by Don DeLillo
They enjoyed doing this, most of them. They liked creating a structure out of willful trivia. But not Terry Cheng, who played the sweetest game of poker, who played online at times for twenty hours straight. Terry Cheng said they were shallow people leading giddy lives.
Then someone made the point that five-card draw was even more permissive than seven-card stud and they wondered why they hadn’t thought of this sooner, with the player’s capacity to discard and draw as many as three cards, or to stand pat, or to fold if he sees fit, and they agreed to limit themselves to one game only, five-card stud, and the large sums they bet, the bright chips in stacks, the bluffs and counterbluffs, the elaborate curses and baleful stares, the dusky liquor in squat glasses, the cigar smoke collecting in stratiform patterns, the massive silent self-reproaches—these free-flowing energies and gestures were posed against the single counterforce, the fact of self-imposed restriction, all the more unyielding for being ordered from within.
No food. Food was out. No gin or vodka. No beer that was not dark. They issued a mandate against all beer that was not dark and against all dark beer that was not Beck’s Dark. They did this because Keith told them a story he’d heard about a cemetery in Germany, in Cologne, where four good friends, cardplayers in a game that had lasted four or five decades, were buried in the configuration in which they’d been seated, invariably, at the card table, with two of the gravestones facing the other two, each player in his time-honored place.
They loved this story. It was a beautiful story about friendship and the transcendent effects of unremarkable habit. It made them reverent and thoughtful and one of the things they thought was that they had to cite Beck’s Dark as the only dark because the beer was German and so were the cardplayers in the story.
Somebody wanted to ban sports talk. They banned sports talk, television talk, movie titles. Keith thought this was getting stupid. Rules are good, they replied, and the stupider the better. Rumsey the fartmeister, dead now, wanted to revoke all the prohibitions. Cigarettes were not prohibited. There was one cigarette smoker only and he was allowed to smoke all the cigarettes he wanted if he didn’t mind appearing helpless and defective. Most of the others smoked cigars and felt expansive, grand in scale, sipping scotch or bourbon, finding synonyms for banned words such as wet and dry.
You are not serious people, said Terry Cheng. He said, Get serious or die.
The dealer skimmed the cards over the green baize, never failing to announce the name of the game, five-card stud, even though it was the only game they now played. The small dry irony of these announcements faded after a time and the words became a proud ritual, formal and indispensable, each dealer in turn, five-card stud, and they loved doing this, straight-faced, because where else would they encounter the kind of mellow tradition exemplified by the needless utterance of a few archaic words.
They played it safe and regretted it, took risks and lost, fell into states of lunar gloom. But there were always things to ban and rules to make.
Then one night it all fell apart. Somebody got hungry and demanded food. Somebody else pounded the table and said, Food food. This became a chant that filled the room. They rescinded the ban on food and demanded Polish vodka, some of them. They wanted pale spirits chilled in the freezer and served neat in short frosted tumblers. Other prohibitions fell, banned words were reinstated. They bet and raised, ate and drank, and from that point on resumed playing such games as high-low, acey-deucy, Chicago, Omaha, Texas hold ’em, anaconda and a couple of other deviant strains in poker’s line of ancestry. But they missed, each dealer in turn, calling out the name of one game, five-card stud, to the exclusion of all other games, and they tried not to wonder what four other players would think of them, in this wallow of wild-man poker, tombstone to tombstone in Cologne.
At dinner they talked about a trip they might take to Utah during school break, to high valleys and clean winds, to breathable air, skiable slopes, and the kid sat with a biscuit in his fist, looking at the food on his plate.
“What do you think? Utah. Say it. Utah. A big leap forward from a sled in the park.”
He looked at the dinner his father had prepared, wild salmon, gummy brown rice.
“He has nothing to say. He has passed beyond monosyllables,” Keith said. “Remember when he spoke only in monosyllables. That lasted a while.”
“Longer than I expected,” she said.
“He has passed beyond that. He has gone to the next stage of his development.”
“His spiritual development,” she said.
“Total silence.”
“Utter and unbreakable silence.”
“Utah is the place for silent men. He’ll live in the mountains.”
“He’ll live in a cave with insects and bats.”
The kid slowly raised his head from the plate, looking at his father or into his father’s clavicle, x-raying the slender bones beneath his father’s shirt.
“How do you know the monosyllables were really a school thing? Maybe not,” he said. “Because maybe it was Bill Lawton. Because maybe Bill Lawton talks in monosyllables.”
Lianne sat back, shocked by this, by the name itself, hearing him say it.
“I thought Bill Lawton was a secret,” Keith said. “Between the Siblings and you. And between you and me.”
“You probably already told her. She probably already knows.”
Keith looked at her and she tried to signal him that no, she hadn’t said a thing about Bill Lawton. She gave him a clenched look, eyes narrowed, lips tight, trying to drill the look into his forebrain, like no.
“Nobody told anybody anything,” Keith said. “Eat your fish.”
The kid resumed looking at the plate.
“Because he does talk in monosyllables.”
“All right. What does he say?”
There was no response. She tried to imagine what he was thinking. His father was back home now, living here, sleeping here, more or less as before, and he’s thinking the man can’t be trusted, can he? He sees the man as a figure that looms over the household, the man who went away once and came back and told the woman, who sleeps in the same bed as the man, all about Bill Lawton, so how can he be trusted to be here tomorrow.
If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty. And it happens he was right.
“He says things that nobody knows but the Siblings and me.”
“Tell us one of these things. In monosyllables,” Keith said with an edge in his voice.
“No thank you.”
“Is that what he says or is that what you say?”
“The whole point,” he said, snapping the words clearly and defiantly, “is that he says things about the planes. We know they’re coming because he says they are. But that’s all I’m allowed to say. He says this time the towers will fall.”
“The towers are down. You know this,” she said softly.
“This time coming, he says, they’ll really come down.”
They talked to him. They tried to make gentle sense. She couldn’t locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing, but the time reversal, the darkness of the final thrust, how better becomes worse, these were the elements of a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence. It was the fairy tale children tell, not the one they listen to, devised by adults, and she changed the subject to Utah. Ski trails and true skies.
He looked into his plate. How different is a fish from a bird? One flies, the other swims. Maybe this is what he was thinking. He wouldn’t eat a bird, would he, a goldfinch or a blue jay. Why should he eat a fish swimming wild in the ocean, caught with ten thousand other fish in a giant net on Channel 27?
One flies, the other swims.
This is what she felt in him, these stubborn thoughts, biscuit in his fist.
Keith walked through the park and came out on We
st 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down by the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park.
It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash.
He used to come home late, looking shiny and a little crazy. This was the period, not long before the separation, when he took the simplest question as a form of hostile interrogation. He seemed to walk in the door waiting for her questions, prepared to stare right through her questions, but she had no interest in saying anything at all. She thought she knew by now. She understood by this time that it wasn’t the drinking, or not that alone, and probably not some sport with a woman. He’d hide it better, she told herself. It was who he was, his native face, without the leveling element, the claims of social code.
Those nights, sometimes, he seemed on the verge of saying something, a sentence fragment, that was all, and it would end everything between them, all discourse, every form of stated arrangement, whatever drifts of love still lingered. He carried that glassy look in his eyes and a moist smile across his mouth, a dare to himself, boyish and horrible. But he did not put into words whatever it was that lay there, something so surely and recklessly cruel that it scared her, spoken or not. The look scared her, the body slant. He walked through the apartment, bent slightly to one side, a twisted guilt in his smile, ready to break up a table and burn it so he could take out his dick and piss on the flames.
They sat in a taxi going downtown and began to clutch each other, kissing and groping. She said, in urgent murmurs, It’s a movie, it’s a movie. At traffic lights people crossing the street stopped to watch, two or three, seeming briefly to float above the windows, and sometimes only one. The others just crossed, who didn’t give a damn.
In the Indian restaurant the man at the podium said, We do not seat incomplete tables.
She asked him one night about the friends he’d lost. He spoke about them, Rumsey and Hovanis, and the one who was badly burned, whose name she’d forgotten. She’d met one of them, Rumsey, she thought, briefly, somewhere. He spoke only about their qualities, their personalities, or married or single, or children or not, and this was enough. She didn’t want to hear more.
It was still there, more often than not, music on the stairs.
There was a job offer he’d probably accept, drafting contracts of sale on behalf of Brazilian investors who were engaged in real-estate transactions in New York. He made it sound like a ride on a hang glider, completely wind-assisted.
In the beginning she washed his clothes in a separate load. She had no idea why she did this. It was like he was dead.
She listened to what he said and let him know she was listening, mind and body, because listening is what would save them this time, keep them from falling into distortion and rancor.
The easy names were the ones she forgot. But this one wasn’t easy and it was like the swaggering name of some football player from Alabama and that’s how she remembered it, Demetrius, badly burned in the other tower, the south tower.
When she asked him about the briefcase in the closet, why it was there one day and gone the next, he said he’d actually returned it to the owner because it wasn’t his and he didn’t know why he’d taken it out of the building.
What was ordinary was not more ordinary than usual, or less.
It was the word actually that made her think about what he said concerning the briefcase, although in fact there was nothing to think about, even if this was the word he’d used so often, more or less superfluously, those earlier years, when he was lying to her, or baiting her, or even effecting some minor sleight.
This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.
It’s a movie, she kept saying, his hand in her pants, saying it, a moan in the shape of words, and at traffic lights people watched, a few, and the driver watched, lights or not, eyes gliding across the rearview mirror.
But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists.
He listened to language tapes labeled South American Portuguese and practiced on the kid. He said, I speak only little Portuguese, saying this in English, with a Latin accent, and Justin tried not to smile.
She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret.
After the first time they made love he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts and thighs stamped on the mirror.
He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge. He worked on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. He used the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand.
The wrist was fine, the wrist was normal. He’d thrown away the splint and stopped using the ice. But he sat alongside the table, two or three times a day now, curling the left hand into a gentle fist, forearm flat on the table, thumb raised in certain setups. He did not need the instruction sheet. It was automatic, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations, hand raised, forearm flat. He counted the seconds, he counted the repetitions.
There were the mysteries of word and glance but also this, that every time they saw each other there was something tentative at first, a little stilted.
“I see them on the street now and then.”
“Stopped me cold for a moment. A horse,” he said.
“Man on a horse. Woman on a horse. Not something I would think of doing myself,” Florence said. “Give me all your money. Wouldn’t matter. I’m not getting on a horse.”
There was a shyness for a time and then something that eased the mood, a look or a wisecrack or the way she begins to hum, in a parody of social desperation, eyes darting about the room. But the faint discomfort of those early moments, the sense of ill-matched people was not completely dispelled.
“Sometimes six or seven horses single file, going up the street. The riders looking straight ahead,” she said, “like the natives might take offense.”
“I’ll tell you what surprises me.”
“Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?”
“It’s your cat,” he said.
“I don’t have a cat.”
“That’s what surprises me.”
“You think I’m a cat person.”
“I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls.”
He was in the armchair this time and she’d placed a kitchen chair alongside and sat facing him, a hand on h
is forearm.
“Tell me you’re not taking the job.”
“Have to do it.”
“What happens to our time together?”
“We’ll work it out.”
“I want to blame you for this. But my turn is coming. Looks like the whole company is moving across the river. Permanently. We’ll have a nice view of lower Manhattan. What’s left of it.”
“And you’ll find a place to live somewhere nearby.”
She looked at him.
“Can you mean that? I don’t believe you said that. Do you think I’d put that much space between us?”
“Bridge or tunnel doesn’t matter. It’s hell on earth, that commute.”
“I don’t care. Do you think I care? They’ll resume train service. If they don’t, I’ll drive.”
“Okay.”
“It’s only Jersey.”
“Okay,” he said.
He thought she might cry. He thought this kind of conversation was for other people. People have these conversations all the time, he thought, in rooms like this one, sitting, looking.
Then she said, “You saved my life. Don’t you know that?”
He sat back, looking at her.
“I saved your briefcase.”
And waited for her to laugh.
“I can’t explain it but no, you saved my life. After what happened, so many gone, friends gone, people I worked with, I was nearly gone, nearly dead, in another way. I couldn’t see people, talk to people, go from here to there without forcing myself up off the chair. Then you walked in the door. I kept calling the number of a friend, missing, she’s one of the photographs on the walls and windows everywhere, Davia, officially missing, I can barely say her name, in the middle of the night, dial the number, let it ring. I was afraid, in the daytime, other people would be there to pick up the phone, somebody who knew something I didn’t want to hear. Then you walked in the door. You ask yourself why you took the briefcase out of the building. That’s why. So you could bring it here. So we could get to know each other. That’s why you took it and that’s why you brought it here, to keep me alive.”