Players (3 page)

“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 the 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
I
. Frank McKechnie was in there, field-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.

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 hall: “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 driftless 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 the 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.