by
Don DeLillo
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We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to their respective machines. But there was something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular—films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family which has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprang a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn’t have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.
god he's good
The crowds didn’t begin to thin out until I got south of Forty-second Street, and traffic was bad all the way. Below Forty-second, people were able to choose their own pace and yet here the faces seemed gray and stricken, the bodies surreptitious in the scrawls of their coats, and it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. It was just a passing thought. I got home, turned on the TV, undressed, and got in the shower.
Merry and I took the large apartment on Gramercy Park. My job paid very little and I had to borrow from my father. But I began to come along, getting out of the mailroom in only four months, which they told me was close to the record. We had a good time in New York that first year. We made quite a few friends and we were a popular couple. Merry got a secretarial job and we left for work together in the morning and then met in the lobby of her building every evening so that we could go home together. We told each other everything that had happened to us during the day, although there wasn’t much to tell. On Sunday afternoons some friends would come over and we would stir up a huge creamy bowl of the drink-dessert we had concocted, the Spontaneous Abortion—gin, vodka, scotch, rye, brandy and a half gallon of cherry vanilla ice cream. Merry clipped recipes from the ladies’ magazines and we would cook together in the evening; when we ended up with something charred and inedible, which was fairly often, we would go laughing around the corner for a hamburger and chocolate shake. In some deep shaft in my being a black machine began to tick. Merry bought some striking clothes with the help of an allowance her father gave her. She had the right figure for the kind of condensed clothing everybody was wearing then. We were always very conscious of what we wore and there were no rules to worry about. One way or another, everything we wore looked great. We saw all the new movies and went to a lot of parties. We seemed to believe that everything we did was the most wonderful thing that had ever been done. We wore certain clothes to certain movies. Grays for black and white. Boots, leather, chino, flag shirts and the like (our pre-acid gear) for Technicolor. Dressing, we matched each unmatching item with great care and spent several minutes assuring each other that we were ready for the waiting line at Cinema I. Each movie we saw was the greatest. Merry would talk about it constantly for two days and then forget it forever. There was no time for remembering things because something else was always coming along—another great movie, a great new pub or restaurant, a great new men’s shop, boutique, ski area, beach house or rock group. I took an army physical and edged out a narrow escape thanks to my trick knee and a chronic cyst at the base of my spine. The action was really just beginning then and they were fairly selective about the young men they tapped for immortality.
jesus
The first girl was Jennifer Fine. I realize there is nothing more dull than another man’s chronicle of infidelity and in many ways that first affair of mine was a dullard’s dream; it differed from most only because I was not a commuter and did not have to adapt my orgasms to the disciplines of a train schedule. Yet a few words must be said here about Jennifer Fine if only to show what happens to people like myself when they are given something like love and asked for nothing in return but a recognition of the other’s need for some elemental form of gentleness. She was a dark girl with large brown eyes. She worked in the research department of the network. We had met there when I was a mailboy, and she had seemed lonely and interesting. Once I realized that Merry and I could not remember our lines, I looked up Jennifer’s extension in the network directory. She was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliché.
[...] Whatever guilt I felt was set around a picture of Jennifer, alone and wounded, and had nothing to do with my stock betrayal of Meredith. To Jennifer I remained unrevealed. I refused to give her any sense of myself and I can only guess the reason, that I needed every ego-scrap, that I feared my own disappearance. To say I took advantage of her love would be much too mild an indictment. What I did was worse. I did not take advantage of it; I did not even acknowledge its existence. I pretended to believe that I was just another season in her life, in no way exceptional; there had been others and there were surely more to come the moment I went my way. Then her body shifted beneath me, hunting a beat, and the four walls returned. I had an early meeting the next day.
There were several other women, girls, during my affair with Jennifer, and there were many afterward. It was simpler with them and at times I was even more the fascist but they let me get away with it, either because they had no choice or because they liked it that way. I was very fond of Jennifer. She is the only one who remains more than a memory of slide-out beds, indifferent dawn departures and that hellish feeling of having left something important behind me in one of those indistinguishable rooms.
You can tell something about a woman by listening to her footsteps on a flight of stairs. As she climbs toward your landing and takes the level walk past your door and then begins to climb again, you can say with some assurance whether she is shapely, impulsive, churlish, simpering, tired, witty or unloved. It is interesting to speculate on the curve of her ankles, how her apartment is furnished, whether or not she believes in a supreme being.
All the doors were open. I felt I was going insane. The entire conversation seemed to be taking place in a dream and I truly could not believe what we were saying to each other. The headache had become a ringing numbness, like that caused by a shot of Novocain. I had ceased to exercise the slightest control over my remarks and I didn’t care anymore. It was neither a good nor a bad feeling. It was hardly a feeling at all. My head seemed to be a telephone delivering an endless busy signal.
My father collected reels of TV commercials. The basement of the house in Old Holly was full of these reels, carefully filed and cross-indexed as to length, type of product, audience recall, product identification and a number of other categories. The index cards filled two file cabinets and the reels themselves stood upright in hundreds of numbered slots in a series of floor-to-ceiling filmshelves which he had designed and built himself. The wine cellar, my mother used to call it. He had a screen and projector and he spent several nights a week viewing the commercials and making notes. He had been doing this for many years. He considered it part of his job. His purpose, he told the family, was to find the common threads and nuances of those commercials which had achieved high test ratings; to learn the relationship between certain kinds of commercials and their impact in the marketplace, as he called it. We spent many of our adolescent nights, Mary and Jane and I, sitting in that dark basement watching television commercials. We looked forward to seeing every new reel he brought home. While my mother wandered through the large old house, the rest of us slouched in the flickering basement and argued about which new commercial was best. My father used to arbitrate our bitter disputes. It doesn’t matter how funny or pretty a commercial is, he used to say; if it doesn’t move the merchandise off the shelves, it’s not doing the job; it has to move the merch. And now, as the waiter put our plates before us, I thought of him standing by the projector as the first new reel of the evening thrust its image through the dust-drizzling church-light toward the screen, an alphabet boy eating freckled soup perhaps, a man carving his Thanksgiving teeth, the tongues of seven naked housewives lapping at a bowl of dog food. I wished he were dead. It was the first honest thought which had entered my mind all day. My freedom depended on his death.
love this
“I love the business,” my father said. “It’s dog eat dog. It’s a crap game in an alley for six million bucks. Where else can a man like me make the kind of money I make? I have the right brand image. You know that as well as I do. Wall Street would kick me out on my ass. But at my age I don’t worry about money anymore. I’ve been reading Tolstoy. Every man feels he has a novel in him. He feels he has a novel and a Eurasian mistress. Tolstoy makes me want to write a novel. Your mother was ill a good deal of the time but she had something these bitches today couldn’t touch. My secretary? Maxine? She has soap under her fingernails. Seven out of eight times I look at her fingernails I see little slivers of soap. Compare that with your mother. At my age you come to realize that you did everything wrong. No matter who you are, everything you did was wrong. Maybe I’ll turn Catholic.”