Underworld (51 page)

“This is the Darwin dog-eat-dog,” Esther liked to say, said incessantly, enjoyed saying because she knew it scared people like Klara.

She loved the floorboards stacked in the corner. Streaked brown wood, sort of drenchingly dark brown like the staved towers on the rooftops, the tanks filled with water and mostly bare to the elements but sometimes enclosed in elaborate churchly structures with lancet arches and great eagled ornamentation.

People weren't saying
Oh wow
anymore. They were saying
No way
instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.

She watched her friend Acey Greene on TV, a new friend, young and talented, interviewed late at night on a local cable outlet. She looked great—you look so great, Klara thought. Modestly afro'd, in a torn dinner jacket and red bow tie.

Miles called and she met him at an old sail-making loft downtown. The film group he belonged to showed rare things, mostly unrunnable in theaters for one reason or another, and the screenings were a floating affair—wherever Miles could secure a space.

Fifty or sixty people were here to see a Robert Frank film,
Cock-sucker Blues
, about the Rolling Stones on tour in America.

Klara sat in the dark and spooned yogurt from a carton. She realized she'd been seeing Mick Jagger's mouth everywhere she went for some time now. Maybe it was the corporate logo of the Western world, the leer and pout that follows you down the street—she liked to watch him dance and devil-strut but found the mouth a separate object, sort of added later for effect.

She told Acey, who sat next to her, she said, “I think everything that everybody's eaten in the last ten years has gone into that mouth.”

She loved the washed blue light of the film, a kind of crepuscular light,
a tunnel light that suggested an unreliable reality—not unreliable at all in fact because you have no trouble believing what you see but a subversive reality maybe, corruptive and ruinous, a beautiful tunnel blue.

“You have to interpret the mouth like it's satire,” Acey said.

Coke sniffing backstage or in the tunnels and people sitting around a room or sleeping on a plane, that edge-of-time feeling, remarks half uttered, a cigarette in someone's mouth, people not yet ready to stir, and she liked the glancing sound, the way documentary sound, this kind of flyby movie, bounces off the tile walls, the cinder-block walls in dressing rooms and stadium tunnels.

Someone saying, Often he will shoot me in an unfavorable way.

And she realized yes, his mouth was completely satirical, it was caricaturish, a form of talking anus from the countercomics of the sixties, and all the jeers and taunts we'd uttered, all the half sentences we'd mumbled had come out of the same body opening, more or less.

Acey said, “I saw them in San Francisco, this is the same tour, has to be, two years ago this was.”

Throwing the hotel TV off a balcony.

Interviews mumbled and blotted, the simplest of earnest rehearsed queries lost and pondered and lost again, the tour is a series of unfinished remarks, and a man and woman fucking on the plane, and the mouth chewing food, the paste-on peel-off mouth, Mick strobed and flashed in concert like some multimouth de Kooning female, sucking on the hand mike.

The camera phalanx in the tunnels. People sitting around, two people asleep in a lump or tripped out or they could be unnoticeably dead, the endless noisy boredom of the tour—tunnels and runways.

Acey said, “I went to the show and there's this bodyguard, maybe I can spot him in one of these shots, a black guy with a T-shirt that says Stones, you know, Security, only something else completely but along those similar lines.”

And Klara loved the tunnel blue light and the nothing-happening parts, everybody's got cameras and they're shooting nothing happening, and the sound that gets lost in the ceiling tiles.

Someone saying, I hate those motherfuckers. Those in-between schmucks.

Saying, What state are we in?

Two mumbling junkies on a bed, a man and woman equally sort of squintingly attentive to the needle that's angled in her arm.

Saying, How come you wanted to film that?

Saying, It hadn't occurred to me to film that.

Oh Indiana.

It just happened.

Mick standing slack-jawed in room. The mouth gargling and spitting, licking ice-cream cone. And the concert footage that's gelled red, bodies bioluminescent, what we all love about rock, Klara thought, the backlit nimbus of higher dying.

Excedrin on TV, significantly more effective than common aspirin.

“And he's following me,” Acey said, “down this long tunnel and he's saying, Brown sugar you wait for me because there's something I got here which I definitely want you to look at. Hey brown sugar. And I turned, which was admittedly, you know, completely dumb-ass, and he didn't have it out but he had his hand on it.”

Two white men in room and one white man talking in black voice about, Put the brothers in touch with their cultural heritage. And second white man threads needle into arm and first white man talking black says, Tomb of the Unknown Junkie, a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street and Lenox Avenue, made top to bottom, he says, from discarded spikes.

Someone saying, They took my child away from me because I was on acid.

Where's my room key?

Tunnels and runways and washed blue light and then the opening to the stage, the loud white glare and prehistoric roar.

You suck him off?

No. Just took a picture with him.

Saying, The state comes along and takes my kid from me.

And nude woman caressing herself on bed in hotel room who rubs hand on pussy then licks it. And Acey interrupting her story to say, “Mmmm.”

The whole jerk-off monotonic airborne erotikon.

And Klara thought it was interesting that this was the only woman
who didn't seem like a girl. It was interesting, she thought, how all the women in the film were girls or became girls. The men and women did all the same things, dope, sex, picture taking, but the men stay men and the women become girls except maybe the woman who rubs her pussy and licks it and says something inaudible because the whole point of sound in a film like this is to lose it in the corners of the room.

I don't care—it's only San Diego.

Acey was telling her story and meanwhile looking for the guy in the story up there on the screen.

“And I wanted to say something to, you know, disabuse him of every wishful thought in his head. Hey brown sugar. But we were alone in this big roaring echoing place, the concert's in full roar somewhere above us and, Brown sugar, he's, Brown sugar, brown sugar.”

“This show we're looking at now?” Klara said.

“I don't know if it's the same night but it's the same show, the same city, the same motherfucking band of emaciated millionaire pricks and their Negro bodyguards.”

It was the rooftop summer and the air was filled with heroes, the dusty sky that burned with stormlight. Oblong gods braced in narrow corners and a pair of seated pharaohs that flank an air conditioner. And she loved the mermaided columns she saw on lower Fifth and all the oddnesses, the enigmatic figures she could not place in particular myth, mainly downtown, atop the older banks, on the parapets and setbacks—robed oracles jutting over the streets or helmeted men of unrevealing aspect, lawgivers or warriors, it was hard to tell.

And it was down there on a roof one Sunday, the streets hot and dead, that the gentleman reappeared, the European she'd talked to once before, gazing into the unfinished grid of the World Trade Center.

Yes, hello, we meet again.

And he told her that the figures she'd been wondering about with their cultic look, faces in shadow under the streamlined headgear, were called the Titans of Finance. And how suitably dour they were, as if measuring the Depression's effects on the streets below—she guessed the building had been erected around that time.

“Some kind of secret fraternal order, sounds like to me.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But all banking is secret, I think.”

And she could believe it, with all the granite and limestone massed around them, and the newer towers, curtained sheer, of reflecting glass and anodized aluminum, and every office empty of human trace today, except in basements maybe where paper was spun through microfilm machines, a billion checks a second.

His name was Carlo Strasser. He lived on Park Avenue and collected art with an amateur's clumsy passion, he said—an apartment on Park and an old farmhouse near Arles, where he went to do his thinking.

And of course she said, “What do you think about?”

And he said, “Money.”

She laughed.

“I sometimes wonder what money is,” she said.

“Yes, of course, exactly. This is the question. I will tell you what I think. It is becoming very esoteric. All waves and codes. A higher kind of intelligence. Travels at the speed of light.”

He was dressed very well, he was turned out, he had presence and manner and she felt a little shambly, but not uncomfortably so, in her denim and old sandals. The man confirmed her in her partialities and she was marvelously, in fact, at ease, talking to him.

They heard foghorns in the bay and paused to listen and the sound had an element of formal awe, it rolled and caromed down the narrow streets, collided with itself, an organ work that swelled the air and sent pigeons beating out of the tower clocks.

He asked questions about painters and she did something she almost never did—she expounded, she did detailed analysis, a thing she'd tended to avoid even when she used to teach. She heard herself go into explanations so ardent and newly struck that she realized she'd been withholding them from herself.

“Louise told me once, Nevelson, that she looked at a canvas or a piece of wood and it was white and pure and virginal and no matter how much she marked it up, how many strokes and colors and images, the whole point was to return it to its virgin state, and this was the great and frightening thing.”

Klara could not connect this remark to her own work but she liked
to repeat it to herself anyway—she liked the idea of a famous artist being frightened by what she does.

“I have a small Nevelson,” he said. “Very small piece, I bought it years ago, and now you have given me a reason to look at it in a different way, and this is something I will do with pleasure.”

“I'd go into her studio and she'd show me a black sculpture, a wood sculpture painted black, and I'd comment on the color and I'd comment on the material and she'd look at the thing and she'd say, ‘But it's not black and it's not wood.' She thinks reality is shallow and weak and fleeting and we're very different in that regard.”

Miles showed up later and Carlo Strasser faded gracefully into the cluster, eight or nine people standing around a table filled with cheese and fruit and wine, those lion-blood Bordeaux, those damson plums and blue-black nights and how the thunder sounded dry and false.

Standing in someone's kitchen, slicing a lemon, she understood that the knife would slip and she would cut herself and she did.

It was one of those microseconds that's long and slow and nuclear-packed with information and she knew it would happen and kept on slicing and then it happened, she cut her finger and watched the blood edge out from the knife line and slide unevenly down her knuckle.

She watched people sunbathing, they did it so completely, dominating the experience, a woman flopped on a ledge with a blanket and a pitcher of iced tea and a child's drinking glass appliquéd with flowers and a paperback book that Klara tried to spy the title of—they did it without conceding anything to the stone ledges or pitched roofs or breathless tar surfaces, it was the spectacle of here I am, and there's a window washer's empty rig scaling the side of a slab tower. She saw a brick facade flushed with coral light, more or less on fire with light, and the brick seemed revealed the way only light reveals a thing—it is baked clay of some intenser beauty than she'd ever thought to notice. And there's the old lady again sitting in her webbed chair with the Sunday papers scattered, so familiar and encouraging—she holds a reflector under her chin and faces sacrificially into the sun, a plattered head going mummy-brown in the deeps of a summer day.

She watched the blood slide out from the cut and noticed the creases and whorls in her finger and heard the music in the next room, it's Esther's husband Jack playing one of his old 45s, the swing-band music that drives his guests out onto the roof.

The garbage was down there, stacked in identical black plastic bags, and she walked home past a broad mound that covered a fire hydrant and part of a bus sign and she saw how everyone agreed together not to notice.

Miles Lightman showed up late for dinner on a roof uptown, carrying a box of the black cigarettes she smoked, queen-sized and extra-mild and slow-burning, and a baggie of marijuana, which he liked to call boo, a term he'd heard in some bar in Harlem maybe twenty years ago.

They were on the roof of a new building, forty stories, it loomed over the reservoir in the park and they stood a while watching runners in the night. The runners went around the reservoir in fair numbers, faintly lamplit, and Miles thought they resembled fleeing crowds in a Japanese horror film. He had a thing for fleeing crowds. He wanted to do a picture book on the subject. He collected publicity stills from obscure productions—fleeing crowds of Asiatics looking up at something awesome.

They stood on the roof and looked across the park to the silhouetted buildings named like ocean liners. The Beresford, Majestic and Eldorado. The Ansonia and San Remo.

Fleeing crowds always included a mother with a baby and a woman with bulging breasts and a man with his arms flung up to shield him from some terror in the sky.

Miles looked at the runners going around the reservoir and he came up with a name for the forty-story building that loomed over the park, so tall and massive it made its own weather, downdrafts nearly strong enough to topple people walking by.