Don DeLillo - Underworld

They went into a couple of bodegas and asked at the check-cashing place.

People said, "Mooney, who's Mooney?" They said, "What kind of Mormon? There's no Mormons here."

And the women said, "No, no, no, no. Moonman. Moonman uno cinco siete." And they made spray-paint gestures and said, "Graffiti, graffiti."

And Esther wore a safari jacket like some network correspondent looking for rebels in the smoky hills and who could blame her, really.

" You look a little Chinese tonight," Miles said.

"Jason used to call me the chink."

She said this in her small voice. She looked and sounded small to herself. People were getting bigger, she was getting smaller, going more or less invisible. If Miles were not here, how long would it take the waiter to wait on her?

"Jason. I know a Jason?"

"Jason my second husband. Jason Vanover."

They were eating seafood on Mulberry Street in a place Miles liked to come to because a mobster had been killed here, shot in the head by a couple of guys from a rival family, or his own family maybe, or a family from out of town.

"You're always mentioning people that I don't know and that I never heard of and you mention them," he said, "in a way that makes me think I'm supposed to know who you're talking about when as a matter of fact I couldn't possibly."

"It's true, I do that."

"People go by me in a blur."

"It's just that I feel if I know someone, it's automatic that the person I'm talking to about that individual should also know him, by some human arithmetic," she said.

Miles had a cold, he always had a cold, it went unnoticed, went without saying, he had coughing jags and slightly woozy eyes, completely unremarked by people who knew him-it was part of the irregular life, the general unhealth, half meals and travel and erratic sleep.

He looked around for particular silhouettes, hefty men in suits who might be connected.

"I used to look more Chinese when my hair was shorter," she said.

"What did he do?"

"He was a market analyst, a risk-taker with his own and other people's money, and a sailor, we used to sail for weeks at a time, a yachtsman. That was the best thing about our marriage. When we shared the ketch everything fell into place. He had a ketch he named High Finance."

"You on a boat?"

"We knew we had to cooperate. We had to live in close quarters. Take turns at the wheel, in the galley, share the head, stow the equipment, coil the lines, keep things in their place. Yes, me on a boat. We were disciplined. We respected the boat and the elements. We had a pretty good marriage as long as we were aboard."

They walked over to the loft. A supermarket cart stood in the middle of the street and cars went around it and a man rose from the shadow of a loading platform murmuring a plea to Jesus.

They shared a joint and watched a newsclip of Nixon waving on TV.

"Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men."

"In six months Acey will be too famous to live," Miles said. "She'll be assassinated walking out of a disco."

It wasn't quite the time for her to go back to work but it was beginning to be the time. Something in her skin began its anxious leap, some need to handle and shape, only deeper really-some need so whole she could sit alone in the loft and be a little wary of it.

"Yes, walking out of a disco," she said. "And then you'll want to take me dancing there."

Her mother took her downtown, her and Rochelle, her best friend, and they ate lunch at the automat near Times Square, where the front window was stained glass and the milk came out of the mouth of a bronzed fish. They watched matinee crowds enter theaters and her mother made comments on the ladies' hats. They looked in shop windows of the better sort. Her mother took them into fine hotels and office buildings, marched them right in and showed them the moldings and engravings in the lobbies, the carved wood on elevator doors. And they stood outside a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, it was probably 1934 and the Japanese were entrenched in Manchuria and they looked straight up the face of the building and walked through the polished lobby and it was the Fred F French Building, which intrigued the girls because who on earth was Fred F French, and Klara's mother, who knew things, who worked for a social service agency and studied child psychology, who followed world events and worried about China, who planned these outings systematically, did not have a clue to the identity of Fred F French, and this intrigued the girls even more, intrigued and amused them, they were thirteen and fourteen and everything amused them. They rode home on the Third Avenue el, rattlebanging up Manhattan and through the Bronx, looking out the train windows into tenement apartments on both sides, hundreds of film-flickering lives shooting past their eyes forty feet above the street, and Rochelle might see an undershirted man leaning tousled out his window and, Maybe that's Fred F French, she'd say, he's had a streak of bad luck, ha ha, and that was the end of that, Klara said to Miles-they were in bed playing cards in the loft, until three or four years later when the girls left a high school dance with two boys who weren't even in their high school, interlopers from the north, and the four of them slipped into somebody's parked car at the dark end of the street and they puffed a couple of cigarettes and talked and smooched and necked and petted. Klara and one boy were huddled in the front seat and Rochelle had the other boy in the roomy rear, boy-crazy Rochelle putting on a show of tonguing and seat-slithering, actually raising dust from the upholstery, and she wore a smoky look that distracted the front-seat partners and made them stop and watch. There was just enough light to watch. And it went on toward the outer limits of what a girl is willing to commit herself to, even a boy-crazy minx like Rochelle. The boy in the backseat was in a bundled frenzy by now and Rochelle's look contained a complicated betrayal, it was smoky and deadly and cool and it seemed to be saying to Klara that their friendship, the best and deepest there could ever be, was about to enter a strange and disturbing phase, the intricate thing of men and sex and personal needs. There was a flurry of hands and knees, there was all that stuff of backseats and body angles and what you're wearing, the whole grabby flare-up of sex in the dark. She heard panty-band elastic snapping. She thought she heard the boy's finger actually enter the fleshy pocket between Rochelle's legs, a palpatory sea suck, the wetness, the slaver of long stupefying kisses, that whole thing of having a strand of his hair in your mouth that you can't exactly locate, and it was abruptly and bitterly clear that Rochelle had done this before, gone this far and more, and what a shock to Klara, detecting such experience in her best friend's eyes, and she watched in a clinical spell, she looked and listened-what a stark thing a secret is when it belongs to someone else.

Now she knew what people meant by experience, the way they used the word experience, and the form it took was not sex but knowledge, and the knowledge was not hers but her friend's-how it twisted her insides and made her feel puppyish and dumb.

She heard Rochelle mutter something like, Time to take the rubber out of your wallet, Bob, or she might have said Rob, but instead of a pale flexible sheath the boy took out his living thing, stiff and pulsing and ultraviolet, there it was, suddenly unbuttoned and in the world, pretty much the configuration Klara had imagined but so hot and real, independently alive, unyoked to the host, to the bearer, the wearer, and Rochelle was nervous because the boy did not have a rubber and Klara was nervous because the Japanese might invade China.