Underworld by Don DeLillo
“You must give it up.”
“Who’s talking?”
“You can’t precisely locate the past, Marvin. Give it up. Retire it. For your own good.”
“Who’s talking?”
“Free yourself,” Tommy said.
“You sit here inhaling dust like what kind of statue.”
“Equestrian,” Eleanor said.
“An equestrian statue in the park.”
“True. My situation is even more unreal than yours. At least you move about. I sit here with my crumbling paper. There’s a poetic revenge in all this.”
“What revenge?”
A hummingbird’s breath of a smile brushed across Tommy’s lips.
“The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously.”
The remark had an impact. Marvin felt a thing in his chest like a Korean in pajamas who’s crushing a brick with the striking surface of his hand. But then he thought, How can I not be serious? What’s not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
He knew Eleanor wanted to leave. He knew Eleanor was thinking, At least Marvin keeps the basement neat.
There was something he had to buy first. A small empty box semi-discarded in a corner, marked Spalding Official National League Number 1—it once held a new baseball, many years ago. And he would save it for the time when the old used bruised ball came into his possession, if and when.
He reached up to pay the man. Hung on the wall was a photograph of President Carter and his daughter what’s-her-name standing in the Rose Garden with Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, a strained smile on every face.
They went out to the street. A woman in rags pushed her belongings in a shopping cart, seemingly bent on a specific destination. Was there a family waiting, was she a commuter of the future, did people live unknown to us in the crawlspaces of the what, the infrastructure, down the tunnels and under the bridge approaches?
“Tommy looks so happy. How is that possible, living in the dark?”
“Pick up your feet, Marv. You’re healthy, not sick.”
“Alone in that dungeon every day.”
“Does he have a wife and children?”
“I don’t know. Who would ask? That’s not a question we ask in the memorabilia field.”
“Does he enjoy the amenities, do you think, of our basic way of life?”
“You say that word terrific.”
“Does he have a little backyard where he grows Jersey tomatoes every summer?”
“I look at him I don’t think I see a tomato looking back.”
“Does he take his bride on business trips?”
Eleanor knew how to make him feel lucky. And she was right, she was nearly always right, the tomatoes, the cleaning business, the house with the spacious basement, the daughter who hadn’t caused them major aggravation by doing something stealthy out of wedlock. Think of Tommy eating Cambodian takeout in his shop at midnight. Think of Avram in Gorki walking down the hall with the kitchen tap every time he wanted to take a bath.
They found a taxi idling in front of an old flophouse.
But in truth, let’s be honest, it was Marvin who shuffled, Marvin who was the true schlimazel, bad-lucked in his own mind, Marvin the Dodger fan, doomed in ways he did not wish to name.
A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen—she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.
Time to think about going to bed. But first he took her dancing in the penthouse lounge of their hotel, an intimate room with a combo, well past midnight.
They moved across the floor, swayed and dipped—not really dipped but only showed a pause, a formal statement that such a thing as a dip could happen here. They liked to dance, were good together, used to go dancing but forgot, let the habit slip away through the years the way you forget a certain food you used to devour, like charlotte russes when they were popular.
She ran her hand through his fire-resistant hair.
And Marvin held her close and felt the old disbelief of how they’d found a life together, such fundamentally different people even if they weren’t, and he knew the force of this disbelief was the exact same thing, if you could measure it, as being stunned by love.
But in the deep currents, in the Marvinness of his unnamed depths, there was still an obscure something that caused disquiet.
And when they danced past the window he looked out at the lights of the Bay Bridge spotting through the mist and saw the old forlorn tanker snug in its berth, pungent and shunned, and he counted over to pier 7 and found that the Lucky Argus was already off-loaded and gone, borne on the tide, a dark shape going at what, flank speed, in the great deep danger of night.
3
* * *
The club was not exactly jumping. There were seven patrons, counting Sims and me, and four guys on the bandstand—a goateed sax and his hunchy sidemen.
I didn’t know where we were, it might have been Long Beach or Santa Monica or some blurry suburban somewhere. This was the third club we’d stopped at and my scant sense of bearing lay in ruins. Big Sims was not talkative tonight, racing through the landscape with dark determination, half a drink and out the door, like a man assigned a task in an epic poem.
“Hey Sims. Go home, okay? You’re not enjoying the music. I don’t want you to think.”
“The music’s okay. It’s music.”
“But don’t think you have to show me the sights. Go home. I’ll stay a while and grab a cab.”
“Go home.”
“Go home. That’s right. But first tell me who you’re mad at.”
“This isn’t mad. If you think this is mad,” he said.
An elderly fellow brought our drinks, a guy with a wad of cotton in one nostril. He had a T-shirt that read Monday Night Football at Roy Earley’s Loins and Ribs. It wasn’t Monday and we weren’t there.
I said, “What happened?”
“What happened. What happens at home?”
“You had a fight with Greta.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Drink up.”
“These guys ain’t half bad.”
“It’s music. Drink up,” he said.
“Your stomach’s knotted up.”
“The fact is we never fight.”
“You never fight. Marian and I never fight. So when it happens.”
“You retain it in the body.”
“You feel a knot, a weight.”
“We never frigging fight.”
“We never fight, Marian and I. Go home and make up. I’ll call a cab. Can I call a cab from here?”
“You’re going a little gray,” he said.
“You’re going a little bald.”
“I’m going a lot bald. But you’re going a little gray.”
The tenor was hitting cubist notes and we’d had a number of half drinks and the drummer was firing rim shots or whatever they do and in the local noise and the wider dislocation of a nightscape that was unfamiliar, I tried to understand what Sims was saying.
“Seriously, go home. I’m fine. I like these guys. It’s hard-driving stuff.”
“It’s race music,” he said.
“It’s hard-driving free-wheeling jazz.”
“It’s race music. You like it for what you want to like it for. I’ll like it for what I want to like it for. I’ll show you this picture I’ve got at home. Great photograph, circa I don’t know, nineteen-fifties. Charlie Parker in a white suit in some club somewhere. Great, great, great picture.”
“A club in New York.”
He gave me a flat-eyed look.
“You know this?”
“Great picture,” I said.
“Wait. You know this? A club in New York?”
“He’s wearing a white suit and th
Out of nowhere I thought about how our faces changed, how I tried to spy out a sign in another man’s eye that would tell me how worried I ought to be but at the same time how I avoided eye contact until I’d had a chance to gain a certain purchase on the situation and how we seemed to agree together, as the room whistled and groaned, that if we all carried the same face we would be free from any harm.
“Can I call a cab from here? Go home. Make up with her. Don’t subject the episode to ten hours of neurotic scrutiny.”
“Go home.”
“Go home. What are those shoes called that I’m trying to think of? Tell her you’re sorry. Don’t let it fester. Old-fashioned two-tone shoes.”
He looked at me, measuring.
“We’ll go to a ball game sometime. You’re coming back in a few months, right? We’ll go to a game.”
“I don’t want to go to a game.”
“We’ll go to a game,” he said.
We drank up and left. In less than fifteen minutes we were in another club listening to hornplayers rake the walls, four guys in fezzes and caftans with a physical sound and a drummer who’s making mostly vocal noise, off-pitch wails and cries.
We ordered drinks and listened a while and then Sims leaned in closer.
“Happen to me twice since I been out here. Pull their guns. My life held in some cop’s bent finger because I resemble a suspect or my tail-light’s out. And he’s out of the car. And he gets me out of the car. He says, I need you to get out of the car right now. And I get out of the car. And he says, I need you to hit the roof and spread them wide. But I just look at him. And he looks at me. We look at each other with a longing to kill that’s completely puzzling in one sense and completely natural in another.”
I nod and wait. He sits very serious over his drink, Sims.
“You want to be my friend, you have to listen to this,” he said.
The walls were decorated with old Pacific Jazz album covers and we turned our heads toward the bandstand and felt the force of the music, a sophisticated jazz that had the texture of life-and-death argument.
I told him, “Yes.” I said, “Yes, I’m going a little gray. But I don’t understand why this is worse than all-out bald. Which is your own admitted destiny.”
“That’s the point.”
“What point? A little gray is not the most ominous thing that happens to a man.”
“Let’s get rolling, okay?”
“Why?”
“There’s a place.”
“I’m enjoying this place.”
“I’m showing you some things, okay? You have to accept this,” he said. “I’m here, you’re not.”
“All right. But you ought to go home. Tell her you’re sorry.”
“I want you to know something about us.”
“What?”
“We never fight.”
“We never fight either. Our friends fight.”
“That’s why I’m twisted up inside.”
“I hear you talking.”
“Then let’s roll,” he said.
The next place was in downtown L.A. Downtown L.A.—the term had a secret life I couldn’t clearly read. The group was between sets and a haze of ten-year-old smoke hung over the room.
“I played the horn. You know that?”
“Still play?”
“An old hockshop horn. Threw it away finally.”
“But you still have it.”
“Threw it away,” he said.
“But you kept it. You still have it.”
“Threw it away.”
“You didn’t keep it?”
“What for? It sounded like hell.”
“Great thing to have. An old trumpet? They’re not called saddle shoes by the way. Those aren’t the shoes I mean when I talk about two-tone shoes.”
“It sounded like the death and burial of music.”
“Jerk. You should have kept it.”
“Wait. I’m a jerk?”
“Great thing to have. You keep things like that. A secondhand horn? Great thing.”
“Wait.”
“Big mistake, Sims.”
“I’m a jerk?”
The pianist came out first, then the bass. The drummer wore a headband and dark glasses.
“The ship’s back,” he said. “You know that?”
“No.”
“Up the coast in San Francisco.”
“Who tells you these things?”
“You know how rumors work. Nobody tells you. You just hear.”
“What do you hear about the cargo?”
“That’s a whole other deal,” Sims said, slipping into the forced-air voice of a used-car salesman, and a cracker at that, and a laugh shot out of me. “That’s real innerestin. That’s the sweetest deal about this whole buncha rumors.”
The horn finally showed, a rangy man with a gold chain and a gap in his front teeth, wearing resort clothes and sandals.
“They said it was heroin. They said it was the CIA moving heroin to finance some covert operation. But we didn’t believe this, you and I.”
“Because we’re responsible men.”
“And we were right,” Sims said. “Because it’s not heroin. It’s not toxic chemicals, it’s not industrial ash and it’s not heroin.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a mixup over a word. That’s what it is.”
“Which word?”
“You know what heroin’s called. It’s called scag, it’s called horse, it’s called H, it’s called smack, it’s called this, it’s called that. And what else, Nick?”
“Called shit.”
“See, it’s not a boatload of heroin. It’s a boatload of shit.”
We were momentarily alert and uncircling. It was one of those episodes of heightened clarity in a night of talking and drinking.
“At one point, am I right, the rumor suggested it wasn’t an ordinary cargo ship.”
“A sludge tanker. Turns out the rumor was correct.”
“Carrying treated human waste.”
“Port to port, it’s nearly two years,” he said.
We listened to the music, a cash register ringing at the end of the bar and a trace of a radio voice, radio or TV, coming from a back room somewhere.
“Tell her you’re sorry. Go home, Sims.”
“Maybe she ought to tell me.”
“Tell her first.”
“Maybe I’m not the guilty party. Ever think of that? The instigator.”
“Doesn’t matter, you jerk.”
“That’s the second time,” he said, showing me two fingers.
We got out of there and went somewhere else, zebra walls and small tables, a fairly crowded room with a body hum, people in aviator glasses and silver shirts.
“He’s wearing a white suit.”
“Right.”
“He’s playing his alto.”
“Right.”
“And he’s facing out of the picture, out of the frame.”
“And he’s wearing white and brown shoes. Two-tone shoes. But they’re not saddle shoes.”
“I didn’t ask what kind of shoes. I don’t care about his shoes.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I’m not interested in his shoes.”
“They have a name I’m trying to think of.”
“Do it somewhere else.”
“In a club in New York,” I said.
“You know this? And I don’t? And it’s my photograph? In my house we’re talking about?”
The waiter brought drinks.
“Look. Go home, tell her you’re sorry, take a bath and go to bed.”
He looked at me, underlip jutting.
“There’s something else.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“A judge issued an order, an injunction that they couldn’t dump the sludge because there’s a body buried there,” Sims said, and took a drink, and pulled a cigar out
“Whose body?”
“Whose body. Whose body do you want it to be? That’s whose body. Some mobster, I hear. Shot in the head execution-style.”
A trio with a singer. She had streaky reddish hair and copper skin, holding the mike at her spangled thigh while the sidemen cued the next verse.
“We never fight. Our friends fight,” I said.
When the set ended a fatigue passed over us, a staleness. Sims blew smoke past my shoulder. I jabbed an ice cube in my drink, poked it with a finger and watched it bob.
“There’s this man I knew once. I didn’t know him, I met him once. I was young,” I said. “He came around the poolroom.”
“You’re speaking in reference to what?”
“To the body in the sludge.”
“A mob figure. Who was he?”
“I was young, high-school age. I only talked to him that one time. But my father had known him years earlier, which he told me about. Badalato told me, not my father. They weren’t friends, they were acquaintances. They might run into each other somewhere.”
“This is Mario, you’re talking about, Badalato? Who I saw one time on TV,” he said, “when they’re putting him in an unmarked car to take him to be arraigned and some detective places a hand on his head to keep him from bumping his head on the door frame and I sit there thinking why is it the police put so much effort into keeping these criminals from bumping their heads when they get into police cars, it’s a major concern of the police, lately, this hand on the head.”
“You’re talkative all of a sudden.”
“He’s always being photographed on the courthouse steps. He’s the king of the steps.”
“You’re right. Let’s leave,” I said.
“Your father knew him. This means—what?”
“It means he knew him.”
“In other words I have to show respect. I have to be reverent when I mention his name. This guy who runs a criminal enterprise in narcotics, extortion, what else. Murder, attempted murder, what else.”
“Waste carting,” I said.
“Could be. Why not? And I have to respect him. Because he was nice to your father.”
“You’re right. Let’s leave,” I said.
“I didn’t say I wanted to leave. I don’t want to leave.”
“Tell her you’re sorry and take a bath,” I told him.