Don Delillo - Players

"Will you be all right?”

"Yes.”

"Will Ethan be back soon?”

"I think so.”

"It won't be so bad when you're not alone. He'll be there in a little while. And I'll be seeing you very soon. It'll be a little easier when you're back in the city. There'll be people.”

"I know.”

"Tell Ethan we'll have lunch when he gets back. Call me, tell him. We'll make a lunch date.”

"All right.”

"Actually I'm not in New York right now. I'm in a motel in a foreign country, believe it or not. Canada anyway. Just a business thing. Nothing special. But I'm leaving right after I hang up. I'll be home in a matter of hours.”

"I guess I'll leave tomorrow, depending.”

"Don't call the apartment," he said. "I'm not answering the phone for a while.”

She had tea waiting when Ethan came back. They sat outside. He wore nothing over his short-sleeved shirt despite the chill. Pammy wondered whether it would be all right to get him a sweater. She decided finally it might be taken as an imposition of sorts, a subtle belittling of his distress. What comfort, really, would warm clothing give him now? It occurred to her that people unconsciously honored the processes of the physical world, danced fatalistically with nature whenever death took someone close to them. She believed Ethan wanted to feel what was here. If it rained, he wouldn't move. If she draped a sweater over his shoulders, he might well shrug it off. We are down to eating and sleeping, if that. Rudiments, she thought. Whatever the minimum. That's what we're down to. She watched color spread across the sky beyond the Cam-den Hills. A sunset is the story of the world's day. They spun back away from it, upended like astronauts, but snug in their seats, night-riding, as the first stars pinched into view.

"They don't have a good burn center here if Jack had lived," he said. "They would have had to rush him to Baltimore, which is ridiculous, considering how remote we are.”

"Don't you mean Boston?”

"There's nothing in Boston that's comparable to what's available in Baltimore. They would have had to get him to Bangor first, either there or Bar Harbor. Then on a plane either to Boston or New York, I would imagine. Then from there to Baltimore. So even if he'd lived.”

"Ethan, the only thing is time. That's the only thing that can alleviate. Time is change. After a period of time it won't be so bad. That's the only thing you can believe right now. That's what you have to concentrate on. Time will make it easier to bear.”

"The consolations of time.”

"That's right. That's it. The only thing.”

"The healing hand of time.”

"Are you making fun?”

"My time is your time.”

"Because I don't think this is funny.”

"I see myself as an old man," he said. "I hobble to the store for cream cheese and a peach. I buy single items only. One sweet roll, one peach, one bottle of celery tonic. 'How much is that cucumber, young fella? No, the other one.' I stand in a corner of the store and take out my little change purse, seeing if I have enough.”

"Stop, really.”

"I'm all alone. There's no one to help me shop. I buy stale bread to save money. Kids race between the shopping carts, knocking me off-balance. They barely notice. Their mothers say nothing. I'm practically invisible. I go to a corner of the store and count my change, my few bills, repeatedly folded, folded repeatedly. I buy one onion, a single stick of margarine.”

"This could be my father," she said, "which isn't in the least amusing to me.”

"Six eggs minimum.”

"People live like that.”

"I hobble down the wide aisles. My body is too ancient to be offensive. All the odors have gone bland on me. I don't even have the pleasure of smelling myself in bed. They tell me six eggs minimum. I say I'm too weak to break the carton. All I can do is lift one out. Six minimum. That's the rule. I live alone. All my friends are dead, Jack in particular, adorable useless Jack. I stand in a corner of the store and bring up phlegm. I'm very secretive and clever about this. I hawk, secretively. I've learned how to do it so it's not too loud. I feel the phlegm bobbling around at the back of my mouth. I hawk some more. A phlegmy old man. This isn't funny," he said. "I wouldn't laugh if I were you.”

She decided not to fly back. It was an eleven-hour bus ride. Watching a small boy come up die aisle to use the toilet, Pammy smiled, close to tears, her face developing cracks around the eyes and becoming lustrous, showing complex regret. The dead elms along the road brought a graver response. She'd never seen them in such numbers, silenced by blight, dark rangy things, their branches arched. It was startling, all this bareness, and the white frame houses, sometimes turreted or capped by a widow's walk, and the people who lived there, how different the dead elms made them seem, more resonant ;deepened by experience, a sense about them of having lived through something, although she knew she was projecting this, seeing them only in glimpses, piano teachers (a sign in the window), dealers in pewter and marine antiques. She was eager to be back in the apartment, closed away again, spared the need to react tenderly to things. These were commonplace moments, no more, simple enough to have gone unnoticed at other times. Sloping lawns. A drowsy fern in a bay window. She wanted to be spared these fragments of coastal noon, garbled eyeblinks, so perishable and affecting. And Ethan's strange delineation of the evening before, his deadpan novella. Spared that, too.

So she wasn't unhappy about stepping out onto Eighth Avenue at ten or so in the evening, part of the morbid bazaar that springs up outside the bus terminal every summer night, spreading through the wetness and stench. Restless men sorted among the miscellany. Pigments, styles, dialects, persuasions. Sets of eyes followed her to the corner. Immediately east, west and south were commercial streets, empty and dark now, a ray system of desolation, perhaps a truer necropolis, the outlying zone to which all bleak neon aspires.

Her taxi rocketed east, the back half about to be jettisoned, it seemed. The apartment was serene. Objects sat in pale light, reborn. A wicker basket she'd forgotten they had. A cane chair they'd bought just before she left. Her memory in things.

She couldn't fall asleep. The long ride was still unraveling in her body, tremors and streaks. She turned on the black-and-white TV, the one in the bedroom. An old movie was on, inept and boring, fifties vintage. There was a man, the hero, whose middle-class life was quietly coming apart. First there was his brother, the black sheep, seriously in debt, pursued by grade-B racketeers. Phone calls, meetings, stilted dialogue. Then there was his wife, hospitalized, apparently dying of some disease nobody wanted to talk about. In a series of tediously detailed scenes, she was variously brave, angry, thoughtful and shrill. Pammy couldn't stop watching. The cheapness was magnetic. She experienced a near obliteration of self-awareness. Through blaring commercials for swimming pool manufacturers and computer trainee institutes, she remained in the chair alongside the bed. As the movie grew increasingly maudlin, she became more upset. The bus window had become a TV screen filled with serial grief. The hero's oldest boy began to pass through states of what the doctor called reduced sensibility. He would sit on the floor in a stupor, either unable to speak or refusing to, his limbs immobile. Phone calls from the hero's brother increased. He needed money fast, or else. Another hospital scene. The wife recited from a love letter the hero had written her when they were young.

Pammy was awash with emotion. She tried to fight it off, knowing it was tainted by the artificiality of the movie, its plain awfulness. She felt it surge through her, this billowing woe. Her face acquired a sheen. She ran her right hand over the side of her head, fingers spread wide. Then it came, on-rushing, a choppy sobbing release. She sat there, hands curled at her temples, for fifteen minutes, crying, as the wife died, the boy recovered, the brother vowed to regain his self-respect, the hero in his pleated trousers watched his youngest child ride a pony.