Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Are you serious?"

"Why not? We need a safe place," she said.

"But your secretary?"

"My assistant. And it's better than a hotel."

"I shouldn't be here."

He walked around the room barefoot, unbuttoning his shirt. He had clown feet, long and bunioned, and he didn't loosen his tie until he'd pulled his shirt out of his trousers.

"Is she young?"

"How do you know it's a woman?"

"Seriously. Young?"

"Yes," she said.

He walked around touching things, looking at photographs and matchbooks.

"Good-looking?"

" You want to check out her underwear? Look, I'm wearing her robe. Fuck me fuck me fuck me," she said drily.

"She can't afford better?"

"We're underbudgeted."

"It's a roomette."

"Small but intense," Marian said.

She was standing against the wall, arms folded, and he stepped into her. She freed her hands and worked at his pants. She liked having sex with Brian because she could handle him, turn him, get him to match her mood, rouse him easily or make him talk, talk-acid candid shameful stuff, bitter-funny.

"I think he knows," she said.

"What?"

"I think he knows."

"He doesn't know."

"I think he knows."

She had her hands in his pants and a smile on her face. He moved the robe off half her body, smeared it-rubbed it against her shoulder and breast before he got it off her, almost off her, pulling her arm through the hole and letting the garment drag.

They eased onto the bed. She tried to get clear of the rest of the robe but he wouldn't let her. He wanted a woman in half a robe. The phone rang and they stopped to listen. Every time a phone rang in a borrowed apartment they stopped and thought about the thing they were doing and maybe at some level about the life of the person whose apartment they were using. It made them feel the wrong kind of guilty trespass, she thought. The bed. The mystery of the other person's life and medicine cabinet and bed. It was the one thing she didn't like about this, one among others, and she couldn't have sex to a ringing phone.

She felt around for her handbag, which was on a chair at the side of the bed. The ringing stopped. Brian got off the bed and finished undressing.

"You trust her to keep quiet?"

"She keeps quiet about everything else."

"This isn't everything else."

Marian found her cigarettes and lit one up and he handed her an ashtray.

"I thought you stopped."

"I'm down to five a day."

"I thought you were wearing the patch."

"I'm not," she said.

He stretched out next to her, on his side. The ringing phone had brought them prematurely to a lazy state of small caresses and mellow bends of conversation and streams of smoke.

He said, "This job of yours. Real or fake?"

"I work with structural engineers, urban designers. I fight with citi-zens' groups all the time. But I get things done, pretty much."

"I had lunch in a mechanical mist the other day In some mall somewhere."

"We don't do malls. We do parkways."

"What do you do to a parkway?"

"Make it livable, bearable. Tell little stories. Sculpture on the road dividers. Piers that are shaped like animals."

"What's your secretary's name?" he said.

She tipped a length of ash onto his pubic hair.

"Long hours, single-minded devotion. Stuck in that Japanese thing," he said. "Death from overwork."

"Disappear in the company and die. Only I don't do it to disappear. I do it to be visible and audible. And I'm not sure what you mean by real or fake."

He picked the ashes out of his crotch and blew them off the tips of his fingers.

"Most jobs are fake," he said.

They'd been late starters and had never developed a reliable pace. Only three or four apartments in all this time and they'd used each apartment only once or twice. She'd learned not to notice her disappointment. This was an aspect of being twistedly perfect. But Brian's reluctance was fairly maddening. She had to arrange the apartments, make the assurances, calibrate the timing and then wonder if he'd show. They talk about demon lovers. She had a demon husband. Her lover was a loose-jointed guy with a freckled forehead and nappy hair. But this was the dare she had to take, a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned. These times were hers, however brief and infrequent. And he was enormously easy to be with and growing dear to her. She liked to tease and scare him but did not want to think about giving him up.

"Blow smoke my way," he said. "I want all the aromas. Tobacco, bedsheets, women."

She was herself with Brian, whatever that meant. She knew what it meant. Less enveloped in someone else's figuration, his self-conscious shaping of a life.

"And don't let me forget, I have a meeting at three," he said.

"I'm a little put off by the fact that you haven't, you know," sort of dangling the words, "fallen in love with me, Brian."

"You're my age, you're my height. I fall in love with small brisk women I see from a distance."

"And they have to be young."

"They have to be young. You and I, we're buddies. And I'm too guilty to fall in love with you. I'm very guilty. I'm guilty as shit."

"Then why are you doing it?"

"Because you want it so much," he said.

She bent the cigarette into the ashtray.

"And you're that accommodating? Because I want it? You're willing to do it?"

"I want it too. But you want it like life and death."

She didn't like him when he was serious. It was outside the rules. He let his head flop toward her, whispering.

"It's stupid and it's reckless and we shouldn't do it anymore. Because if he finds out," he whispered.

"What if your wife finds out? She's the one who'll cut your balls off."

"Nick will only kill me."

"And he doesn't have to find out. He already knows."

"He doesn't know."

"I think he knows."

He whispered, "Let's make this one last happy farewell fuck."

She started to tell him something but then thought no. They fell together, folded toward each other, and then she leaned back, arching, shored on her back-braced arms, and she let him pace the occasion. At some point she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, measuring her progress, and he looked a little isolated and wan and she pulled his head down to her and sucked salt from his tongue and heard the sort of breast-slap, the splash of upper bodies and the banging bed. Then it was a matter of close concentration. She listened for something inside the bloodrush and she spun his hips and felt electric and desperate and finally home free and she looked at his eyes stung shut and his mouth stretched so tight it seemed taped at the corners, upper lip pressed white against his teeth, and she felt a kind of hanged man's coming when he came, the jumped body and stiffened limbs, and she ran a hand through his hair-be nicer if we did it more often.

She waited for their breathing to settle so she could ease free and get her handbag off the chair.

He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water.

It was a fairly large bag, a drawstring bag, and she pulled out a length of aluminum foil and unrolled it and spread it on the bed. Brian stood watching from the kitchen entrance. Then she took out a small transparent packet. It looked like a pleated sandwich bag, only smaller, and it carried a stick-on label reading Death Trip #1.

"Come here," she said.

She opened the packet and let the contents, half the contents, spill onto the aluminum sheet. It was a resinous substance, chunked up, nubbed up. She told Brian to sit on the bed and pick up the sheet and hold it straight, hold it by the edges so the stuff, the tarlike chunks, didn't run off the ends.

"What the hell is it? And how can it run off if it's solid?"