Players

by Don DeLillo

  After the close Lyle showed up at the office. She wasn’t at her desk. He lingered in the area, trying to be inconspicuous. Deciding finally that she’d left early or hadn’t come in at all, he went into an empty office and called her at home. She didn’t answer. Three times, at ten-minute intervals, he returned to dial her number. On the elevator he thought: grieved suitor. Was he coming to understand the motivating concepts that led to obsession, despair, crimes of passion? Haw haw haw. Denial and assertion. The trap of wanting. The blessedness of being wronged. What sweet vistas it opens, huge neurotic landscapes, what exemptions. Gaw damn, Miss Molly. In the taxi he was oddly calm. He had the driver take him two blocks past his destination. (It was that kind of involvement, already.) He called her number from a booth near a gas station. When she didn’t answer he walked to the house and rang her bell in the vestibule. He waited there an hour, then went back to the phone booth. There was no answer. He thought he saw the VW turn into her street. He ran across Queens Boulevard and hurried to the corner. The car was parked in front of her building. It was still early, at least two hours of sunlight left. He smoked and waited. A man and a woman (not Rosemary) came out of the building. The car moved north. He went to the house and pressed her bell again. No one came to the door. He remained in the vestibule half an hour, ringing and waiting. Then he went to the booth near the gas station and dialed her number. There was no answer. He waited five minutes and dialed again. Then he decided to count to fifty. At fifty he would call one last time. When she didn’t answer, he lowered the count to twenty-five.

  Pammy in the back of a rented limousine sat drinking from a Thermos bottle full of gin and dry vermouth. When the car passed a delicatessen near the Midtown Tunnel she asked the driver to stop. She ran inside and bought a lemon. She came running out, in high boots and a puffy cap, her getaway gear. Back in the car she tore off a strip of lemon rind with her teeth and thumbnail. She rubbed it over the inner edge of the Thermos cup, then dropped it in. If she had to fly, she would do it at less than total consciousness. She drank much faster than usual. It was roughly eight parts gin to one vermouth. She didn’t like martinis particularly but felt they represented a certain flamboyant abandon, at least in theory—a devil-may-care quality that suited a trip to the airport. If she had to go to the airport at all, she would go in a limousine, wearing high boots, faded denims and a street kid’s jive cap. She knew she looked pretty terrific. She also knew Ethan and Jack would enjoy her story of going out to the airport, smashed, in a mile-long limo, although she had to admit she disliked hearing other people go on about their drinking or drug-taking, the quantities involved, the comic episodes that ensued. But they’d be glad to see her and they’d love her outfit. She felt so good, leaving. Maine was up there somewhere, vast miles of granite and pine. She could see Jack’s face when she walked into the arrivals area, hear Ethan’s arch greeting. It would be a separation from the world of legalities and claims, an edifying loss of definition. She poured another cup. When the land began to flatten and empty out, she knew they were in the vicinity of the airport. It was a landscape that acceded readily to a sense of pre-emption. She lowered the shades on the side windows and rode the rest of the way in semidarkness, conscientiously sipping from the cup.

  Lyle was slightly surprised by the degree to which he enjoyed being alone. Everything was put away, all the busy spill of conjugal habits. He walked through the apartment, noting lapsed boundaries, a modification of sight lines and planes. Of course it hadn’t nearly the same warmth. But there was something else, an airy span about the place, the re-distancing of objects about a common point. Things were less abrupt and sundry. There was an evenness of feeling, a radial symmetry involving not so much his body and the rooms through which he passed but an inner presence and its sounding lines, the secret possibilities of self. He’d seen her, after he stepped off the bus, come out of the building and walk to the limousine. He was half a block away. She’d stood briefly on the sidewalk, checking her shoulder bag for tickets, keys, so forth. The long boots were a surprise, and the hat as well, making her seem, even from this distance, never more captivating, physically, a striking sight really, and vulnerable, as people can appear to be who are fetching and carefree and unaware of being watched. He felt his soul swing to a devastating tenderness. She was innocent there, that moment; had put away guile and chosen to distrust experience. Short of pretending to be blind, he could do nothing but succumb to love. The bronze shock of it was pure truth, the kind that reveals conditions within, favors and old graces coming into the light. He watched the automobile glide into traffic. He shared her going, completely. It would be only several weeks but in that time he knew the simplest kitchen implement would be perceived as brighter, more distinct, an object of immediate experience. Their separations were intense.

  9

  He passed McKechnie several times on the floor but said nothing, as was customary, and avoided eye contact. He looked for him during slack periods and again in the smoking area. That night he called him at home.

  “Frank, a friend of yours was supposed to get in touch with me.”

  “I told him the thing.”

  “Who is he, where is he, when do we talk?”

  “I don’t know what he does but he does it in Langley, Virginia.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Christ, Lyle.”

  “ ‘Christ, Lyle.’ What’s that? ‘Christ, Lyle.’ ”

  “Use your head,” McKechnie said.

  “Look, just tell me, will you?”

  “Langley fucking Virginia.”

  “What is that? ‘Langley fucking Virginia.’ What is that?”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re being intentionally stupid.”

  “Is there a curse attached if you utter the goddamn thing? What happens, your eyeballs drop out?”

  “Shit but you’re dumb sometimes.”

  “Langley, Virginia.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When do I hear?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “This is supposed to be some kind of obscure figure and everybody’s searching for terrorist links and here’s this secretary walking around who’s met the man, who knows him apparently, who’s got his picture hanging in her kitchen. It could be important, Frank.”

  “Not to me it couldn’t.”

  “You don’t even know what he does, your friend.”

  “I don’t know, that’s right.”

  “And you don’t want to know.”

  “Never righter, Lyle.”

  “But he does it in Langley, Virginia.”

  “Wow but you’re stupid.”

  “Say it, Frank.”

  “Either you know or you don’t. If you don’t know, try guessing.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Try guessing.”

  “Utter it, come on.”

  “I’m hanging up,” McKechnie said.

  “Whisper it in my ear.”

  “I’m putting down the phone, dumbfuck.”

  10

  Rosemary’s flesh, her overample thighs, the contact chill of her body were the preoccupations of his detachment from common bonds. Once her clothes were off, she rarely spoke. He gripped and bit at her, leaving spit everywhere. Her breath was milky. She was uninterested in all but the most commonplace sex. Suitable, he thought. Perfectly acceptable. Why not? She clutched the back of his neck. Her flesh obsessed him, color and touch, bland odors coming off it. She might almost have been a drugged child. He wanted to scratch at her flesh, to leave teeth marks, pink ridges, alternately lapping and clawing away. It was hardly the mood of squandered afternoons. He wanted to put his mouth inside hers; roar.

  “It’s that I’m all through with that. I’m out. Let it all come down. Don’t you think everybody, nearly, feels that way about their work, where they work all those years? It’s insane, besides. The whole thing is. Besides, why not?”

  She never let him undress her. She would go
into the bathroom, emerging ten minutes later, slightly ill at ease although not about her nakedness, he felt, but about the way she walked when barefoot, a somehow downhill step, heavy-tending. She showed little sign of whatever measures of desire his own body might have been expected to arouse in her.

  “There may be some people you can meet.”

  “Of course, I know.”

  “I was wondering,” she said. “The car?”

  “Sure, I remember, clearly.”

  “That picks me up from work sometimes.”

  “Absolutely, who else but them?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Why not, certainly, what am I here for?”

  Her thighs distorted the line of her body. A plodder’s thighs, surprisingly. Hard to spot in someone who wears a dress but reassuring in that it confounded the set of his expectations. He pressed onto her constantly, all his body, ravenous for flesh, his hands mixing and working her into a mass of mild discoloration. She never approached orgasm. He accepted this not as a deficiency he might correct (as people often interpret the matter), using patience and skill, the bed mechanic’s experience; nor as a deeper exhaustion, a failure of the spirit. It was simply part of their dynamics, the condition of being together, and he had no intention of altering the elements of the spell or even of wishing them otherwise. One kind of sex or another was not the question. The triteness that pervaded their meetings supplied what he wanted of eroticism and made “one” or “the other” a question of recondite semantics. He gripped her fiercely. There was never any point at which he guided himself past a certain stage or prepared to approach a culmination. It was too disorganized, the moments of intensity only loosely foreseen. He would climax unexpectedly, barely aware, feeling both criminal and naïve.

  She is padding to the bathroom, he thought. Holding her breasts she admires her body in the full-length mirror. She is rosy with fulfillment. Two waiting-maids enter to prepare her perfumed bath. On the bed of carved walnut, he thought, her lover reclines against a mound of silk pillows, recalling how she’d groaned with pleasure.

  TWO

  1

  She turned the car into a dead-end street. It was Sunday and very still, midafternoon. Lyle looked out the side window, dreamily, his arm hanging out over the door, a surfer returning from a day at the beach. The woman parked, turned off the ignition and sat there. Lyle waited. Only one sidewalk was paved. The house was gray frame, two-storied, fronted by shrubs and a single tree. She made a small noise, routine irritation, as she attempted to bend herself out of the car. She looked back in at Lyle, who hadn’t yet reached for the door.

  “I forgot the Cheerios,” she said. “This will precipitate a small crisis in the morning. Is that right—‘precipitate’?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Maybe not quite.”

  She reached in for the groceries.

  “Do I come in now?” he said. “Or wait out here.”

  “Oh, I think come in. By all means now. I think it’s clearly the thing.”

  He heard piano music coming from the back of the house, a record player apparently, upper floor. The woman, reacting to the sound, turned on the radio. She gestured to Lyle and he sat in a deep chair with enormous laminated arms. The woman, Marina Vilar, stood behind the table the radio was on, reaching over the top of the radio to turn the station selector. Through the window behind her Lyle could see part of a bridge, either the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck. He knew they weren’t far from the Nassau County line but couldn’t recall which was the easternmost bridge. The woman found what she wanted, a rapid-fire disk jockey, and turned up the volume, grimly satisfied, her look directed toward the top of the stairs.

  Marina was squat, close to shapeless, dressed in what might have been thrift-shop clothing. Her face had precise lines, however, strongly boned, a trace of the socialist painter’s peasant woman, broad arcs and shadows. Her hair was parted in the middle and combed back over the ears. She had eyes that concentrated intently and would not easily surrender their assertiveness. She believed in one thing, he felt, to the exclusion of everything else. Although he didn’t know what this thing was as yet, he was certain she’d imbued it with a particular kind of purity, a savage light.

  “You didn’t meet my brother, unfortunately. Only Rosemary, is that right? My brother did the rockets at Tempelhof. He planned it to the last detail.”

  “I don’t know if I recall.”

  “They hit the wrong plane. They hit the DC-9. They were totally stupid. One plans something to the closest degree of precision. What happens?”

  “They go and hit the wrong plane,” he said.

  The place was full of blond furniture, secondhand, the kind of thing found in rec rooms or settlement houses. Everything had a chemical veneer. Marina put the groceries away and made some phone calls, not bothering to reduce the volume on the radio. During the third such call, J. Kinnear came down the stairs, moving quickly, feet wide apart, taking the last few steps with a rhythmic little canter. Five nine or ten, Lyle thought, identifying yet another suspect for some detective lieutenant. Checked shirt, brown pants, brown loafers, older than he appeared to be at very first glance.

  “Hi, I’m J. Delighted. You want to turn, is that it?”

  He smiled, shaking Lyle’s hand, half winking, and sat on a stack of phone books, hunched forward, clutching his knees. His manner suggested they were fellow believers whose paths had diverged only through the force of horrid circumstance. Furthermore he was eager to hear the whole story. There was humor in the way Kinnear assembled this sense of flattering intimacy. He was at a distance from it but certainly not in a way intended to deceive. His hands were at his ankles now, absently scratching. Marina turned off the radio and made another phone call. The room hummed as the two men waited for her to speak before resuming their own conversation. Kinnear had a gaze that never quite penetrated. If there was such a thing as being stared at evasively, Lyle felt he was experiencing just that. Rusty brown hair. Remnants of wide-spread freckling. Creases about the eyes and mouth.

  “A man from the floor itself.”

  “The floor of floors.”

  “Delighted, delighted.”

  “What happens now?”

  Kinnear laughed. He said he’d been making trips to and from the Coast. He said things were getting interesting. Lyle inferred that he wasn’t supposed to ask questions. The room was warm. He wanted to go to sleep. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t more alert, more interested. From the beginning, when Marina Vilar picked him up outside a bookstore on Fourth Avenue and took a less than direct route to the Midtown Tunnel, Lyle hadn’t been able to feel wholly engaged. It was happening around him somehow. He was slipping right through. A play. It was a little like that. He found himself bored, often, at the theater (although never at movies), even when he knew, could see and hear, that the play was exceptional, deserving of total attention. This kind of torpor was generated by three-dimensional bodies, real space as opposed to the manipulated depth of film. So things here might take a while to pinch in, raise a welt or two. In the meantime she’d taken him shopping. He’d followed her up and down the aisles of a small market in Bayside.

  “What’s curious,” he said to Kinnear, “is the little sort of reversal here. I’m a white collar. A walk-in. That was the secret dream of the white collar. To place a call from a public booth in the middle of the night. Calling some government bureau, some official department, right, of the government. ‘I have information about so-and-so.’ Or, even better, to be visited, to have them come to you. ‘You might be able to deliver a microdot letter, sir, on your visit to wherever,’ if that’s how they do things. ‘You might be willing to provide a recruiter with cover on your payroll, sir.’ Imagine how sexy that can be for the true-blue businessman or professor. What an incredible nighttime thrill. The appeal of mazes and intricate techniques. The suggestion of a double life. ‘Fantastic, sign me up, I’ll do it.’ ‘Of course, sir, you won’t be able to tell anyone ab
out this, including your nearest and dearest.’ ‘I love it, I love it, I’ll sign.’ But what’s happening here, J.? That’s the twist. You have somebody like George Sedbauer, to name just one instance of what I’m talking about, and what was old George up to, a white collar like old George? He was hanging around with the wild-eyed radicals, with the bomb-throwers. He was doing business with the other side. A white collar. What happened to the bureau, the service, the agency?”

  Kinnear’s smile emptied out as Lyle went along. The piano music stopped. He didn’t change expressions; merely vacated his smile, leaving ridged skin behind. The woman passed between them and went upstairs. There was a pause. They waited for the effects of her presence to diminish, the simple distraction of her body in transit.

  “Our phone bill is unreal. And we don’t have two dimes to rub together.”

  “But somebody like Sedbauer involved with terrorists, these total crazies from the straight world’s point of view. What does that suggest to you, J.?”

  “I want to show you something. It’ll be your initiation into the maze you spoke of. I have this fool notion that once you see this stuff, you’re in for good. This nearly mystical notion.”

  Kinnear led the way to the basement. There was a door beyond the furnace. He snapped back the bolt and went into the back room. Lyle watched him lift paint-stained canvas from a large table. There was a stock of weapons on and under the table. Kinnear brushed dust from his hands, holding them out away from the rest of his body.

  “I don’t know how many rounds of machine gun ammunition.”

  He worked on his trouser legs now, concentrating on removing dust, and then, beginning to speak, turned to face Lyle across the table.

  “Ironically no machine guns at the moment. But the usual sawed-off shotguns, sporting rifles, handguns. Some flak jackets. Some riot batons, riot helmets. Explosives and explosive components of various kinds, i.e., Pento-Mex, ammonium nitrate, various other powders and compounds. Ah, yes, an alarm clock for guess what purpose. Silhouette targets, cartridge clips, tracer bullets, a whole bunch of nine-volt batteries. I don’t know how many cans of Mace and CN.”