Don DeLillo - Underworld

When they were finished they walked up a stairway to the lobby and in her mind she kept ascending to a shadowed room at the end of a long empty hall and saw herself folding down the bedspread and standing above the cool sheets waiting for a knock at the door. Then they heard plaintive falsettos from the loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and they walked down to the cars in the easy heat.

Brian went into a state of body rapture over a lime sherbet Chevrolet, a '57 Bel Air convertible with white upholstery. He draped himself over the hood and pretended to lick the hot metal. Marian thought this is what men get instead of fatty deposits around the thighs. But she had to admire the car, which was carefree and racy and even great in a way, the chromium sweep of it and the funny and touching music that bared its innocence.

Brian detached himself from the hood.

"Did you own one?"

"Too young," he said. "My oldest brother had one for a while. Brendan's Bel Air. We still talk about it in awed tones. It was the high point of his life. It meant everything to him. Girls, love, personality, power. It meant the moment. All those cars had the so-called forward look. Sleek as jet fighters. But it turned out that forward didn't mean the future. It meant do it now, have your fun, because the sixties are coming, bow wow bang bang. The engine had a throaty roar. We couldn't know it at the time but it's been downhill for Brendan ever since."

They walked under the elms at the edge of the square. His car was parked by the old city jail, which was the chamber of commerce now. They spoke oddly polite goodbyes. She thought maybe they felt guilty about something and needed to prepare their faces for the journey home, get the noise out of the system. She walked up the street to her car and felt the liquid pulse of the sun in every step.

Brian drove due north, looking for a sign that would lead him to the bridge. A sludge tanker moved downriver, funky and low-slung. He felt the old foreboding. It wasn't widely known, it was narrowly known that he experienced terrible things every time he crossed a bridge. The longer and higher the span, the greater his sense of breathless abyss. And this was a major bridge over a broad and historic body of water. The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some mobius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws-hanging sort of unborn in generic space.

Then he saw it in the distance, steel-beamed and cabled, sweeping to the palisaded bank. He followed the signs, made the loops and started out across the bridge, choosing the upper level because the long gray Lincoln in front of him went that way. Lincoln and Washington, keep me safe. The radio was ablast with call-in voices, they're griping, they're spraying spit, it's the sidewalk salvo and rap, and he imagined a long queue of underground souls waiting to enter the broadcast band and speak the incognito news. He listened in solemn gratitude. It was a clamor so strong it amounted to a life force, carrying this Ohio boy through his white anxiety and across to the Jersey side.

He was looking for 46 west. He'd written out directions that the man had recited over the phone. The man had recited the routes and streets in a manner so automatic that Brian realized many pilgrims had made the trip across the river.

He had the directions written on hotel stationery and he kept the page on the seat next to him, snatching a look every ten seconds. After a mile on 46 west he spotted the Exxon station and made the maneuver onto 63 south, racing along the three-mile stretch to the Point Diner. Then he made a left turn out of the howl of highly motivated traffic and into residential streets, beginning to relax at last, approaching the circle on Kennedy Drive, another dead president.

Down a side street to an old frame house. Marvin Lundy opened the door, a hunched fellow with a stylized shuffle, in his late sixties, holding a burnt-out cigar. Brian thought he resembled some retired stand-up comic who will not live a minute longer than his last monopolized conversation. He followed the man through two rooms steeped in aquarium dimness. Then they went to the basement, a large finished room that held Marvin Lundy's collection of baseball memorabilia.

"My late wife, she would serve us tea with popovers that she made fresh, all other things being equal."

The room was filled with objects on tasteful display. Flannel jerseys draped along the walls, caps with souvenir buttons pinned to the visors, there were newspaper pages framed and hung. Brian did a reverent tour, examining autographed bats ranked on custom wall fittings, game bats beautifully grained, some with pine tar on the choke. There were stadium seats labeled like rare botanical specimens-Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, Griffith Stadium. He nearly touched an old catcher's mitt set on a pedestal, the object gashed yellow, spike-gashed and sun-smoked and patriarchal, but he managed to hold back. He looked at autographed baseballs in plexiglas globes. He leaned over display cases that held cigarette cards, ticket stubs, the signed contracts of famous players, nineteenth-century baseball board games, bubblegum wrappers that carried the pinkish likenesses of men from Brian's youth, their names a kind of poetry floating down the decades.

"You would put strawberry preserves on the popovers, which forget it, all life from the Renaissance onward it pales by compare."

None of this amounted to an astonishment. It was interesting, even moving in a way, but not great or memorable. The wondrous touch, the outlandish and surpassing fancy was the large construction along the far wall, a replica of the old Polo Grounds Scoreboard and clubhouse facade. It covered an area about twenty-two feet long and twelve feet high, floor to ceiling, and included the Chesterfield sign and slogan, the Longines clock, a semblance of the clubhouse windows and parapet and finally a hand-slotted line score, the inning by inning tally of the famous play-off game of 1951.

"You would have to eat them hot. She made a strict rule of no dawdling, Eleanor, because lukewarm you lose the whole experience."

Brian stood near the Scoreboard, looking at Marvin for permission to touch.

"I had a draftsman, a carpenter, an electrician and a sign painter, not a house painter, very temperamental. I showed them photographs and they did measurements and sketches so they could respect the proportions and get the colors. The hit sign and the E light up, for error. Where do you live?"

"Phoenix."

"I was never there."

In the stronger light down here he could see that Marvin Lundy's hair was a swatch of loomed synthetic, ash-brown, combed sleekly forward, and it made Brian think of Las Vegas and pinky rings and prostate cancer.

He said to Marvin, "I grew up in the Midwest. Cleveland Indians, that was my team. And I was flying in on business last night and saw an article in the airline magazine, the piece about you and your collectibles, and I felt a strong compulsion to get in touch with you and see these things."

He fingered the silky lapel of Babe Ruth's smoking jacket.

"My daughter talked me into doing the interview," Marvin said. "She thinks I'm turning into a what-do-you-call."

"A recluse."

"An old recluse with half a stomach. So now my picture's in twenty thousand seat pouches. This is her idea of get out and meet people. They put me in with the vomit bags."

Brian said, "I went to a car show and it did something to me."

"What did it do?"

"Cars from the nineteen-fifties. I don't know."

" You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you're a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination."