Underworld (43 page)

The ball brought no luck, good or bad. It was an object passing through. But it inspired people to tell him things, to entrust family secrets and unbreathable personal tales, emit heartful sobs onto his shoulder. Because they knew he was their what, their medium of release. Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his own cockeyed march through the decades.

All right. Marvin was not a night person but he knew one place he might take her, one street really, that's all it was, called the Float, out near the old hippie district, shops that came and went overnight, buildings without house numbers, an area catering to very select desires that changed with the phases of the moon.

He lifted himself off the floor mat in stages, joint by joint, and they called a cab and went outside.

Twenty minutes later they walked along the street, umbrellas up, it was raining lightly, a few panhandlers about, a woman in a mohawk and white makeup punching a doomsday leaflet into the belt buckle of Marvin's raincoat.
PEACE IS COMING—BE PREPARED
. Most of the shops were open despite the hour or because of the hour and they were almost all below street level so you peered over a guardrail to see what they were selling, Role-Reversal Rubber Goods, or Endangered Fashions—jackets made from the skin of disappearing species.

They went into a hole-in-the-wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you're not talking
about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, or bugs in the wall, recordings of organized crime figures discussing their girlfriends or their lawyers, he's a hard-on with a briefcase—you're talking about men on the eleven o'clock news in cashmere overcoats with enough material you could clothe a Little League team from Taiwan. And phone taps of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take over a person's life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time.

The Float had an edge, it had a midnight finish.

They stepped briefly into shops that sold autopsy photos, that sold movie stars' garbage, the actual stuff deep-frozen in a warehouse—you looked in a catalog and placed an order.

Eleanor was delighted by the ambiance, a word she pronounced a little French. Bare-board floors and stained walls. She took Marvin's arm and they went down the street, spotting a sign in a first-floor window, Foot Fetish Cruise of Spanish Ports.

Floating zones of desire. It was the what, the dismantling of desire into a thousand subspecialties, into spin-offs and narrowings, edgewise whispers of self. There was a dive with a back room where they showed sex movies involving people with missing limbs. They had gay nights and straight nights. If you were open to suggestion you could float through the zone, finding out who you were by your attachments, slice by slice, tasting the deli specials of the street. You were defined by your fixation.

A boy walked by in clothes so raggedy he could have been a ticker-tape parade.

There was a place called the Conspiracy Theory Café. Shelves filled with books, film reels, sound tapes, official government reports in blue binders. Eleanor wanted to have a coffee and browse but Marvin waved the place off—a series of sterile exercises. He believed the well-springs were deeper and less detectable, deeper and shallower both, look at billboards and matchbooks, trademarks on products, birthmarks on bodies, look at the behavior of your pets.

Something's staring you straight in the face.

The largest shop was at street level, a dozen men standing around, furtive, in raincoats, looking at old copies of National Geographic. These were used magazines, used and handled, lived-with, and the address labels were attached, machine-stamped and ink-smudged and skin-greasy, and printed on the labels were the names and addresses of real people out there in magazine America, and the men in raincoats stood by tables and bins and read the labels and leafed through the magazines, heads never lifting.

A man bought a magazine and left quickly, slipping it under his coat.

Marvin did not think these men were interested in photos of wolf packs on the tundra at sunset. It was something else they sought, a forgotten human murmur, maybe, a sense of families in little heartland houses with a spaniel flop-eared on the rug, a sense of snug innocence and the undiscovered world outside, the vast geographic. A pornography of nostalgia, maybe, or was it something else completely?

And was there a back room, because isn't there always a back room, another splintering of desire, a little more refined and personalized, and in the back room weren't the magazines cased in acetate folders, maybe these were rare issues or rare labels, or maybe the folders themselves were the fetish items here, dust-veneered, handled, nearly opaque some of them, a dullish sort of plastic with a faint odor and prophylactic feel, like condoms for reading matter, and maybe there's another room where you need to whisper a password and this is the room with folders only, empty folders, handled a thousand times, and Eleanor was completely creeped out by this place, it was more than she'd bargained for, raincoated men with National Geographics, furtively thumbing the labels.

Across the street they saw a tall woman's shop, called Long Tall Sally, but not for dresses and coats. Fantasy Enhancements, the sign read. Books, movies, appliances—tall women only.

You see a few funny things in some off-street on a rainy night and you wonder why they seem significant. Marvin thought there was something here that might be an early sign of some great force beginning to tremble awake, he didn't know what exactly, he didn't know
for good or ill, he didn't know where in the world—a shaking in the earth that could alter everything.

“All right, Marv. I'm ready to go to bed now.”

One more place. The one place on the street he'd been to before, run by an acquaintance, you could call him a colleague, Tommy Chan, maybe the country's first baseball memorabilist if that's an actual word.

They went down a grimy set of steps into a dark cubby stacked with scorecards and old songbooks and a thousand other baseball oddities, whole slews of records and documents in tottering columns.

Eleanor sighed in her chest like a shot partridge.

And there was Tommy in his high chair, the chair and cash register platformed, islanded higher than the surging mass of old paper that was going chemically brown, and it made Marvin think of all the game footage he'd seen during his search, fans in the Polo Grounds throwing scorecards and newspapers onto the field as the day waned and the Dodgers approached their doom. All that twilight litter. Maybe some of it was sitting here today, preserved by the stadium sweepers and eventually entering the underground of memory and collection, some kid's airplaned scorecard, a few leaves of toilet tissue unfurled in jubilation from the upper deck, maybe autographed delicately by a player, the scatter of a ball game come to rest all these years later, a continent away.

“This is my wife.”

“We don't see many women,” Tommy said like a Buddhist monk in a backcountry compound, polite and wise.

“It's a wonder you see anybody. Because frankly who would come here?” Marvin said. “You have to make the place halfway presentable.”

“Presentable.” Nice word. “Marvin, think. What am I selling here? I'm not selling housewares in a regional mall.”

He was a smart guy and would-be likable but ageless in the face, which disconcerted Marvin because you like to know how old a man you're talking to.

“What did you sell today?”

“You're the first people in the shop.”

“Don't look so smug.”

“I've been here since noon. These other merchants don't open till very late.”

“Since noon. And no one.”

“How interesting to see a woman,” Tommy said.

Eleanor stood motionless, maybe part paralyzed by her exotic status.

She said, “Don't you have to give people an incentive to buy? Not that it's any of my.”

“An incentive.” What a novel idea. “The incentive is within, I think. These materials have no esthetic interest. They're discolored and crumbling. Old paper, that's all it is. My customers come here largely for the clutter and mess. It's a history they feel they're part of.”

Marvin said to Eleanor, “I always thought the people who preserved these old things, baseball things, I always thought they lived in the East. I thought this is where all the remembering is done. Tommy is the first collector I found anywhere west of Pittsburgh.”

Tommy had a smile so slight and fleeting it could only be photographed on film stock developed by NASA. His little knickknack face floated in the gloom and Marvin had a childlike urge to reach up and touch it, just to see if it felt like his, the rough dull surface he washed and shaved every day.

“Did you find your man?” Tommy said.

“I found my ship. The man, forget about.”

“You must give it up.”

“Who's talking?”

“You can't precisely locate the past, Marvin. Give it up. Retire it. For your own good.”

“Who's talking?”

“Free yourself,” Tommy said.

“You sit here inhaling dust like what kind of statue.”

“Equestrian,” Eleanor said.

“An equestrian statue in the park.”

“True. My situation is even more unreal than yours. At least you move about. I sit here with my crumbling paper. There's a poetic revenge in all this.”

“What revenge?”

A hummingbird's breath of a smile brushed across Tommy's lips.

“The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously.”

The remark had an impact. Marvin felt a thing in his chest like a Korean in pajamas who's crushing a brick with the striking surface of his hand. But then he thought, How can I not be serious? What's not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

He knew Eleanor wanted to leave. He knew Eleanor was thinking, At least Marvin keeps the basement neat.

There was something he had to buy first. A small empty box semi-discarded in a corner, marked Spalding Official National League Number 1—it once held a new baseball, many years ago. And he would save it for the time when the old used bruised ball came into his possession, if and when.

He reached up to pay the man. Hung on the wall was a photograph of President Carter and his daughter what's-her-name standing in the Rose Garden with Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, a strained smile on every face.

They went out to the street. A woman in rags pushed her belongings in a shopping cart, seemingly bent on a specific destination. Was there a family waiting, was she a commuter of the future, did people live unknown to us in the crawlspaces of the what, the infrastructure, down the tunnels and under the bridge approaches?

“Tommy looks so happy. How is that possible, living in the dark?”

“Pick up your feet, Marv. You're healthy, not sick.”

“Alone in that dungeon every day.”

“Does he have a wife and children?”

“I don't know. Who would ask? That's not a question we ask in the memorabilia field.”

“Does he enjoy the amenities, do you think, of our basic way of life?”

“You say that word terrific.”

“Does he have a little backyard where he grows Jersey tomatoes every summer?”

“I look at him I don't think I see a tomato looking back.”

“Does he take his bride on business trips?”

Eleanor knew how to make him feel lucky. And she was right, she was nearly always right, the tomatoes, the cleaning business, the house with the spacious basement, the daughter who hadn't caused them major aggravation by doing something stealthy out of wedlock. Think of Tommy eating Cambodian takeout in his shop at midnight. Think of Avram in Gorki walking down the hall with the kitchen tap every time he wanted to take a bath.

They found a taxi idling in front of an old flophouse.

But in truth, let's be honest, it was Marvin who shuffled, Marvin who was the true schlimazel, bad-lucked in his own mind, Marvin the Dodger fan, doomed in ways he did not wish to name.

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen—she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.

Time to think about going to bed. But first he took her dancing in the penthouse lounge of their hotel, an intimate room with a combo, well past midnight.

They moved across the floor, swayed and dipped—not really dipped but only showed a pause, a formal statement that such a thing as a dip could happen here. They liked to dance, were good together, used to go dancing but forgot, let the habit slip away through the years the way you forget a certain food you used to devour, like charlotte russes when they were popular.

She ran her hand through his fire-resistant hair.

And Marvin held her close and felt the old disbelief of how they'd found a life together, such fundamentally different people even if they weren't, and he knew the force of this disbelief was the exact same thing, if you could measure it, as being stunned by love.

But in the deep currents, in the Marvinness of his unnamed depths, there was still an obscure something that caused disquiet.

And when they danced past the window he looked out at the lights of the Bay Bridge spotting through the mist and saw the old forlorn tanker snug in its berth, pungent and shunned, and he counted over to pier 7 and found that the Lucky Argus was already off-loaded and gone, borne on the tide, a dark shape going at what, flank speed, in the great deep danger of night.