Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  “You do me a favor and press it now,” Manx tells him. “Because I’m about to die sitting here conferring.”

  “Be calm. I take you where you going.”

  Antoine puts the vehicle in motion. He drives steady and unfazed, pointing the car up Broadway like a poison dart.

  Manx realizes this is why the snow shovels were not in the car, where he’d told Antoine to put them. No room for shovels in the car.

  Then he realizes they left the shovels in the barroom. Good a place as any. Except they won’t be there tomorrow. So cross that little caper off the slate.

  The last thing he realizes is that Antoine’s been telling him all night to raise his sights. And him driving a DeSoto full of garbage.

  “You drop me just up ahead there.”

  “I take you exactly where you’re going.”

  “Broadway be fine,” Manx says.

  The stink is killing him, lifting him out of the insulated state of a day’s slow whiskey burn.

  The trash is bumping and mashing around and it has a life of its own, a kind of seething vegetable menace that pushes up out of the cans and boxes, it’s noisy and restless, or maybe that’s just the vermin moving around, on the verge of being carsick.

  “This here’s fine,” Manx says. “Right at the corner.”

  “You’re not gonna tell me where you’re going?”

  “I tell you where you’re going if you want to take this trash to the Whitestone Bridge. You cross the river and get on One Sixty-first, which I think it runs two ways, and you take it to Bruckner, you be okay, Boulevard.”

  Antoine looks at him. Manx is already out of the car and he’s standing on the sidewalk and Antoine looks at him, sitting unfazed at the wheel. A long lazy snake-eye look.

  “Or I could dump it in the street.”

  “That’s what I thought. That’s what I said to myself.”

  “While the city sleeps,” Antoine says. “And the cops be eating their chowder.”

  Manx watches the car move off. The feel of empty streets after midnight and the wind off the Hudson as he walks east. The hawk at his back. The cutting wind that sends loose trash skidding in the street.

  Could be Antoine unleashing early.

  He’d like to see an Alka-Seltzer is what he’d like to see, sizzling down the length of a cold glass of water.

  He walks down the long ramp with the ballpark on his left, the Polo Grounds, and he looks for people standing in line or huddled on the pavement with blankets and food, the all-nighters, the men and boys eager for tickets, the kids who get paid by scalpers to stand in the cold and buy tickets that desperate fans will haggle over next day, paying prices out of sight.

  The place is deadly still. And Manx has a stale acid feeling, that fidgety indigestion where you drink too much on an empty stomach, even though he knows he ate a meal, he recalls the dish Ivie left him, he tastes the meat loaf and greens, but there’s a wrenching pull like he’s all sucked dry.

  He’s down on Eighth Avenue now wandering the perimeter of the ballpark, looking for a sign that someone’s still alive. The place is stone cold quiet.

  What’s a pyramid doing on a U.S. bill? That’s a question you do well to ask.

  The only thing he sees is a dog of the slinking type, been kicked so often it decides it’s being petted. He can’t understand how Phil could be wrong about this. Phil’s a straight-up guy. If Phil says the fans will be lining up all night to buy tickets and then you go there and look around and the place is deadly still, you have to wonder who’s messing with your head.

  It is frankly a fly-by-night moving and storage. They call him and he works, they don’t and he don’t.

  Now he sees a car stopped for a light and he walks on over, sliding his feet the way he does when things get culminated on him. A man sits at the wheel. He sees Manx coming and rolls up the window, a white man with a look on his face like I ain’t ready to die. Manx makes a motion with his hands. He shakes his hands in the air, no no no no—I only want to ask a question. And the man hits the pedal and he’s gone, never mind the light’s still red, burning rubber real impressive.

  The sound dies into the night stillness and a deep quiet comes on again. The old ballpark stands over the avenue and makes its own enormous silence, different from the street and the river. Kids still swim in the Harlem River in the summer, way uptown where it turns out of the Hudson, and his own boys used to leap off a dock, arms all flung—he sees them momentarily in midair.

  It grieves the bejesus out of him.

  He feels a little empty. He feels low and put off and frankly humanly disgusted and he wants to lie down and sleep. He feels a little messed with. He wants to somehow, from someone, make some money.

  One chance in ten million the ball club even lets him in the door. He has to find the paying fans. And he only walked toward the car to ask where they are. And the face at the wheel, like don’t cut me up in little pieces please.

  He looks across 155th Street, south to the tenements, and he sees a woman standing under the Power of Prayer sign, soliciting her trade.

  He hears a sound across the river.

  What’s the point of all the secret codes on a U.S. dollar except to disconnect you from the people who know the facts?

  He hears something. He’s ready to head home, there’s nowhere to go but home unless he finds another bar, and he knows he has to go down the subway and wait for a train in an empty station, another bringdown, stand there on the long platform waiting, half an hour maybe, and he hears a sound from across the river, far away but clear, the way voices travel exact on the water at night.

  He stands near the bridge approach and listens. Men singing, the sound of a great many voices, some following behind the others, rambunctious and uneven, and he knows the tune.

  They’re singing, Riding on a pony.

  They’re singing, Stuck a feather in his cap.

  They’re singing, Called it macaroni.

  And he hears laughter drift across the river and begins to understand finally. It wasn’t the bartender who made the mistake. Phil never said the people would be lining up at the Polo Grounds. He never named the ballpark. It was Manx who made the mistake. Because they’re lining up at Yankee Stadium just across the river. It’s the Giants versus the Yankees at Yankee Stadium and the voices travel so exact it’s like someone’s whispering just to him.

  He hears a group of fans chanting Say Hey Willie and of course those are Giant fans and that’s Willie Mays they’re singing his praises.

  And he hears the answering chant from the Yankee fans with that old Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio song from before the war, he thinks, that they were playing on every radio in the country, we want you on our side, and it’s all rough-and-tumble and good-natured and his mood picks up and he gives the ball a smack with the palm of his hand where it’s tucked in his jacket pocket, the perfect roundness and hardness of an object that’s substantial.

  He walks across the swing bridge and hears them in the streets and then he begins to see them. They’re walking across the public park to the stadium, across the fields and pathways, and they’re coming down from the elevated train, men and boys in long streams turning the bends in the high stairways, and they’re laughing and singing.

  He sees flags waving on the stadium roof and World Series bunting hung high on the outer wall. He sees fires on the pavement, they’re building fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, and he is struck a little dumb by the masses of people out to buy tickets at this time of night. His mouth hangs a little open and he is wide-eyed dumb. He paces himself to the crowd, feeling pulled along, feeling frankly happy to be among them, and they’re carrying food and chairs, webbed chairs for the beach that fold up light, and they have sleeping bags strapped to their backs, a dozen college boys with their hair clipped short, and they’re passing thermos bottles that smoke up when you screw off the lid, strong coffee to keep them awake and warm.

  He sees fathers and sons standing around the fires to w
arm themselves, masses of people if you could count them, and mounted police with horses breathing steam, and he feels a rare elation, a wanting-to-be-among-them, and he is pulled along a little slack-jawed because it’s a great thing to see, and they’re singing roaring warring songs, they’re back-and-forthing on the street with rough-and-tumble humor, all these ball fans striding toward the ticket lines at two or three in the morning or whatever the actual hour.

  Manx is wearing a watch that stopped running six weeks ago. This is a situation he will direct his attention to when his life gets back to being regular.

  PART 4

  COCKSUCKER BLUES

  SUMMER 1974

  1

  * * *

  It was the rooftop summer, drinks or dinner, a wedged garden with a wrought iron table that’s spored along its curved legs with oxide blight, and maybe those are old French roses climbing the chimney pot, a color called maiden’s blush, or a long terrace with a slate surface and birch trees in copper tubs and the laughter of a dozen people sounding small and precious in the night, floating over the cold soup toward skylights and domes and water tanks, or a hurry-up lunch, an old friend, beach chairs and takeout Chinese and how the snapdragons smell buttery in the sun.

  This was Klara Sax’s summer at the roofline. She found a hidden city above the grid of fever streets. Walk and Dont Walk. Ten million bobbing heads that ride above the tideline of taxi stripes, all brain-waved differently, and yes the street abounds in idiosyncrasy, in the human veer, but you have to go to roof level to see the thing distinct, preserved in masonry and brass. She looked across the crowded sky of ventilators and antennas and suddenly there’s a quirk, some unaccountable gesture that isolates itself. Angels with butterfly wings tucked under a cornice on Bleecker Street. Or the mystery of a white clapboard cottage on the roof of an office building. Or the odd deco heads, sort of Easter Islandish, attached to the corners of a midtown tower. She found these things encouraging, dozens such that hung unauthored, with bridge cables in the distance and occasional booming skies, the false storms of summer.

  She was fifty-four now, let that number rumble in your head—fifty-four and between projects and humanly invisible and waiting to go back to work, to make and shape and modify and build.

  The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building—about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.

  “I think of it as one, not two,” she said. “Even though there are clearly two towers. It’s a single entity, isn’t it?”

  “Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think.”

  “Yes, you have to look.”

  And they were out of ideas for a while, standing at the ledge and taking in the baleful view together, uncomfortably, she thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger, and finally she sensed a rustle, a disturbance in his bearing that was meant to mark a change of subject, earnest and determined, and he said to her, still looking toward the towers, he whispered actually, “I like your work, you know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Very sympathetic.”

  It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you.

  She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe a Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace—you can’t identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze.

  Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving her money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years—they all said so.

  It was the time of Nixon’s fall from office but she didn’t enjoy it the way her friends did. Nixon made her think of her father, another man of frazzled mind, rehearsed in his very step, his physical address, bitter and distant at times, with a loser’s bent frame, all head and hands.

  She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky.

  She wasn’t used to being recognized. She was recognized in certain situations but only rarely and it made her feel that someone was taking measurements of her body in a small mirrored room. She tended to be unseen except by friends. She was mostly invisible, humanly invisible to people in the market down the street and not just youngsters hurrying past a hazy shape in the aisles, the unfocused stuff of middle age, but people in general—okay, men in general—who gave her generic status at best.

  It was not an issue. She wasn’t lonely or unloved. Well, she was unloved in the deeper senses of the word but that was fine, she’d had enough love of the deeper types, painful and ever echoing, the rancorous marriages that make it hard for you to earn a dependable solitude. It was a curiosity only, and a bracing form of self-awareness, learning to be unseen.

  Miles Lightman came around a lot that summer. There was something about Miles that made her think he ate off dirty dishes but she began to get used to him, to like him a lot—he was kinetic and unreflective, essentially artless, blank to the schemes of conceit that ruin many a budding love.

  She wore long ruffled skirts, she wore denim skirts with floriated hems.

  She stood on the roof of a factory building, a space made available for the evening so that a small theater group might launch a fund drive, and fifty people drank tepid wine out of plastic cups and said, We need theater.

  She was near the ledge talking to a woman she didn’t know and at some point she understood that the building she was facing, about ten blocks uptown, an oldish tower with a massed midsection and mosaic summit, was the Fred F. French Building.

  And she tried to listen to the woman but could not concentrate because the name lit up her brain, one of those deep sheer flashes that take forty years to happen.

  Fred F. French. She had to tell the story to Miles because it was funny and screwy and she wanted to give in to it completely, get it out and work it around and pile on the details. Boy-crazy Rochelle and the horny boy in the backseat and she was in it too, of course, Klara Sachs without the x, how she walked and talked, how things were real and she was real in ways she’d forgotten how to be.

  From the tall windows of her loft she saw fire escapes angled and stepped, this was her principal view, dark metal structures intersecting in depth over the back alleys, and she wondered if these lines might tell her something.

  Lofts were maybe dangerous, she thought, but not for fires—spacious and pillared and memoried and grand. She had to watch for ego creeping in. She had to ask herself would you do this piece a truer way if you worked in a stunted garret somewhere. She tried to scale her work to the human figure even though it wasn’t figural. She was wary of ego, hero, heights and size.

  That was the stuff of rooftop eloquence. Admire but do not emulate.

  Her daughter was in town and they walked around the cast-iron district and had lunch in the Village and they shopped a little b
it and it was hard. It was always hard with Teresa, she had an air of deprivation and a plainness that seemed obstinate—she was overweight and willfully unpretty and seemed to be saying that daddy loves me exactly the way I am but my mother doesn’t, my mother thinks I can be better and smarter and know better and smarter people.

  She heard those shots and then looked up and saw the Cinzano awning and realized the fringes were flapping in the river wind.

  Teresa was twenty-five but looked ageless and shapeless and the hardest part of the visit for Klara was sitting in the loft talking, or waiting out the silences, or finding out her daughter took sugar in her tea and not having sugar in the house.

  “You should visit daddy,” Teresa said.

  And this is spoken as a provocation, a form of censure that has nothing to do with a train ride to the Bronx.

  “That’s not a good idea. Trust me.”

  “I can’t believe you live in the same city and you never once.”

  “Frankly I could live on the same street. It’s not a question of where we live, you know? There’s nothing to be gained and he knows it and I know it.”

  She leaves unsaid the fact that Teresa knows it too.

  “Why does something have to be gained? Why is there always this thing of a gain?”

  “So many years, Teresa. What’s the point?”

  Another silence now of tea things clinking and trucks at the loading platforms along the street, those trucks with dented metal sides and no company names.

  “You don’t have any Sweet ’n Low, even?”

  Klara looked out the windows at the fire escapes, the backsides of gray buildings, what a gleaning of sheened iron and rust fungus and scaly brick.

  “How is he?” she said.

  “What? He’s all right. He won’t move to a new building. That building is getting to be ridiculous that he’s in now.”

  Everywhere they walked there was garbage stacked in black bags. They were seven days into the strike, which included a number of violent incidents and one private hauler nearly beaten to death. Teresa said nothing about the mounds of trash, fifty bags in some places, because she lived in Vermont and what could she say? But she used the trash against her mother. The trash was another form of accusation, it passed telepathically between them, a hundred bags on one corner and a smell so summer-lush it enveloped the whole body, pressing in like a weather system.