Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Where's pessimistic? I'm standing here having a conversation."

"You're hunched and slumped."

"I'm always hunched and slumped. This is how it came from the factory."

"You're more hunched than usual when the subject is the baseball."

Eleanor was not wrong. Was Eleanor ever wrong? He grouched at her sometimes but they both knew she was almost always right. She had her English accent, her popovers she baked that he felt the anticipation a day in advance, her excruciating neatness of dress that he thought might be a disease, he caught her talking to her closet a couple of times-but always seemly is a word he likes, tastefully matching this to that. She had a stern determination that she soft-pedaled but made sure he got the point. And now that their daughter was on her own, with a nice job and an apartment on a safe street, Eleanor stood guard over Marvin's obsessiveness and joke-spattered gloom.

They were walking now, taking an amble along the Embarcadero, and Marvin realized the pier numbers were getting higher as they walked-high numbers and even numbers, which meant they were moving away from pier 7. But this is where the odor seemed to be leading him, a stinky wisp intermittent on the wind.

"And you need this fellow Wainwright to tell you what?"

"How his father acquired the ball, who's dead and buried."

"And in this way you will complete the what?"

Eleanor was here, the first time she'd ever accompanied him on a trip in search of the baseball. This was San Francisco, don't forget, which she didn't want to live a life and miss it.

And that was the Bay Bridge over his right shoulder, flashing a million cars a minute that never heard of Marvin Lundy and his baseball mania.

He checked his watch again and peered across the bay.

Chuckie Wainwright was a crewman on a tramp steamer coming down the coast from Alaska. Marvin had communicated with shipping companies, harbormasters and actual captains on matters pertaining to the whereabouts of the ship and the roster of the crew, making phone calls and sending radiograms. And it was confirmed more than once, it was determined and duly documented that Charles Wainwright Jr., known as Chuckie, was aboard the Lucky Argus steaming out of Anchorage with a load of sand and pulverized rock.

Chuckie was his key to the chain of possession. Marvin had gathered a thousand tidbits of information that connected the baseball to previous owners and finally, what is the word for the thing that is not ultimate but next to ultimate-finally the Wainwright name came into play.

He waited half an hour and then went to the Ferry Building to ask about the Lucky Argus, should he be worried or not, and they told him it would put in at pier 7 in about an hour and a half.

Outside he caught a whiff in the air, a faint sort of stinkhole odor, barely detectable but odd in its emotional force. Then it passed, gone on the breeze, and he heard the watery shush of traffic on the bridge and saw his Eleanor approach, alight with her strawberry smile, under a sky blue umbrella.

"Thought I'd find you here. I came to see this lovely old building."

Marvin looked behind him to fathom what was lovely that he'd missed.

"Did you know this building survived the great earthquake but the clock stopped dead and stayed that way for a whole year?"

"There's always a clock somewhere that's stopping," Marvin said morosely,

"As if to remind everyone in visual range."

rowed a boat across the Volga under a strafing attack by Stukas, who was captured by the Germans and escaped, who fled south wearing newspapers for shoes and married a gypsy in the Carpathians and ate whitefish from the Black Sea and disappeared somewhere in the Urals.

Such Russian stuff, and here was Marvin today looking for a baseball. But he wasn't inclined to make light of his preoccupation. It had its own epic character, its history of comebacks and sweet memories and family picnics and buggy evenings on the back porch and hopes that rise and fall and the song of loss that goes unwritten in the records.

"Let's turn back, shall we? I don't think I want to get any closer to that smell."

She said the word with a grimace of suspicion, the response reserved for certain smells, clutching up the mouth and nose, beading the eyes against the sight of criminal matter at the source.

"Just some sewer work probably. Comes and goes. Let's walk a little more."

"I'm on holiday," she said.

"This makes you squeamish? People eat camel meat barehanded, they're back at work in the morning."

"Make a deal. We'll walk as far as that construction site up ahead. Then we'll come back."

"What's a little smell?" he said.

But it wasn't a little smell anymore. It grew stronger and drew him nearer and he recalled those old hotels and their toilets, the toilets down the hall, fortunately, and he thought of the public toilets in railroad stations, a stranger in the next stall with his own autobiography of foreign foods and personal smells, through England, France and Italy, but it wasn't other people's smells that began to overwhelm him-only his own.

Marvin's bowel movements seemed to change, gradually, in grim stages, as he and Eleanor moved east through Europe. The smell grew worse, deeper, it acquired a kind of density, it ripened and aged, and he began to dread the moment after breakfast every day when it came time for him to haul himself to the toilet.

What is the word, ignoble?

"The what-do-you-call."

"The lineage."

"The lineage," Marvin said.

1. The ex-wife of Chuckie Wainwright, Susan somebody-never mind the details.

2. The one-eighth Indian, Marvin forgets the tribe, who led him to the former wife.

3. The shock of other people's lives. The truth of another life, the blow, the impact.

4. Chuckie in the Air Force, in Greenland, in Vietnam, and going AWOL, which is a what, an acronym, and drifting afar and growing a beard and fathering a child and naming it Dakota.

5. Which is where Marvin found the ex-wife, coincidentally, in Rapid City, walking sick people across a swimming pool in four feet of water.

6. The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

"Marvin, you know what I'm going to say."

"There's a three-hour time difference. I don't think I can wait."

"Pick up your feet when you walk. You're a healthy man who tries to look sick."

"This is chitchat on the people channel."

She did not quibble or carp, she spoke gently to him, she was better than he deserved, writing postcards when she went back home to visit-imagine getting a postcard from your wife.

Then she stopped dead, going rigid in her brilliant slicker.

"What's that I smell?" she said.

Marvin began to understand why the odor was so compelling. It came, in a way, from him. He recalled the trip they'd made through Europe six years after the war, he and Eleanor, newly wed, a girl of modest background, taking a long honeymoon by the cheapest means possible, slow trains and old hotels squeezed of every convenience, but they were also embarked on a mission important to Marvin's family. He was trying to find his half brother, Avram Lubarsky, who'd served in the Red Army, who was wounded at Leningrad, who was wounded at Stalingrad, who shot himself in the toe at Grodno, who

"This is as far as I'm going," she said now.

"We're not at the construction site."

"I will die gasping if I take another step."

Ahead a hundred yards was an area of halted roadwork, there were unmanned bulldozers and dump trucks, the pavement heaved-up and rubbled and not a living soul in sight except for a lone figure asleep in a mail sack, one of those draggled men Marvin sees everywhere these days-where have they been hiding all this time?