Underworld

  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.

  Godzilla Towers, he thought they ought to call it.

  It’s women, usually, who take the lead in recovering lost careers. When you begin to hear about a writer reemergent or a painter lovingly disinterred, it’s usually because women have sho
wn extraordinary interest, even when the artist is a man. Usually the artist is a woman, but even a man—we specialize in forgotten lives, Klara said.

  She was talking to Acey Greene. Acey did not need to be reclaimed, of course. She was young, smart, ambitious and so on, and interestingly sweet-mean, playing with juxtapositions as a form of ironic dialogue with herself—a device to help her confront the prospect of being famous.

  Acey grew up in Chicago, where both parents were teachers, and she began to do pen-and-ink sketches, she began to do West Indian collages pretty much in the tritest manner possible, according to her own account, and had a sexual adventure with a member of the Black-stone Rangers, a very sizable street gang, and eventually packed a bag and went to Los Angeles, where she married a professor of sociology and enrolled at Cal Arts and got a divorce and found her karma as a painter.

  When Klara first saw her work she told people how good it was and word reached Acey on the Coast. Eventually she followed her paintings east. She was living at the Chelsea Hotel for the time being and sharing studio space in Brooklyn somewhere.

  “What about you?” she said.

  “Me, I had to make a career before I could worry about losing it. That was not easy. I pay and pay.”

  “A family,” Acey said.

  “I broke up a family, yes. I went away, I came back, I took my daughter for a while. She was better off with her father and I understood that but it consumed me, being separated like that. I had a very bad time. Of course we all did. She came down to see me on weekends or whenever. He rode the subway with her and left her at the door because he didn’t want to set eyes on me.”

  “What would it do to him?”

  “And then he came and picked her up and I was not allowed to walk all the way down the stairs. I walked her down to the first floor. I was living in a ramshackle building way downtown and it was arranged and agreed that I would walk her to the first floor and let her go the rest of the way herself because he might otherwise set eyes on me. What would it do to him? Something, I don’t know, catastrophic.”

  “But you talked on the phone.”

  “We talked on the phone. In monosyllables. We sounded like spies passing coded messages. It was a very hateful time. But once she was older, that stopped, the phone calls. She and I made our own arrangements. Albert was gone for good.”

  “And her?”

  “Teresa doesn’t hate me. Maybe worse. I think she hates herself. She was part of the failure somehow. Let’s not talk about this.”

  “We’ll go for a walk.”

  “We’ll walk across the bridge. Ever do that?”

  “I’m new here, lady. You forget.”

  Acey’s best work was part of a series about the Blackstone Rangers. Chicago winters, young men in hooded sweatshirts, morose and idly violent, hunched in front of barred windows or sitting on a broken sofa in the snow, and Klara thought these pictures were utterly modern in one sense only, that the subjects seemed photographed, overtly posing or caught unaware, sometimes self-consciously aloof, a housing project massed behind them or here’s a man with lidded eyes and a watch cap and one of those bloated polyester jackets and a gun with banana clip—you see how Acey belies the photographic surface by making the whole picture float ineffably on the arc of the cartridge clip.

  People on the roof, Esther’s guests fleeing the swing band on the record player in the apartment and Esther’s husband coming out as well, Jack, because he’s the kind of man who melts away if he’s left alone for twenty seconds.

  She loved the little temple across the street, a top-floor facade with a set of recessed windows between the fluted columns, and does someone actually live there?

  She felt good. She felt lucky for a change. She was sleeping well and saving money and seeing friends again.

  “What’s she reading?” someone said, talking about the woman on the ledge with the child’s drinking glass and paperback book.

  “Looks like detective fiction from here,” Jack said. “Lots of moral rot. That’s what people read in summer.”

  He was a tall florid guy, Jack Marshall, a Broadway press agent who was on the perennial edge of dropping dead. You know these guys. They smoke and drink heavily and never sleep and have bad tickers and cough up storms of phlegm and the thrill of knowing them, Klara thought, is guessing when they’ll pitch into their soup.

  She wore a bandage on her finger and waited for Miles to show up with her cigarettes because he was more reliable than she was.

  She grubbed one from Jack for now.

  And people on the street, when did Klara begin to notice how people talked to themselves, spoke aloud, so many of them and all of a sudden, or made threats, or walked along gesturing, so that the streets were taking on a late medieval texture, which maybe meant we had to learn all over again how to live among the mad.

  “You have a boo-boo, Klara.”

  “You can’t kiss it, so go away.”

  “I don’t want to kiss it. I want to lick it,” Jack said.

  “Does someone live, I’m very curious about the thing across the street there.”

  “Inside the little Greek temple? I think it’s an office.”

  “I would love to get a job there.”

  “Import-export.”

  “I could do either.”

  “So could I. But I want to lick it,” he said.

  Acey had an oval face and high forehead. Her hair had the barest cinnamon tinge. If you looked at her, if she sat across the aisle on a bus and you sneaked a glance every other stop, it was probably because of her mouth. She had a tough mouth, a smart mouth—it had a slight distortion of shape you’d probably call a sneer although the look shifted and moderated all the time and gave her smile a windfall quality, like a piece of unexpected news.

  “I didn’t have to leave my husband to paint,” she told Klara. “I had to leave him because I didn’t want to be with him anymore.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “He’s a man,” Acey said.

  Klara noticed, midbridge, how the younger woman checked the human action, the bike riders and runners and what they wear and who they are and the thing they develop together of a certain presentational self. Not like Chicago, Acey said, where the action near the lake is all unself-conscious sweat, people who are busting to run, to shake off the film of office and job, the abnormal pall of matter. Here the film is what they’re in, the scan of crisp skyline, and she seemed ready for it, Acey did.

  “And you’re here now. And maybe for good. So the sense of starting over must be doubly strong.”

  “I probably started over a long time ago. Unbeknownst, basically, to everyone but me.”

  “You worry about the consequences?”

  “Of breaking up? Had to happen. I’d worry if it hadn’t.”

  “What about the husband?”

  “What about him?” Acey said.

  “I don’t know. What about him? Does he know you have women lovers?”

  “He gets off on dykes. I told him. I said, James, I’ll send you some action snaps, baby.”

  “You’re a gangster,” Klara said.

  “Gangster’s moll. Gang moll. That’s what they called me in L.A. You know, the Blackstone paintings. Middle-class Negro groupie.”

  “Very nice. They called me the Bag Lady.”

  They laughed and crossed to the Brooklyn side, where Acey worked in an old warehouse not far from the bridge approach. She did not want to show her current work prematurely and they only did a tour of the space. There was a Marilyn Monroe calendar on the wall, the famous early pinup called Miss Golden Dreams, a high-angle shot of the nude body posed on a velveteen blood-red bedsheet.

  “This can’t be here accidentally, can it?”

  “Okay, it’s something I’m looking at,” Acey said.

  “And thinking about.”

  “Something I’m working out for myself, little by little by little.”

  “Interesting. But I hear you’re doi
ng something completely different.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you hear?”

  And Klara swung an arm toward the far wall, where canvases stood on a low shelf or were bracketed on easels, some with strips of construction paper she’d glimpsed earlier—paper taped to unfinished work as color-mapping guides.

  “I hear you’re doing a Black Panther series.”

  Acey did her scornful smile, slow and elaborate.

  “Oh yeah? Well you know what? That’s what I hear too.”

  This was supposed to be a postpainterly age, Klara thought, and here was a young woman painting whole heat, a black woman who paints black men generously but not without exercising a certain critical rigor. The frontal swagger of the gangs, a culture of nearly princely hauteur but with bodings, of course, of unembellished threat, and this is what Acey examined surgically, working the details, looking for traces of the solitaire, the young man isolated from his own moody pose.

  They walked back across the bridge.

  “They still call you that? The Bag Lady?”

  “Not so much anymore,” Klara said. “There were a few of us then. We took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I’m still doing it, only deeper maybe.”

  “It’s not my thing. Maybe I don’t trust the need for context. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess.”

  “Because I understand up to a point. You take your object out of the dusty grubby studio and stick it in a museum with white walls and classical paintings and it becomes a forceful thing in this context, it becomes a kind of argument. And what it is actually? Old factory window glass and burlap sacking. It becomes very, I don’t know, philosophical.”

  They reached the other side and Acey wanted to walk some more and Klara was nearly beat. They looked at old sailing ships moored off South Street. She was trying to dispel the little hurt, the small delayed disappointment of Acey’s casual slighting of her work. First she delayed her reaction, then she tried to smother it.