Don DeLillo - Underworld

Some women have one man in their life and he was the one, that bastard, in hers.

Mr. Imperato liked to joke about our famous forefathers. Abraham Linguin' and George Washingmachine.

In warmer weather Matty sat at the board in his beeveedees, how little he looked, so thin and pale, but his eyes were fixed on the pieces so hard and hot she could easily think there was someone else in there, sent to possess the boy.

The trick was, the thing was he was not the center of the family when he was here. She was the center, the still center, the strength. Now that he was gone, she could no longer make herself feel still, or especially central. Jimmy was central now. That was the trick, the strange thing. Jimmy was the heartbeat, the missing heartbeat.

It was a promise that was also a call to duty. Tell him I'm making gravy.

They said, See what you're gonna do.

This was a threat to a son or daughter who was not behaving. Straighten out. Change your attitude. See what you're gonna do.

They said, Who's better than me?

This was a statement of the importance of small pleasures. A meal, a coat with a fake-fur collar, a chair in front of a fan on a hot day.

It did not happen violent. It was the small thing of a weak man walking out the door. It was not big. It was not men with guns who tie paving stones to someone's ankles and put a bullet in his head. It was small and weak.

If you could feel the soul of an experience, then you earned the right to say, Who's better than me?

Jimmy knew some dialect. Abruzzese . He used to take the knives down and talk to the knife grinder and he found it satisfying to use the dialect. They talked while the man sharpened the knives and it was something Jimmy did not do with men he saw more often who came from the same region, or their people did. He talked to the knife grinder because he saw him only rarely and this was an arrangement he preferred.

They called her Rose. They had assurance and force, most of them, they had nerve and personality and loud voices, not all but most.

She did her beadwork, her piecework, working off the books just like Jimmy.

He slept continuous. Never got up in the night. Drank coffee and slept right through. Didn't seem to feel the cold. Walked barefoot on the cold floors, slept in his shorts on those winter nights when she'd finally hear the heat whistling in the pipes, her signal to get up for mass.

Somebody put serious money on a horse called Terra Firma and he began to worry when it finished first.

She listened to Matty analyze a position. They stopped the game occasionally and talked out the moves.

He was not a braggadocio. He told sly quiet stories late at night.

Conceal, conceal. But it was hard.

The baseball man Charlie Dressen was a horseplayer. Jimmy took his bets. He took bets from Toots Shor. He left seven hundred dollars in a coat that she took to the dry cleaner. The coat was his private bank, only he never told her, and she took it to the dry cleaner and went back when she found out about the money and they said, What money, lady? There was an inside pocket she didn't know was there. What money, lady?

She applied the beads with a wood-handled needle, following the design printed on the fabric.

But how is it we did so much laughing? How is it we went dancing the night of the seven hundred dollars and we laughed and drank?

He was not a harum-scarum guy who took crazy chances but the long shot came in and he began to feel the pressure to pay off.

Who's better than me, they said.

This was a statement she couldn't make, partly out of personality but also because she could not feel the ordinary contentment of things the way she used to. She could not feel favored or charmed.

He'd replaced her life with his leaving. The voice running through her head was not the voice she used to hear before he left.

But how is it we ate a German meal on 86th Street and went dancing at the Corso down the block, seven hundred dollars poorer?

There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people. Maybe that's why they called her Rose.

Nick was walking the halls at school. This close to Christmas the Catholic school kids were already off, Matty was off, the shopping area was decorated with lights and wreaths, the merchants were putting out trees at five in the morning, which you could smell from a distance, and there were eels on sale for Christmas Eve and spruce and balsam fir stacked against the walls, from upstate, and kids unloading crates of grapes from California for customers who made their own wine.

Nick wandered the halls smoking and Remo came out of a classroom wearing tight pegged pants and the Eisenhower jacket he never took off.

"What are you doing here?"

"Taking a walk," Nick said.

" You take walks indoors?"

" You been out? Fucking freezing. What are you doing here?"

"Hey. I go to school here. What are you doing here?"

"Talking a walk," Nick said.

"I got a pass to see the doctor."

"The nurse. That's who you want to see."

"Save me a drag," Remo said.

"Where's home economics?"

"I don't know. The end of that hall maybe. I hear you're working."

"Ice-cream plant."

"Pays decent?"

"Forget about it."

"It's steady then?"

" You have to shape up. Like the docks," Nick said, and he felt like a man, saying this. " A guy says, You, you , you, you. Everybody else goes home."

Remo seemed impressed.

"You get to eat the merchandise?"

"Actually, you want to know the truth."

"What?"

"We steal it and sell it. But we have to work fast."

Remo didn't know whether to believe this. He reached for the butt-end of Nick's cigarette and Nick gave it to him and he took two hungry drags and then dropped it, stomped it, exhaled and went into the doctor's office.

After the bell rang and the classrooms emptied out Nick spotted Loretta and Gloria and they walked out onto Fordham Road together.

"Allie's father hit a number," Gloria said.

"I know. I heard."

"He had five dollars on it if you can believe that."

"It's true. I know it for a fact," Nick said.

An older guy named Jasper, a noted cuntman, sat in a Ford convertible, with the top down yet, in this weather, motor running, listening to the radio. The two girls were quiet walking by, quiet together, by mutual consent, exchanging unspoken thoughts about Jasper.

"Who puts five dollars?" Loretta said. "They put fifty cents. They put a dollar if they're feeling very, very lucky."

"He had a dream," Nick said.

"He had a dream. What kind of dream?"

"What kind of dream. He dreamed the number. What else would he dream?"

"For five dollars," she said, "it must have been very convincing."

"It was in technicolor," Gloria said.

"If I dream a number I think I'm gonna die on that date," Loretta said. "This man gives five dollars to a gangster."

"Gangster. What kind of gangster? He gave the money to Annette Esposito."

"Who's that?"

"She's a Catholic school girl. She goes to my brother's school," Nick said. "She runs numbers for her father. Every day she makes the rounds."

"In her school uniform," Gloria said.

"The customers like a runner they can trust."

They walked past White Castle, where kids were eating sawdust hamburgers, and then Gloria crossed the street and went into her building.

"Where's your radio? You used to carry your radio all the time," Loretta said.

"I had a radio in my car. That's the only radio I needed."

"It's for the best," she said.

"You think it's for the best."

"I'm relieved," she said. "That car, my god. What wasn't wrong with it? Not to mention it was stolen property."