Underworld by Don DeLillo
“Most jobs are fake,” he said.
They’d been late starters and had never developed a reliable pace. Only three or four apartments in all this time and they’d used each apartment only once or twice. She’d learned not to notice her disappointment. This was an aspect of being twistedly perfect. But Brian’s reluctance was fairly maddening. She had to arrange the apartments, make the assurances, calibrate the timing and then wonder if he’d show. They talk about demon lovers. She had a demon husband. Her lover was a loose-jointed guy with a freckled forehead and nappy hair. But this was the dare she had to take, a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned. These times were hers, however brief and infrequent. And he was enormously easy to be with and growing dear to her. She liked to tease and scare him but did not want to think about giving him up.
“Blow smoke my way,” he said. “I want all the aromas. Tobacco, bedsheets, women.”
She was herself with Brian, whatever that meant. She knew what it meant. Less enveloped in someone else’s figuration, his self-conscious shaping of a life.
“And don’t let me forget, I have a meeting at three,” he said.
“I’m a little put off by the fact that you haven’t, you know,” sort of dangling the words, “fallen in love with me, Brian.”
“You’re my age, you’re my height. I fall in love with small brisk women I see from a distance.”
“And they have to be young.”
“They have to be young. You and I, we’re buddies. And I’m too guilty to fall in love with you. I’m very guilty. I’m guilty as shit.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Because you want it so much,” he said.
She bent the cigarette into the ashtray.
“And you’re that accommodating? Because I want it? You’re willing to do it?”
“I want it too. But you want it like life and death.”
She didn’t like him when he was serious. It was outside the rules. He let his head flop toward her, whispering.
“It’s stupid and it’s reckless and we shouldn’t do it anymore. Because if he finds out,” he whispered.
“What if your wife finds out? She’s the one who’ll cut your balls off.”
“Nick will only kill me.”
“And he doesn’t have to find out. He already knows.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“I think he knows.”
He whispered, “Let’s make this one last happy farewell fuck.”
She started to tell him something but then thought no. They fell together, folded toward each other, and then she leaned back, arching, shored on her back-braced arms, and she let him pace the occasion. At some point she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, measuring her progress, and he looked a little isolated and wan and she pulled his head down to her and sucked salt from his tongue and heard the sort of breast-slap, the splash of upper bodies and the banging bed. Then it was a matter of close concentration. She listened for something inside the bloodrush and she spun his hips and felt electric and desperate and finally home free and she looked at his eyes stung shut and his mouth stretched so tight it seemed taped at the corners, upper lip pressed white against his teeth, and she felt a kind of hanged man’s coming when he came, the jumped body and stiffened limbs, and she ran a hand through his hair—be nicer if we did it more often.
She waited for their breathing to settle so she could ease free and get her handbag off the chair.
He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water.
It was a fairly large bag, a drawstring bag, and she pulled out a length of aluminum foil and unrolled it and spread it on the bed. Brian stood watching from the kitchen entrance. Then she took out a small transparent packet. It looked like a pleated sandwich bag, only smaller, and it carried a stick-on label reading Death Trip #1.
“Come here,” she said.
She opened the packet and let the contents, half the contents, spill onto the aluminum sheet. It was a resinous substance, chunked up, nubbed up. She told Brian to sit on the bed and pick up the sheet and hold it straight, hold it by the edges so the stuff, the tarlike chunks, didn’t run off the ends.
“What the hell is it? And how can it run off if it’s solid?”
Then she went into the handbag again and took a small rolled-up straw of some kind, a foil straw a few inches long.
“Yo, Marian, what are we doing here?”
Then she reached for her matches and lit one and held it under the aluminum sheet in Brian’s hands, heating the substance on the sheet.
“It’s heroin,” she said, watching the tar slowly begin to liquefy.
“It’s heroin,” he said. “What am I supposed to say to that?”
When the tar started evaporating and smoking up, she shook out the match and put the foil straw in her mouth and trailed the curling smoke, sucking it up and holding it in her lungs, conscientiously.
“Okay. Where’d you get it?”
She watched the tar melt and run and evaporate and she followed the smoke off the stretched foil and sucked it through the straw.
“Mary Catherine.”
“Who’s that?”
“My assistant.”
“Whose bed we’re on? Your secretary’s your dealer? When did you start doing this?”
“I never actually thought of her.”
She trailed the smoke off the sheet and put her head right into it and sucked it through the straw.
“I never thought of her as my dealer but I guess she’s my dealer and I’m her whatever.”
“This is something new?”
“Fairly new yes. Here, take a chase.”
“No, thanks.”
She trailed the smoke into the air.
“I’m, you know, completely prudent. I use it rare, rare, rare. I don’t get out of bed puffy-eyed, or pain, or nausea. Take a chase.”
She sucked up the smoke.
“Nick knows this? He can’t know this.”
“Are you crazy? He’d kill me. Take a chase.”
“Get the hell away from me.”
“I want to get you in deeper. Take a chase. I want to get you in so deep you’ll stop eating and sleeping. You’ll lie in bed thinking about us. Doing our things in a borrowed room. You’ll be able to think about nothing else. That’s my program for you, Brian.”
“Mary Catherine. I like the name,” he said. “Sexy.”
They sat on the bed, side by side, listening to traffic roll by on Thomas Road. When she was finished they cleared the things away and brushed off the bed and lay back talking.
“I think he knows,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“On his way to Houston or there already. Then he drives out to that nuclear waste site wherever it is exactly.”
“The salt dome.”
“At the mercy of the Texas Highway Killer.”
“He doesn’t know,” Brian said. “But we ought to think about ending it. We ought to make this the end.”
“I’m not nearly ready. So just keep quiet. You’re making me feel like some old dowd barely hanging on.”
“You’re not a dowd. You’re a bawd.”
“Be nice to me,” she said.
The day had slipped down to a drowsy pulse located somewhere near her eyes. When she stretched she felt the jismic crust in her pubic hair speck out and crackle slightly.
He whispered, “Let’s have a civilized final fuck and get out alive.”
She listened to the traffic and wondered what she would say in the movie version.
He whispered, “Let’s fuck the sayonara fuck and get into our suits and dresses.”
She smiled faintly. The air had the feel of some auspicious design. She was feeling faintly L.A.ish and she rolled over on Brian and talked while they were doing it, on and off, sweetness, dearness, blowing the words, sensing an unseen design of completely auspicious things.
When they were
“You have that molten ball of defiance in your eye.”
“Just don’t talk about ending. It’s not yours to end.”
He laughed. When Brian laughed he became semitransparent. You could see blood racing under his skin, a freshet of rose pink. He got up and began to dress. He picked up a fashion magazine and held it open to a looming photo of some casually muscled bisexual, maybe a white guy, maybe not—dangled it over the bed as if to indicate how dated he was in his own body, his very life, Brian himself, a man without a fitness video to sling in the oblong groove.
“Underwear. Everything, suddenly, is underwear,” he said. “Tell me what it means.”
He checked the time and got a little panicky. She attempted to help, handing items of apparel across the bed, and he fumbled things intentionally, he wore a sock inside out and tied his shoes together so he could scuttle and lurch to the door. The later it got, the more he capered. It was Brian at his best.
“But what if he knows?”
“He doesn’t know,” she said.
She had a demon husband if demon means a force of some kind, an attendant spirit of discipline and self-command, the little flick of distance he’d perfected, like turning off a radio. She knew about his father’s disappearance but there was something else, hard and apart. This is what had drawn her in the first place, the risky and erotic proposition.
Brian was looking at the photographs on the wall by the door.
“Which one is her?”
“Get out,” she said.
She made the bed and bagged the dope and put the robe back in the closet. She washed the glass Brian had used, standing naked in the kitchenette, and it seemed completely reasonable and natural, all of it, earned, needed, naked, and she took a shower and got dressed.
She was feeling pretty good. She felt lazy-daisy, you know. You know the way something’s been nagging and dragging and then it gets unexpectedly sort of settled.
She felt all the good things would find her, which they usually don’t. She would know them when she saw them with her L.A.-type eyes.
She stood before the mirror adjusting her sunglasses. Because if she didn’t have this thing to do, to plan and maneuver and look forward to, this far-too-infrequent Brian, and this is what she’d almost told him earlier, she would become lonely and shaky, driving along the decorated highway under the burning sky, and maybe a little indistinct.
She felt well liked. She liked who she was today. She felt a little lazysouled. She thought anything L.A. seemed right today. She’d even say she was more or less euphoric, although she wasn’t ready to commit to that completely.
Before she left she inspected the room one last time. These were the things that opened the world to secret arrangements, the borrowed flat and memorized phone number and coded notation on the calendar. Childish spy games really that made her feel guiltier than the sex did, a sheepish kind of self-reproach. She patted down a pillow to remove the indentation. She wanted things to have an untouched look so Mary Catherine would not mind when she asked to use the place again.
10
* * *
He spread the mayonnaise. He spread mayonnaise on the bread. Then he slapped the lunch meat down. He never spread the mayonnaise on the meat. He spread it on the bread. Then he slapped down the meat and watched the mayo seep around the edges.
He took the sandwich into the next room. His dad was watching TV, sitting in that periscope stoop of his, crookback, like he might tumble into the rug. His dad had infirmities still waiting for a name. Things you had to play one against another. If one thing required a certain medication, it made another thing worse. There were setbacks and side effects, there was a schedule of medications that Richard and his mother tried to keep track of through the daily twists of half doses and warning labels and depending on this and don’t forget that.
Richard ate about half the sandwich and left the rest on the arm of the chair. In the kitchen he called his friend Bud Walling, who lived forty miles into nowhere and wasn’t really his friend.
He drove out to Bud’s place through old fields marked off for development, with skivvy strips on narrow posts running stiff in the wind. Out here the wind was a force that seized the mind. You left the high school a quarter of a mile behind still hearing the big flag snapping and the halyard beating nautically on the pole and you powered your car into the wind and saw dust sweep across the road and you drove into a white sky feeling useless and dumb.
Bud’s place could have been something blown in from the hills. It had a look of being deposited in a natural spree, with lumber warping in the yard and sprung-open doors and an unfinished porch on cinder blocks, one of those so-low porches the house looks sunk in sand. Bud had a coydog that lived in chains in a ramshackle hut out back, part coyote, part alley mutt. Richard thought this dog was less dangerous than legend would have it. Richard thought Bud kept this dog basically for the juvenile thrill of having a chained beast that he could feed or starve according to his whim.
He realized he’d forgotten to give his dad two glasses of water to take with the blue and yellow capsule despite the bold-faced reminder on the prescription bottle. These little failures ate away at his confidence even when he knew it was his father’s fault for not managing his own intake or his mother’s for not being around when she was needed. There were constant little wars of whose fault is it and okay I’m sorry and I wish he’d die and get it over with, all taking place in Richard’s inner mind.
He did the dumb-joke thing of knocking on Bud’s door and saying, “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”
Nothing happened. He went in and saw Bud in a large open room sawing a two-by-four that he’d set between benches of unmatching height. The house was still mainly framework although Bud had been working for many months in a conscientious struggle that Richard thought had less to do with gutting and reshaping a house than destroying some dread specter, maybe Bud’s old drug habit, once and for all.
“Your phone’s out of order,” Richard said. “I thought I’d drive on out, see if everything, you know’s, okay.”
“Why wouldn’t it be okay?”
“I reported it to the phone company.”
“My only feeling about the phone.”
“Sometimes they correct the problem from the office.”
“It brings more grief than joy.”
Bud finally looked up and noted his visual presence.
“It brings personal voices into your life that you’re not prepared to deal with.”
Richard kept to the edges of the room, running his palms over the planed sills, examining the staples that kept plastic sheeting fastened to the window frames. It was empty distraction of the type that forestalls the pain of ordinary talk.
“I’m putting in parquet,” Bud said. “Herringbone maybe.”
“Should be good.”
“Better be good. But I probably won’t ever do it.”
The sound of the wind in the plastic sheeting was hard on the nerves. Richard wondered how an ex-addict could work all day in this scratching and popping. The sheeting popped out, it whipped and scratched. Crack cocaine fools the brain into thinking dope is good for it.
He thought of something he could say.
“Tell you, Bud. I’m forty-two years old next week. Week from Thursday.”
“It happens.”
“And I still feel like I’m half that, pretty much.”
“That’s because it’s obvious why, you living as you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“With your folks,” Bud said.
“They can’t manage alone.”
“Who can? My question to you is.”
Bud tossed half the length of sawed wood into a corner. He studied the other half as if someone had just handed it to him on a crowded street.
“What?” Richard said.
“Don’t they smell?”
“What?”
Richard heard the plastic windows pop.
“Not so I notice.”
“Not so you notice. Okay. You want to feel your correct age. Get yourself a wife. That’ll do it for you. It’s horrible but true. A wife is the only thing that can save guys like us. But they don’t make you feel any younger.”
Richard fidgeted happily in his corner. He liked the idea of being included in the female salvation of wayward men.
“Where is she?” he said.
“Working the late shift now.”
Bud’s wife worked on the line at Texas Instruments, mounting microchips on circuit boards, Bud said, for the information highway. Richard thought he was half in love with Bud’s wife. It was a feeling that came and went, secret and sort of semipathetic, like his heart was made of some cotton product. If Aetna ever had a clue to what he felt, what would she think? The fear this question carried made him experience actual physical symptoms, a heat, a flush across his upper back, and a tightening at the throat.
He thought of something else to say.
“Left-handers, I read this the other day.” And he paused here trying to recall the formal sentences in the narrow column of type. “Lefthanders, which I am not one of, live typically shorter lives than righthanders. Right-handed men live ten years longer than left-handed men. You believe that?”
“We’re talking this is mean life span.”
“Left-handed men die typically at age, I think, sixty-five.”
“Because they jerk off facing the North Pole,” Bud said in a remark that Richard could not analyze for one shred of content.
He watched Bud pry nails out of the old floorboards and offered to help, looking around for a claw hammer.
“So, Richard.”
“What?”
“You drove fifty miles to tell me my phone’s not working.”
Richard didn’t know if this was a setup for a scathing type of Bud Walling remark or maybe just an ordinary thank-you.
“Forty miles, Bud.”
“Well that’s a relief. I’d offer you a beer, but.”
“No problem.”
“Maybe it’s Aetna who drives fifty miles. I forget exactly.”