Players

Don Delillo Players

THE MOVIE

Someone says: "Motels. I like motels. I wish I owned a chain, worldwide. I'd like to go from one to another to another. There's something self-realizing about that.”

The lights inside the aircraft go dim. In the piano bar everyone is momentarily still. It's as though they're realizing for the first time how many systems of mechanical and electric components, what exact management of stresses, power units, consolidated thrust and energy it has taken to reduce their sensation of flight to this rudimentary tremble. Beyond the windows not a nuance of sunset remains. Four men, three women inhabit this particular frame of arrested motion. The only sound is drone. One second of darkness, all we've had thus far, has been enough to intensify the implied bond which, more than distance, speed or destination, makes each journey something of a mystery to be worked out by the combined talents of the travelers, all gradually aware of each other's code of recognition. In the cabin just ahead, the meal is over, the movie is about to begin.

As light returns, the man seated at the piano begins to play a tune. Standing nearby is a woman, shy of thirty, light-haired and unhappy about flying. There's a man to her left, holding the rim of his drinking glass against his lower lip. They're clearly together, a couple, wearing each other.

The stewardess moves past with pillows and magazines, glancing into the cabin at the movie screen, credits superimposed on a still image of a deserted golf course, early light. Near the entrance to the piano bar, about a dozen feet from the piano itself, are two chairs separated by an ashtray stand. Another obvious couple sits here, men in this case. Both look at the piano player, anticipating their own delight at whatever pointed comment his choice of tunes is meant to suggest.

The third woman sits near the rear of the compartment. She pops cashew nuts into her mouth and washes them down with ginger ale. She's in her early forties, indifferently dressed. We know nothing else about her.

Without headsets, of course, the people in the piano bar aren't able to hear the sound track of the movie being shown. Early light, some haze, surfaces burnished with moisture. As the final credit disappears, the flag marking a distant green lifts slightly and ripples and then men appear, golfers and their paraphernalia, at the left edge of the screen.

Feeling his way, still tentative in these introductory moments, the pianist is rendering a typical score for a silent film. This amuses the others, although their smiles and expressions aren't directed toward anyone in particular but are instead allowed to drift, as happens among travelers in the initial stages. The stewardess alone seems disappointed by the limits of this logical association between music and film. True, the movie they're viewing is in effect a silent one. But she gives the impression she's been through this routine before.

Between the piano bar and the screen, the rows of seats appear to be empty, the top of not a single head visible over the high-backed mechanical chairs. We assume people are sitting there, motionless, content to sift among the images.

The woman near the piano begins to yawn, almost compulsively, a mild attack of something. She yawns on planes just as she used to yawn (adolescence) seconds before getting on a roller coaster, or (young womanhood) when she was dialing her father's phone number. Her companion, with a stylized jerkiness that's appropriately Chaplinesque in nature, brings his left foot way up behind him and boots her lightly in the rear, an act so neatly conceived it makes her laugh in mid-yawn.

The golfers plod onscreen, seven or eight in all, white, male, portly, several driving golf carts, bumping slowly over knolls in single file. They're all middle-aged and wear the kind of rampantly bright sports clothes that suburban men favor on weekends, colors so strident they might serve as illustrations of the folly of second childhood.

The piano player adds an element of suspense to his sequence. His face, although lined about the eyes, has been slow to lose an appealing openness, the objective emblem of a moral competence we associate with young people who make pottery or do oceanic research.

Moist surfaces, light breeze, the mist beginning to clear. The golfers cluster around a tee and the members of an improvised threesome drive in turn, twisting their bodies to the flight of the ball. They set off down the fairway as their companions take practice swings, one of them (yellow cardigan) tucking the club head into his armpit and sighting along the shaft, briefly, in a rifle-firing jest, this wholly offhand moment shading away into borders of surrounding activity.

The older of the homosexuals leans over the top of the ashtray to give his companion a theatrical nudge. The piano player has also noted the nearly concealed gesture of the golfer in the yellow cardigan and responds with a series of bass chords. Import, foreboding.

It's worthwhile to point out that the characters and landscape are being seen through the special viewpoint of a long lens. This is a lesson in the intimacy of distance. Space in this context seems less an intuitive experience than a series of relative densities. It intervenes in compact blocks. What the camera shares with those watching is an appreciation of optical cunning. The sense of being unseen. The audience as privileged onlookers.

The piano music, a substitute sound track as well as a medium of autonomous comment, begins to express a deepening degree of (sly) apprehension that blends well with the film's precisely timed sequence of shots, each slightly briefer than the one before, a suggestion of routine events about to give way to some unforeseen pressure.

The young woman has managed to stop yawning. The man alongside studies the fingernails of his right hand. He does this with fingers bent in over the palm, thumb extended. The woman, without taking her eyes from the screen, reaches over, grabs his thumb and begins to bend it back. He looks up and away, eyeballs rolling. In time he begins making the sound either or both of them make when troubled by anxiety, critical choices, nameless dread, the prospect of boring dinner guests, his job, her job. The woman in the rear looks on without expression. It's a prolonged hum, the speech sound m.

The golfers on this sweet green morning attend to their game. Together again momentarily on a particular fairway they appear almost to be posing in massed corporate glory before a distant flag. It is now that the vigilant hidden thing, the special consciousness implicit in a long lens, is made to show itself.

A man, his back to the camera, rises from the underbrush in the immediate foreground, about two hundred yards from the golfers. When he turns to signal to someone, it's evident he holds a weapon in his right hand, a semiautomatic rifle. After signaling he doesn't reassume his crouch. One of the golfers selects an iron.

Another man comes up out of the shrubbery, rising to his full height. We don't know his precise location as it relates to any of the other people. He faces the camera. Behind him are deep woods. His clothing is diverse-baseball cap (peak up), threadbare paisley vest, work shirt, garrison belt, white trousers fitted into high boots. Bandoliers crisscross his chest. He carries a cut-down Enfield.

The long lens picks out a man and woman standing at the top of a small hill. More bass chords. Accumulating doom. At this distance they appear to be built into the sky, motionless, both carrying rifles. Another woman, in a much tighter shot, stands alone in a sand trap, barefoot, wearing a tank top and fringed buckskin pants. One leg is bent, all her weight on the other, the left. She holds a machete back up over her right shoulder, resting it there.

The piano player moves to the end of the bench and sits up on one haunch for a fuller look at the screen, his fingers not straying from the keyboard. The first of the terrorists begins the long run across the fairway.

Most of what happens next takes place in slow motion. The terrorists are seen running, one by one, out into the open and toward the golfers. Being young, and dressed as they are in jeans and leather and attic regalia, and running, they can hardly fail to be a lyrical interlude. The subnormal speed at which their bodies perform makes them seem creatures of gravity, near animals struggling toward some fundamental transition, their incomparable crude beauty a result of carefully detailed physical stress. On the hill a single figure remains, man, hands in pockets, shotgun under one arm.

The first runner starts firing as he approaches the group. A man in a sweater falls, golf balls rolling out of his pockets. The terrorists, trying to isolate their victims singly or in twos, have three men dead almost immediately. Bodies tumble in slow motion. There's blood on golf bags, on white shoes, spreading over tartan pants. Several men try to run. One swings his club and is shot in the groin by the man with the Enfield. He topples into a pond, clouding it with blood. The stewardess serves mixed drinks to the male couple and a ginger ale to the woman in the rear.

It isn't until now that the silent-movie music reveals the extent of its true relationship to the events on the screen. To the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul, the piano's shiny tinkle brings an irony too apt to be ignored. The simple innocence of this music undermines the photogenic terror, reducing it to an empty swirl.

We're prompted to remember something here, although this act of recall may be more mythic than subjective, a spool of Biograph dreams. It flows through us. Upright pianos in a thousand nickelodeons. Heart-throbbing romance and knockabout comedy and nerve-racking suspense. History this weightless has an easy time of it, we learn, contending with the burdens of the present day.

In the piano bar the small audience laughs, except for the woman drinking ginger ale. Despite the camera's fascination for the lush slaughter of these clearly expendable men, the scene becomes confused, due to the melodramatic piano. We're steeped in gruesomely humorous ambiguity, a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful things to total fools.

What conceivably makes this even funnier (to some) is the nature of the game itself. Golf. That anal round of scrupulous caution and petty griefs. Watching golfers being massacred, to trills and other ornaments, seems to strike those in the piano bar, at any rate, as an occasion for sardonic delight.

Bodies are blown back into sand and high grass. If it's all a little bit like cowboys and Indians, so much the better. One of the golfers tries to escape in his cart, steering it toward the woods. The young woman with the machete sets out in pursuit, arms pumping in slow motion, hair sailing out.

The piano player introduces a chase theme. His mock-boyish face carefully qualifies every smile-a grimace here, a shudder there. The violence, after all, is expert and intense. His fellow passengers laugh as the golf cart overturns on a slope and the woman skids down after it, her arm slowly raising to deliver a backhanded slash. The man tries to crawl away. She walks calmly alongside, chopping at his back and neck. Here the chase music gives way to a lighthearted lament.

The woman leaves the machete in his body and heads back to the others.

The man who'd remained on the hill walks down now into this scene of fresh death. He is liberation's bright angel, in watch cap and black slicker, coming out of the sun. He wears lampblack under his eyes and thick white pigment across his forehead and cheeks. The others stand around, taking deep breaths, consciously intent on nothing but their own exalted fatigue. He holds the shotgun out away from him, as nearly parallel to his body as he can feasibly manage, muzzle up. The golfers are strewn everywhere. We see them frame by frame, split open, little packages of lacquer. The terrorist chief, jefe, honcho, leader fires several rounds into the air-a blood rite or passionate declaration. Buster Keaton, says the piano.

And now the stewardess serves drinks to those who need them and everybody gradually moves to different parts of the piano bar, their loss of interest in the movie manifesting itself in this nearly systematic restlessness. With the configuration thus upset, the piano silent, the film ignored, there is a sense of feelings turning inward. They remember they are on a plane, travelers. Their true lives lie below, even now beginning to reassemble themselves, calling this very flesh out of the air, in mail waiting to be opened, in telephones ringing and paper work on office desks, in the chance utterance of a name.

ONE

1

The man was often there, standing outside Federal Hall, corner of Wall and Nassau. Lean and gray-stubbled, maybe seventy, sweating brightly in a frayed shirt and slightly overused suit, he held a homemade sign over his head, sometimes for whole afternoons, lowering his arms only long enough to allow blood to recirculate. The sign was two by three feet, hand-lettered on both sides, political in nature. Loungers at this hour, most of them sitting on the steps outside the Hall, were too distracted by the passers-by to give the man and his sign-familiar sights, after all-more than a cursory glance. Down here, in die district, men still assembled solemnly to gape at females. Working in a roar of money, they felt, gave them that vestigial right.

Lyle stood at the door of a restaurant, cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick he'd lifted from the little bowl when he paid the check. He no longer ate in the Exchange luncheon club, pleasant as it was, restricted to members and their guests, well run and comfortably appointed as it was, so capable the waiters, knowing one's name, so effortless the attentions of the washroom personnel, swift with towels, brilliant in the understated brushing of one's suit, actual blacks, convenient as it was, an elevator ride from the trading floor itself. He watched the old man standing in the sun, arms upright, one hand trembling. Then he moved into the lunchtime crowds, wondering if he'd somehow become too complex to enjoy a decent meal in attractive surroundings, served, a minute from the floor, by reasonably cheerful men.

Across Broadway, a few blocks north, Pammy stood in the sky lobby of the south tower of the World Trade Center, fighting the crowd that was pushing her away from an express elevator going down. She wanted to go down, although she worked on the eighty-third floor, because she was in the wrong building. This was the second time she'd come back from lunch and entered the south tower instead of the north. She would have to fight the lunch-hour mob in the sky lobby here, go down to the main floor, walk over to the north tower, take the express up to that seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby, fight more crowds, then take a local to eighty-three, panels vibrating. Trying to move sideways now, she realized someone nearby was staring into her face.

"It's Pam, isn'tit?”

"I don't, what.”

"Jeanette.”

"Actually no.”

"High school.”

"Jeanette.”

"How many years was that ago?”

"High school, Jeanette.”

"I don't blame you not remembering. Boy, the time.”

"I think I may remember now.”

"You work here, right? Everybody works here.”

"I'm supposed to be on the down.”

"You're still remembering? Jeanette, who hung around with Theresa and Geri.”

"I remembered just then.”

"That was how many years, right?”

"They won't let me on.”

"But don't you love this place? You should see how I have to get to the cafeteria. A local and an express down. Then an express up. Then the escalator if you can get there without them ripping your flesh to pieces.”

"Torn asunder, I know.”

"You work for the state, being here?”

"I'm in the wrong tower.”

Pammy and Lyle didn't go out much anymore. They used to spend a lot of time discovering restaurants. They traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral decor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity. They went to clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised. On spring weekends they bought plants at greenhouses in the suburbs and went to boatyards on City Island or the North Shore to help friends get their modest yachts seaworthy. Gradually their range diminished. Even movies, double features in the chandeliered urinals of upper Broadway, no longer tempted them. What seemed missing was the desire to compile.

They had sandwiches for dinner, envelopes of soup, or went around the corner to a coffee shop, eating quickly while a man mopped the floor near their table, growling like a jazz bassist. There was a Chinese place three blocks away. This was as far as they traveled, most evenings and weekends, for nonutili-tarian purposes. Pammy was skilled at distinguishing among the waiters here. A source of quiet pride.

Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn't looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercials, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best served by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English.

Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child's conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small gray bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret pf celestial energy. He wondered if he'd become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred.

"Here, look. We're here, folks. The future has collapsed right in on us. And what does it look like?”

"You made me almost jump.”

"It looks like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It's being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.”

"Let me sleep, hey.”

"See, look, I'm saying. Just as I speak. I mean it's this. We're sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they've got their loft and their camera and it gets shown because that's the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It used to be people waved.”

"Good.”

"Right here. Ri'chere, ladies and gennemen. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”

Pammy had the kind of smile that revealed a trace of upper gum. She'd been told that was touching. In her more complicated movements, in package-carrying or the skirting of derelicts, she showed a gawkiness that was like a clap of hands bringing back her youth. She had a narrow face, hair lank and moderately blond. People liked her eyes. Some presence in them seemed at times to jump out in greeting. She was animated in conversation, a waver of hands, an interrupter, head going, eyes intent on the speaker's mouth, her own lips sometimes repeating the beat. Her body was firm and straight and could have been that of a swimmer. Sometimes she didn't associate herself with it.

She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder's name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its efforts to understand and assimilate grief. There were fees for individuals, group fees, special consultation terms, charges for booklets and teaching aids, payments for family sessions and marital grief seminars. Most regional offices were small and located in squat buildings that also housed surgical-supply firms and radiology labs. These buildings were usually the first of a planned complex that never materialized, Pammy had visited several, for background, and the photos she took for her brochures had to be severely cropped to eliminate the fields of weeds and bulldozed earth. It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed. Teams of behaviorists assembled in the sewers and conceived a brand of futurism based on filing procedures. To Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seem even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partitions, opened up others, moved out file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they'd been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief.

Pammy shared a partitioned area with Ethan Segal, who was responsible for coordinating the activities of the regional offices. Because of his longish hair, his repertoire of ruined flourishes, his extravagantly shabby clothing, a somewhat ironic overrefinement of style, Pammy thought of him as semi-Edwardian. Even the signs he showed of middle age were tinged with a kind of blithe ornamentation. Extra weight gave him an airiness, as it does some people, and Ethan used this illusion of buoyancy to appear nonchalant while walking, lofty in conversation, a coward at games. And those sweeping motions of his arms, the ruined flourishes, became more dramatic, emptier (by intention), as various irregularities crept into his posture. With him lived Jack Laws, a would-be drifter. Jack had a patch of pure white at the back of an otherwise dark head of hair. His success with certain people was based largely on this genetic misconjecture. It was the mark, the label, the stamp, the sign, the emblem of something mysterious.

"Adorable useless Jack.”

"What, I'm working.”

"It's amazing, it's almost supernatural, really, the way people get an idea, a tiny human hankering for something, and it becomes a way of life, the obsession of the ages. To me this is amazing. A person like me. Nurtured on realities, the limitations of things.”

"I walked in the wrong tower.”

"Jack wants to live in Maine.”

"I find that, you know, why not?”

"It's the driving force of his life, suddenly, out of nowhere, this thing, Maine, this word, which is all it is, since he's never been there.”

"But it's a good word," she said.

"Maine.”

"Maine," she said. "It's simple maybe, Ethan, but it has a strength to it. You feel it's the sort of core, the moral core.”

"This from a person who uses words, so it must mean something.”

"I use words, absolutely.”

"So maybe Jack has something.”

"Ethan, Jack always has something. Whatever it is, Jack has the inner meanings of it, the pure parts. We both know this about Jack.”

"What do I do, commute?”

"I'd like to be there now," she said. "This city. Time of year.”

"July, August.”

"Scream city.”

"You think he's got something then.”

"I use words.”

"You think he's picked a good one.”

"Jack has. Jack always has.”

In the same way that she thought of Ethan as semi-Edwardian, she considered his mouth, apart from the rest of him, as German. He had assertive lips, something of a natural sneer, and there were times when he nearly drooled while laughing, bits of fizz appearing at the corners of his mouth. These were things Pammy associated with scenes of the German high command in World War II movies.

"Maybe we'll go up and look.”

"Look at what?" she said.

"The terrain. Get the feel of it. Just to see. He's telling everyone. Maine or else. Not that I'd commute, obviously. But just to see. Three or four weeks. He'll get it out of his system and we'll come back. Life as before, the same old grind.”

"Maine.”

"You're right, you know, Pammy old kid. It does have a kind of hewn strength. Sort of unbreakable, unlike Connecticut. I like hearing it.”

"Maine.”

"Say it, say it.”

"Maine," she said. "Maine.”

Lyle saw his number on die enunciator board. He went to one of the booths along the south wall, reaching for the phone extended by a clerk.

"Buy five thousand Motors at sixty-five.”

"GM.”

"There's more behind it.”

He put down the phone and walked over to post 3. An old friend, McKechnie, crossed toward him at an angle. They passed without sign of recognition. Sporadically over the next several hours, as Lyle moved to different parts of the floor, traded in the garage annex, conversed with people at his booth, he thought of something that hadn't entered his mind in a great many years. It was the feeling that everyone knew his thoughts. He couldn't recall when this suspicion had first occurred to him. Very early on, obviously. Everyone knew his thoughts but he didn't know any of theirs. People on the floor were moving more quickly now. An electric cross-potential was in the air, a nearly headlong sense of revel and woe. On the board an occasional price brought noise from the floor brokers, the specialists, the clerks. Lyle watched the stock codes and the stilted figures below them, the computer spew. Inner sex crimes. A fancywork of violence and spite. Those were the shames of his adolescence. If everyone here knew his present thoughts, if that message in greenish cipher that moved across the board represented the read-outs of Lyle Wynant, it would be mental debris alone that caused him humiliation, all the unwordable rubble, the glass, rags and paper of his tiny indefinable manias. The conversations he had with himself, straphanging in a tunnel. All the ceremonial patterns, the soul's household chores. These were far more revealing, he believed, than some routine incest variation. There was more noise from the floor as Xerox appeared on the board. Male and female messengers flirted in transit. The paper waste accumulated. It was probably not an uncommon feeling among older children and adolescents that everyone knows your thoughts. It put you at the center of things, although in a passive and frightening way. They know but do not show it. When things slowed down he went to the smoking area just beyond post 1. Frank McKechme was in there, held-stripping a cigarette.

"I'm in no mood.”

"Neither am I.”

"It's total decay.”

"What are we talking about?" Lyle said.

"The outside world.”

"Is it still there? I thought we'd effectively negated it. I thought that was the upshot.”

"I'm walking around seeing death masks. This, that, the other. My wife is having tests. They take tissue from underneath the arm. My brother is also out there with his phone calls. I'm seeing visions, Lyle.”

"Don't go home.”

"I understand you people have something to look at these days.”

"What's that?”

"Zeltner's new sec'y. I understand it walks and talks.”

"I haven't been over yet this week.”

"Living quiff, I hear. I wish you'd check that out and tell me about it. I have to live somehow. I'm in no mood for what's out there. She goes for more tests tomorrow. Fucking doctor says it could be cancer.”

"Let's have lunch sometime.”

Pammy thought of the elevators in the World Trade Center as "places." She asked herself, not without morbid scorn: "When does this place get to the forty-fourth floor?" Or: "Isn't it just a matter of time before this place gets stuck with me inside it?" Elevators were supposed to be enclosures. These were too big, really, to fit that description. These also had different doors for entering and leaving, certainly a distinguishing feature of places more than of elevators.

If the elevators were places, the lobbies were "spaces." She felt abstract terms were called for in the face of such tyrannic grandeur. Four times a day she was dwarfed, progressively midgeted, walking across that purplish-blue rug. Spaces. Indefinite locations. Positions regarded as occupied by something.

From Grief's offices she looked across the landfill, the piers, the western extremities of anonymous streets. Even at this height she could detect the sweltering intensity, a slow roiling force. It moved up into the air, souls of the living.

2

Lyle shaved symmetrically, doing one segment on the left side of his face, then the corresponding segment on the right. After each left-right series, the lather that remained was evenly distributed.

Crossing streets in the morning, Pammy was wary of cars slipping out from behind her and suddenly bulking into view, forcing her to stop as they made their turns. The city functioned on principles of intimidation. She knew this and tried to be ready, unafraid to stride across the angling path of a fender that probed through heavy pedestrian traffic.

The car turning into Liberty Street didn't crowd her at all. But unexpectedly it slowed as she began to cross. The driver had one hand on the wheel, his left, and sat with much of his back resting against the door. He was virtually facing her and she was moving directly toward him. She saw through the window that his legs were well apart, left foot apparently on the brake. His right hand was at his crotch, rubbing. She was vaguely aware of two or three other people crossing the street. The driver looked directly at her, then glanced at his hand. His look was businesslike, a trifle hurried. She turned away and walked down the middle of the street, intending to cross well beyond the rear of the car. The man accelerated, heading east toward Broadway.

They roamed in cars now. This was new to her. She felt acute humiliation, a sure knowledge of having been reduced in worth. She walked a direct line toward the north tower but had no real sense of destination. Her anger was imparted to everything around her. She moved through enormous smudges, fields of indistinct things. In a sense there was no way to turn down that kind of offer. To see the offer made was to accept, automatically. He'd taken her into his car and driven to some freight terminal across the river, where he'd parked near an outbuilding with broken windows. There he'd taught her his way of speaking, his beliefs and customs, the names of his mother and father. Having done this, he no longer needed to put hands upon her. They were part of each other now. She carried him around like a dead beetle in her purse.

In college the girls in her dormitory wing had referred to perverts as "verts." They reacted to noises in the woods beyond their rooms by calling along the halclass="underline" "Vert alert, vert alert." Pammy turned into the entrance and walked across the huge lobby now, the north space, joined suddenly by thousands coming from other openings, mainly from the subway concourses where gypsy vendors sold umbrellas from nooks in the unfinished construction. They'd been stupid to make a rhyme of it.

Lyle checked his pockets for change, keys, wallet, cigarettes, pen and memo pad. He did this six or seven times a day, absently, his hand merely skimming over trousers and jacket, while he was walking, after lunch, leaving cabs. It was a routine that required no conscious planning yet reassured him, and this was supremely important, of the presence of his objects and their locations. He stacked coins on the dresser at home. Sometimes he tried to see how long he could use a face towel before its condition forced him to put it in the hamper. Often he wore one of the three or four neckties whose design and color he didn't really like. Other ties he used sparingly, the good ones, preferring to see them hanging in the closet. He drew pleasure from the knowledge that they'd outlast the inferior ties.

He was sandy-haired and tall, his firm's youngest partner. Although he'd never worn glasses, someone or other was always asking what had happened to them. A quality of self-possession, maybe, of near-effeteness, implied the suitability of glasses. Some of the same people, and others, watching him shake a cigarette out of the pack, asked him when he'd started smoking. Lyle was secretly hurt by these defects of focus or memory on the part of acquaintances. The real deficiency, somehow, he took to be his.

There was a formality about his movements, a tiller-distinct precision. He rarely seemed to hurry, even on the trading floor, but this was deceptive, a result of steady pace, the drift-less way he maneuvered through a room. His body was devoid of excess. He had no chest hair, nothing but downy growth on his arms and legs. His eyes were grayish and mild, conjuring distances. This pale stare, the spareness of his face, its lack of stark lines, the spaces in his manner made people feel he would be hard to know.

The old man was outside Federal Hall again, leaky-eyed and grizzled, holding his sign up over his head-the banks, the tanks, the corporations. The sign had narrow wooden slats fastened to each vertical border, making it relatively steady in the breeze, when there was a breeze. Lyle crossed diagonally toward the Exchange. The air was smothering already. By the close of trading, people would be looking for places to hide. In the financial district everything tended to edge beyond acceptability. The tight high buildings held things in, cross-reflecting heat, channeling oceanic gusts all winter long. It was a test environment for extreme states of mind as well. Every day the outcasts were in the streets, women with junk carts, a man dragging a mattress, ordinary drunks slipping in from the dock areas, from construction craters near the Hudson, people without shoes, amputees and freaks, men splitting off from groups sleeping in fish crates under the highway and limping down past the slips and lanes, the helicopter pad, onto Broad Street, living rags. Lyle thought of these people as infiltrators in the district. Elements filtering in. Nameless arrays of existence. The use of madness and squalor as texts in the denunciation of capitalism did not strike him as fitting here, despite appearances. It was something else these men and women had come to mean, shouting, trailing vomit on their feet. The sign-holder outside Federal Hall was not part of this. He was in context here, professing clearly his opposition.

Lyle made small talk with the others at his booth. The chart for a baseball pool was taped to the wall above a telephone. The floor began to fill. People generally were cheerful. There was sanity here, even at the wildest times. It was all worked out. There were rules, standards and customs. In the electronic clatter it was possible to feel you were part of a breath-takingly intricate quest for order and elucidation, for identity among the constituents of a system. Everyone reconnoitered toward a balance. After the cries of die floor brokers, the quotes, the bids, the cadence and peal of an auction market, there was always a final price, good or bad, a leveling out of the world's creaturely desires. Floor members were down-to-earth. They played practical jokes. They didn't drift beyond the margins of things. Lyle wondered how much of the world, the place they shared a lucid view of, was still his to live in.

Moments before noon something happened near post 12. To Lyle it seemed at first an indistinct warp, a collapse in pattern. He perceived a rush, unusual turbulence, people crowding and looking around. He realized the sharp noise he'd heard seconds earlier was gunfire. He thought: small arms. There was another burst of activity, this one more ragged, at post 4, nearer Lyle, not far from the entrance to the blue room annex. People were shouting, a few individuals, uncertainly, their voices caught in a hail of polite surprise. He saw the first clear action, men moving quickly through the crowd, sideways, skipping between people, trying to hand-force a path. They were chasing someone. He approached the entrance to the blue room. Total confusion in there. A guard brushed by him. It was not possible to run in this gathering. Everyone moving quickly went sideways or three-quarters, in little hop-steps. The electronic gong sounded. At the far end of the room he saw heads bobbing above the crowd, a line of them, the chasers. The people in the blue room didn't know where to look. A young woman, a messenger in a blue smock, covered her mouth with the piece of paper she'd been taking somewhere. Lyle turned and went over to post 12. There was a body. Someone was giving mouth-to-mouth. Blood spread over the victim's chest. Lyle saw a man step back from a small inching trickle on the floor. Everyone here was attentive. A stillness had washed up. It was the calmest pocket on the floor right now.

Later that afternoon he had a drink with Frank McKechnie in a bar not far from the Exchange. McKechnie was beginning to look like some crime czar's personal chauffeur. He was stocky, grayer by the day, and his clothing could barely resist the surge of firmness and girth that had been taking place these past few years. They smoked quietly for a moment, looking into rows of bottles. McKechnie had ordered two cold draft beers, stressing cold, almost belligerent about it.

"What do we know?”

"George Sedbauer.”

"Doesn't sound familiar," Lyle said.

"I knew George. George was an interesting guy. He could charm people. Charm the ass off anybody. But he had this thing, this almost gift for complications. He would find ways to get into trouble. If a way didn't exist, he'd invent one. He was in trouble with the Board more than once. George was likable but you never knew where he was.”

"Until now.”

"You know now.”

"I heard they caught up to the guy down on Bridge Street or somewhere?”

"They got him in the bond room. He never made it out to the street.”

"I heard street.”

"He made it no further than the bond room," McKechnie said. "Whoever told you Bridge Street, tell him he's spinning a web of lies.”

"I heard he made it out.”

"Sheer fantasy.”

"A trail of deceit, is that it?”

"What did you hear about his identity?”

"Nothing," Lyle said.

"That's good, because there's nothing to hear. That anybody's heard of, he never existed before today. Hey, when the hell are you coming up to have dinner with us with your goddamn spouse and all?”

"We never seem to get out.”

"My wife is still with the tests.”

"We seem to have trouble getting out. We're not organized. She's as bad as I am. One of these days we'll get organized enough.”

"You sure you're married, Lyle? There's talk you got something going with so many women in so many places, you couldn't possibly have a wife too. I hear talk.”

Lyle blinked into his beer, smiling lightly.

"He had a visitor s badge, I understand.

"Correct," McKechnie said.

"Well whose visitor? Obviously that's the thing.”

"He was George Sedbauer's visitor.”

"I didn't know that.”

"George got him on the floor.”

"Well you have to wonder if they knew each other why the guy would shoot him right there instead of some side street.”

"Maybe it wasn't planned, to shoot him.”

"They had an argument," Lyle said.

"They had an argument and the guy whips out a handgun. Which they recovered, incidentally. A starter's pistol with the barrel bored out to take twenty-two-caliber ammunition.”

"How do you have an argument with an outsider on the floor? Who on the floor has time to get into an argument with someone who's his own guest?”

"Not everybody with a guest badge is your sister-in-law from East Hartford. Maybe George had interesting friends.”

With his index finger McKechnie made a wigwag motion over the glasses. The bartender moved their way, talking to someone over his shoulder.

"You know what it all means, don't you?”

"Tell me, Frank.”

"It means they'll install one of those metal detection devices and we'll all have to walk through it every time we go on the floor. I hate those goddamn things. They can damage your bone marrow. My life is crud enough as it is.”

3

Lyle sat by a window at home, in T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, drinking Irish lager.

Pammy bought fruit at a sidewalk stand. She loved the look of fruit in crates, outdoors, tiers of peaches and grapes. Buying fresh fruit made her feel good. It was an act of moral excellence. She looked forward to taking the grapes home, putting them in a bowl and letting cold water run over the bunches. It gave her such pleasure, hefting one of the bunches in her hand, feeling the water come cooling through. Then there were peaches. The earthly merit of peaches.

Lyle remembered having seen some pennies in the bedroom. He went in there. Ten minutes later he found them, three, sitting on a copper-and-brown Kleenex box. He heard Pam take the keys out of her purse. He stacked the pennies on the dresser. Transit tokens on the right side of the dresser. Pennies on the left. He went back to the window.

Pammy had to put down the bag of fruit before she could get the door opened. She remembered what had been bothering her, the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother. She tended to forget about it. When she recalled what it was that had been on her mind, she felt satisfied at having remembered and relieved that it was nothing worse. She pushed into the apartment.

"There she is.”

"Hi, you're home.”

"What's in that big wet funny bag?”

"I may not show you.”

"Fruit.”

"I got you some cantaloupe.”

"Do I like cantaloupe, he asked," Lyle said.

"And these plums, can you believe them?”

"Who'll eat all that? You never eat any. You eat a little bit when you take it out of the bag and then that's it, Chiquita. In the fruit thing to shrivel.”

"You like plums.”

"Then you say it's for me, look what I got you, world's greatest tangerine, glom glom.”

"Well I think fruit's pretty.”

"In the fruit bin to shrivel up like fetuses.”

"Where's my beer?" she said.

He had a look on his face, supposedly an imitation of her virtuous-fruit look, that made her laugh. She moved through the apartment, taking off clothes, putting the fruit away, getting cheese and crackers. There were pieces of her everywhere. Lyle watched, humming something.

"A guy got killed today on the floor, shot.”

"What, at the Exchange?”

"Somebody shot him, out of nowhere.”

"Did you see it?”

"Ping.”

"Christ, who? Puerto Ricans again?”

He reached out when she went by. She moved into him as he rose from the chair. She felt his thumb at the small of her back, slipping inside elastic. She reached behind him to draw the curtains. He sat back down, humming something, arms raised, as she lifted the T-shirt off him.

"I wouldn't want to say porta rickens. I wouldn't want to say coloreds or any of the well-meaning white folks who have taken up the struggle against the struggle, not knowing, you see, that the capitalist system and the power structure and the pattern of repression are themselves a struggle. It's not an easy matter, being the oppressor. A lot of work involved. Hard dogged unglamorous day-to-day toil. Pounding the pavement. Checking records and files. Making phone call after phone call. Successful oppression depends on this. So I would say in conclusion that they are struggling against the struggle. But I wouldn't want to say porta rickens, commanists, what-have-you. It be no bomb, remember. It be a gun, ping.”

Pammy and Lyle, undressed, were face to face on the white bed, kneeling, hands on each other's shoulders, in flat light, dimming in tenths of seconds. The room was closed off to the street's sparse evening, the hour of thoughtful noises, when everything is interim. The air conditioner labored, an uphill tone. There were intermittent lights in the distance, high-tension streaks. With each discharge a neutral tint, a residue, as of cooled ash, penetrated the room. Pammy and Lyle began to touch. They knew the shifting images of physical similarity. It was an unspoken bond, part of their shared consciousness, the mined silence between people who live together. Curling across each other's limbs and silhouettes they seemed repeat-able, daughter cells of some precise division. Their tongues drifted over wetter flesh. It was this divining of moisture, an intuition of nature submerged, that set them at each other, nipping, in eager searches. He tasted vinegar in her spinning hair. They parted a moment, touched from a studied distance, testing introspectively, a complex exchange. He left the bed to turn off the air conditioner and raise the window. Evening was recharged and fragrant. Thunder sounded right over them. The best things about summer were these storms, filling a room, almost medicinally, with weather, with variable light. Rain struck the window in pellets. They could see trees out back take the stiff winds. Lyle had gotten wet, opening the window, his hands and belly, and they waited for him to dry, talking in foreign accents about a storm they'd driven through in the Alps somewhere, laughing in "Portuguese" and "Dutch." She twisted into him, their solitude become a sheltering in this rain. They lost contact for a moment. She brought him back, needing that conflict of surfaces, the palpable logic of his cock inside her. Then she was gripping hard, released to the contagion of recurring motion, rising, as they ached and played, sunny as young tigers.

It is time to "perform," he thought. She would have to be "satisfied." He would have to "service" her. They would make efforts to "interact.”

When he was sure they were finished he moved away, feeling the barest spray of rain after it hit the window ledge. On their backs they reorganized their breathing. She wanted pizza. It made her feel guilty not to want fruit. But she'd worked all day, taken elevators and trains. She couldn't deal with the consequences of fruit, its perishability, the duty involved in eating it. She wanted to sit in a corner, alone, and stuff herself with junk.

She is padding to the bathroom, he thought.

It grew darker. She sat at the foot of the bed, dressing. The rain slackened. She heard the Mister Softee truck down in the street. It announced itself with recorded music, a sound she hated, the same cranked-out mechanical whine every night. She couldn't hear that noise without feeling severe mental oppression. To indicate this, she made a low droning sound, the tremulous m that meant she was on the edge of something.

"There really is a Mister Softee.”

"I believe," she said.

"He sits in the back of the truck. That's him making the noise. It's not music on a record or tape. That's his mouth. It's coming out of his mouth. That's his language. They speak that way in the back of ice cream trucks all over the city. I won't say nation yet. It hasn't spread.”

"A local phenomenon.”

"He sits back there dribbling. He's very fat and pastelike. He can't get up. His flesh doesn't have the right consistency.”

"He has no genitals.”

"They're in diere somewhere.”

"Kidding aside, let's talk," she said.

She crawled along the bed, wearing a shirt and jeans, and settled next to him, pressing contentedly. He made a sound, then started to bite her head. She scratched lightly at his ribs.

"Better watch.”

"I bite heads for a living.”

"Better watch, you. I know where and how to strike.”

He made gulping sounds. This seemed to interest him more than most noises he made. He evolved chokes and gasps out of the original sound. He began to drown or suffocate, making convulsive attempts to breathe. Pammy answered the phone on the fourth or fifth ring, as she always did, either, he thought, because she considered it chic, or just to annoy him. It was Ethan Segal. He and Jack were dropping over. What do we have to drink?

Lyle called Dial-a-Steak. By the time the food arrived, everyone was a little drunk. Ethan shuffled to the table, a chess-playing smile on his face. They sat down, having brought their drinks with them, and began to strip aluminum foil from the steak, the salad, the potatoes, the bread, the salt and pepper.

"It's Jack's birthday.”

No one said anything.

"I'm thirty.”

"Welcome to Death Valley," Lyle said.

"I feel different.”

"But none the wiser," Ethan said.

"I used to think thirty was so old. I'd meet people who were thirty and I'd think God, thirty.”

"Wait till you're fortyish," Ethan said. "All hell breaks loose for about ten minutes. Then you begin to grow old quietly. It's not bad, really. You begin wearing house slippers to the theater and people think you're some unbelievably interesting man about to get written up in What's Happening, you know, or People Are Talking About, in Vogue or some such.”

"We forgot to open the wine," Jack said.

"At what specific time," Pammy said, "does one become fortyish?”

"Wine, Lyle.”

"We're out. There is no wine. Our cellar was auctioned off to pay taxes on the estate.”

"We brought wine," Jack said. "We came with wine.”

"There is no wine, Jack. You're free to look around.”

"It's in the cab," Ethan said.

Jack said: "The cab.”

"We left it in the cab. I remember distinctly that we had it when we got in the cab and I don't recall seeing it after that.”

"Because you drank it," Pammy said.

"Because I drank the wine in the cab.”

"Do I hear diet cola?" Jack said.

They were talking quickly and getting laughs on intonation alone, the prospect of wit. This isn't really funny, Lyle thought. It seems funny because we're getting half smashed. But nobody's really saying funny things. Tomorrow she'll say what a funny night and I'll say it just seemed funny and she'll give me a look. She'll give me a look-he saw the look but did not express it in verbal form, going on to the next spaceless array, a semi-coherent framework of atomic "words." But I'll know I'm right because I'm making this mental note right now to remind myself tomorrow that we're not really being funny.

Shut up, he told himself.

Jack Laws nurtured an element of hysteria in his laugh. His head went tilt, his hands came up to his chest in paw form and he shook out some cries of phobic joy. It was an up-to-date cultural mannerism, an index of the suspicion that nothing we say or do can be properly gauged without reference to the fear that pervades every situation and specific thing. Jack was broad-shouldered and short. He had a snub nose, small mouth and well-cleft chin. His face, over all, possessed a sly innocence that quickly shaded off into grades of uncertainty or combativeness, depending on the situation. His presence in a room was an asset at most gatherings. The area he occupied seemed a pocket of sociability and cheer. In some rooms, however, people's reactions to Jack, whether friendly or indifferent, were based on their feelings for Ethan. Pammy was aware of these angles of reflection. She tried to divert Jack at such times, subtly.

Ethan was back in the armchair, smiling cryptically again. He was onto vodka, neat. Jack finished off Pammy's steak, talking at the same time about a friend of his who was in training to swim some strait in Europe, the first ever to attempt it north to south, or something. There was a comedy record on the stereo. It was Lyle's latest. He played such records often, getting the routines down pat, the phrasing, the dialects, then repeating the whole thing for people on the floor in slack times. This one he played for Ethan's benefit. He watched Ethan, studying his reaction, as the record played, as Jack ate and talked, as Pammy wandered around the room. After a while he followed her over to the bookshelves.

"Did you pay the Saks thing?”

"No, what thing?”

"They're panting," he said. "They're enclosing slips with the bill. Little reminders. They're calling you Ms.”

"Next week.”

"You said that.”

"They'll wait.”

"Where did I tell you the battery was for the Italian clock when the one in there now runs out?”

"I don't know.”

"You forgot already.”

"What battery?" she said.

"I went to nine places, looking. It's one point four volts.

You can't go around the corner. It's a certain size. Least you could do is remember where it is when I tell you.”

"There's a battery in there.”

"For when it runs out," he said. "It's a ten-month-some-odd life expectancy and we've had the clock nearly that long already.”

"Okay, where's the battery?”

"In the kitchen drawer with the corkscrews and ribbons.”

Lyle went into the bedroom and turned on the TV set. That was the only light. He watched for a few minutes, then began coasting along the dial. Jack came in and he had to stop. It made Lyle nervous to watch television with someone in the room, even Pammy, even when he wasn't changing channels every twenty seconds. There was something private about television. It was intimate, able to cause embarrassment.

"What's on?”

"Not much.”

"You watch a lot?" Jack said. "I do.”

"Sometimes.”

"It keeps the mind off things. You don't have to involve yourself too much. Listen, talk, anything.”

"I talk all day," Lyle said.

"Exactly, I know.”

Jack hadn't moved from the doorway. He was eating a peach, standing in light from the hall. When he turned and laughed, reacting to something Ethan or Pam had said, Lyle saw the patch of white hair above his neck. He thought of saying something about it but by the time Jack turned his head again, he'd lost interest.

"Bed's a mess but come on in, find a chair, cetra cetra.”

"That's okay, I'm just snooping around.”

"Nothing's on, looks like.”

"But can you believe what they show sometimes? I think it's disgusting, Lyle. I can't believe. It's so sleazy. Who are those people? I refuse to watch. I totally do not watch. Ethan watches.”

"Sometimes you see something, you know, interesting in another sense. I don't know.”

"What other sense?”

"I don't know.”

"I totally cannot believe. What goes on. Right there on TV.”

"What are you doing these days, Jack?”

"I'm thinking of getting a scheme together.”

"What kind?”

"I know where I can get microfilmed mailing lists of two hundred thousand subscribers to these eight or nine health publications. I think it's A to M.”

"You'll, what, sell them?”

"Sell them.”

"What else, of course.”

"Sell them, what else?”

They watched and listened for ten minutes as two announcers tried to fill time during a rain delay at a ball game.

"We have two sets," Jack said.

"I'm thinking of that.”

"I made him get an extra.”

He laughed lightly, ending on a note of apprehension, and went back inside. Pammy was sitting on the floor. With her index finger she kept tapping an ice cube in her glass, watching it plunge briefly, then surge.

"You know what I don't think?" she said. "I don't think I can stand the idea of tomorrow.”

She looked at Ethan, who stared into the carpet.

"I really, it seems, I don't think.”

"It's that time of night," Jack said.

"It's just that I can't accommodate any more time than what's right here. It's, where we go, your friend here, together with me. Choose precisely the word, for this is important. Not place, which is the elevator's word. Not office or building, which are too common and apply anywhere.”

"Environment.”

"Thank you, Jack.”

"Should I make coffee?”

"No, no, this isn't a coffee conversation. This is a gut topic. Wait a minute now, I'll get to it. Don't think I don't know that your friend here has not in the longest time made the slightest remark to his job. Why? Because you know as well as I do, Jack, what happens to people. Your friend here used to joke. You recall it, Jack, as well as I do. We both heard this man. He'd be so funny about his job and those people in the field. The stories. Do you believe? Per diem rates for terminal-illness counseling? So if it drags on, forget it, we got you by the balls? And the woman in Syracuse? With the grief-stricken pet, what was it, canary, in Syracuse, that the other one died -not canary, what, shit, I'm screwing this up. But that's okay. You're dear friends. We're dear friends here. But he no longer does it. That's the point and he thinks I don't notice. Because it's so stupid. It's so modern-stupid. It's this thing that people are robots that scares me. And the environment, Jack, thank you.”

"I never heard about the grief-stricken canary.”

"Jack, you heard. We all did." She pointed toward the bedroom. "He still talks about it. Just say Syracuse to Lyle, blink-blink-blink, the way he laughs, right, with the eyelids.”

Ethan made a sweeping movement with his arm, a gesture of cancellation. His cravat, an ironic adornment to begin with, had slipped over the front of his shirt so that he appeared to be wearing a child's scarf.

"The thing is," he said.

They waited.

"To forge a change that you may be reluctant to forge, that may be problematical for this or that reason, you have to tell people. You have to talk and tell people. Jack sees what I'm getting at. You have to bring it out. Even if you have no intention at the time of doing it out of whatever fear or trembling, you still must make it begin to come true by articulating it. This changes the path of your life. Just telling people makes the change begin to happen. If, in the end, you choose to keep going with whatever you've been doing that's been this problematical thing in your life, well and good, it's up to you. But if you need to feel you're on the verge of a wonderful change, whether you are or not, the thing to do is tell people. 'I am on the verge of a wonderful change. I am about to do something electrifying. The very fibers of your being will be electrified, sir, when I tell you what it is I propose to do.' To speak it in words is to see the possibility emerge. Doesn't matter what. Don't bother your head over what. For the purposes of this discussion it could be mountain-climbing we're talking about or this friend of Jack, the oft-mentioned scaly chap who plans to swim the North Sea left-handed. Our lives are enriched by these little blurbs we send each other. These things are necessary to do. 'I am going back to school to learn Arabic, whatever.' Say it to people for six months. 'I am going to live in Maine or else.' Jack sees my point. Tell people, tell them. Make something up. The important thing is to seem to be on the verge. Then it begins to come true, a little bit. I don't know, maybe talking is enough. Maybe you don't want to forge the change. Maybe telling people is the change. How should I know? Why ask me? Lyle, where is Lyle? Say good night to Lyle.”

"I think I know what you mean," Pammy said.

"Do you see a glimmer?”

"I think I see a glimmer.”

"We'll hail a cab, Jack. Our bottle of wine will be in the back seat. It will complete the circle. I believe in circles.”

"Jack, really, happy birthday, I mean it.”

"I tried to get drunk.”

"Needn't apologize," she said. "Tell your friend here I think I see what he means.”

"Well I don't," Jack said.

In the bedroom Lyle watched television. Pammy came in, sat at the end of the bed, where earlier she'd dressed, and undressed. It made little or no sense, all this undressing, dressing. If you calculated the time. Hours spent. After a while she stood up, nude, and walked to Lyle, who sat in a director's chair, his back to her. She put her hands on his shoulders. The volume on the TV set was turned way down. She heard cars outside, the sound of tires on a wet street, whispered s's. Her face had Nordic contours and looked flawless in this light. He extended one arm across his chest and gripped her hand in his.

4

After the close Lyle walked north on Pearl. Currents of humid air swept through the streets. As he waited for a light to change he became aware of a figure nearby, a furtive woman, literally inching toward him. He turned slightly, nearly facing her. She stopped then and spoke, although not directly to Lyle, her head averted somewhat.

"She's a man's toilet, a whore. He's legally disabled meanwhile. He sits with his clocks and watches, knowing she's out of his sight, being a toilet for men. Three in the morning. Four in the morning. Please, who needs it? For him, special, she'll drop dead. I'm expecting it shortly.”

Lyle noted that she was in her fifties, stunted somewhat, normally dressed, probably not Jewish despite the faint lilt to her voice. He went east on John Street, enumerating these facts as though he were conversing with someone who sought a description of the woman. This was something he did only on buses as a rule. His attention would wander to someone across the aisle and he'd find himself putting together a physical description of the man or woman-almost always a man. The notion of police interrogation was part of the mental concept. He was a witness identifying a suspect. These interludes developed without planning; he simply found himself relating (to someone) the color of a particular man's shoes, trousers and jacket, his estimated height and weight, black man, white man, so forth. When he realized he was doing it, he stopped, telling himself to shut up. Sometimes, walking, he memorized the numbers on license plates of certain cars. Hours later he'd repeat the number to make sure he still knew it. The testing of a perennial witness.

Near the foot of John Street was the toy skyscraper where his firm had offices. The benches outside were painted in primary colors, as were various decorations on the lower facade. He thought of building blocks and games with flashing lights. There were whimsical phone booths and a superdigital clock. To get to the elevator bank he went through a blue neon tunnel. He got off the elevator and was stopped by Teddy Mackel, a middle-aged man in charge of the mail room.

"I think you ought to walk by Zeltner's room, Lyle.”

"I heard.”

"Makes me want to take back my chastity vow that I took when I was with the Marist Brothers earlier in this century, Lyle, Jesus.”

"We need it around here, something, for morale”

"Tall, I like that about a woman. Tall, nice.”

"More there.”

"Never end a sentence with a preposition," Mackel said. "That's the other thing I learned when I was with the Marists. They're a teaching order. Those were the two things they taught us. Chastity and how to end sentences. Which one did me less good I bet you can guess.”

"Neck to neck, I judge it.”

"Tell me confidentially, will we survive, Lyle? My kids are worried. They want to finish college. You're down there in the dust of battle. Say some words to our viewing audience.”

There was an alcove outside Zeltner's office. She was at the desk there, reading a paperback book, her shoulders hunched in a way that indicated a special depth of solitude, he thought, like a figure in a Hopper painting. He came back the other way now, having stopped at the water cooler. Fairly long blond hair. That was about all that registered. He stopped at the end of the hall, wondering what to do next. There were two or three people he could visit, more or less plausibly, in their offices. He didn't feel like doing that but didn't want to leave either. Leaving presented a void. He heard the elevator door open and decided he couldn't stand around any longer. He went back to the alcove. He leaned over, tapping his index finger on the surface of the desk.

"Where is he? Is he around somewhere?”

"He didn't say.”

"Nothing's moving in there.”

"I don't know where he is.”

"The elusive Zeltner.”

"He forgets to tell me.”

"That's right, I forgot that about him.”

"Who should I say was asking?”

"Not important, really, I'll come back.”

Blond hair, little or no makeup, blank sort of face with nice enough features. Teeth and nails on the drab side. Blondness and probably great figure would account for local acclaim. Must be seen in motion no doubt.

Pammy on the eighty-third floor of the north tower contrived to pass the time by devising a question for Ethan Segal. If the elevators in the World Trade Center were places, as she believed them to be, and if the lobbies were spaces, as she further believed, what then was the World Trade Center itself? Was it a condition, an occurrence, a physical event, an existing circumstance, a presence, a state, a set of invariables? Ethan didn't respond and she changed the subject, watching him type figures into little boxes on a long form, folded over his machine, crowding down on it, only his fingers moving.

"We have nothing planned," she said. "Lyle doesn't think he'll be able to get away. It's very hair-raising right now, I gather. He's talking about not before October.”

"That's a nice time, really.”

"I think it would be specially nice if we did something together.”

"Where?”

"Wherever.”

"Vales of time and space.”

"I think it would work very well, Ethan. It can be wearing, just two. We all get along.”

"Lyle's not available, so.”

"You wouldn't consider October as soon enough, I don't imagine.”

"I'd never last it out, Pam.”

"This city.”

"July, August.”

"I'm thinking about tap-dancing lessons," she said.

"Let me type.”

"No comment?”

"Let me type awhile," he said. "I like filling these little boxes with numbers. Numbers are indispensable to my world view at present. I don't believe I'm doing this. This is some toad's chore. But I genuinely enjoy it. It's so anally satisfying. Contentment at last.”

Late one afternoon Lyle waited outside the building on John Street. When she came out, in a crowd, he realized it would be awkward, physically and otherwise, to try to isolate her from the others. She might not recognize him. Someone from the office might see them and come over to join the conversation. He followed her half a block, not yet trying to catch up. At the corner she got into a waiting car, which moved off quickly. He felt resentful, as if he'd been supplanted by another man. It was a green VW, California plates 180 boa.

He sat on a bench in a plaza overlooking the river. He felt lessened somehow. Freighter cranes slanted across the tops of sheds in the Brooklyn dock area. It was the city, the heat, an endless sense of repetition. The district repeated itself in blocks of monochromatic stone. He was present in things. There was more of him here through the idle nights than he took home with him to vent and liberate. He thought about the nights. He imagined the district never visited, empty of human transaction, and how buildings such as these would seem to hold untouchable matter, enormous codifications of organic decay. He tried to examine the immense complexity of going home.

The next afternoon he managed to reach her before she joined the flow into the streets. He spoke through a reassuring smile. He concentrated on this expression to the degree that he could visualize his own lips moving. It was a moment of utter disengagement. He didn't know what he was saying and with people swarming around them and traffic building nearby he could barely hear her voice when she replied, as she did once or twice, briefly, in phrases as translucent as his own. He guided her unobtrusively toward a quieter part of the arcade, trying to reconstruct the first stages of their conversation even as he continued to babble and gleam. He wasn't yet certain she recognized him.

"The floor," he said.

Her reply made no sense. It went right through him, suffused with light. He leaned closer and renewed his smile, warmly. This would keep him from blinking. He blinked only with tight smiles, for emphasis.

"The Exchange," he said. "You've seen me outside Zelt-ner's office. I know, people you've seen just once, hard to place, I realize. Is there the subway? I'll walk along. Where do you live? Queens, I'll wager. I like it out there, despite people saying Queens, what, where, my God. It's metaphysical.”

"I usually get a ride.”

"I understand there's a certain insecurity in the Zeltner power alley. You've been up there how long now? Let's stand over in the shade. Queens is endless. This endless something about it. It's like a maze without the interconnections. A bland maze. I have a theory about where people live in New York.”

She wore a white blouse, pleated blue skirt and white shoes. As he talked and then listened he tested himself by recalling the VW's license number. It completed a mental set. They walked slowly to the corner where she'd been picked up the day before.

"This is where my ride should come.”

"Is it all right if I wait?”

"I guess.”

"What's your name?”

"Rosemary Moore.”

"I have to be up there tomorrow after the close. Maybe I'll stop by if you're not busy. We can stop off after you're through. Would that be all right? A drink or two. A quick drink as they say. Tiny. A tiny drink. They serve only tiny drinks.”

This time she got into the back seat. A man and woman were in front, both somewhat older than she was, Rosemary Moore in navy and white.

5

Pammy examined the uses of boredom. Of late she'd found herself professing to be bored fairly often. She knew it was a shield for deeper feelings. Not wishing to express conventional outrage she said again and again, "How boring, so boring, I'm bored." Pornography bored her. Talk of violence made her sigh. Things in the street, just things she saw and heard day to day, forced her into subtle evasions. Her body would automatically relax. To feel this slackening take place was to complete another weary detour.

People talked to her on the bus, strangers, a little detached in tone, a little universal, sometimes giving the impression they were communicating out to her from some unbounded secret place.

Flying made her yawn. She yawned on the elevators at the World Trade Center. Often she yawned in banks, waiting on line to reach the teller. Banks made her guilty. Tellers and bank officers were always asking her to sign forms, or to resign forms already bearing her signature, or to provide further identification. It was her own money she wanted to draw out, obviously, but there was still this bubble of nervousness and guilt, there was still this profound anxiety over her name, her handwriting, there was still this feeling that the core content of her personality was about to be revealed, and she would stand on line with two dozen others, roped in, yawning decorously, a suspect.

Pammy heard Lyle in the corridor outside. She leaned forward and closed the toilet door. He entered the apartment, walked down the hall, stopped outside the door, then opened it. She made a monkey face and uttered a series of panicky squeals, bouncing on the seat. He closed the door and went into the bedroom.

She called out: "What'd you get me for Valentine's Day?”

"A vasectomy," he said. "Is this February?”

"I only wish.”

"Why?”

"So our vacation would be over.”

"Why?”

"Because I know we're not going to take one.”

"You go.”

"What will you do?”

"Work," he said.

She came out of the bathroom. He followed her into the kitchen zipping up lightweight cords, his pelvis drawn back to avoid the primal snare. They jostled each other before the open refrigerator.

"Goody, cheddar.”

"What's these?”

"Brandy snaps.”

"Triffic.”

"Look out.”

"No you push me, you.”

They went into the living room, each with something to eat and drink. Lyle turned on the new television set and they watched the evening news. Pammy became embarrassed on behalf of someone being interviewed, a man with a minor speech defect. She put her hands over her ears and looked away. The air conditioner made loud noises and Lyle turned it off. Then he went into the bedroom and watched television in there for a while.

"Are you watching this?" she called out.

"What, no.”

"The beauty technician.”

"No.”

"Put it on quick.”

"Gaw damn, Miss Molly, a man can't watch but one thing at a time.”

"Put it on, on seven." "Later, I'm watching.”

"Now," she said. "Hurry. Hurry up. Quick, seven, you dumb.”

Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respective sets. But noises bound them, a cyclist kick-starting, the plane that came winding down the five miles from its transatlantic apex, rippling the pictures on their screens. Objects were memory inert. Desk, the bed, et cetera. Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of how easily halved a life can become. Death, perhaps, was not the point so much as separation. Chairs, tables, dressers, envelopes. Everything was a common experience, binding them despite their indirections, the slanted apparatus of their agreeing. That they did agree was not in doubt. Faithlessness and desire. It wasn't necessary to tell them apart. His body, hers. Sex, love, monotony, contempt. The spell that had to be entered was out there among the unmemorized faces and uniform cubes of being. This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment, the near common dream they'd countenanced for years. Only absences were fully shared.

"What's with Grief?" he called. "I don't hear lately.”

"Ethan and I made a secret pact. It don't exist far's we's concerned.”

"You bottomed out in the second quarter. You're in the midst of a mini-surge right now. You're also talking about diversification.”

"Let me lower this.”

"What?”

"Can't hear you.”

"Diversification.”

"Is that, what, Dow Jones or the other guys?”

"Theme attractions," he said. "That's very much a part of the shed-ule, pending word from the data retrieval chaps.”

"I don't think.”

A fantasy ranch in Santa Mesa County, Arizona. Grief fantasies. People dressing up to grieve.”

"Hee hee, I know you're stupid.”

"No tengo tiene.”

"We never eat paella," she said. "Remember the place on Charles, was it? Or West Fourth?”

"Maybe the corner," he said. "Is there a corner there?”

Her father had made her yawn. Whenever she picked up the phone to call him, she would feel her mouth gaping open with "fatigue," "boredom," her countermeasures to compelling emotion. He'd lived then near the northern point of Manhattan, mentally distressed, a man who preferred gestures to speech. During her visits he would answer most of her questions with his hands, indicating that this was all right, that was not so bad, the other was a problem. He nodded, smiled, showed her the contents of various cigar boxes and shopping bags. On the phone he begged for documents. Birth certificate, savings passbook, social security card, memberships, compensations, group plans. She'd remind him where everything was, having learned to steady her desperation until it became a stretch-tight level of patience. Sometime before he died she learned from one of his neighbors that he often stood on corners and asked people to help him cross the street, although he wasn't physically impaired. He would take the person's arm and walk to the other side, then continue slowly on his own to the next corner, where he'd wait for someone else. She wished she hadn't known that. It suggested a failure on her part, some defect of love or involvement. Dialing his number she would yawn, reflexively. Whatever the point source of this mechanical tremor, she'd learned to accept it as part of growing up and down in the vast world of other people's pain.