindling. Death became her well, so horribly well, and when I heard the bells of an ice cream truck I had almost laughed. American sky-chariot come to take mother to the mansion with the familiar orange roof and the twenty-eight flavors. I had almost, but not quite, laughed; and then the chill had entered and she died.
“I have to get out of here, Sully.”
“David?”
“I no longer control the doors. Words blow in and out. I can hear them perfectly, with really astounding clarity, but I can’t believe they’re coming from my mouth. I think it’s time to leave.”
“Nothing will be solved out there, you know. It’s just telephone poles stringing together the cities. Those distances out there will only confuse you.”
“I had lunch with a friend recently. He cried. He wanted to build a boat and sail to Tasmania. I laughed at him. A week later he had a cerebral hemorrhage. We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we’re all the same.”
“I know what your problem is. You don’t have any Jewish friends. Why don’t you c
ome on over tonight? I’m working on something new. I’d like you to take a look at it.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
I put down the phone. The door opened slightly, revealing the condensed figure of Mrs. Kling, six inches wide, armless and hipless. With the door open just a crack I didn’t know whether she could see Binky on the sofa.
“Somebody took my stapler,” she said. “It was on my desk when I went into Mr. Denney’s office. Now it’s gone. I’ve had it for nine years. My name is Scotch-taped to the bottom of it. I’m telling everybody that if it’s not back on my desk by nine sharp on Monday morning there’ll be trouble. That gives all of you the whole weekend to make up your mind.”