Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  There was something going on in the courthouse square. She parked a block away and walked back down to the square and it was one of those days in the high pines when the sun and sweet breeze get into your underwear. There were cars arrayed on a closed-off street, four rows of vintage machines extending two city blocks along the edge of the plaza, and loudspeakers on the lawn did dance-party rock-and-roll.

  She had fifteen minutes to spare and walked among the cars, many with hoods raised for the pleasure of connoisseurs. It was early, not yet eleven, and only a dozen people wandered about. She saw a red-haired man who looked faintly familiar and watched him bend under a hood and then stand back to appraise a customized Buick with a black lacquer chassis.

  He stood donnishly posed with jutted elbow and cupped hand and she realized after a moment that he worked with Nick at Waste Containment and that his name, which took another moment, was Brian Glassic, which rhymes with classic, which describes these cars.

  He saw her and showed a beam of recognition. Then he did a little dance from half a block away, the slowest of clinging fox-trots from out of the fifties.

  About two hours later they met for lunch in the dining room of an old hotel just up the street. The room was close and warm and she held the glass of ice water up against her face.

  He said, “You are here?”

  “For a job interview. There’s a small design firm here that renovates old structures. They want to open a Phoenix office. I would be it.”

  “How did it go?”

  “All right, I think.”

  “You’ve done this kind of work?”

  “Not exactly. Before the kids I helped manage a small real estate operation. Since the kids I’ve done part-time things now and then.”

  “Your own office. This is a fantasy of mine. To come wandering in just before lunch. Like a private detective. Hungover, a faceful of stubble. Riffle through the mail. Throw it down.”

  “Do you get stubble?” she said.

  “Yes, eventually. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe the smoother and fairer the complexion.”

  “We do shave,” he said.

  “I don’t think my office will resemble a private detective’s.”

  “You want light and air.”

  “Great thick proposals in strong binders.”

  “You want scale models, with trees.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And little bland people on the sidewalk.”

  “Multiracially bland.”

  “Brava. Want a drink?”

  “Why not?” she said.

  Brian ordered drinks from an old fellow who probably doubled as hall porter.

  She said, “And you are here?”

  “For the cars. I read about the show last night and felt a sort of schoolboy itch.”

  “Couldn’t even wait for the weekend.”

  “Crowded. I deserve a day off anyway.”

  “You had to wait around for lunch. I’m sorry. I thought you had a business appointment.”

  “I’m not finished with the cars. They’re worth a second look. And what could be nicer than sitting here waiting for someone to bring our drinks and fix the air conditioner and do something about the stuffing in the banquettes?”

  “Is that what smells?” she said.

  She smoked of course. Once she ordered the drink she knew the facade would crumble. It took very little to bring it down. She would smoke all she had and then find more. He made her laugh a few times and was funny even when he wasn’t trying to be. She thought he probably had a rabbit for a pet when he was small but she wasn’t sure why this made sense.

  “You’re tall, aren’t you?”

  He asked this suspiciously, as if she’d been concealing it.

  “No taller than you.”

  “My wife is small. Have you met her?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She wants me to take her to New York next month. I have to consult with engineers at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is sort of the King Kong of American garbage mounds.”

  “Does Nick like this kind of work?”

  “You’re asking me?” he said.

  “Yes, I’m asking you.”

  “I think he likes it more than I do. I think he sees it in purer terms. Concepts and principles. Because this is Nick—the technology, the logic, the esthetics. Whereas I, in my little gringo mind-set.”

  “You’re moving into new quarters. That may help your self-image.”

  “Yes, a great bronze tower. Just like an investment firm or media giant. Of course the structure resembles a geometric turd but that’s only fitting, no?”

  The man brought their drinks and they looked at the menus in the nearly empty room, they talked and looked, not really looking—looking and forgetting. Marian felt the nice bite of the gin and wondered what it was about Brian that made him so easy to talk to. She thought he went around scared most of the time but did not try to hide it from women, some women anyway, maybe the rare woman he runs into a hundred miles from home, and he falls all over himself with honesty and self-scathing insight, the things he does not normally show the boys.

  To reciprocate perhaps. She didn’t know why else she’d tell the dog story if not to strut her own confessional skills. They had another drink and ordered lunch.

  “The dog barked and whined incessantly, Dukey, but the kids were small and they loved their dog and he barked, he cried, he went bye-bye in the house, he yapped at other kids and the neighbors complained and I secretly tried to give him away but no one would take him and so I finally, on an impulse—this is awful, why am I telling you this?”

  “Because the story haunts you. Because you see mercy in my eyes.”

  “Yes, a frantic impulse. I convinced myself the dog was miserable and sick and suffering some irreversible thing and I drove out on 85, I think it is, down past some dam into stark stony desert, much farther than I absolutely had to go, and I just kept going and going and finally stopped the car and opened the door and set Dukey out on the ground and then drove home and told Lainie, Sweetheart the dog ran away and I’m so sorry. But I did not let it go at that. I went reeling out of control. I started driving them through the streets, both kids, day after day, calling out the windows for Dukey, Dukey, and it haunts me, yes, like something I only dreamed and what a relief it is to realize it didn’t actually happen.”

  “And then you realize it did happen.”

  Brian was enjoying this immensely and so she began to enjoy it too, which was probably the point, she thought.

  “Driving through the dead summer streets in the long afternoons. I can hear their voices. Dukey, Dukey. They were five and three, I think. Calling out the windows for their dog.”

  She was nearly laughing-crying, looking at Brian’s mug alight with pleasure and feeling the misery and shame of her act and smoking in the middle of a meal in an empty dining room where the air conditioner is not responding.

  He said, “Dukey, Dukey.”

  “Duchino actually. Little Duke. Nick came up with the name. Do you know he’s half Italian?”

  “Our Nick? When did this happen?”

  “You don’t see it in his face?”

  “I hear it in that voice he does.”

  “What voice?”

  “The gangster making threats.”

  “What gangster?”

  “It’s a voice he does. Expert, stereotyped, pretty funny.”

  “Speaking of backgrounds,” she said. “And if this is too personal, you don’t have to answer. But did you ever have a rabbit for a pet?”

  They were having a fine time. When he talked she found herself sorting through the responses, getting them ready, one after another, and sometimes she broke in irresistibly and watched his face go bright. She told him she played field hockey in school and missed it. She missed drinking from a garden hose. She missed her mother and father more than ever and they’d been dead nine years and six years and were stronge
r forces now, so deeply present in her life that she understood completely how people see ghosts and have conversations with the dead. She had a garden hose but did not drink from it and did not allow her kids to drink from it and this was the difference, less in lost things than in knowledge become suspicious and alert. She told him she missed smoking even though she hadn’t been able to stop.

  When they were finished they walked up a stairway to the lobby and in her mind she kept ascending to a shadowed room at the end of a long empty hall and saw herself folding down the bedspread and standing above the cool sheets waiting for a knock at the door. Then they heard plaintive falsettos from the loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and they walked down to the cars in the easy heat.

  Brian went into a state of body rapture over a lime sherbet Chevrolet, a ’57 Bel Air convertible with white upholstery. He draped himself over the hood and pretended to lick the hot metal. Marian thought this is what men get instead of fatty deposits around the thighs. But she had to admire the car, which was carefree and racy and even great in a way, the chromium sweep of it and the funny and touching music that bared its innocence.

  Brian detached himself from the hood.

  “Did you own one?”

  “Too young,” he said. “My oldest brother had one for a while. Brendan’s Bel Air. We still talk about it in awed tones. It was the high point of his life. It meant everything to him. Girls, love, personality, power. It meant the moment. All those cars had the so-called forward look. Sleek as jet fighters. But it turned out that forward didn’t mean the future. It meant do it now, have your fun, because the sixties are coming, bow wow bang bang. The engine had a throaty roar. We couldn’t know it at the time but it’s been downhill for Brendan ever since.”

  They walked under the elms at the edge of the square. His car was parked by the old city jail, which was the chamber of commerce now. They spoke oddly polite goodbyes. She thought maybe they felt guilty about something and needed to prepare their faces for the journey home, get the noise out of the system. She walked up the street to her car and felt the liquid pulse of the sun in every step.

  3

  * * *

  Brian drove due north, looking for a sign that would lead him to the bridge. A sludge tanker moved downriver, funky and low-slung. He felt the old foreboding. It wasn’t widely known, it was narrowly known that he experienced terrible things every time he crossed a bridge. The longer and higher the span, the greater his sense of breathless abyss. And this was a major bridge over a broad and historic body of water. The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some möbius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws—hanging sort of unborn in generic space.

  Then he saw it in the distance, steel-beamed and cabled, sweeping to the palisaded bank. He followed the signs, made the loops and started out across the bridge, choosing the upper level because the long gray Lincoln in front of him went that way. Lincoln and Washington, keep me safe. The radio was ablast with call-in voices, they’re griping, they’re spraying spit, it’s the sidewalk salvo and rap, and he imagined a long queue of underground souls waiting to enter the broadcast band and speak the incognito news. He listened in solemn gratitude. It was a clamor so strong it amounted to a life force, carrying this Ohio boy through his white anxiety and across to the Jersey side.

  He was looking for 46 west. He’d written out directions that the man had recited over the phone. The man had recited the routes and streets in a manner so automatic that Brian realized many pilgrims had made the trip across the river.

  He had the directions written on hotel stationery and he kept the page on the seat next to him, snatching a look every ten seconds. After a mile on 46 west he spotted the Exxon station and made the maneuver onto 63 south, racing along the three-mile stretch to the Point Diner. Then he made a left turn out of the howl of highly motivated traffic and into residential streets, beginning to relax at last, approaching the circle on Kennedy Drive, another dead president.

  Down a side street to an old frame house. Marvin Lundy opened the door, a hunched fellow with a stylized shuffle, in his late sixties, holding a burnt-out cigar. Brian thought he resembled some retired stand-up comic who will not live a minute longer than his last monopolized conversation. He followed the man through two rooms steeped in aquarium dimness. Then they went to the basement, a large finished room that held Marvin Lundy’s collection of baseball memorabilia.

  “My late wife, she would serve us tea with popovers that she made fresh, all other things being equal.”

  The room was filled with objects on tasteful display. Flannel jerseys draped along the walls, caps with souvenir buttons pinned to the visors, there were newspaper pages framed and hung. Brian did a reverent tour, examining autographed bats ranked on custom wall fittings, game bats beautifully grained, some with pine tar on the choke. There were stadium seats labeled like rare botanical specimens—Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, Griffith Stadium. He nearly touched an old catcher’s mitt set on a pedestal, the object gashed yellow, spike-gashed and sun-smoked and patriarchal, but he managed to hold back. He looked at autographed baseballs in plexiglas globes. He leaned over display cases that held cigarette cards, ticket stubs, the signed contracts of famous players, nineteenth-century baseball board games, bubblegum wrappers that carried the pinkish likenesses of men from Brian’s youth, their names a kind of poetry floating down the decades.

  “You would put strawberry preserves on the popovers, which forget it, all life from the Renaissance onward it pales by compare.”

  None of this amounted to an astonishment. It was interesting, even moving in a way, but not great or memorable. The wondrous touch, the outlandish and surpassing fancy was the large construction along the far wall, a replica of the old Polo Grounds scoreboard and clubhouse facade. It covered an area about twenty-two feet long and twelve feet high, floor to ceiling, and included the Chesterfield sign and slogan, the Longines clock, a semblance of the clubhouse windows and parapet and finally a hand-slotted line score, the inning by inning tally of the famous play-off game of 1951.

  “You would have to eat them hot. She made a strict rule of no dawdling, Eleanor, because lukewarm you lose the whole experience.”

  Brian stood near the scoreboard, looking at Marvin for permission to touch.

  “I had a draftsman, a carpenter, an electrician and a sign painter, not a house painter, very temperamental. I showed them photographs and they did measurements and sketches so they could respect the proportions and get the colors. The hit sign and the E light up, for error. Where do you live?”

  “Phoenix.”

  “I was never there.”

  In the stronger light down here he could see that Marvin Lundy’s hair was a swatch of loomed synthetic, ash-brown, combed sleekly forward, and it made Brian think of Las Vegas and pinky rings and prostate cancer.

  He said to Marvin, “I grew up in the Midwest. Cleveland Indians, that was my team. And I was flying in on business last night and saw an article in the airline magazine, the piece about you and your collectibles, and I felt a strong compulsion to get in touch with you and see these things.”

  He fingered the silky lapel of Babe Ruth’s smoking jacket.

  “My daughter talked me into doing the interview,” Marvin said. “She thinks I’m turning into a what-do-you-call.”

  “A recluse.”

  “An old recluse with half a stomach. So now my picture’s in twenty thousand seat pouches. This is her idea of get out and meet people. They put me in with the vomit bags.”

  Brian said, “I went to a car show and it did something to me.”

  “What did it do?”

  “Cars from the nineteen-fifties. I don’t know.”

  “You feel sorry for yourself. You think you’re missing something and you don’t know what it is. You’re lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole poin
t is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination.”

  “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? But probably harmless too.”

  “Nothing is harmless,” Marvin said. “You’re worried and scared. You see the cold war winding down. This makes it hard for you to breathe.”

  Brian pushed through a turnstile from an old ballpark. It creaked sort of lovingly.

  He said, “Cold war? I don’t see the cold war winding down. And if I did, good. I’d be happy about it.”

  “Let me explain something that maybe you never noticed.”

  Marvin was sitting in an armchair alongside an old equipment trunk bearing the stenciled inscription Boston Red Stockings. He gestured toward the chair on the other side of the trunk and Brian went over and sat down.

  “You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It’s the one constant thing. It’s honest, it’s dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that’s when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal bloodstream. You will no longer be the main—what do I want to say?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Point of reference. Because other forces will come rushing in, demanding and challenging. The cold war is your friend. You need it to stay on top.”

  “On top of what?”

  “You don’t know on top of what? You don’t know the whole thing is geared to your dominance in the world? You see what they have in England. Forty thousand women circling an air base to protest the bombs and missiles. Some of them are men in dresses. They have Buddhists beating drums.”

  Brian didn’t know how to respond to these remarks. He wanted to talk about old ballplayers, stadium dimensions, about nicknames and minor league towns. That’s why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century—the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.