Underworld (64 page)

“You're crossing over. White women,” Klara said.

“Jayne was a white whale. I had to shake off a lot of higher-minded shit before I got to where I am with this work. And I'm doing some things with color I want your opinion of.”

“Anytime.”

“Because you're the one I trust.”

“Paying phony compliments is hard work,” Klara said. “That's why I don't do it.”

It was the summer of Nixon waving on TV, clutching Ike's wrist in the fifties clips, or the hand-jerk over the head, sudden and neurologically odd, or the final wave from the helicopter on the lawn, arms shooting out, fingers shaping a sad pair of V's, or the clips of the late sixties that showed his arms wantonly flung in the winged gesture of victory, of resentful writhing triumph—here I am, you bastards, still alive and kicking.

Miles talked her into going to Bloomingdale's to help him buy a gift for his mother because she'd be thrilled and slightly shamed, his mother would, wrapped in happy chagrin, outside Toledo, to own a thing from Bloomingdale's. They went through a vast area of reflecting surfaces and little knobby bottles and the cling of a hundred teeming essences and Klara finally found something, a batik blouse and vaguely Persian slippers, and they were headed out through the menswear area, touches of autumn decor and many tables and displays, racks of field coats and fleece liners, and Miles said, “Wait.”

What is it, she wondered, and he put a hand to her arm—wait, look, do not speak. Then she saw what he meant. Eight or nine boys, black kids moving among the suits and knit sweaters, maybe a dozen now, adolescents mostly but some no older than ten. Then she saw a guard coming from the perimeter, summoned by walkie-talkie, and the younger kids were trying to go unnoticed, among the mirrored surfaces,
somewhat comically, their eyeballs doing surreptitious scans, and they must have felt the pressure by now, the full weight of observation. One of them grabbed a jacket, half hurried, and one of them said something and they all moved now, converging on one display. They grabbed and ran, jackets flying off hangers and hangers bouncing on the floor, and they grabbed what they could, two-three jackets, some of them, or only one, or two kids snatching the same jacket, and ran for different exits. There were two guards coming fast and another semicrouched by the main door. The customers stood motionless and alert, fixed in neutral zones, and one kid was pinned by a guard and Klara had a sense of half a dozen others scatter-running through the store, weaving and shying off, all the jacket arms flapping.

And Miles said, “Leather,” in a voice that rang with broadest joy.

He said, “They take the subway down to Fifty-ninth Street and come up the stairs right into the store and they flood one area and grab what they can and then they're outta here, man, in a dozen directions.”

He said, “Security gets ahold of two, maybe three kids at most.”

He said, “Notice, they didn't take the big insulated parkas, they didn't take the warm stuff or the hooded stuff or the down vests. Only leather. They took the leather,” and his voice was musical with admiration.

Acey leaned over her empty glass.

“How old was he?”

“I don't know. Seventeen, eighteen. I don't think I wanted to know.”

“Seventeen's a man.”

“I was teaching kids to draw, part-time. And I had a baby, two or three years old, and this was awesome enough, and my husband's mother who was bedridden, although maybe she'd died by then, and my husband of course as well.”

“And this juvenile delinquent in his what—did they wear pegged pants? He came on to you.”

“I don't know who came on to whom. Only thing I know, we're in the spare room next to where my mother-in-law just died.”

Acey's eyes went humorously wide and she let her mouth hang open.

“Maybe you're right. Seventeen's a man,” Klara said. “Because one thing this was not. This was not a case of sexual initiation. It wasn't at all tender. And he didn't need instruction especially. And you're also right about juvenile delinquent. Except the term doesn't do justice to the thing he eventually did.”

She looked down the cornice line of Park Avenue to the New York Central Building with its traffic arches and great clock and floodlit summit and she wasn't sleeping well lately and someone stood next to her looking at the same thing she was looking at and she went inside to watch Nixon wave.

Esther Winship's apartment was lavishly understated, beiges, off-whites, great staid sofas that did not give when you sat, and expanses of dunnish rug, deep-piled, and almost no pictures, and the few pictures Esther elected to hang were self-effacing to the point of who cares, and the place had so much attitude, all tension and edge, that Jack seemed largely lost here.

Esther said, “I haven't given up, you know. I've sent agents into the field.”

“For what?”

“Moonman.”

“I thought we'd forgotten all that. Besides, didn't somebody do a graffiti show?”

“It didn't include him.”

“I think it's just as well you don't find him.”

“Why's that, sweetie?”

“You'll sign him and dump me.”

Esther liked that. She had a laugh that was two thousand years old, salty and hoarse. And Klara found it strange to feel the way she did about graffiti writers. It should have been Esther who decried the marked-up trains—defaced, ugly, like mobile dumpsters. Esther in her flawless suits and face powders and lightly clanging jewelry. Esther, she thought, and not for the first time, her dealer and friend and enemy.

“That is the utterest nonsense of course.”

“Just tell me when we're going,” Klara said.

“Out to my place?”

“So I can stop the mail.”

“You're invited, you know. We're all going. It's official. Friday week.”

“I love stopping the mail,” Klara said.

And it should have been her who defended the graffitists, daredevil kids who put color and spunk into the seismic blur of a rush-hour Monday.

Chance of rain, said the Weather, but it didn't rain. The garbage was down there in identical black plastic bags, leaching out, beginning to burn its way out of the bags, and she looked and did not look for rats, passing the mound on her way to the Y. She swam nearly every day at the Y and then not so often and then only once a week because the point of swimming was to take the edge off work, return her to the offsetting rhythms, the agreeable mild monotony of what is left of you after a long pull of work and isolation.

It was the summer of damson plums, juicy and bluish, and she loved the water towers that hung at dusk, raised on pillars and stilts, like oddments of the carpentered city, the least likely things to survive, dowels and staves, the old streaked wood hooped in its delicate bulk.

In a little roof garden with a cheapo copy of a marble from the Acropolis, a male figure minus arms and head and most of one leg, and with a ravaged cock and birdblown shit on his left pec, and why was he so sexy, Klara thought—it was here that she saw the man for the third time in about seven weeks, Carlo Strasser, the amateur art collector and whatever else he was, in his splendid Italian shoes, with a farmhouse, she recalled, near Arles.

It turned out the host had been meaning to invite the two of them to dinner for the longest time. And it turned out Carlo was in solid-state electronics, traveled to Hong Kong and Taiwan on business and had once flown to Mexico City to see a soccer game.

“Actually I'm supposed to be in Dus-sel-dorf today”—he pronounced it comically—“but I thought, you know, life is short and I get on too many planes lately and besides.”

“Besides you can pick up the phone.”

“I can pick up the phone, absolutely. Someone is there at the other end.”

All around them on brownstone roofs were skylights and tall vents with spiral caps and new metal fencing that extended past the roof edge to discourage cat burglars.

And late at night she woke up in the loft and thought she was somewhere else—not somewhere else but in a place that wasn't hers because even after years here she could not wake up without feeling she was in alien space, in dreamspace still. The height and breadth of the area, the pillars and tall windows were out of some early dream, not quite nightmarish, of a child located at the edge of a room, or a child dreaming the room but not in it herself—a room surreally open at one end, where the child stands or the dream begins, a room where things, where objects are called chairs and curtains and beds but are also completely different, unsupported by the usual guarantees, and she shifted in the bed and woke up Miles.

They went to the Fulton Fish Market and Miles took photographs, it was four in the morning, of a row of enormous swordfish chucked down on the pavement, what an epic of misplacement, these great sea creatures beached on a New York street, and then they found an all-night diner and had bacon and eggs and coffee.

Miles wanted to talk about Acey Greene.

“This stuff she's doing. You know what she's doing, don't you? A group of paintings on the Black Panthers. More crap being dumped on black males.”

She let him talk.

“You overrate her about two hundred percent. Her stuff is all show. It's a cut above total shit. You need to look again. It's all surface. She's catering, she's pandering to white ideas about scary blacks.”

Klara realized that in her praise of Acey's work she'd been waiting
all along for someone to disagree. Now here it was. The moment sat in her stomach in a lump with the egg yolk and rye toast.

“You know how it works. She got what she wanted from you. Approval, publicity, whatever. Now she's greasing other wheels.”

Klara sat there in an odd kind of thoughtful silence. She wanted him to keep talking. Say it all whether it's true or not. She felt completely ungenerous but thought he might have a point about Acey's work. He had useful intuitions about art. It was one of the things between them, of course, how he'd stand before one of Klara's pieces and let her know with a few well-placed words and with his general surrender to the object that he saw what she was doing.

“She loves the slippers,” he said.

“She loves the slippers. What are we talking about? Oh your mother.”

“She loves the slippers.”

“She loves the slippers. Good. I'm happy.”

Or possibly the case could be stated thus. He was totally wrong about Acey's work but maybe she wanted him to be right.

In Sagaponack she dropped her bag in the guest room and went to visit painters all over the local map. They painted in sheds, whitewashed studios and renovated potato barns and she went mostly alone, borrowing Esther's car because Esther was on the phone trying to deal with landlords and lawyers.

At dinner Jack got dizzy and lay on the sofa and the evening more or less went on around him.

She stood on the sand and watched the waves barrel up and come snugging beachward.

She called Miles, who was leaving the next day for Normal, Illinois.

She met a sculptor with a face full of burst capillaries, English, his wife was dying, and she had a long talk with him, a completely intense conversation about the way in which their work exposed them, layer by layer, as inadequate, and they took solace one from the other, seeing how such things can be shared no matter how seemingly unique. And embraced when she left.

Esther said, “You're looking sexy lately, you know that?”

“Says who?”

“Old Jack.”

Klara typically grew tired of old Jack and then took his side, sympathizing, saying Jack has a point and finding him funny and then finding him tiresome again, even pathetic at times, but he loved Esther in the sweetest way, spoke about it openly and didn't care who heard and told waiters and doormen how good she was in bed and Esther knew it wasn't possible to stop him and probably didn't want to. They both needed the drama of public avowals because how else could their vividness survive?

Things flew out of her hand. A glass flew out of her hand when she was standing on someone's deck. Alone in Esther's car she talked about left turn and right turn, reciting directions aloud, telling herself to stop on red.

On the phone Miles said, “People don't think it's totally, you know, bizarre that a woman can get sick every time Henry Kissinger gets sick, a thousand miles away. We the ungreat have to get our diseases any way we can.”

A wind started blowing and would not stop and it carried a faint taste of summer's end and Esther said, “It's like the
tramontana
,” and Klara thought oddly of Albert, or not so oddly—he loved the Italian words for different kinds of winds blowing off the Alps and up from the African littoral.

And she didn't really like the English sculptor's work if we're going to be honest about it, whatever their affinity of ominous doubt.

“No, seriously, you look great,” Esther said.

The nights so breezy and clean. Shadows, whispers, a man's chin-line, his hair, how he holds a wineglass.

Esther said, “Jack's a baby of course. That's why he stayed on the sofa when he was feeling out of sorts the other night.”

“He wanted to be with people.”

“He's the biggest baby ever but if he dies on me I'll go to pieces in a tenth of a second.”

She loved them both and told them when she left and meant it the way you always mean it after four blowy days and nights and good
food and talk and the potato fields running clear to the dunes under high swift skies.

Such luck to be alive, she thought, and took the train back, humanly invisible in her roomy seat, where she smoked a cigarette and looked forward to being home—home alone, surrounded by all the things and textures that make you familiar, once again, to yourself.

Her father used to say, The best part of a trip is coming home.

But when did they ever go away? Only rarely, and briefly, a rented bungalow on a lake, with another family, because godforbid we shouldn't feel crowded, her mother said, and let's hurry back before someone steals the note we left for the milkman.