Don DeLillo - Underworld

"To Spain," she said. " Madrid. The Prado." And she laughed a little coldly, with the hollow tone she used when she was punishing herself. "I want to look at pictures till I drop."

Then she saw him on the street with a friend, veering toward an army-navy store, and she stopped and stood right there, stationed in his path, and he nearly walked into her before he saw who it was, and he stopped and showed only the thinnest surprise, and his friend stopped, and then she went around them and crossed the street.

The next day he was standing by the lamppost when she looked out the window. She was putting up new curtains in the front room and he was standing there smoking. A Railway Express truck passed between them. Then he looked up and saw her. He flicked the cigarette and walked across the street.

She threw down the mattress. Nick watched her and pulled his shirt over his head. Then he watched her again. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember something, and then she undid a button at the side of her skirt.

She didn't finish her kisses. This was interesting and a little puzzling, unlike last time when they kissed nearly into old age. The way she broke off now and looked away just when he thought a kiss was getting her warm and soft, and the way she looked when she did this, ripping away hurt, almost, and he was surprised at how different she looked, not what he remembered from last time but paler maybe, hands weightless and drained, these white things floating past, and eyes that bugged out a little and seemed to see things he didn't know were there.

But the eyes also looked away and that was the same and the twisty smile, the little turn at the end of the mouth. Some things the same. The tits the same, the ass and tits and bush, and the slub of folded tongue when he kissed her.

Looks that he couldn't figure out what they were supposed to mean.

And the other smile, where she smiled privately at the two of them together, or whatever she was smiling at, smiling to herself like it was three days later, after the fact, and she was walking down an aisle at the A amp;P thinking what they'd done, but it wasn't three days after the fact, it was still the fact, and she had his balls in her hand, squeezing slightly.

A naked woman was amazing.

He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked across the room, all these ways and walking toward him too and different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn't bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she'd been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn't have curves and swerves but was good-looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth.

He took her stocking off the floor and fitted it over his head. She smiled and looked away and seemed to want to say something and then changed her mind. He jammed it down so he was looking out at her more or less through the heel of the stocking. He pantomimed pulling a gun out of a shoulder holster and pointed it at her.

"Everything you own. Mine or die."

"It's hard to be serious about this, considering what you look like."

"Hey. Lady. This is what they do."

"Holdups, you mean?"

"That's right. But I have to say. They must need money pretty bad to wear this on their face."

"Well, it's used. They don't wear used stockings, do they?"

"I don't think these guys are finicky. They wear whatever's lying around."

"I have to admit you're a changed man."

"You think you'd recognize me if you came in the house and I was standing here in this mask?"

"No. But I wouldn't recognize you without the mask either."

He pulled off the mask and sat on the mattress. She went to get some water and he watched her walk out of the room, the way her ass barely jounced, and he held the stocking around his dick and then tossed it away.

The warm fusty sort of slightly tired smell, the nylon cling of the odor still in his face, sad, tired, day-old, hers, and close to him, and something he knew about her that made her less strange.

But she was still strange. She was something you didn't want to tell your friends about and that was strange. And she was something you didn't have to tell yourself was really happening. It just happened. It happened bang and that was it, with Whistler's fucking Mother hanging on the wall.

He watched her come into the room.

He said, "You know, my brother when he was a little kid, he was somewhere watching a girl taking a pee, a small girl that was a neighbor's kid probably, and she dropped her drawers and wiggled up onto the seat and had herself a pee, and my brother's watching this and then he goes out to a room full of grown-ups, as I later heard the story, and he waits for them to stop talking and then they finally stop talking and they look at him and he says, Mary Feeley has no birdy."

She handed him the glass. It was one of the longest speeches he'd ever made, Nick, not counting jokes he sometimes told. Then she reached for his bunched pants on the floor and felt in the pockets for a pack of cigarettes.

They sat on the mattress, knees touching, smoking and sharing the water.

"You know why I smoke Old Golds? I wouldn't tell this to just anybody."

"Bullshit. Why?" she said.

"That's the cigarette that used to sponsor the Dodgers on the radio. Old Gold. We're tobacco men, not medicine men. The Dodgers were my team. Were. Not anymore."

"This is a big privileged secret you're telling me."

"That's right. Now you have to tell me one of your secrets. Could be big, could be small."

"What's your name?"

"Nick."

"Nick, you can't come here anymore. It's too completely crazy. No more, okay? We did it and now we have to stop doing it."

"We can do it somewhere else," he said.

"Nowhere else. No. I don't think so."

Never mind the body. He's never looked at a woman's face so closely. How he thinks he knows who she is from her face, what she eats and how she sleeps, from the lookaway smile and the uncombed hair, the hair over the right eye, how her face becomes everything she is that he can't put into words.

"Nick Shay," he said with a little stab in it, a touch of vengeful intent, because she knew about the chess lessons of course, and would recognize Matty's last name, and would know Nick was the older brother, and would feel the close-knit danger of the thing.

But she didn't seem to give a damn. The way he didn't give a damn that she was someone he knew's wife, she didn't care that he was someone's brother.

"Then I might as well," he said.

"Yes, I think it's time."

He picked up the pants and got dressed and left her naked on the mattress, seated sort of leaning to one side, legs together and bent, blowing smoke away from her face with the hand that held the cigarette, and he didn't even think of looking back.

Rosemary sat in the law office over the bakery, filing documents in an old cabinet, and her boss came in, Mr. Imperato, returned from a rare morning at the criminal courts. He was a shambling man who told jokes expertly, who rose to the occasion of a joke. He was bald, flat-footed and carelessly dressed and he was forgetful in his work, sometimes, but when there was a joke to tell he heard the music of the spheres. He never botched a punch line or missed a pause. He did voices and accents, men, women, talking birds, unfalteringly, a quickness rising to his eyes.