Underworld by Don DeLillo
Matt said, “But who kept other gambling interests from moving in? A couple of car dealers couldn’t do that, could they? They must have imported real gangsters.”
“They didn’t have to. The money they paid the police was double coverage money. They paid the police to let them operate. And they also paid them to roust the competition. When competition showed up, the borough detectives or precinct detectives came down on them like a holy terror.”
“Gangbusters,” Matt said.
“Like gangbusters. Which is the story I started out to tell before I got involved in the fine print. The police making arrests. They even had to arrest the bookies who were paying them off. They got pressure when people complained, upstanding citizens, you know, or straight from City Hall. These were called accommodation arrests. The sergeant would apologize, he would book you at the precinct on Thirtieth Street and then you went to Centre Street, where the lawyer for the Solomons was waiting, and you said, Guilty, judge, and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine and went back to work. And the day you were born,” she said to Matt, “your father was arrested twice. Confusion inside the precinct. They arrested him in the morning and when he finally got released he took the subway to the Bronx, where I was in the hospital getting ready to deliver, it was one of those steamy sticky days and he came in the room and mopped my brow and fanned me with the racing form and said, Did you have it yet, and after a while he said he has to see a man, very important, be right back, and he went downtown and got arrested again, different cop, same desk sergeant, I don’t know about the judge, and when he got back to the hospital, with the running around and the heat and the subway, he looked worse off than I did but he got no sympathy, you can believe it, from me.”
Matt said, “Interesting day.”
“It was a dizzy comedy but we had no one to share it with because it was one thing to take bets but not so acceptable to get arrested for it and I’ve never told this story until now.”
Nick watched her carefully, absorbing every gesture and expression. A depth in her eyes that she dared her sons to interpret—the gnaw, the rankling pain that sits inside the good-natured telling. And the voice in its factual carry, vowels extended and bent a bit, a sound out of the old streets, the old demotic song gone to the near suburbs now, and a slight Irish pitch teasing the piece from somewhere deep in childhood.
There was a noise in the street, a customized car speaker bombing the night with music, a car that was all sound, a mobile sound bomb, and Nick glanced sharply at his brother, who shrugged and grinned.
“He wants you to sit on his patio, Mama. Bright stars above. Cactus outlined in the moonlight.”
“Imagine me and cactus.”
“No noise in the street. They arrest people for noise out there. If your front yard isn’t neat and clean, your neighbor’s kids won’t talk to your kids.”
Nick waited for her to speak again. He opened himself to everything inside her, to the past that never stops happening, and the passing minute, and what she feels when she scratches the back of her hand, pulling at the skin, then scratching. He tried to hear the rustle of her life, the fly buzzing in the room of the woman who lives alone.
One of the cats rubbed against his ankle, the orange tom his mother had found in the street. He shook it off and poured coffee all around.
They sat at the table talking in low tones.
Rosemary was in the bedroom and they talked across the dishes and cups and the flick of spilt milk.
“Where do you sleep?”
“I make up the sofa,” Matt said. “Where do you sleep?”
“Park Avenue South. The Doral. You drove down?”
“Took the shuttle. Tell me in all seriousness. Do you really want to take her out there?”
“More than ever.”
“You have to understand this woman is not afraid. She lives a free life. People know her. They respect her. The neighborhood’s still a living thing.”
“Lower your voice.”
“Lower my voice.”
“Did you see the hallways?” Nick said.
“The hallways. These hallways? Which hallways?”
Matt stacked some dishes and took them to the kitchen.
“Listen to me. Stand at the elevator. Look to your left. Then look to your right. What do you see?”
“I don’t know. What do I see?”
“You see the longest, saddest, scariest, most depressing—that feeling, you know?”
“It’s a hallway,” Matt said.
“It’s that feeling. A nightmare out of some Stalinist—all right, I’m overreacting.”
“It’s a hallway. Filled as a matter of fact with little kids most of the time.”
“Lower your voice.”
“Look, it is well within your experience to invent a fantasy of events as you think they transpired or are transpiring. This is not un-up your alley.”
Nick could not look at his brother without wanting to pop him a shot across the mouth. Same reason as ever—the father, not the mother. The deep discordance, the old muscling of wills, that ungiving thing in the idea of brothers.
“No one came for him, Nicky. No one got him and took him away. He left because of us basically. He didn’t want to be a father. Being a husband was bad enough, what a burden, you know, full of obligations and occasions he couldn’t handle. He was a loner, to use the romantic word, only worse than that, clinically self-involved, not out of vanity or stupidity but out of some fear, some inbred perspective, some closeness of perspective that amounted to fear. It made him unable to see other people except as encumbrances, little hazy shapes that interfered with his solitude, his hardness of being. He should have joined the French Foreign Legion when he was twenty. Not that I’m ready to renounce my existence. But speaking honestly and realistically. That’s what he should have done.”
“You know a lot. How do you know so much?”
“She tells me things. She tells me things she never told you.”
“I’m looking at you saying this.”
“You’re looking at me.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re giving me the look.”
“That’s right, I am.”
Matt was at the sink doing dishes now, running the tap at low volume so they could hear each other, and he didn’t turn to check his brother’s look.
“He had some trouble. Some sharpshooter hit a long shot on him. A big bet at long odds. Jimmy had his own operation by then, independent of the Solomons. I even know the horse’s name.”
“You know a lot. How come I’m not impressed?”
“It was the final weight, the final pressure, and it pushed him out the door.”
“Listen to me. I’m confused here. Help me out. First he leaves because of us. Then he leaves because somebody hits a long shot and he can’t pay off.”
“Terra Firma. Jimmy hadn’t laid off the bet with bookies who could handle those sums. Maybe it was a late bet and he didn’t have time to shop it around.”
“You know this and I don’t?”
“She protects you.”
“I am completely fucking unimpressed. Why is that?”
“There was no drama of men pushing him into a car and speeding away. He owed money he couldn’t pay. He was a small operator. He paid a buttonmaker ten dollars a week to help figure out his tally. He dealt in small numbers.”
“Listen to me. This is not an invitation to violence? When you owe money to someone and can’t pay off? In that environment?”
“What environment? You heard her. They didn’t need enforcers.”
“No, they had cops. But not for this kind of situation.”
“He left before a situation could develop. He had one foot out the door for years. You heard her. He left her once before. He was looking for an excuse to make it permanent.”
“You know all this. And I don’t. And yet I’m remarkably unimpressed. Help me out. Explain this to me.”
Matt turned off the tap an
“He did the unthinkable Italian crime. He walked out on his family. They don’t even have a name for this.”
“He didn’t walk out. They came and got him.”
“Keep believing it,” Matt said.
He turned on the tap, sponging and rinsing the dishes. The car came back, the car-sized boom box, causing a fuzz storm out there. Nick leaned heavily over the table, lazy-eyed now, brows lowered and mouth open just a chink, forming a lifeless grin. He resembled a man who’d started out drinking hours ago determined to reach a point of particular abandon.
No one spoke. Matt washed and dried a dish, then tried to find the place in the cabinet where it belonged. The car moved off now, finally. Then Nick got up. He took the remaining objects from the table and carried them into the kitchen area. He didn’t walk, he moved. It was heavy movement, sluggish and brooding.
“She has her church,” Matt said.
“What?”
“She has her church. Her priest.”
“We’ll get her a new church.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“We don’t want it to be the same. We want it to be different. That’s the point.”
Matt handed him a glass to dry. They worked quietly for a time, doing the dishes and putting them away, finding the right place for each item.
“How’s the waste business?”
“Booming. The waste business. Bigger by the minute.”
“I’ll bet it is.”
“We can’t build enough landfills, dig enough gaping caverns.”
“You get in there? See the stuff up close?”
“I drive by sometimes. Inspect from a distance.”
“You smell the smell?”
“I’ve done this, yes.”
“You see the rats? It must be the Planet of the Rats.”
Nick found the place in the cabinet for dessert dishes.
“Did I ever tell you about the rat downtown?”
“I don’t think so,” Matt said.
“I was thinking about it coming up here. I had a date, a jazz date, we went to see Charles Mingus. I’m trying to think. I think I was living in Palo Alto then, doing textbook work. Came back for a conference. Maybe I was twenty-six. And my date was a German woman, a philosophy student, yes, and a sort of future, now that I think of it, terrorist type, and we went to see Mingus on Hudson Street somewhere, and Mingus stood up there rocking his bass and glaring down at the cash register every time it rang. Mingus was big and he was wide. He looked like three men sharing a suit. And I walked her home, we walked way across town and then downtown and we get to her place, a basement apartment in an old building, and we walk in the door. The second we walk in the door she turns on the light. And then this rat. I’m standing there thinking whatever I’m thinking. Sex is not external to these thoughts. And then this rat. I see this rat go right up the wall. It runs up the wall, a very tremendous rat, and it makes a sound I can still hear, like a whistling corpse. And my date. My date says something in German and picks up something from a table and goes after the rat. I stand there dead still. I’m immobilized by frozen desire. My desire has frozen in my loins. And my date is charging across the room after the rat.”
Matt placed a wet cup in the dish towel that Nick held in his hand. Nick could see the pleasure of the kid brother who is invited into the action, given the privileged details of some infamous event. All the more dimensional, the rarer and sweeter when the narrator allows an element of foolery to attach itself to his sober persona, some haplessness or slippery shame. All the more intimate and appealing.
“And the rat runs down the other side of the wall and goes zip into the bathroom like a toy on a string, only a thousand times quicker. A phenomenal rat, big and fast, and my date goes right after it, wielding whatever she was wielding that I never actually identified. She turns on the bathroom light and goes right in. I’m feeling frankly a little neglected. But never mind. I stay where I am. I think, What is happening to my jazz date? It’s disintegrating into a rat hunt. And then she sticks her head out the door.”
Matt studied his brother’s face, perceptibly moving his lips to Nick’s account, anticipating a word, changing expression when Nick did.
“I am standing as far from the bathroom door as I can stand and still be said to occupy the apartment. I have the front door open. My date is battling the rat in the bathroom and I can hear the rat’s sick whistle. And my date sticks her head out the door and says, I am not believing this! I am killing this fucking rat two times already! Rat poison with skulls! And now it is coming back! And she goes back in and resumes the hunt. And I feel totally unworthy. Sleep with her? I have no right being in the same city. I can hear the rat running across the bathtub. Did you ever hear a rat run across a tub? I’ll tell you, man, it’s awesome.”
Matt was strangling with pleasure. He made a sound in his throat, an involuntary quaver. Nick finished the story—the rat squeezing neatly through a vent in the wall, the evening completely queered. They drank another cup of coffee and then his brother found the phone book and called a cab. Nick stood by the window in the living room. He was looking for hookers in spandex tights on the motel roof.
• • •
The Italians. They sat on the stoop with paper fans and orangeades. They made their world. They said, Who’s better than me? She could never say that. They knew how to sit there and say that and be happy. Thinking back through the decades. She saw a woman fanning herself with a magazine and it seemed like an encyclopedia of breezes, the book of all the breezes that ever blew. The city drugged with heat. Horses perishing in the streets. Who’s better than me?
She heard them talking out there.
He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake, which made him laugh.
It would have been easier to believe she deserved it. He left because she was heartless, foolish, angry, she was a bad housekeeper, a bad mother, a cold woman. But she could not invent a reliable plot for any of these excuses.
But it was the sweetest intimacy, his whispered stories of the gamblers and the police, lying in bed the two of them, his days with the garment bosses and bellhops. He made her laugh, telling these stories late at night, love nights, whispering to her afterward, lying close in bed, and even when he was flat-pocket broke he told her funny screwy stories in the night.
She began to drift into sleep now and said a Hail Mary because this is what she always did before she went to sleep. Except she wasn’t always sure anymore whether the last Hail Mary she said was a Hail Mary from last night or from two minutes ago and she said this prayer and said this prayer because she mixed up the time and didn’t want to go to sleep without being sure.
She had more material things than most people she knew, thanks to sons who provided. She had nicer furniture, a safer building, doctors left and right. They made her go to a gynecologist, with Janet calling and then Marian calling, women of the world hooray. But she still couldn’t say, Who’s better than me?
She got the Italian without the family, the boy who just showed up, like a shadow off a wall. She didn’t mind that at first. She liked it. She didn’t want relatives turning up with pastry in white boxes. She liked his slimness, his lack of attachments. But then she began to see what this meant. The only thing preserved in the man’s dark body was a kid in empty space, the shifty boy on the verge of using up his luck.
Then she slept and then the car music woke her up. She heard their voices again, the cupboard doors shutting.
She did not show her love. She showed it but not enough. She was not good at that. But it was partly his doing. The more she loved him, the scareder he got. He was scared in his eyes, telling funny stories in the night.
She heard them opening and shutting the cupboard doors. They’d
This is how she was brought up. Go to mass, mind your parents, marry the hardworking boy, the ordinary boy, the ham-and-egger they used to say. And the nuns used to say, You’re a child of Mary and you don’t have to kiss him. But he wasn’t ordinary and she kissed him.
She could not bear to think that Nick might be right. Someone came and got him. This would make her Jimmy innocent. Which Nick believed from an early age. But maybe the other was worse, the truth was worse. It did not happen violent.
She slept and then woke up. She listened and knew that Nick had left and Matty had gone to bed and then she listened for noises in the street and she thought of the animals in their cages and habitats, lions near Boston Road coughing in the night.
They were showing the videotape again but Nick wasn’t watching. He stood by the window in his hotel looking at cars move soundlessly on the avenue, sparse traffic in the sodium glow of the streetlamps.
He was waiting for room service to show up with his brandy.
On the trip down here the cabbie had driven left-handed all the way, a Dominican in a net shirt, his right arm extended across the seat back. He told Nick about the murders of gypsy drivers, a regular event lately, a game of chance you play every night.