Underworld (65 page)

When Klara's mother found a business card in his jacket—she was taking his suit to the cleaner and found a business card with his name but no company and the name was spelled Sax and of course she asked him about it.

He told her it was for trips he might take. He wanted to have a card to give to someone he might meet on a train.

Her mother said, That's not what I'm asking. Never mind such a trip is strictly I don't want to say what.

So then what you are asking?

I'm asking the spelling. Her mother said, Sachs is not a hard name.

He said, It's not a question hard or easy.

Her mother said, What is
s-a-x?
This is what? You're changing careers, this means? We have a jazz musician in the house?

He said, It's a small thing, never mind.

Her mother said, It's not so small.

He said, The names are pronounced the same. It's a small thing. I only changed the spelling so it's easy for someone to pronounce on a train who's accustomed to easy names. Which most names in business they're easy if you'll notice.

Sachs is an easy name. Her mother said, This is not a hard name unless the train you're talking about is full of people who are a little funny, let's say, in the head.

Her mother's maiden name was Soloveichik.

He said, It's not the name is easy or hard. It's what the letters say. That whole business of the
c-h.

Her mother said, What whole business?

And her father made a sound that Klara would not forget. She thought about it many times in the years since he made the sound. He made a sound, a harsh guttural produced at the back of the mouth, rattling and metallic, filled with rancor, and at first she thought he had the card printed because he did not want people to make the mistake of thinking he was German and then she thought he had the card printed because he did not want people to know he was a Jew.

People on trains. Businessmen with their own cards and shaving kits and private compartments on the most important trains out of Grand Central Station.

And how curious, what a distance he sought to travel from the grating sound of that
c-h
with its breadth of reference, its guttural history and culture, those heavy hallway smells and accents—from this to the unknown
x
, mark of mister anonymous.

And the change provoked Klara's loyalty precisely because it made no practical sense, because it exposed the mind spirals of a certain kind of torment.

Her father was a billing clerk in a department store. Then he was an insurance agent working on commission in the drearier reaches of the Bronx. They gave him the Negro neighborhoods and Chinese laundries and the immigrants from everywhere, just off the boat. He painted signs for a while, company names on frosted glass doors, applying gold leaf with a sable brush, a thing he did well but hated.

It's only a business card, he said. I didn't go to a judge and get my name changed. On my tombstone you can carve the regular spelling to your heart's content.

Her mother said, How come I never knew you played an instrument?

And when Klara's divorce from Albert became final, she changed her name from Bronzini back to Sachs but made a point of spelling it with an
x,
if only publicly in her emerging identity as an artist—it was how she signed her work.

•    •    •

“Yes, well, maybe it's true. Seventeen's a man,” Klara said. “And I've asked myself was the thing more important than I was willing to admit?”

“In other words did it show you a way out?”

“Did it point a way out?”

“Which you didn't want to think about at the time.”

Acey didn't want another drink and Klara still had half a glass of wine and they talked away the afternoon, one of those dead summer days in a dark and empty bar.

“And he didn't seem to make too much of it himself. He was, I thought, remarkably unconfused and even-keeled was my impression. My second husband sailed a yacht but was not so even-keeled and I don't know why I'm bringing that up.”

She laughed and sipped her wine.

“He drank Tanqueray martinis, Jason did. He took a bottle of Tanqueray every time we went to Maine, or a couple of bottles, I guess. We were allowed to forget the vermouth but not the gin but we didn't forget the vermouth either and I loved going up there but I used to wonder sometimes in the most detached sort of way.”

“How it happened.”

“How did it happen that I'd marry a man who says what he says and thinks what this man thinks?”

“And drinks martinis,” Acey said.

They talked about other things. They talked about work.

“See, Marilyn hated being Marilyn. But Jayne loved it,” Acey said. “She was born to be Marilyn. She lived in a pink palace that had a sizable zoo. And the way these things happen, the discount sex queen becomes famous and famous and famous and finally she's the most photographed woman in the world.”

“And she died how?”

Acey lowered her head to her chest, doubling up her chin and doing a southern sheriff's voice.

“Ho-rrific car crash. Like Jimmah Dean.”

“Are you painting the wreck?”

“No, I want a Jayne that's a living threatening presence. This is one greasy peroxide blond. Constant secretions from every quarter. This is a woman with a heavy flow. Atomic Jayne.”

“Anytime you're ready to show it,” Klara said, and the sun had cleared a building nearby and was beating on the street.

“You worry too much,” Acey said. “You worry about the work you're not doing because you feel deeply obliged to justify. I think you're always justifying in your mind. And you also worry about the work you've done because considering what you gave up and took away, considering the damage you caused, if we tell it like it is, child, you need to convince yourself your work is good enough to justify this.”

They paid the bill.

Acey put her hands on the older woman's shoulders and pressed tight, sort of macho motherly, and the bartender brought their change.

In Sagaponack Esther wore safari outfits and talked on the phone.

She said to Klara at breakfast, “Who cuts your hair? Did they arrest the mass murderer who cuts your hair?”

At someone's house Klara talked with a woman it turned out she used to know, a painter from the early days, the industrial spaces on the East River, near the ferry terminal, where Klara lived after her divorce, with a makeshift shower and no stove, fifty dollars a month, and met painters and sculptors, people who worked with found material, and the street was paved with old stone blocks, once used as ballast perhaps, and they used to gather on the roof sometimes, three or four painters and a wife or husband and a couple of kids and a dog someone was keeping for someone else, and the two women remembered how Klara never sat on the sloped part of the roof, on the tarpaper surface that sloped up to the edge because she was afraid of edges, and there was a sense of sea passage and new work, and off to the north, situated beyond the rooftop, between the rooftop and the great bridge, was the polyhedral mass of towered downtown.

The wind blew day and night and Jack said, “I'm reasonably sure that's what's-his-name over there who used to be married to the paper bag woman. It was a great scandal. She was the paper bag heiress and I sat next to her at dinner—this was, godhelp me, twenty-five years ago. Esther knows who I'm talking about. It was a major scandal. Esther, help me out here.”

The thing about Jack is that he sounded drunk when he wasn't and then made beautiful and courtly sense absolutely blotto.

They were in a small basement place in Chinatown eating broad noodles that were very tasty, chow fun or chow fon, the menu was spattered—a place with formica tables and spattered menus and no liquor license and Miles with a mint toothpick in his mouth.

“I've got a movie to show you that you're going to hate me for this movie.”

“We can't be talking about Normal,” she said.

“We shot about eleven hours in Normal. She was inexhaustible, this woman, because she was born that way. She comes across like a law of physics but I still don't know what we've got. Could be crap.”

“And in the meantime.”

“You're going to hate this other thing but there's no question of not seeing it because you have to see it.”

He deferred to Klara in a number of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, and forced soft arguments he knew he could not win and played certain subjects toward her strength, which should have annoyed her but didn't, and was otherwise thoughtful, carrying her brand of cigarettes and talking her through this dormant period in her work, a time of small despair.

He had his cold, it was always there, voice a little woofy, his eyes dimmed by medications, and after Acey's show they all went to a disco somewhere and she watched Miles and Acey dance and they looked completely great together and how curious, of course, because there was no love lost, or maybe not so curious—the lights were flashing and the music shook the walls.

It was the rooftop summer, still, and she sat in the dense shade of a grape arbor on a Chelsea roof, redwood posts and rafters and a latticework of cedar that was weathered bony gray.

A poet walked across the roof, he came from the far end of the roof over the thin slate surface.

He said, “They're writing the name Marie.”

And Klara looked out through the opening at the front of the arbor, fringed with broad puckered leaves, grape leaves of whatever variety of native grape, and she saw the smoke from a skywriting plane, spelling the name Marie.

And the World Trade Center rising at the southern rim, the towers siamesed when you see them from this angle, joined at the waist by a transit crane.

What an encouragement it was that someone built this thing, lugging so much wood and soil up five narrow flights, raising the posts and joists, and vines growing out of half barrels, old whiskey barrels great-girthed and stained, and she sat with three others at the table eating nachos and drinking sangria, the others did—Klara liked her wine unmixed.

It was the summer of blue-black nights, ambiguous thunder to the east, hoarse and false, and the city grid below—a guy beheads his lover, puts the object in a box and takes it on the train to Queens.

And don't forget the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench and the small strange woman who photographed him obsessively.

Klara watched the skywriter's smoke begin to attenuate and drift. A cat walked along the ledge at the far end, a stray from the alleys and back gardens, and she didn't know why, you never know why, but her mother was part of this moment, angry about something, and a neighbor with a special shoe, a man with a high shoe, an orthopedic shoe, things, shapes, masses, memories, all the braidwork of unmatching states.

Even the poisoned air floats a woman's name.

Miles took her to the studio of a video artist he knew. Not a studio, okay, but an ordinary set of rooms packed with equipment and TV sets, where the guy lived and worked. People started arriving. There were people already there and others started arriving and there was a pungent trail in the air, the root aroma of marijuana rolled and toked communally, and a sense of some event not unlike the showing of a midnight film, only not so loose a group—a little beady-eyed, these people, wary of their own anticipation.

They sat on the floor mainly. There were a few folding chairs and a sofa in one room and a number of people stood huddled in corners but most of them sat on the floor, which was covered with soda stains and unspeakable scuz. TV sets were arranged in stacks everywhere in the flat and other sets were parked individually on TV tables with copies of TV Guide and there were sets with rabbit ears and a few old mahogany consoles and every size screen from the smallest imported eyeball to the great proscenium face of the household god.

And one whole wall in one room—there was a TV wall, maybe a hundred identical sets banked floor to ceiling.

Klara and Miles stood in a corner and she'd begun detaching herself from the event long before she got here because she'd been told what it was at some point but still had to see it, whatever the level of misgiving.

The event was rare and strange. It was the screening of a bootleg copy of an eight-millimeter home movie that ran about twenty seconds. A little over twenty seconds probably. The footage was known as the Zapruder film and almost no one outside the government had seen it.

Of course the event had a cachet, an edge of special intensity. But if those in attendance felt they were lucky to be here, they also knew a kind of floating fear, a mercury reading out of the sixties, with a distinctly trippy edge.

The footage started rolling in one room but not the others and it was filled with slurs and jostles, it was totally jostled footage, a home movie shot with a Super 8, and the limousine came down the street, muddied by sunglint, and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and then the force of the shot that killed him, unexpectedly, the headshot, and people in the room went ohh, and then the next ohh, and five seconds later the room at the back went ohh, the same release of breath every time, like blurts of disbelief, and a woman seated on the floor spun away and covered her face because it was completely new, you see, suppressed all these years, this was the famous headshot and they had to contend with the impact—aside from the fact that this was the President being shot, past the outer limits of this fact they had to contend with the impact that any high-velocity bullet of a certain
lethal engineering will make on any human head, and the sheering of tissue and braincase was a terrible revelation.

And oh shit, oh god it came from the front, didn't it?

And that was the other thing, all these things in the sequence that begins with frame 313, and wouldn't you know, Miles would say later, there had to be a thirteen somewhere in the case.