Players (8 page)

It was dark. There were two hundred people in the streeet. Jack stepped onto the narrow platform at the back of one of the fire engines. He swung out from the vertical bar. The gaiety they’d brought into the street dissolved in minutes. Ethan and Pam started off down the block but Jack didn’t want to get off the fire truck. He shouted commands and made wailing noises. Nobody paid much attention. The man with the needle beneath his lip came out with the last of the plants. Firemen dragged a hose around the corner. Ethan stood looking at Jack, a steadying distance in his gaze.

“I wonder what happened to the rain they predicted,” Pammy said.

Jack came along finally. They turned a corner and headed south, moving toward Canal Street and the possibility of a taxi. Standing outside the cast-iron buildings were large cardboard cylinders that contained industrial sweepings from the factory lofts. Jack charged one of them, shoulder-first, knocking it down. They followed along quietly as he ranged both sides of the street, crashing into containers. Just past Grand he hurdled an overturned container and veered neatly, forearm out front, body set low, to run into a metal garbage can. Pammy, eventually, noted that Ethan hadn’t altered stride and she had to hurry to catch up with him. Jack was sitting in the gutter, holding his knee. The can was on its side, rolling only slightly back and forth, much of its contents still within, an
indication of weight. To Pammy it made sense in a way. He’d always appeared to have reserves of uncommitted energy. A hitter of garbage cans. She watched him get to his feet, raggedly. Although there was no sign of an empty cab, Ethan leaned into the sparse traffic, arm high in the air.

“Does he do this often?”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Ethan said. “The rest of the week he speaks in tongues.”

Lyle sometimes carried yellow teleprinter slips with him for days. He saw in the numbers and stock symbols an artful reduction of the external world to printed output, the machine’s coded model of exactitude. One second of study, a glance was all it took to return to him an impression of reality disconnected from the resonance of its own senses. Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was nowhere in evidence. The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point. He knew that people want to see their own spittle dripping from the lacy openwork of art. On the slip of paper in his hand there was no intimation of lives defined by the objects around them, morbid tiers of immortality. Inked figures were all he saw. This was property in its own right, tucked away, his particular share (once removed) of the animal body breathing in the night.

When Pammy got home, he wasn’t there. This was disappointing. Lately she’d found that the nutritive material for their sex life was often provided by others, whoever happened to be present at a party or other gathering. She wondered
whether she’d become too complex to care whether the others were gay or straight. It would be nice, so nice if he walked in right now. When she realized how late it was, she grew angry. Soon she was doing what she always did when she was mad at Lyle. She began to clean the apartment. First she mopped the kitchen, then the bathroom. She swept up in the living room and, once the kitchen floor was dry, quickly did the dishes. It was an intricate cycle of expiation and virtue, a return to self-discipline. Whenever things went badly between them, she took it as a preview, seeing herself alone in a brilliantly well-kept apartment, everything in place, everything
white
somehow, a sense of iron-fisted independence clearly apparent in all this organization. In the middle of the night, obviously too late to vacuum, she took a shower, put on her pajamas and sat reading in bed, feeling good about herself.

Lyle came home.

“Your face is splotched,” he said.

“You’ll get hit.”

“What are you doing up? You’re still up. It’s unbelievably late. I’ve never seen it so late. It’s really late out there. You should see. Go to the window and look. No, don’t. You won’t learn a thing that way. Stay where you are.”

“He feels like talking.”

“I was downtown. I walked around down there till now. What was it like, she asked. Well, to begin with, it was cool finally, a rivery breeze, and no one around, nothing, a drunk or two early on but later nothing, a car, another car, another car, looking for the tunnel. The district, outwardly, is like the end of organized time—outwardly, mind you. At night I mean it’s like somebody forgot something. They went away. The
mystery, right, of why everybody left these gorgeous pueblos.”

“Inwardly?”

“Things happening. Little men in eyeshades.”

“Fascinating, these insights of his.”

“What is it, Splotch? Annoyed at my lack of consideration? I called. You weren’t here.”

“We ought to go out more.”

“There’s nothing out there. That’s my point. Everybody went away. You can hear doors blowing shut in the wind. The scientists are mystified.”

Lyle cultivated a quality of self-command. As a corollary to this extreme presence of mind, he built a space between himself and most of the people he was likely to deal with in the course of daily events. He was aware of his studied passage down the corridors of his firm’s offices. Happily he parodied his own manner, swiveling toward a face and beaming an anemic look right past it. It was satisfying to stand on the floor, say, during a lull in trading, or after hours in a bar in the district, and note how some people subtly exhibited their relative closeness to him while others, sensing his apartness or knowing it for fact, were diligent in keeping ritual distances.

The waiter, at six feet four, let his head slip down a notch as he took their orders.

“I want something outer spacelike,” Lyle said. “What’s a zombie? Bring me one of those.”

Rosemary Moore had a Scotch and water. Her boss, Larry Zeltner, ordered gin and tonic for himself and also for the two young women, known to Lyle only as Jackie and Gail. He’d come upon them in the elevator as he and Rosemary were leaving the office. Zeltner suggested they all go for a drink. Lyle quickly agreed, trying to indicate that he and Rosemary had entered the elevator together by chance, just as the others had.

“It’s what I said this morning,” Zeltner said. “It’s what I always say: who’ll do it? Get somebody to do it and I’m with you. Otherwise goodbye. Then there’s the situation, how do we total, who’s reconciling, where do you tighten up the indicators?”

Lyle made a point of conversing with Jackie, who was unattractive. He didn’t know why he took this precaution or what, exactly, it meant. Somehow it seemed a safe course. He finished his drink before the others were halfway through with theirs. Jackie appeared to be studying him as she spoke, measuring his attentiveness or wondering why his replies had dwindled to simple nods of the head, three every ten seconds. Rosemary said she had to leave. He emptied his face of indications. Zeltner told her not to bother with money; it was his treat, et cetera. Lyle watched her walk out the door. She hadn’t implied to the others, in any manner at all, that she’d ever spoken a word to him before this evening. He wasn’t sure whether this was by specific design or part of a social code that prevailed in all her relations with others.

“Yumpin’ yimminy,” he said. “My train to catch. Have to go out to the boonies to see this friend of mine’s wife with all kinds of problems. Jesus, hospitals, I hate them. Kid is all
screwed up. Wife may be serious. I told him I’d be out tonight. Larry, lunch, without fail, the soonest.”

He smiled at the women, left money and hurried out, trying to detach himself from the tiny disaster of that speech. It was rush hour in the streets. He half ran toward the corner where the Volkswagen usually arrived to get her. His body was filled with chemical activity, streams of desperate elation. She was still there, waiting. Again he could see his lips moving as he spoke through a hole in the air. Rosemary put her sunglasses on.

They were in a taxi heading uptown. Strategically he’d chosen a bar near the approach to the Queensboro Bridge. It seemed the way to deal with her. She was the kind of woman whose very lack of reaction summoned in him a need to resort to discredited tactics. The driver’s name was Wolodymyr Koltowski. Lyle tried to ignore the hack number. He was sweating extensively. Traffic on the East River Drive was unusually manic-depressive, a careening streak of excitation and suicidal gloom. Lyle felt at fault, as he always did in a cab, with a woman, when traffic moved too slowly or at this raging pace. He realized he’d forgotten to put stamps on some envelopes the night before.

The place was crowded. There were no empty tables and they couldn’t get near the bar. He didn’t know this area well. He didn’t know what was around. It had been there all day, this unfinished space, a negative awareness. He reached in for their drinks and worked his way toward her. She stood near the door, legs crossed at the ankles. He’d meant to put stamps on the envelopes. There were bills inside. He’d written the checks and wanted to get them in the mail. To pay a bill
was to seal off the world. The pleasure here was inward-tending, an accumulation of self. Putting stamps on the envelopes was the decisive point. Stamps were emblems of authentication. Her hands were folded in front of her, purse dangling from her wrist. Wolodymyr Koltowski. Shut up, he told himself. The crowd at the bar continued to grow, pressing out toward them. Rosemary didn’t seem to mind.

It was a challenge to something deeper than virility. To be recognized by this woman, accepted as a distinct and welcome presence in her murky ken, was the end toward which his passions were now directed.

They rode out over the bridge and onto Queens Boulevard. They got out of the cab and walked north half a block. It was still light. She lived on the ground floor of a row house with a corrugated aluminum awning outside and webbed beach chairs stacked in the hallway.

There were three small rooms and a large kitchen. Until he wandered into the kitchen he saw nothing he might identify with Rosemary as occupant of the place—Rosemary Moore as opposed to someone he’d never seen before, or talked to, or wanted to touch, another woman entirely, or a man dressed as a woman, snatching him out of a dark hallway into this square bag of space, these shades of gray and beige. There was no feeling of individual history, the narrative in things, habits intact in one’s belongings.

In the kitchen he stood before a large corkboard. Pinned there were ticket stubs, menus, matchbook covers, photos of Rosemary with various people. The echoes of her self-absorption converged here, apparently. In one photo she sat on a sofa between two men. There was no one else in the picture
but Lyle suspected that others (besides the photographer) were present in the room. One man’s sidelong glance, the other’s half-sheepish mien indicated the possibility of onlookers. The man being sheepish was George Sedbauer, heavy-set and balding. Lyle had seen news photos of him after the shooting. Of course he’d also seen him dead, although he wouldn’t have been able to identify Sedbauer from those scattered glimpses on the floor. Rosemary handed him a drink. It had only two ice cubes in it. It wouldn’t be cold enough. He wanted a cold drink. He realized, incredibly, that he’d forgotten what he was going to ask her. He had to work his way back to it.

“That’s George, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s with him?”

“That’s me in the middle. That’s somebody Vilas or Vilar. I think it was on a weekend. We went to Lake Placid? It was supposed to be to ski. That’s the lobby where we stayed. Or that’s the room. I think that was someone’s room.”

“Who’s somebody Vilas?”

“That’s the man who shot George.”

“Interesting,” he remarked.

“He was around a lot sometimes. Other times you never saw him for long periods.”

“I think that’s interesting, said the wide-eyed young man.”

“George didn’t ski. That was it. When we got all the way up there, George hated snow.”

Unsure of something, she’d narrow her eyes and gaze into space. She gestured slowly. Her face betrayed the barest abandonment when she turned to find him staring. It was necessary,
he knew, to talk to her about herself. She was tall, more pale than fair, walking in a somber frost.

To be alone with her was to occupy the immediate center of things. There were no gradations to this kind of desire. Everything turned on the point of her chalk image. It would be essential to talk awhile. He would find his way to her through this process of filling in.

“This drink needs about eleven more ice cubes.”

“I don’t think you can stay too long.”

“Let’s sit in the living room. I’m a living-room fanatic. I’m a buff, really. I have this thing. Without a living room around I’m dead, just about.”

The sensual pleasure of banality was a subject worth the deepest investigation. He lingered in the kitchen to watch her walk into the next room. He sat facing her, ten feet away, knowing she would cross her legs. There were cigarettes and liquor, absolute necessities when he was with her. He tried to limit his remarks to tapered extensions of predictable types. He was working toward a pure state, some embryonic science of desire, perhaps to be known as reciprocal hypnotism. When she spoke he concentrated every effort on creating a face that would return to her not only a sense of what she’d said but of the person speaking, Rosemary Moore in a camisole dress. He moved to the sofa, settling in next to her. Together they would craft the branding instrument of character.

“When I was flying,” she said, “I was always sleeping too little or too much. I used to sleep whole days sometimes. This is a little more regular. But I don’t know how interesting it’ll wind up being. There isn’t enough to do. I have to see if I’m going to stay. The people are pretty nice, though. Not like this
job with buyers that I had. That was insane. They would shout into the phone. I don’t like when people
do
that.”

He took the glass out of her hand and put it on the end table next to his own drink. She moved her head briefly, shaking hair out of her eyes or ending one sequence of encounter to begin another. The second he touched her, touch turned to grip.