Underworld

  “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, seri
ously, 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.

  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 someon
e 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.