Underworld (34 page)

She put the magazine in her closet with the old fan mags she'd stopped reading decades ago when she lost her faith in movie stars.

The faith of suspicion and unreality. The faith that replaces God with radioactivity, the power of alpha particles and the all-knowing systems that shape them, the endless fitted links.

That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned a steel wool pad with disinfectant. Then she used the pad to scour a scrub brush, cleaning every bristle. But she hadn't cleaned the original disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. She hadn't done this because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it is called infinite regression. You see how fear spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves.

She cleaned and she prayed.

She said brief prayers while she worked, simple pious pleas called ejaculations that carried indulgences numbered in the days rather than years.

She prayed and she thought.

She went to bed and lay awake and thought of Esmeralda. They'd spotted her a number of times but hadn't been able to catch her. Not Gracie or the monks or the agile writers in Ismael's crew. And Edgar's sense of her safety was beginning to grow less assured.

She welcomed every breath of knowledge that came her way, all the better for its element of disquiet, but this time the foreboding shook her strongly. She sensed something out there in the Wall, a muddled shuffling danger that waited for the girl on her lithe passage through car bodies and discarded human limbs and acres of uncollected garbage.

Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days.

Nick was trying to find the magazine he'd been saving to take to Houston. He saved certain kinds of reading for business trips, things he never got around to looking at otherwise, magazines that stacked and nagged and finally went to the sidewalk on the designated day. There was a noise that started, a world hum—you began to hear it when you left your carpeted house and rode out to the airport. He wanted something friendly to read in the single sustained drone that marks every mile in a business traveler's day.

The magazine was Time, missing about a month. He found it finally in the bathroom, stashed in a basket that Marian kept filled with mostly glossy fashion books—every shadow brushed to an anatomical polish, contoured against crumble and waste. Just the thing to browse when your body is squatted and your pants are down. The copy of Time had an article on Klara Sax he wanted to read, not the first such piece he'd spotted through the years but maybe more interesting than most, some desert project she'd started, bristling with ambition.

His suitcase was on the bed, small enough for the overhead bin, and
he zippered the magazine into an outer pocket and finished packing. Marian walked in wearing her catwoman shades. They came with the job. She worked for the city's arts commission now and wanted a sleeker look.

“Don't you need to hurry?”

“The car's not here. I trust the car,” he said.

“The car is dependable.”

“The car knows things we don't know.”

“The car is never late.”

“The car and the plane are in constant touch.”

She always looked great when he was walking out the door. Why is that, he thought. Some soft-bodied mood, some tone that half insisted on being noticed but was also a shy secret, afraid of disturbing the air between them.

He moved her into the wall and put his hands on her thighs, kissbiting her mouth and neck. She said something he didn't quite catch. He put his hands between her ass and the wall and moved her into him. Her skirt slid against her parted legs, fabric stretched out and up, the tensile whisper of friction he counted on to carry him through life. He stepped back slightly and looked at her.

“Why is that?” he said.

“What are we talking about?”

“And why is it that when I get back, the whole thing's gone and lost and forgotten?”

“What thing?”

He took off her sunglasses and handed them to her. When he walked out the door, seconds later, the company car was waiting.

A few hours later Marian stood in a small room in a two-story pale brick building near Jack in the Box and Brake-O. Cars were parked under a lopsided shed out back and there was a man's abandoned shoe in one of the empty slots. She stood naked in the room by the edge of the window. Then she walked to the long mirror and edged her hip against the surface of the glass, feeling some small coiled chill of body and object. She looked all right. All the exercise, the diet, the diet, the
exercise. All the butt repetition, the toilsome boredom she endured in the name of keeping fit. She was not the twisted perfect woman she used to be but she still kept fit. Fuck you, keep fit. She stood squared up to the glass. Nothing she could do about the needle nose but otherwise not bad. She never looked at herself so closely at home. It was easier to see herself out here, inside strange walls. She let her nipples touch the glass and when she backed away she saw they'd left a moistness, a pair of pressed kisses like winter breath.

When Brian arrived she was wearing a robe she'd found in the closet.

“I shouldn't be here,” he said.

“Neither should I. This is the point, isn't it?”

He sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes, a little like the class crybaby undressing for gym.

“Whose place is this?”

“My assistant's.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? We need a safe place,” she said.

“But your secretary?”

“My assistant. And it's better than a hotel.”

“I shouldn't be here.”

He walked around the room barefoot, unbuttoning his shirt. He had clown feet, long and bunioned, and he didn't loosen his tie until he'd pulled his shirt out of his trousers.

“Is she young?”

“How do you know it's a woman?”

“Seriously. Young?”

“Yes,” she said.

He walked around touching things, looking at photographs and matchbooks.

“Good-looking?”

“You want to check out her underwear? Look, I'm wearing her robe. Fuck me fuck me fuck me,” she said drily.

“She can't afford better?”

“We're underbudgeted.”

“It's a roomette.”

“Small but intense,” Marian said.

She was standing against the wall, arms folded, and he stepped into her. She freed her hands and worked at his pants. She liked having sex with Brian because she could handle him, turn him, get him to match her mood, rouse him easily or make him talk, talk—acid candid shameful stuff, bitter-funny.

“I think he knows,” she said.

“What?”

“I think he knows.”

“He doesn't know.”

“I think he knows.”

She had her hands in his pants and a smile on her face. He moved the robe off half her body, smeared it—rubbed it against her shoulder and breast before he got it off her, almost off her, pulling her arm through the hole and letting the garment drag.

They eased onto the bed. She tried to get clear of the rest of the robe but he wouldn't let her. He wanted a woman in half a robe. The phone rang and they stopped to listen. Every time a phone rang in a borrowed apartment they stopped and thought about the thing they were doing and maybe at some level about the life of the person whose apartment they were using. It made them feel the wrong kind of guilty trespass, she thought. The bed. The mystery of the other person's life and medicine cabinet and bed. It was the one thing she didn't like about this, one among others, and she couldn't have sex to a ringing phone.

She felt around for her handbag, which was on a chair at the side of the bed. The ringing stopped. Brian got off the bed and finished undressing.

“You trust her to keep quiet?”

“She keeps quiet about everything else.”

“This isn't everything else.”

Marian found her cigarettes and lit one up and he handed her an ashtray.

“I thought you stopped.”

“I'm down to five a day.”

“I thought you were wearing the patch.”

“I'm not,” she said.

He stretched out next to her, on his side. The ringing phone had brought them prematurely to a lazy state of small caresses and mellow bends of conversation and streams of smoke.

He said, “This job of yours. Real or fake?”

“I work with structural engineers, urban designers. I fight with citizens' groups all the time. But I get things done, pretty much.”

“I had lunch in a mechanical mist the other day. In some mall somewhere.”

“We don't do malls. We do parkways.”

“What do you do to a parkway?”

“Make it livable, bearable. Tell little stories. Sculpture on the road dividers. Piers that are shaped like animals.”

“What's your secretary's name?” he said.

She tipped a length of ash onto his pubic hair.

“Long hours, single-minded devotion. Stuck in that Japanese thing,” he said. “Death from overwork.”

“Disappear in the company and die. Only I don't do it to disappear. I do it to be visible and audible. And I'm not sure what you mean by real or fake.”

He picked the ashes out of his crotch and blew them off the tips of his fingers.

“Most jobs are fake,” he said.

They'd been late starters and had never developed a reliable pace. Only three or four apartments in all this time and they'd used each apartment only once or twice. She'd learned not to notice her disappointment. This was an aspect of being twistedly perfect. But Brian's reluctance was fairly maddening. She had to arrange the apartments, make the assurances, calibrate the timing and then wonder if he'd show. They talk about demon lovers. She had a demon husband. Her lover was a loose-jointed guy with a freckled forehead and nappy hair. But this was the dare she had to take, a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned. These times were hers, however brief and infrequent. And he was enormously easy to be with and growing dear to her. She liked to tease and scare him but did not want to think about giving him up.

“Blow smoke my way,” he said. “I want all the aromas. Tobacco, bedsheets, women.”

She was herself with Brian, whatever that meant. She knew what it meant. Less enveloped in someone else's figuration, his self-conscious shaping of a life.

“And don't let me forget, I have a meeting at three,” he said.

“I'm a little put off by the fact that you haven't, you know,” sort of dangling the words, “fallen in love with me, Brian.”

“You're my age, you're my height. I fall in love with small brisk women I see from a distance.”

“And they have to be young.”

“They have to be young. You and I, we're buddies. And I'm too guilty to fall in love with you. I'm very guilty. I'm guilty as shit.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because you want it so much,” he said.

She bent the cigarette into the ashtray.

“And you're that accommodating? Because I want it? You're willing to do it?”

“I want it too. But you want it like life and death.”

She didn't like him when he was serious. It was outside the rules. He let his head flop toward her, whispering.

“It's stupid and it's reckless and we shouldn't do it anymore. Because if he finds out,” he whispered.

“What if your wife finds out? She's the one who'll cut your balls off.”

“Nick will only kill me.”

“And he doesn't have to find out. He already knows.”

“He doesn't know.”

“I think he knows.”

He whispered, “Let's make this one last happy farewell fuck.”

She started to tell him something but then thought no. They fell together, folded toward each other, and then she leaned back, arching, shored on her back-braced arms, and she let him pace the occasion. At some point she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, measuring her progress, and he looked a little isolated and wan and she pulled his head down to her and sucked salt from his tongue and heard the sort
of breast-slap, the splash of upper bodies and the banging bed. Then it was a matter of close concentration. She listened for something inside the bloodrush and she spun his hips and felt electric and desperate and finally home free and she looked at his eyes stung shut and his mouth stretched so tight it seemed taped at the corners, upper lip pressed white against his teeth, and she felt a kind of hanged man's coming when he came, the jumped body and stiffened limbs, and she ran a hand through his hair—be nicer if we did it more often.

She waited for their breathing to settle so she could ease free and get her handbag off the chair.

He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water.

It was a fairly large bag, a drawstring bag, and she pulled out a length of aluminum foil and unrolled it and spread it on the bed. Brian stood watching from the kitchen entrance. Then she took out a small transparent packet. It looked like a pleated sandwich bag, only smaller, and it carried a stick-on label reading Death Trip #1.

“Come here,” she said.

She opened the packet and let the contents, half the contents, spill onto the aluminum sheet. It was a resinous substance, chunked up, nubbed up. She told Brian to sit on the bed and pick up the sheet and hold it straight, hold it by the edges so the stuff, the tarlike chunks, didn't run off the ends.

“What the hell is it? And how can it run off if it's solid?”

Then she went into the handbag again and took a small rolled-up straw of some kind, a foil straw a few inches long.

“Yo, Marian, what are we doing here?”

Then she reached for her matches and lit one and held it under the aluminum sheet in Brian's hands, heating the substance on the sheet.