by Don DeLillo
He freed the parakeet. He opened the cage and let it go. The boy who adored animals, judge.
But about the shorts it is, “No, Mama, I no like.” And I said, “Marina, you are a married woman and it is proper for you to have a little longer shorts than the younger girls.” But it is, “No, Mama, this no good.” And I am strongly saying that this girl was not home. And this man was working. And I saw myself that this man came home and didn’t have any supper in front of him. This couple does not have a maid to give this workingman his supper. We are a family that has struggled to stay together. His daddy collected insurance premiums right up to the moment he went down on the lawn, mowing the lawn in a raging heat. It is Marguerite and Lee ever since.
A family expects you to be one thing when you’re another. They twist you out of shape. You have a brother with a good job and a nice wife and nice kids and they want you to be a person they will recognize. And a mother in a white uniform who grips your arms and weeps. You are trapped in their minds. They shape and hammer you. Going away is what you do to see yourself plain.
It was a Sunday and he stood in the empty lobby of the Republic National Bank Building in Dallas. Tan marble everywhere. He was waiting for George de Mohrenschildt. This was the second time he was meeting George. He wore a clean white shirt and the ready-made trousers of rough material he’d bought at the state-run store in Minsk.
George had a handful of keys. He jiggled them in greeting and walked to the elevators. They rode to sixteen and went down deserted corridors. The air was heavy and dense, with a carpet smell, a closeness. George was in tennis shorts and a shirt with an alligator emblem. He had a nice-size office with diplomas on the wall.
“You’ve been reading about this nut-case general.”
“I know about him since Russia,” Lee said.
“He’s getting involved in Cuba now. Sit down. I have your papers.”
“He’s only reflecting the feelings of what most people think. What Walker says and does, this is white America.”
“There are missiles poised to demolish us all and we have to open the newspaper and see this man.”
“It is Mississippi, it is Cuba, it is wherever he sees the opportunity.”
“He is making a switch to Cuba. He will jump into the Cuba thing. Wait and see.”
“They are asking questions about my mail,” Lee said.
“What do you mean?”
“A postal inspector talked to my landlord about the type mail I get. ”
“What type mail?”
“What some people would say subversive.”
“Why do you read this material? It is totally boring material. I know this material without reading a word. It is the definition of boring.”
“They are coming at me from a number of angles,” Lee said, breathing a little laugh through his nose.
George gave him a copy of the material that had been typed since their last talk. He returned the original handwritten pages, page fragments, random notes, autobiographical notes, notes for speeches.
“I’m not disappointed, Lee. This is solid work, the main essay in particular. I think it is definitely a prospect that you move here to Dallas with a new job, something more suited. You’ll come to my house. You’ll be nearby, for easy visits. I’ll tell you the most interesting thing about the house where I live. It is less than two miles from the house of General Walker.”
George stuck out his index finger and raised his thumb.
The door opened and a tall man with cropped gray hair walked in. He was very tan and wore a tan suit with a blue shirt and he had to be Marion Collings. George introduced them. Collings had the spare build, the leanness and fitness of an older man who wants you to know he is determined to outlive you.
George left.
“This essay you’ve written,” Collings said. “Very impressive, very thorough. I appreciate the fact you’ve allowed us to see it. You picked up things only a trained observer ordinarily spots. Many interesting facts about the radio plant and the workers. Well organized, a nice grasp of social interplay. I would say a good beginning. We have something solid to start us out.”
“I told George just about everything I remember that I didn’t put in ‘The Kollective.’ ”
“Yes, George and I have had our sit-down. I would say the major omission is glaring enough.”
“Which is?”
“Lee, if I may, it is not even remotely conceivable that you spent over two and a half years as a defector in the Soviet Union and remained free of contact with the KGB.”
“I had an interview with Internal Affairs, MVD, as final clearance for my departure.”
“Who cleared your entry? You applied for a visa in Helsinki and had it in two days. Normally a week is what it takes. We happen to know the Soviet consul in Helsinki at that time was a KGB officer.
“You may know it but I didn’t. They’re all over the place. That doesn’t mean I was doing any business. I went there to seek a better life.”
“Lee, if I may, once we saw that you wanted out of there, we helped smooth the way. You’re an interesting fellow. You’ve lived in the heart of the USSR for a long period. We want to have a relationship. We’re very pragmatic people. We don’t care what sort of affair you carried on with the Second Chief Directorate. You had a romance, you broke up. Fine. Happens all the time. Supply some details is all we’re looking for. We’re not the FBI. We don’t pursue with a vengeance, or apprehend and prosecute. We want a relationship. A give-and-take, okay?”
“Is the FBI watching me?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Collings said. “How would I know a thing like that?”
It was as if he’d been asked the melting point of titanium.
“Look, it’s simple. We want to know how you were handled. Who you saw, where you saw them, what they said. We don’t have to get into it right this minute. We purposely waited some weeks to debrief you. We want to be careful not to crowd you. We understand defection, disillusionment, mental pressures. This piece of writing you’ve done shows that you know exactly what kind of material is worth recording. Understand, we’re not asking for confessions or apologies. That’s not our agenda.”
He sat on the edge of George’s desk.
“A fact is innocent until someone wants it. Then it becomes intelligence. We’re sitting in a forty-story building that has an exterior of lightweight embossed aluminum. So what? Well, these dullish facts can mean a lot to certain individuals at certain times. An old man eating a peach is intelligence if it’s August and the place is the Ukraine and you’re a tourist with a camera. I can get you a Minox incidentally, any time. There’s still a place for human intelligence. George, for example. George gives us material that we promptly analyze and disseminate to other agencies.”
Lee said nothing.
“May I call you Lee?”
“All right.”
“Lee, you have no high-school diploma, only a so-called equivalency. You have no college degree. You have an undesirable discharge. You have almost three years in the USSR, which is either a gap in your employment record or it is three years in the USSR. Take your pick. Now, all I have to do is make a call and you’ll have a job with a firm here in Dallas that does very interesting work, classified work, where you’ll start low but have a chance to learn a serious trade. ”
Marion Collings stood by the desk, well tanned, sincerely and correctly tanned, so trim and fit he could snap his fingers and knock a picture off the wall.
“It’s a job I guarantee you are suited for and you’ll be working there in a matter of days. Okay. Just tell me what to do.”
Minox is the world-famous spy camera. Hidell has seen the name in books.
He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointe
d. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history.
12 August
Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, known professionally as Baby LeGrand, sat at the vanity in the dressing room of the Carousel Club, putting flesh-tone ointment on a pimple near her mouth. The narrow table was crowded with hairbrushes, coffee cups, thermos bottles, makeup kits, eight-by-ten glossies, sprays and foams, boxes of Kleenex, and it extended the length of the room, supporting four unframed mirrors. Brenda wore a bathrobe belonging to her sister.
Life Line was on KRLD, a patriotic show where they hiss at federal spending.
To get the ointment on right, Brenda had to stick her tongue against the side of her mouth, bulging the face, and this made it hard to talk. She was talking to the girl at the next mirror, Lynette Batistone, who looked barely out of high school.
“He might let you have an advance,” Brenda said. “Only make sure he’s in a good mood when you ask.”
“I heard about his advances,” Lynette said.
“This is just Jack. It’s not, he doesn’t expect results in other words. Who all’d you talk to, honey?”
“Molly Bright was saying.”
“Never mind Molly. The thing of Jack is, he gets personal with words. This is the windbag of the world talking. But it’s not like you have to fight your way out of the club.”
“From what I hear. But this is strictly, you know.”
“What?”
“He threatens his girls with, ‘Dumb cunt,’ like, ‘I’ll throw you down the fucking stairs.’ ”
“Honey, all right, this is not a bookkeeping firm. What’s a little language?”
“He gets screaming fits all the time,” Lynette said.
“He will not put a hand on your body.”
“Molly Bright offered she would fill in for Blaze and what happens, there’s this pandemonium.”
“You want to quote Molly. Let me say about Molly. If bullshit was music, she’d be a brass band. You need the money bad, go tell Jack. Just be sure to mention groceries. He reacts to anything concerning food.”
Lynette was in costume, a cowgirl outfit with a riding crop and long-barreled pistol. Brenda thought the girl had talent but not an ounce of taste. What she did was not even striptease. She was doing the dirty dog basically, with added little struts and touches.
“They told me in New Orleans this Jack is up and coming.”
“He owns another club.”
“He owns another club. I heard that.”
“The Vegas,” Brenda said. “But I don’t know about up and coming. I have to think on that a little.”
“What are these dogs I keep seeing?”
“He has dogs he calls his family. They live at the club except for one he takes home.”
“This is in case of protection.”
“I don’t know what he’s got to protect here but just us strippers.”
“I gotta go wee,” Lynette said.
“The other thing of Jack is, he’ll ask you if he’s queer. ‘Do you think I’m queer, Lynette?’ ‘Do I look like I’m queer to you?’ ‘Serious, tell me, do I strike you as queer from your experience?’ I guarantee he will ask these questions. ‘How surprised would you be if someone told you I’m a queer?’ ‘Do I talk the way a queer might talk if he’s trying to hide it, or what?’ ”
“What am I supposed to tell him?” Lynette said.
“Doesn’t make the slightest little difference. This is just Jack.”
Jack Ruby came in off Commerce Street, paunchy, balding, bearish in the chest and shoulders, fifty-two years old, carrying three thousand dollars in cash, a loaded revolver, a vial of Preludins and a summons from small-claims court for passing a bad check in a department store.
He walked into the dressing room.
“Quiet,” he told Brenda. “I want to hear this.”
They listened to Life Line on the radio. It was a commentary on heroism and how it has fallen into disuse.
Jack sat at the second mirror, his head lowered for maximum listening.
The announcer said, “In America, not so long ago, thirty-five bright young university students in a history class were asked to identify Guadalcanal. Less than one-third of them had ever heard of it. Three thousand years of military history tell no story more splendid than the blazing heroism on Guadalcanal, every bit of it American, as truly American as the log-cabin frontier and the open range. But nobody hears it now. United Nations Day gets a hundred times the publicity.”
Jack was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and white silk tie, and he carried the snap-brim fedora that put him into focus, gave him sharpness and direction, like a detective on assignment.
“I love this stuff,” he said. “I get welled up something tremendous when they talk about our country. You should have seen me when FDR died, when they announced on the radio, I was in uniform crying like a baby. Where is this Randi Ryder of mine?”
“Taking a pee.”
“Is she torrid or what? I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid they’ll take my license.”
“This is striptease,” Brenda said.
“She was a big draw on Bourbon Street. But this is, I don’t know, they might think she goes too far, popping her G-string like that.”
“She is after publicity, Jack.”
“I could make her wear a different little doohickey there.”
“She would snap it and pop it whatever.”
“Dallas draws the line at pussy hair. She could get me closed down.”
“She is awful young to me.”
“That’s part of the draw. The competition’s breathing down my back.”
“Is that why you’re paying her more than us?”
Jack leaned away, incredulous.
“Do I know this?” he said. “When did this come out?”
“You are paying Lynette like double.”
“Brenda, I swear this sounds like something I never heard of. I am claiming I am nowhere on this.”
“You pay extra, then you complain she’ll close you down.”
“I give her the margin so she’ll draw. I need the draw very bad.”
“You have this big thing built up in your mind that the competition is trying to put you out of business. They’re just the competition, making a living like the rest of us.”
“Fuck you, Brenda, okay.”
“Same back, Mr. Ruby.”
“I’m only the owner of this establishment and I have to sit here.”
“That is exactly right.”
“I have to listen.”
“They have nothing better to do than get Jack. When Jack is the biggest conniver and sharpie of all.”
“Hand me a Kleenex,” he said.
“I also have to say. Now that I’m started. You’re always off somewhere in your mind. Carrying on your own conversation. You don’t listen to people.”
“You don’t know how deep they’re digging me.”
“That’s why there is all this yelling all night long in this place.”
“I have my dogs and I.”
“Which you’re very welcome.”
“You should know my early life, Brenda, which I’m still obsessed. My mother, this is the God-honest truth, I swear to God, she spent thirty years of her life claiming there was a fishbone stuck in her throat. We listened to her constantly. Doctors, clinics, they searched for years with instruments. Finally she had an operation. There was nothing caught in her throat, absolutely, guaranteed. She comes home from the hospital. The fishbone is there.”
“Well this is just a woman and a mother.”
“So help me, thirty years, my brothers and sisters, never mind. And that’s the least of it. I’m just showing you some idea. My father was the drunk of all time. But I don’t care anymore what they did to each other or to me. I’m not a person who m
aintains a malice. I feel only love and respect for those people because they suffered in this world. So forget it, I don’t care, go away.”
“You never married, Jack, but how come.”
“I’m a sloven in my heart.”
“Personal-appearance-wise, you dress and groom.”
“In my heart, Brenda. There’s a chaos that’s enormous.”
They heard the MC telling jokes out on the stage. Jack leaned toward the radio and listened some more.
“I love the patriotic feeling I get, hearing this stuff. I am one hundred percent in my feeling for this country. What else do I trust? My own voice goes creepy at times. I can’t control the inner voice. There are pressures unbelievable.”
“Everybody gets pressure. We get pressure. You work us seven days a week.”
“I’m about halfway out of it in common terms.”
“Why don’t you marry your Randi Ryder? She’ll straighten out your life.”
“She’s a famous lay in New Orleans but she won’t do anything unnatural.”
Somebody shouted around the corner. Visitor for Jack. He touched Brenda on the shoulder and went out of the room. It was six paces to his office, where Jack Karlinsky was sitting on the sofa with one of the dogs.
“This is my dachshund Sheba,” Jack Ruby said. “Get down, baby.”
Jack Karlinsky was in his sixties, an investment counselor who had no office, no business phone, no employees and no clients. At his twenty-room house outside Dallas, a Coast Guard fog light played over the grounds all night long.
“I want to know did you hear. ”
“Be calm, Jack. That’s why I’m here. To discuss terms.”
“There are people who’ll speak for me out of long association. I talk to Tony Astorina on the phone.”
