Underworld (67 page)

Someone passed her a joint, she passed it back.

On a large console the screen was split four ways and the headshot ran in every sector and, “It's outside language,” Miles said, which was his way of saying far-out, or too much, or the other things they used to say, and here was an event that took place at the beginning of the sixties, seen belatedly, that now marked the conceptual end, carrying all the delirium that floated through the age, and people stood around and talked, a man and woman made out in a closet with the door open, remotely, and the pot fumes grew stronger, and people said, “Let's go eat,” or whatever people say when a thing begins to be over.

It ran continuously, a man in his forties in a suit and tie, and all the sets were showing slow motion now, riding in a car with his confident wife, and the footage took on a sense of elegy, running ever slower, running down, a sense of greatness really, the car's regal gleam and the murder of some figure out of dimmest lore—a greatness, a kingliness, the terrible mist of tissue and skull, so massively slow, on Elm Street, and they got something to eat and went to the loft, where they played cards for a couple of hours and did not talk about Zapruder.

She married Carlo Strasser in his Park Avenue apartment before a justice of the peace and twenty-five friends of the couple. Carlo's daughter was there, the youngest of his three children, a beautiful spindly girl, fifteen, who lived with her mother in Brussels. It was one of those
autumn days in New York. And Klara's daughter also appeared, about half an hour late but lively and bright, completely unmorose—she embraced people left and right and danced after the ceremony with Jack Marshall.

It was one of those taut autumn days. The bride wore an old brocade vest that had once been her mother's, and someone's before that, a second cousin or great-aunt, and maybe someone's before that, before America. People ate wherever they found a space, standing up or sitting primly in hall chairs, and the dancing did not last long—it wasn't meant to be a drawn-out affair.

When the guests were gone they decided to take a walk, the bride and groom and their daughters, and after a night of stiff winds the air was rinsed clean and the light was so precise that distances in the park seemed diminished. Clouds began to build, fair-weather cumulus, high-prowed and drifting. It was one of those days in Central Park when there's a distilled sense of perception, a spareness, every line firm and unredundant, and the leaves were beginning to turn, the dogwoods and sumacs, and nothing was wasted or went unseen.

How nice to be a family again, even if fleeting and incomplete, with parceled-out children and children on tight schedules and who knows when they'll all see each other next. Carlo's daughter spoke a clipped efficient English. She stuck to her father's side and followed his wagging hand to particular vistas. They could look over the treetops to the buildings on Fifth Avenue, the unbroken taupe facade, and then to the mansards and temple-tops at the western edge of the park, and Klara imagined the whistling doormen, the taxis hotfooting past—she loved the showy yellow coats of New York cabs.

It was one of those days of light and scale when everything you see has the full breadth of intention. She held Teresa's hand and talked about visits here and there, and they made promises and resolutions, they made mental notes. And how nice, how strange to be doubly paired like this, husband and wife, mother and daughter, and she saw that Carlo walked with a slight limp and was amused to think she'd never noticed—felt free to be amused, felt what the hell it's only marriage.

They walked behind a man with a wolfhound, a dog as grand as any in a vodka ad.

Klara laughed for no reason. Maybe she laughed for no reason and maybe because she'd noticed her husband had a limp. The others thought she was laughing in relief, laughing in the spirit of a swirling day, and it made them all smile benignly. They thought she was laughing in the aftermath of checking on planes that were late and hearing complaints from the caterer and finding the right receptacles for all the goddamn flowers. And finally just unwinding on a walk, they thought. Laughing in ragged relief. They thought they knew the mystery of living in her skin.

You looked at the hills and they were rolling hills that made you wonder who you were and how you got here. The hills had no more connection to your life than a calendar with a picture of hills, old rolling hills set above a river, fixed to some kitchen wall.

I sensed the river was out there somewhere, a briskness in the wind, and I took deep breaths because I was upstate and it was supposed to be healthy here.

Staatsburg was seventy-five miles from home, farther than I'd ever been, and I got settled in the dorm and took classes for a high school certificate and never missed an afternoon in the old barn where the makeshift gym was located, a boxing ring at one end and a backboard at the other.

You commit your crimes in the city and they send you upstate to take deep breaths and get a perspective on your life.

I played basketball with members of a street gang named the Alhambras after a movie theater in Harlem. They were doing nigger
time, they said. They'd come up through Youth House and a number of reformatories, raised on the felony alphabet, and we pounded up and down the floor in that dusty gym, working off the effects of our transgressions.

We were all juvies, under eighteen. I was an E-felony, criminally negligent homicide, reduced from a charge of manslaughter in the second degree, and we played game after game of half-court, going all-out and taking deep and healthy breaths and having a tussle or two.

You could fight a guy here and then forget it, leave it on the court or in the ring, because you'd already mind-whipped yourself repeatedly for what you'd done out there in the streets, whatever misfit thing of rage or bleakness or stupendous aberration, and maybe you'd reached an early maturity on the subject of running a grudge—how important it is to be selective.

When I entered correction I wanted things to make sense. I kept my bed neat, corners squared, and stacked my clothes sensibly in my cubicle.

The minute I entered correction I was a convert to the system. I went out on work crews that did road repair and I was the eagerest hand, giving myself up to the rote motions of breaking asphalt, leaky-eyed and sneezing in the ragweed brush.

I believed in the stern logic of correction. I did my study assignments every night and pounded the floor and pounded the boards in the old gym, good riddance to bad beginnings, blood beginnings, and I was ready for this, hammering hard surfaces on some country road in the julepy haze of a midsummer day, feeling the dead soul slowly drain out of me, the sedimentary stuff of who I was, gone in the dancing air of insects and pollen.

The hills took on color in the fall and they had about as much meaning in your life as a poem on a calendar, four lines about rolling hills in Ronald Colman English.

At Staatsburg I heard many stories about doojee, which was one of the ninety-nine names of heroin, but I didn't tell them my own weak-kneed story, about how I was scared of needles and drugs.

At Staatsburg they had a psychologist who wanted me to talk about the shooting. She thought it was the way to my salvation. I told her,
No, man, forget it, let's talk about the weather. I gave her nothing she could use on my behalf.

I didn't want sweetheart treatment. I was here to do time, one and a half to three, and all I wanted from the system was method and regularity. When the kitchen caught fire I was disappointed. I took it personally. I didn't understand how a well-trained staff could allow this to happen. When three kids went out the gate in the rear of a bakery truck, fifteen-year-olds, junior Alley Boys as the Alhambras were sometimes called, I thought it was a tremendous, what, a dereliction, a collapse, bunched in the back of a Silvercup truck—I was shocked at the level of neglect.

In the gym that day we played half-court with our customary combat skills, hacking the shooter, wheeling off the boards with elbows jutting, but the intensity wasn't there and the game stopped cold a couple of times so the players could talk about the escape. They cracked jokes and bent over laughing but I thought the joke was on us. We weren't worth much if the system designed to contain us kept breaking down.

All that winter I shoveled snow and read books. The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in deep snow—this was how I began to build an individual.

But before the snows came and the ground hardened they put in the golf course. Miniature golf, novelty golf. They unloaded the equipment in a field near the mess hall on a sweet and clear November day. Plywood castles and ramps. Enough junk for nine holes. Little waterwheels and bridges and whatnot. I watched it all take shape with an odd kind of disbelief. I felt tricked and betrayed. I was here on a serious charge, a homicide by whatever name, destruction of life under whatever bureaucratic label, and this was where I belonged, confined upstate, but the people who put me here were trifling with my mind.

The club was in West Hollywood, called the Troubadour, and the man walked onto the stage and unscrewed the mike from the stand and waved it over the crowd, blessing them, and maybe they felt they needed a benediction, tonight of all nights, because the President had addressed the nation about six hours earlier, four o'clock Pacific time, on a matter of the highest national urgency.

The man looked into the audience, stroking his chin, body set in a hipster slouch, and he wore a charcoal suit, continental cut, with natural shoulders and half lapels, and a dark slim knit tie, and that New York Levantine look—yes, this was the infamous sick comic, Lenny Bruce, and they waited for him to tell them how they felt.

Because the Russians had put missiles into Cuba. And President Kennedy's grim speech still formed a kind of auditory wall running through the room. Nuclear strike capability. Full retaliatory response. Such resonant and carefully crafted terms. This was an audience accustomed to a different level of dread. Out-of-work actors and musicians, screenwriters doing draft number ninety-two, there were agents with eczema, wholesome blond beach-body hookers with their vicious slithering pimps. And Lenny's wearing a little smirk, eyeing this group like he sees right to the tacky nougat center of their collective soul. Always a few literate junkies. Maybe a couple of beehived tourists who'd wandered in by mistake with their siding salesmen husbands. And there has to be one name actor with a dose of clap and another who's been reduced to doing soaps. And they all needed Lenny to help them make the transition to the total global thing that's going on out there with SAC bombers rumbling over the tarmac and Polaris subs putting to sea, like
dive dive dive,
it's dialogue from every submarine movie ever made and it's all factually happening but at the same time they find it remarkably unreal—Titans and Atlases being readied for firing.

Lenny studies them a while, letting the moment draw meaning and portent. It's not at all obvious what he's going to say until he says it, with a thrust to his lower lip and an executive timbre in his voice.

“Good evening, my fellow citizens.”

And once he says it, the remark is retroactively inevitable because this was the President's opening line of course and it gets a medium laugh but Lenny kills the bit before it begins. He's not about to do a Kennedy imitation.

He leaned back to distance himself further from the line. Smoke rose from the crowd, hanging in the beam of the baby spot, and he shifted into his own voice with its bent vowels and high nasal shadings.

“I dig it on one level. Being on the brink. It's a rush, man. You can talk all you want about living on the edge. Yeah I know, you smoke some grass on Saturday night. Making the scene. Plus you accidentally drove through Watts one night and can't stop talking about it. Made your shorthairs stand on end. Negroes in porkpie hats. No, yes, this thing here, let me tell you what the edge is. The true edge is not where you choose to live but where they situate you against your will. This event is infinitely deeper and more electrifying than anything you might elect to do with your own life. You know what this is? This is twenty-six guys from Harvard deciding our fate.”

He swiveled toward the wings and pointed at some shadow presence as a laugh bubble broke over the massed heads.

“Dig it. These are the guys from the eating clubs and the secret societies. They have fraternity handshakes so complicated it takes three full minutes to do all the moves. One missed digit you're fucked for life. Resign from the country club, forget about the stock options and the executive retreat, watch your wife disappear in a haze of secret drinking. You have to be hip to stay connected. These guys wear boxer shorts with geometric designs that contain the escape routes they've been assigned when the missiles start flying.”

Lenny was a handsome guy with dark hair and hooded eyes and he resembled a poolshark who'd graduated to deeper and sleazier schemes. His brows were set at a cosmopolitan arch that seemed to function as an open challenge to his hustler aspect—if you're dumb enough to believe my scam, that's
your
problem, shmucko.

And he said, “Picture it,” and snapped his fingers, releasing the genie from the bottle. “Twenty-six guys in Clark Kent suits getting ready to enter a luxury bunker that's located about half a mile under the White House and the faggot decorator's doing a last-minute
checklist. Let's see, peach walls, stunning. Found the chandelier in a little abbey outside Paris. None of that Statler Hilton dreck in
my
bomb shelter.”