Underworld (42 page)

The deeper into communist country, the more foul his BMs.

They were accompanied everywhere they went by an Intourist guide. A guide dropped them off, another guide met them, someone sneaked a look in their luggage, a guide made sure they did not cast a passing glance at certain sensitive buildings, at rivers with dams a hundred miles upstream, at roads that led to military sites a thousand miles away. It was like sharing every breath with your personal policeman. Even the weather was a secret, unpublished in newspapers and never mentioned in tones above a whisper.

He had names and addresses and talked to a dozen people and followed a trail that led to Gorki, where a cousin many times removed told him to go to a street of unfinished buildings and that's where they found Avram, the first time he and Marvin had ever set eyes on each other, he's living in a tiny flat with his second wife and his second, third and fourth children. They embraced and wept, maybe it was real, maybe partly for effect, speaking smidgens of Russian, English and Yiddish, and soon they were arguing strenuously. Avram was a dedicated communist with a beetled brow and he spat little word-flecks of contempt at the U.S., the system is corrupt, we will eat you for lunch, you are a what-do-you-call-it kind of culture, a mickey mouse culture, and that night Marvin had to make an emergency visit to the hotel toilet, where he unleashed a
firewall of chemical waste. The smell that surrounded him was infused with what, with geopolitics, and he waved a towel for five minutes and propped open the window, it kept closing, with a rolled-up copy of Pravda, he was still looking for baseball scores, and then he went and stood in their room and watched Eleanor sleep—she came from a gentle rural place and could easily perish from his reek.

He walked to the edge of the construction debris and realized this was not the source of the smell. The smell was still distinct, completely reminiscent of his Soviet experience, only less farshtinkener than his personal output, a bit toned down, and it was not coming from a sewer main break or a communal toilet of the homeless.

Then he saw the ship. It was docked at a remote pier up ahead, between a number of empty slips and a wide basin, and it appeared to be abandoned, with bridge and deck deserted and rust stains running down the sides and graffiti spray-painted on the smokestacks in languages he did not recognize and in alphabets unknown.

He turned and looked at Eleanor. She had a thing she did to show impatience, where she dipped her body and tilted her head and went half limp, her mouth showing a yawny oh.

The name of the ship was unreadable, covered with rust and graffiti. Such a woebegone thing, an oceangoing vessel that carries a public funk of portable toilets in a field.

Marvin and Avram argued for three days. They ate meals in the little unheated flat where you had to unscrew the tap from the kitchen sink and take it down the hall to the bathroom when you wanted to take a bath because construction of this block of flats ended on a certain date, finished or not. The two men traded many family stories but always with an undercurrent of contention and with intervals of open insult, Us and Them, and it grated on Marvin to hear these things from a man so self-assured who's a total nobody, a little guy who pushed upward when he talked, with two false teeth made of stainless steel, he's the shiniest appliance in sight. The flat came without windows. Avram had to install the windows himself, they came from the plate-glass factory where he worked, glass so thin you had to come away from the window to talk. A word with too many consonants might shatter the glass.

He said to Marvin, We're making bigger bombs than the West can even dream. That's why the windows break so easy.

Yes, it galled Marvin to think of a man living under these circumstances, carrying a kitchen tap back and forth, the spout and two valves but only the cold gives water, the family crowded up the walls and he's so cocky and flushed, this was the thing that drove Marvin nuts, how the guy gets along without the basic whatevers, Eleanor knows the word, the things that contribute to material comfort—she says it so refined.

She called out to him now, “Come away.”

And on the way back to Western Europe his system slowly returned to normal, branny BMs, healthful and mild.

And they were on a train in Switzerland, a normal neutral place, going through tunnels and past moonlit lakes, and Marvin heard a familiar voice up ahead, a radio crackle and yak, and he followed the sound to the front of the car, where two GIs were huddled over a little portable radio with a stunted antenna, listening to Russ Hodges on the Armed Forces Network, his account of the game interrupted whenever the train entered a tunnel, and that's where Marvin was when Thomson hit the homer, racing through a mountain in the Alps.

Eleanor was just out of the shower when Marvin walked in, collapsing the room with his mood. She stood in a towel, pink-toed, and looked at him.

“The ship came in. Lucky Argus. Pier seven. Exactly when they said to the minute.”

“But Wainwright,” she said.

“Not on board.”

“Stand up straight.”

“Jumped ship in Vancouver.”

“Do they know where he went?”

“Signed on some other ship. Going north somewhere. He's a cold-weather person, this Chuckie.”

“You'll find him.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Actually it does. I used to think you were mad. But I understand now. Yes, you're mad but there's a certain reasoning behind it. There's a little childlike spot of logic. A little bedtime thing. You need to finish the story. Dear Marvin. Without the final link to the baseball there's no way to be sure how the story ends. What good's a story without an ending? Although I suppose in this case it's not the ending we need but the beginning.”

He liked her in a towel. They'd first met near the end of the war, said hello-goodbye but corresponded, she was an air-raid warden with a torch, they called it, and he was a quartermaster handing out condoms for D-day that the troops fixed to the muzzles of their rifles to keep out sand and water and he still liked her in a towel or slip, married twenty-seven years to this point.

He sat in his shorts at the edge of the bed, taking off his ribbed socks. They would do like tourists in commercials, have marital sex in a nice hotel. Their room had a view of a view. From their window they could look across the courtyard to office towers and reflected clouds in the picture window of the hotel restaurant.

“Marvin, do you plan to wear it?”

She was talking about his toupee.

“I need it for how I see myself.”

He also needed it because it took the edge off his large ears and sorrowful Marvin nose. He wanted to look nice for her even if she didn't think it mattered. Tonight he'd wear his best shirt, with cuffs so French he wanted to hum the what-do-you-call.

“You're my man, with or without.”

A thing she said with a half-fake quiver of her mouth that made him feel he owned the earth.

She slipped off the towel and placed a knee on the end of the bed. They were honeymooners still, shy but eager, and Marvin in his Brooklyn-bomness, his religion of skeptical response—he was only now beginning to see how hard it was to persist in the sentimental myth, after all these years, of their dissimilarity, a thing he'd fabricated out of her accent and complexion. He was glimpsing his Eleanor truth by truth, that she matched him in appetite, that her ambitions for the business were bigger than his own, that her main ambition was
America, a fact he'd managed to miss—the things, the places, the bright buzz of products on the shelves, the sunblast of fortune's favor.

Here they were in a strange bed in California, what twists to life, how uncertain go the turns, an English girl in his arms, pink and innocent even if she's not, and Marvin's polymerized hairpiece secure on his head.

She wanted Japanese but that wasn't enough. They had to go to a place where the guidebook said tatami seating.

Marvin thought if he lived all his life for a hundred years before meeting Eleanor, he would have done the same three or four things in the same order every day and as soon as he met Eleanor, at the age of a hundred and one, he would be sitting on the floor to eat seaweed.

They faced each other over the low table, in their stocking feet.

“What's the word for the thing that's not ultimate but next to ultimate?”

“Penultimate.”

“Penultimate. See, that's what I've got in Chuckie Wainwright.”

“Sit up straight,” she told him.

“Greenland. I always had my suspicions about that place.”

“What do you mean?”

“That's where he was stationed in the Air Force if he was actually there.”

“Why wouldn't he have been there?”

“Do you personally know anybody who's ever been there?”

“No, I don't,” Eleanor said.

“Let me advise you. Neither do I. And neither does anyone I've talked to lately.”

“I think there's a main city.”

“You think there's a main city. Do you know the name of this place?”

“No, I don't.”

“Did you ever look at Greenland on a map?”

“I guess I have, once or twice perhaps.”

“Did you ever notice that it's never the same size on any two maps? The size of Greenland changes map to map. It also changes year to year.”

“It's large,” she said.

“It's very large. It's enormous. But sometimes it's a little less enormous, depending on which map you're looking at.”

“I believe it's the largest island in the world.”

“The largest island in the world,” Marvin said. “But you don't know anyone who's ever been there. And the size keeps changing. What's more, listen to this, the location also changes. Because if you look closely at one map and then another, Greenland seems to move. It's in a slightly different part of the ocean. Which is the whole juxt of my argument.”

“What's your argument?”

“You asked so I'll tell you. That the biggest secrets are staring us right in the face and we don't see a thing.”

“What's the secret about Greenland?”

“First, does it exist? Second, why does it keep changing its size and its location? Third, why can't we find anyone who's personally been there? Fourth, didn't a B-52 crash about ten years ago that the facts were so hush-hush we still don't know for sure if there were nuclear weapons aboard?”

He pronounced it nucular.

“You think Greenland has a secret function and a secret meaning. But then you think everything has a secret function and a secret meaning,” she said.

“The bigger the object, the easier it is to hide it. How do you get to Greenland? What boat do you take? Where do you find an airport that has a flight to this main city that nobody knows the name of and nobody has ever been to? And this is the main city. What about the outlying areas? The whole enormous island is one big outlying area. What color is it? Is it green? Iceland is green. Iceland's on TV. You can see the houses and the countryside. If Iceland is green, is Greenland white? I'm only asking because nobody else is asking. I have no personal stake in this place. But I watch the nature channel and I see tribes they wear mud on their body in New Guinea and I see those thingabeests, they're mating in some valley in Africa.”

“Wildebeests,” Eleanor said.

“But I never hear a peep from Greenland.”

The waitress brought saki for her, beer for him. She called the drinks beverages and Marvin thought he was on an airliner. All the traveling he'd done, baseball-related, the unsheveled lives, the words and sentences.

Wait-listed passenger Lundy please present yourself at the podium.

1. The mother of twins in what's that town.

2. The man who lived in a community of chemically sensitive people, they wore white cotton shifts and hung their mail on clotheslines.

3. The woman named Bliss, which he was younger then, Marvin was, and maybe could have, with eyes as nice as hers, done a little something, in Indianola, Miss.

4. The shock of lives unlike your own. Happy, healthy, lonely, lost. The one-eighth Indian. Lives that are blunt and unforeseen even when they're ordinary.

5. Who knew a Susan somebody who spoke about a baseball with a famous past. Marvin forgets the tribe.

6. Stomach acting up again.

7. The chemically sensitive man, his whole body vibrated when somebody snapped a photo a mile and a half away.

8. And Chuckie Wainwright gone to sea, leaving a woman and child behind, a hippie Christian cluster, barefoot with beads, and Marvin tracking him ship by ship.

9. And the bone cancer kid in Utah, which his mother blamed the government.

10. Marvin often lost, setting out one day for Melbourne, Florida and nearly ending up Down Under.

11. And the woman with the chipped tooth—a whole long story, you shouldn't ask.

12. And the chemicals in the core of the ball that made the man run in place after breakfast every day.

“Tell me what we're going to do after dinner.”

“Me you're asking?”

“You've been to this city before. I haven't,” she said.

“What's left to do by the time I pick myself off the floor? I've got a knot in my leg a cannibal would spit it out.”

“Come on. Show me a good time.”

“She wants to go gallivanting.”

“Let's make this our city, Marv.”

Strange how he was compiling a record of the object's recent forward motion while simultaneously tracking it backwards to the distant past. Sometimes he thought he was seeing the ball sort of fly by. He wanted to find Chuckie and establish the last link, the first link, the connection to the Polo Grounds itself, but if he couldn't find the guy he would probably buy the ball anyway, the reputed ball, once he located it, and keep looking for Chuckie till he died.

“I want you to show me the seamy underside,” Eleanor said.