Underworld

  In the loft Teresa said, “He listens to opera all day long. All summer until school’s back in. He wants Aunt Laura to move in with him. She’s getting, I don’t know, not senile, just a little shaky, Laura, but I think she’d rather live alone.”

  Klara could hear the drag in her daughter’s voice, the old mauled vowels, and how odd to hear these neighborhood noises so close to hand and from her own child, who seemed to exaggerate the slur, the loitering quality of the accent, a form of inflection and pronunciation her father and mother had escaped—that is the word, escaped—as if the young woman needed to go one boundary farther back, one level deeper into the life of the streets to make some point about constancy and faith.

  She’d been pulling color out of her work for years. For a while she used bitumen and house paint. She liked to mix colors in clamshells she’d brought back from Maine a dozen years ago. But there was less color to mix now. It felt right for her to pull it out.

  She walked down to the market past another new gallery, there were galleries and shops now but the cast-iron facades were safe from the wreckers, that was the main thing—the old factories where immigrants made buttons and suits, women and girls working eighteen hour days, and she bought a box of sugar in the market before she forgets and ten months go by and Teresa turns up again.

  Art in which the moment is heroic, American art, the do-it-now, the fuck-the-past—she could not follow that. She could look at it and respect it, envy it, even, in a way, but not, herself, place hand to object and make some furious now, some brilliant jack-off gesture that asserts an independence.

  She said to a friend on the phone, her friend and dealer Esther Winship, who was always ready to advise a painter or sculptor, to bully the washy artist into a sound strategy, some plan for clear action, when in fact it was Esther who needed help, Esther in her bosslady trousseau, her pearls and pinstripe suits, who was losing painters and getting squeezed by her landlord uptown and feeling sorry for herself, and she said to Esther on the phone, “Hey, look, I’ll start working again if you’ll invite me to the country.”

  “Never mind the country. I want you to take me to the Bronx.”

  “What’s in the Bronx?”

  “A kid who does graffiti. He does trains, subways, whole trains, he does every car in a subway train. I want to sign him up and show his work. But I have to find him first.”

  “How do you show his work?”

  “I’ll give him a wall,” she said.

  Klara had to admit she liked the sound of that. Maybe it was the first stage of saying, I’ll give him a building, I’ll give him a city block. That’s the way Esther wanted it to sound. You live longer and sleep better if you can say things like that. I’ll give him a train with a hundred cars.

  “Why do you need help finding him?”

  “I don’t know his name. I only know his tag. Moonman 157.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Klara said.

  “You’ve seen it. Everybody’s seen it. The kid’s a goddamn master.”

  She loved the water tanks she saw from the roofs, perched everywhere, old brown wood with tops like coolie hats. They often built the tanks right on site, the way you make a barrel, grooved staves bound with metal hoops, and of course the twin towers in the distance, a model of behemoth mass production, units that roll identically off the line and end up in your supermarket, stamped with the day’s prices.

  Miles was younger than Klara, eight or nine years maybe, and looked even younger than that, so free of responsibility, engagement with real things, that he struck her as an ever welcome and weightless state, someone who happens by, almost always late but it almost never matters kind of person.

  He was usually in jeans and lizard-skin boots and he had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose and wore his hair raked straight back and lived in a room and a half on the Upper West Side with reels of film and things from his life still packed in boxes—just things, you know, stuff you carry with you and keep because it’s a form of mind clutter that you are comfortable with.

  He worked for a movie distributor part-time and also produced documentaries, or coproduced, or made phone calls, and it was a process that carried just enough slanting light to make it renewably futile. He arranged screenings for a film society as well. And he saw everything, collected movie posters and lobby cards, could recite the filmographies of the obscurest directors because the more obscure the figure, of course, the more valuable the knowledge. This has always been a point of honor in the business.

  And this summer he was trying to put together financing for a documentary about a woman who contracted the illnesses and diseases of celebrities. Through some odd form of neurohypnosis, or whatever the term, this woman, who lived in Normal, Illinois—this made her irresistible—showed the symptoms of whatever illness Elizabeth Taylor was suffering at a particular time, or John Wayne, or Jackie Onassis, or name your star, from a fluey sort of fatigue to the skin eruptions of herpes simplex and the wasted frame of cancer.

  It was the modern stigmata. And doctors sponsored by the tabloids were studying her. And Miles wanted to title the film, if he could put it together, nice and simple—Normal Illinois.

  • • •

  Her hair fell freely to both sides of her face, more or less untended to, sort of chop-cut at the bottom and going noticeably gray at the parted top. She had eyes that were set wide and bulged slightly and her brows slanted away toward her temples. She had a shy look—not shy but private and if you’d seen her alone on a roof that summer you might have thought twice before sidling up with small talk.

  It was the summer of sheet lightning and red wine, those deep Bordeaux that resemble lion’s blood, and she stood on rooftops and terraces and wondered how all these things could have been here so long without her ever knowing.

  She loved the biplane sculpture on a roof downtown, an old mail plane maybe, full-scale, with a landing strip and lights. And the stepped pyramid atop a building on Wall Street and the machined-steel spire of the Chrysler Building and the south face of the Hotel Pierre like some scansion of rooftop Paris, only elongated many times, shot versingly skyward.

  She realized how rare it was to see what stands before you, what a novelty of basic sensation in the grinding life of the city—to look across a measured space and be undistracted by signs and streetlights and taxis and scaffolding, by your own bespattered mind, sorting the data, and by the energy that hurrying people make, lunch crowds and buses and bike messengers, all that consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan so that it becomes impossible to see across a street to the turquoise tiles of some terra-cotta facade, a winged beast carved above the lintel.

  Klara conducted dialogues with her body, reminding herself before she got out of a chair where it was she wanted to go, to the kitchen maybe for a spoon, and exactly how she would have to get there. She needed to locate her body in a situation, tell herself where she was, sometimes looking back as if she might still be sitting in the chair.

  She had a full mouth that was too bunched and puckered and also slightly askew, designed to speak asides, and her voice had tonal changes that were interesting, it had dips and hollows and husky undertows.

  Me and my friend Rochelle, who taught me how to smoke.

  She had drinks with a few people on a high roof planted with fruit trees and scarlet runner and they watched a woman jogging on a track on top of an office tower and it made them all feel happy, the jogger in day-glo sweats and the medieval turrets in the distance and the smokestacks beyond that and then the river lying silky just off Brooklyn.

  Klara had a slender neck and wore a chain with an amulet from North Africa, a charm against bad luck, which her second husband gave her, Jason, when they were divorced.

  Miles had a fancy deck of Italian cards and taught her a game called scopa. They played it late at night after a dinner somewhere and a session in her bed beneath the tall windows of her loft with the intersecting steps of the fire escapes running a deep perspective do
wn the alleys.

  He asked her about the stack of floorboards in the far corner. Floorboards, burlap, lengths of rope.

  She had a former student who gathered materials for her. She’d taught a class in sculpture for some years and one of her young men went to abandoned buildings, to boatyards, glazieries, he scoured the outer boroughs, went to garages and bowling alleys and came back once with a dozen old pillows from a condemned hotel, stained gray by how many transient heads—such sad and eerie objects to have around.

  “You don’t mind working and living under one roof?”

  “It’s one thing,” she said.

  “But don’t you have to get away from it? All this stuff in here. You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere and it’s work and you have to look at it all the time.”

  “I am lying here with someone whose own abode.”

  “I know but I don’t work there. I talk on the phone at most. That’s the actual extent of what I do workwise. We’re screening a thing you’ll want to see. Next week. I’ll call you.”

  “Good. The movies.”

  She loved to swim, she went to the Y nearly every day and stroked invisibly through the water, delivering herself to the laps, the soothing pool lengths, monotonous and restoring, like the rote recitations in early school—stiffens your sense of who you are.

  “The thing about summer is you feel you have the city to yourself.”

  “I’d like to take a few days in Sagaponack. But Esther wants me to show her the Bronx before she invites me out there.”

  At some point she realized that the card game she played with Miles, the game they played with the expensive deck of attenuated knaves and queens, figures of a certain sinister minimalism—she understood gradually that scopa was the same game she’d seen boys playing on the stoop of the building where she lived when she was married to Albert, they were Albert’s own students, some of them, Mr. Bronzini’s boys, and they played the game with an ordinary dog-eared deck, of course, and called it sweep.

  “What’s in the Bronx?” he said.

  “There’s a kid she’s looking for. Graffiti artist.”

  “Graffiti writer.”

  “Yes, well, it’s so completely everywhere, this writing.”

  “Tell me when you find him,” Miles said.

  “What for?”

  “I’ve been thinking about a film where we follow a kid day and night into the paint stores, into the train yards, into the trains.”

  “Sounds like a film they’ve already done even if they haven’t.”

  “They haven’t,” he said.

  “What happened to Normal, Illinois?”

  “We’re going ahead, pushing to get a grant. But she’s sick now.”

  “Of course she’s sick. This is what she does, isn’t it?”

  “I mean sick-sick. Independent of other sources,” he said.

  But the laps were more effective when she was busy on a project. She didn’t love swimming nearly so much when she was idle. The laps were an attachment to rigorous work, the interval that completes the octave.

  When Esther gave advice and Klara submitted to it, there should have been an element of reciprocal condescension. Because Esther was usually overbearing and Klara a little offhand and glib. But in fact she needed to hear whatever Esther had to say. Esther said a number of useless things but she needed to know someone was out there preparing a space, making time for her and uttering her name and passing on stray accolades from whatever shadowy source.

  It didn’t always help. When Klara heard praise it sounded weak and tentative to her, badly rehearsed, and when she was criticized in the press or through the intimate roundabouts of rumor and half news, she had to struggle against the feeling that they might be right, she was doing shallow and meek and dismissable work.

  “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 In
diana.

  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.