Don Delillo - Players

"I saw it sticking it out there," Lyle said.

"A radio and a blanket came with it.”

"Common thief," she said.

"A little more time, I would of had the engine block.”

"When people come up, he tells them he's with the government. They see the parachute, he says CIA. He tells them he has to keep it nearby, it's in the manual.”

"CIA, man.”

"The manual has a whole page on how to care for your parachute.”

"I say, Hey man I can't go with you tonight if you're taking all those people because then there's no room in the car for my parachute.”

"He has to keep it nearby at all times.”

"It's in the manual.”

Luis stepped out the window and onto the fire escape. Lyle leaned out, watching him climb the metal ladder to the roof. He felt sleepy. Ninety minutes from now he would have to be back at the apartment picking up his things.

"When do we do it?”

"Two days at most we'll be set.”

"How old is he?”

"Thirty-two," she said.

"He looks younger, much.”

"He's developed a manner. A dozen ways. He's very quick, he slips away. You never know he's gone until you look for him. Don't believe what he says necessarily. He likes to make up a character as he goes along. He doesn't necessarily want you to trust him or respect him. I think he likes to appear a little stupid when he doesn't know someone. It's a strategy.”

"He refers to me in the third person.”

"His manner.”

"Even when he's looking right at me.”

"Luis has lived here half his life. To you, he seems one thing. To us, another. Your view of our unit is a special perception. An interpretation, really. You see a certain cross-section from a certain angle. And everything was colored by J., who occupied only a small and routine area of the whole operation. Of course you couldn't know this.”

"How many others are there?”

"You know what you have to know.”

"No more, no less.”

"Obviously," she said.

"A good policy, I guess.”

"It's clearly the way.”

"Do I believe Luis when he says he's making a bomb by looking things up at the library?”

"I don't think I'd believe that, Lyle, no.”

"His manner again. A technique.”

"Luis traveled with my brother to Japan and the Middle East. He's acquired a number of skills along the way.”

"Plus a parachute.”

"The parachute you can believe. I would believe the parachute.”

Several minutes passed. The taxed amosphere grew a shade more serene. Lyle moved from the window to a chair nearer Marina. The stress of truth-telling became less pronounced, of performances, strategies, assurances. Luis by leaving didn't hurt matters. He would be careful, Lyle would, not to ask the precise nature of her relationship with Luis. You know only what you have to know. First principle of clandestine life.

"What happens to you?”

"I vanish," he said.

"They'll know he was your guest. You had a visitor that day. You brought him on the floor.”

"I'm gone.”

"Of course there's another way. No need for Luis to set foot inside the Exchange. You bring the package in. You leave it. This way you can't be identified with a second party.”

"Middle of the night, it goes.”

"This is cleaner, obviously.”

"No second party.”

"Think about it," she said.

He studied her face, an instant of small complications. Her eyes measured reference lines, attempting to get a more sensitive bearing on the situation. To the commitment she sought, endlessly, the tacit pledging of one's selfhood, he sensed a faint exception being made. Not all agendas called for rigid adherence to codes. There were other exchanges possible, sweeter mediations.

"J. said you and George.”

"True.”

"It was part of his least convincing scenario. He told me you'd been to bed with George.”

A short time passed. It was decided they would have sex. This happened without words or special emanations. Just the easing sense Marina had loosed into the air of possibilities other than death. She seemed to take it as a condition. Sex: her body for his risk. Not quite a condition, perhaps. Equation would be closer. It was old-fashioned, wasn't it? A little naïve, even. He hadn't seen it that way himself (he didn't know how he saw it, really) but he was satisfied to let her interpretation guide them toward each other.

The bedroom was fairly dark, getting only indirect light. He thought her gravely beautiful, nude. She touched his arm and he recalled a moment in the car when she'd put her hands to his face, bottles hitting the pavement, and the strangeness he felt, the angular force of their differences. Nothing about them was the same or shared. Age, experience, wishes, dreams. They were each other's stark surprise, their histories nowhere coinciding. Lyle realized that until now he hadn't fully understood the critical nature of his involvement, its griev-ousness. Marina's alien reality, the secrets he would never know, made him see this venture as something more than a speculation.

She had a thick waist, breasts set wide apart. Bulky over all, lacking deft lines, her legs solid, she had a sculptural power about her, an immobile beauty that made him feel oddly inadequate-his leanness, fair skin. It wasn't just the remote tenor of her personality, then, that brought him to the visible edge of what he'd helped assemble, to the pressures and consequences. Her body spoke as well. It was a mystery to him, how these breasts, the juncture of these bared legs, could make him feel more deeply implicated in some plot. Her body was "meaningful" somehow. It had a static intensity, a "seriousness" that Lyle could not interpret. Marina nude. Against this standard, everything else was bland streamlining, a. collection of centerfolds, assembly line sylphs shedding their bra-lettes and teddy pants.

They were both standing, the bed between them. Light from the air shaft, a stray glare, brought a moment of definition to her strong clear face. She was obviously aware of the contemplative interest she'd aroused in him. She put her hands to her breasts, misunderstanding. Not that it mattered. Her body would never be wrong, inexplicable as it was, a body that assimilated his failure to understand it. He nourished her by negative increments. A trick of existence.

She knelt on the edge of the bed. He watched the still divisions her eyes appeared to contain, secret reproductions of Marina herself. He tried helplessly to imagine what she saw, as though to bring to light a presiding truth about himself, some vast assertion of his worth, knowledge accessible only to women whose grammar eluded him. The instant she glanced at his genitals he felt an erection commence.

In bed he remembered the man on the roof. Such things are funny. Trapped in the act of having sex. It exposes one's secret feeling of being involved in something comically shameful. Luis in the doorway with a pump-action shotgun. It's funny. It exposes one's helplessness. He wondered what "pump-action" meant and why he'd thought of it and whether it had multilevel significance.

All this time they were making love. Marina was spacious, psychologically, an elaborate settling presence. At first she moved easily, drawing him in, unwinding him, a steadily deepening concentration of resources, gripping him, segments, small parts, bits of him, dashes and tads. She measured his predispositions. She even struggled a little, attaching him to his own body. How this took place he couldn't have said exactly. Marina seemed to know him. Her eyes were instruments of incredibly knowing softness. At her imperceptible urging he felt himself descend, he felt himself occupy his body. It made such sense, every pelvic stress, the slightest readjustment of some fraction of an inch of flesh. He braced himself, listening to the noises, small clicks and strains, the moist slop of their pectorals in contact. When it ended, massively, in a great shoaling transit, a leap of decompressing force, they whispered in each other's ear, wordlessly, breathing odors and raw heat, small gusts of love.