Underworld (100 page)

Nick took the hand away from her.

“Iodine,” he said.

“First he washes the hand with soap and cool water, Matthew, are you listening? Then he dries the hand.”

“Then he puts iodine on it.”

“I don't want the iodine,” Matty said. “I want the mercurochrome.”

“Iodine. It's stronger, it's better, it's hotter, it burns.”

“Mercurochrome,” Matty said.

“It eats right into the wound, cleaning and burning.”

“Mercurochrome,” Matty said.

But he didn't want his brother to drop the hand, to let go of the hand just yet.

Klara stood on the roof watching stormclouds build bluish and hard-edged, like weather on some remote coast, a sky that seemed too lush and wild to pass this way.

The child played with a neighbor's child on a blanket nearby.

She'd taken down the laundry and put it in the basket but wasn't ready to go inside just yet. The wind was gaining force and she could see women on rooftops all up and down the block unpinning clothes from swaying lines, ducking under bedsheets walloped up, and she could hear other women pulling on the lines that crisscrossed alleyways between windows and laundry poles, the screech-song of old ropes passing through the grooved rims of all those rusty wheels.

She missed Albert's mother. It was strange to walk into the front room now, an awkward empty place, first the empty bed and now not even the bed, just floor space that needed filling.

It was also strange how they hadn't wanted to get rid of the bed, either one of them. They'd kept it around for weeks, cranked to her daylight angle, the hours when she liked to close her eyes and feel the sun on her face.

The white of her nightgown and hair and the white sheets and the sheets billowing on the rooftops and the women fisting them down to gatherable size.

The first drops hit thick and splatting.

She'd been up here once, not long ago, more or less hiding from her life, and she saw the young man standing across the street, standing smoking by a lamppost.

Most of the time when she thought of him at all she thought of him in motion, she thought of notched hands moving on her body and dirt
grained deep in his fingers, she thought of the turn of his shoulder and the way he looked at her over his clenched fist.

She'd liked it when she saw him by the lamppost looking at the building. Then she thought about it and didn't like it so much. But that was the only time she saw him there.

The two children did not want to go inside but the rain was getting close.

He'd been easy in a way, natural in a way, not distant or totally unknown. At first she thought it might be nice to think of him as the Young Man, like a character in a coming-of-age novel, but she only thought of him in motion, and nameless, and nonfictional, a sort of rotary blur that hovered just off her right shoulder somewhere, the thing her brain condensed from all that pleasure and wet.

She looked over the ledge and saw three girls playing jacks on a stoop across the street, seated on different steps, the girl with the ball still-bodied and hunched, only her hand working among the strewn jacks, frantically, and Klara could hear them calling threesies and kissies and interference, an argument breaking out, steely and clear.

She didn't want more, she wanted less. This was the thing her husband could not understand. Solitude, distance, time, work. Something out there she needed to breathe.

She took the laundry basket to the door and left it just inside. The surrounding rooftops were just about empty now and the yowl of the alley lines had stopped. Even from this height she could hear the rapping sound. A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in from play.

Then the rain came hard. Klara picked up her daughter and scooped the blanket under her arm and took the other child by the hand and they ran laughing across the roof under racing skies.

At dinner she told him she'd been selfish.

“I don't think that's true,” he said.

He tore a length of crusty bread in two, a thing he did ritually and with such depth of dependable habit that she could not imagine him
getting through a full meal, all the switches and intervals and hand movements, without this crucial flourish.

“The painting's a waste. I'm not getting anywhere. We'll put Teresa in that room.”

“Give it time,” he said. “And anyway where do you expect to get with it? Do it for the day-to-day satisfaction. For the way it fills out the day.”

She had a small print of a Whistler, the famous Mother, and she hung it in a corner of the spare room because she thought it was generally unlooked at and because she liked the formal balances and truthful muted colors and because the picture was so clashingly modern, the seated woman in mobcap and commodious dark dress, a figure lifted out of her time into the abstract arrangements of the twentieth century, long before she was ready, it seemed, but Klara also liked looking right through the tonal components, the high theory of color, the theory of paint itself, perhaps—looking into the depths of the picture, at the mother, the woman, the mother herself, the anecdotal aspect of a woman in a chair, thinking, and immensely interesting she was, so Quaker-prim and still, faraway-seeming but only because she was lost, Klara thought, in memory, caught in the midst of a memory trance, a strong and elegiac presence despite the painter's, the son's, doctrinal priorities.

“No, we'll do something with the room. That's what I ought to be doing. Getting this place in some kind of livable shape.”

“We have the front room to do,” he said.

“We have the front room, which is still a kind of no-man's-land. I'll do the front room. Then I'll do the spare room.”

“And I'll step up my own efforts. Head of the science department. I'll make this my goal. And we'll travel this summer. To Spain or Italy. Wherever you like,” he said.

She liked to watch him eat because he did it so deeply, handling and savoring things, handling utensils, chewing food thoroughly, the way he paused unpretentiously with the wineglass an inch from his lips, waiting, savoring, a sense of earth and our connection to it, that was Albert over a dish of inky squid—earth and sea and the way he looked at food in the plate, breathing it all in before he even touched a fork.

“To Spain,” she said. “Madrid. The Prado.” And she laughed a little coldly, with the hollow tone she used when she was punishing herself. “I want to look at pictures till I drop.”

Then she saw him on the street with a friend, veering toward an army-navy store, and she stopped and stood right there, stationed in his path, and he nearly walked into her before he saw who it was, and he stopped and showed only the thinnest surprise, and his friend stopped, and then she went around them and crossed the street.

The next day he was standing by the lamppost when she looked out the window. She was putting up new curtains in the front room and he was standing there smoking. A Railway Express truck passed between them. Then he looked up and saw her. He flicked the cigarette and walked across the street.

She threw down the mattress. Nick watched her and pulled his shirt over his head. Then he watched her again. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember something, and then she undid a button at the side of her skirt.

She didn't finish her kisses. This was interesting and a little puzzling, unlike last time when they kissed nearly into old age. The way she broke off now and looked away just when he thought a kiss was getting her warm and soft, and the way she looked when she did this, ripping away hurt, almost, and he was surprised at how different she looked, not what he remembered from last time but paler maybe, hands weightless and drained, these white things floating past, and eyes that bugged out a little and seemed to see things he didn't know were there.

But the eyes also looked away and that was the same and the twisty smile, the little turn at the end of the mouth. Some things the same. The tits the same, the ass and tits and bush, and the slub of folded tongue when he kissed her.

Looks that he couldn't figure out what they were supposed to mean.

And the other smile, where she smiled privately at the two of them together, or whatever she was smiling at, smiling to herself like it was three days later, after the fact, and she was walking down an aisle at the A&P thinking what they'd done, but it wasn't three days after the fact, it was still the fact, and she had his balls in her hand, squeezing slightly.

A naked woman was amazing.

He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked across the room, all these ways and walking toward him too and different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn't bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she'd been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn't have curves and swerves but was good-looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth.

He took her stocking off the floor and fitted it over his head. She smiled and looked away and seemed to want to say something and then changed her mind. He jammed it down so he was looking out at her more or less through the heel of the stocking. He pantomimed pulling a gun out of a shoulder holster and pointed it at her.

“Everything you own. Mine or die.”

“It's hard to be serious about this, considering what you look like.”

“Hey. Lady. This is what they do.”

“Holdups, you mean?”

“That's right. But I have to say. They must need money pretty bad to wear this on their face.”

“Well, it's used. They don't wear used stockings, do they?”

“I don't think these guys are finicky. They wear whatever's lying around.”

“I have to admit you're a changed man.”

“You think you'd recognize me if you came in the house and I was standing here in this mask?”

“No. But I wouldn't recognize you without the mask either.”

He pulled off the mask and sat on the mattress. She went to get some water and he watched her walk out of the room, the way her ass barely jounced, and he held the stocking around his dick and then tossed it away.

The warm fusty sort of slightly tired smell, the nylon cling of the odor still in his face, sad, tired, day-old, hers, and close to him, and something he knew about her that made her less strange.

But she was still strange. She was something you didn't want to tell your friends about and that was strange. And she was something you didn't have to tell yourself was really happening. It just happened. It happened bang and that was it, with Whistler's fucking Mother hanging on the wall.

He watched her come into the room.

He said, “You know, my brother when he was a little kid, he was somewhere watching a girl taking a pee, a small girl that was a neighbor's kid probably, and she dropped her drawers and wiggled up onto the seat and had herself a pee, and my brother's watching this and then he goes out to a room full of grown-ups, as I later heard the story, and he waits for them to stop talking and then they finally stop talking and they look at him and he says, Mary Feeley has no birdy.”

She handed him the glass. It was one of the longest speeches he'd ever made, Nick, not counting jokes he sometimes told. Then she reached for his bunched pants on the floor and felt in the pockets for a pack of cigarettes.

They sat on the mattress, knees touching, smoking and sharing the water.

“You know why I smoke Old Golds? I wouldn't tell this to just anybody.”

“Bullshit. Why?” she said.

“That's the cigarette that used to sponsor the Dodgers on the radio. Old Gold. We're tobacco men, not medicine men. The Dodgers were my team. Were. Not anymore.”

“This is a big privileged secret you're telling me.”

“That's right. Now you have to tell me one of your secrets. Could be big, could be small.”

“What's your name?”

“Nick.”

“Nick, you can't come here anymore. It's too completely crazy. No more, okay? We did it and now we have to stop doing it.”

“We can do it somewhere else,” he said.

“Nowhere else. No. I don't think so.”

Never mind the body. He's never looked at a woman's face so closely. How he thinks he knows who she is from her face, what she eats and how she sleeps, from the lookaway smile and the uncombed hair, the hair over the right eye, how her face becomes everything she is that he can't put into words.

“Nick Shay,” he said with a little stab in it, a touch of vengeful intent, because she knew about the chess lessons of course, and would recognize Matty's last name, and would know Nick was the older brother, and would feel the close-knit danger of the thing.

But she didn't seem to give a damn. The way he didn't give a damn that she was someone he knew's wife, she didn't care that he was someone's brother.

“Then I might as well,” he said.

“Yes, I think it's time.”

He picked up the pants and got dressed and left her naked on the mattress, seated sort of leaning to one side, legs together and bent, blowing smoke away from her face with the hand that held the cigarette, and he didn't even think of looking back.

Rosemary sat in the law office over the bakery, filing documents in an old cabinet, and her boss came in, Mr. Imperato, returned from a rare morning at the criminal courts. He was a shambling man who told jokes expertly, who rose to the occasion of a joke. He was bald, flat-footed and carelessly dressed and he was forgetful in his work, sometimes, but when there was a joke to tell he heard the music of the spheres. He never botched a punch line or missed a pause. He did voices and accents, men, women, talking birds, unfalteringly, a quickness rising to his eyes.