Don Delillo - Players

In Blue Hill they visited a married couple Ethan knew, three children, a dog. Leaving, she and Jack waited by the car while Ethan exchanged prolonged goodbyes with his friends. Jack was looking at her.

"I'm not really gay," he said.

"If you say so, Jack.”

"I'm not, it's true.”

"It's your mind and body.”

"I should know, right?”

Late that afternoon she stepped out of the shower and felt pain, momentary pressure, at the side of her head. She would be dead within weeks. They'd force her to go through a series of horrible tests but the results would be the same every time. She was depressed, standing in a towel, her body slowly drying, dying. Waste, what a waste. She felt awful about Lyle. It would be easier for her to accept if she weren't leaving someone behind. Thank God no kids. She dressed and went outside.

After dinner they took the remaining wine and some brandy out to the deck. It was the mildest night they'd had. Jack was restless and decided to take the garbage over to the dump instead of waiting for morning. He got a flashlight and went up the path to the car, dragging two large plastic bags.

"He's right," Ethan said. "We can't seem to do anything without discussing it at the same time.”

"Vacation," she said. "That's what people do.”

"I hadn't realized we were doing it to the extent we were.”

"Your German mouth is so serious.”

"Maybe that's the secret meaning of new places.”

"What is?”

"Quiet, I'm working it out.”

"I don't want to hear.”

"It concerns self-awareness," he said. "I'll give you the rest later.”

"God, stars.”

"The clearer everything is. That has something to do with it too.”

"Look at them, millions.”

"I am.”

"Talk about them," she said. "Quick, before Jack comes back.”

Much later there were long silences between periods of conversation. Jack brought out extra sweaters, then three blankets. When the wind rolled through the tops of trees, Pammy had trouble understanding the sound in its early Stages, that building insistence of surf.

Later still, in some perfect interpenetration of wine and night air, she drifted through a more congenial region, a non-space, really, in which immaculate calm prevailed. Between moments of near-sleep she felt her mind alive in the vivid chill. Clarity rang through every sparse remark. When Ethan laughed briefly, an idiot grunt, she felt she knew what tiny neural event had caused that sound. There was total order in the night.

Then she was sluggish and dumb. She wanted to be in bed but hadn't the will to get up and go inside. She kept edging into some unstable phase of sleep. Her elbow slipped off the inside of the chair arm, causing her to snap awake. Everything was different after that, a struggle.

"God, the stars," Jack said.

It occurred to Pam that Ethan rarely talked to Jack. He addressed Jack by talking about furniture, movies, the weather. That, plus third person. He said things to Pammy that were meant for Jack. Sometimes he read an item aloud from a newspaper or repeated a phrase spoken by a TV newsman, repeated it in a certain way-meant for Jack, some fragmentary parable. She didn't think this revealed as much about the two men involved as it did about people living together, their lesions of speech and demeanor. Pammy and Lyle had their own characteristics, of course. Pammy and Lyle, she thought. We sound like a pompom girl and a physics major. Or chimps, she thought. The names of chimps learning language with multicolored disks. She drank more wine, watching Ethan make a series of preliminary hand flourishes.

"New places, when they're really new, really fresh and new, make you more aware of yourself. This can be dangerous.”

"I want my sleeping bag," Jack said.

"All this stuff is flashing your way. It's like a mirror, ultimately. You end up with yourself minus all the familiar outward forms, the trappings and surroundings. If it's too new, it's frightening. You get too much feedback that's not predetermined.”

"Want sleep out," Jack said. "Air, wind.”

"Fear is intense self-awareness.”

"Like today, earlier," Pammy said, "when I thought I had something wrong, I thought me, me, my tissue, my inner body. But it's easier to die alone. Kids, forget about.”

"Ground," Jack said. "Sleep, earth, creature.”

Ethan ran the side of his index finger along his throat, thoughtfully, and up over the point of his chin, many times- an indication of ironic comments in the offing, or pseudo wisdom perhaps, or even autobiography, which, in his framework of slanting planes, was itself determinedly ironic. They both waited. It was the middle of the night. Water closed around the rocks near shore, audibly, finding lanes.

"You people here.”

Jack went inside, returning with a sleeping bag, which he tossed on the deck. Everything was happening slowly now. Jack went around lighting candles. Jack paced, imitating a tiger. Pammy was aware that he was seated again, finally. They drank awhile in silence.

"I'm slightly lantern-jawed," she said.

They seemed to laugh.

"No, really, people, I'm slightly lantern-jawed. It's all right. It's, so what, no problem, long as I accept it.”

"Pam-mee.”

"So, you know, so what? When you think of other people's, what they have to accept type thing. And it's slight, just hardly noticeable, I know that. So you accept. And you live. You simply everyday live.”

"She's not about to blow her cookies, I hope.”

"Your sleeping bag gets the brunt if I do.”

"Mercy me.”

"Blat," she said.

Pammy and Jack began a sequence of giddiness here. Everything was funny. She felt lightheaded, never more awake. Where was Ethan? She turned to see his profile, partly shrouded in the blanket, theatrical and grave. It would be dawn soon, maybe an hour or two, unfortunately at their backs somewhere. Jack's voice grew shrewd and dry. It was the only sound for a time. He paused between remarks, effectively. She laughed at everything he said. It was comical, this matter-of-fact Jack. She began to laugh at the end of pauses, anticipating. There was a spell of quiet. Softest color seeped into Pammy's awareness, something pared away from the night, a glow of the lowest resolution, as though night itself were being broken down into its optically active parts.

"You people here," Ethan said.

The others laughed.

"What you don't know is a whole era of things. You've been gone right by. It must be solid void to live without the references, although it's problematical that you even know it, this blank space. I mean a Pete Smith Specialty. Do you even imagine what this conjures up? No idea, have you? What it means when two people might meet, not knowing each other, and then to realize this association in their past, this small thing magnified, the utter dumbness of a Pete Smith Specialty, that narrator's voice, or tapes of Sin Killer Griffin recorded in some Texas jail. Hearing that's a footing of sorts, a solid footing. You missed that, see. Because, then, at that time, there wasn't this Zeitgeist of the Month business. It was all one thing, which you missed completely. Pull My Daisy, Jesus, which wasn't that long ago, with some of the people still around, but you don't know it, total nothing. Pull My Daisy at the Ninety-second Street Y. Or Lord Buckley, a whole thing you missed, Lord Buckley doing The Naz. No idea what I'm talking about, right? You missed the references. You missed the Village clubs. All the hanging around. The footing, the solid footing. You don't know, see, what you don't know is that your whole own attitudes come from some of these things, which were the basis, the solid rock. What else, who else can I mention? The Naz, I said that. Do you know how the Lone Ranger found Silver?”