Underworld

  “We scrape and sandblast,” she said. “We have many blasting machines with guns and nine-gallon hoppers, I think they are. We have some pressure blasters, big things on wheels. Most of the planes have only one coat of paint to remove because they were painted originally with weight considerations foremost in mind. They were built to carry bombs in other words, not beautiful coats of paint. Of course this is impossible work. Working outside in heat, dust and wind. Completely impossible. Too much dust we don’t paint. A little dust we paint. We’re not looking for precision. We spray it on, grit and all. Spray it, shoot it, throw it.”

  She said, “Of course the planes have been stripped of most components that might still be useful or salable to civilian contractors. But the wheels are still there, the undercarriages, because I don’t want planes that sit flat on their bellies. So we need a great deal of elevation to work on the fuselage and the massive fin. We have people standing on ladders with twelve-foot pole guns, we have people on the stabilizers spraying away at the damn tail.”

  “But you have cooperation.”

  “We have cooperation from the military up to a point. We can paint their deactivated aircraft. They let us paint and they promise to keep the site intact, to isolate it from other uses and to maintain the integrity of the project. No other objects, not a single permanent object can be located within a mile of the finished piece. We also have foundation grants, we have congressional approval, all sorts of permits. What else? Materials donated by manufacturers, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. But we still have to scratch and steal to get many of the things we need.”

  “And the dry air of the desert this keeps the metal safe.”

  “It is dry and it is hot.”

  “It is very hot okay?”

  “Abandoned aircraft. Like the end of World War II,” Klara said. “The one difference is—two differences. The one difference is we haven’t actually fought a war this time. We have a number of postwar conditions without a war having been fought. And second we are not going to let these great machines expire in a field or get sold as scrap.”

  “You are going to paint them.”

  “We are in the process of painting them. We are saving them from the cutter’s torch. And it’s very strange let me tell you because thirty years ago when I gave up easel painting and started doing my castoffs they attacked me for it. And I don’t recall when the term first came into use but they eventually started calling me the Bag Lady, which I said funny ha-ha, figuring it would last a month. But the name trailed me for quite a long time and I was not amused anymore.”

  “Now you are here in the desert.”

  “Back to castoffs. This time it is not aerosol cans and sardine tins and shampoo caps and mattresses. I painted a mattress and some sheets. It was the end of marriage number two and I painted my bed in effect. Anyway, yes, I am now dealing with B-52 long-range bombers. I am painting airplanes that are a hundred and sixty feet long with wingspans even longer and total weight operating on full tanks maybe half a million pounds, I don’t know about empty—planes that used to carry nuclear bombs, ta-da, ta-da, out across the world.”

  “This is not a mattress.”

  “I’ll tell you what this is. This is an art project, not a peace project. This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself. The desert is central to this piece. It’s the surround. It’s the framing device. It’s the four-part horizon. This is why we insisted to the Air Force—a cleared area around the finished work.”

  “Yes it is true the landscape.”

  “Wait. I’m not finished. I want to say in this passage from small objects to very large ones, in the years it took me to find these abandoned machines, after all this I am rediscovering paint. And I am drunk on color. I am sex-crazed. I see it in my sleep. I eat it and drink it. I’m a woman going mad with color.”

  And she looked toward her audience, her workers, briefly, and they stirred and laughed.

  “But the beauty of the desert.”

  “It’s so old and strong. I think it makes us feel, makes us as a culture, any technological culture, we feel we mustn’t be overwhelmed by it. Awe and terror, you know. Unconducive”—and she waved a hand and laughed—“to industry and progress and so forth. So we use this place to test our weapons. It’s only logical of course. And it enables us to show our mastery. The desert bears the visible signs of all the detonations we set off. All the craters and warning signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried.”

  The interviewer asked a series of questions about young conceptualists working with biological and nuclear waste and then called for a short break. The spectators applauded lightly and folded into chatty clusters or went outside to watch the night sky build and thicken.

  I reached for the guy with the welcome on his chest.

  “Can you approach her now? Tell her it’s Nick Shay. From New York, tell her. Tell her if she can spare a minute,” I said. “We lived near each other in New York.”

  He was blinking at me.

  I told him my name again and watched him head for the director’s chair. He had to wait until she was unoccupied and then he spoke to her, gesturing in my direction.

  I watched her face, waiting for the name to register, for light to strike her eyes. She paused, then began to look around for me. Her face showed—what? A certain concern, a solicitude on my behalf, grave and memoried. Are you really here? Are you all right? Are you alive?

  I walked over there and grabbed a folding chair and set it down alongside her and waited for the kid to go away.

  “So this is Nick.”

  “Yes.”

  “Talk about surprises.”

  “You remember.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, and there was the fadeaway smile, the look that says how did this happen.

  “I was in Houston.”

  “You’re leading a regular life.”

  “Shave every day.”

  “Pay taxes—good.”

  “I had business in Houston. There was a magazine I took with me that had a story about your project. So I thought why not.”

  “Nick exercises, I think.”

  “Well, let’s see. I drink soy milk and run the metric mile.”

  I waited for her to smile. Then I said, “But the story didn’t say exactly where the site was located. So I flew to El Paso and rented a car and thought I would drive home to Phoenix and pay a visit along the way.”

  “And you found us.”

  “Wasn’t easy.”

  She was looking at me, openly evaluating. I wondered what she was seeing. I felt there was something I ought to explain about the intervening years. I had that half dread you feel when someone studies you after a long separation and makes you think that you’ve done badly to reach this point so altered and drawn. Unknown to yourself, you see. To reach this point so helpless against your own connivings that the truth has been obscured from you.

  “And you’re well? You look well,” she said.

  She was saying I looked well but she was staring in a certain way and there was something in her voice, you see, that made me wary. People kept interrupting to tell her things, to relay messages. Someone came by with a message about some administrative matter and she introduced us.

  “An old friend from the cherished past,” she said. “Well, cherished in memory maybe. Rough going at the time.”

  Then she turned to me again.

  “Married?”

  “Yes. Two children. College-age. Although they’re not in college.”

  “I’ve married out of impulse, out of a cozy evening with a nice wine. Not lately, though. Lately I’ve been crazy with work. It took me a long time to realize I was careful and logical about affairs, really sort of scrupulous about who and where and when, and completely reckless when it came to marriage.”

  I wanted to say, You weren’t always careful about affairs. But then it wasn’t an affair, was it? Just an occurrence, a thing in two episodes, a
few hours only, measured in hours and minutes and then ended. Of course I said nothing. I didn’t know how to handle the subject. We could not be wry, considering the difference in our ages, about growing old and deaf and hobbled, and I despaired a little, I began to think we’d already stretched the visit past bearable limits and what a mistake I’d made, coming here, because the subject was not speakable—too secret, still, even between the secret-keepers, after forty years.

  “I thought I owed us this visit. Whatever that means,” I said.

  “I know what it means. You feel a loyalty. The past brings out our patriotism, you know? We want to feel an allegiance. It’s the one undivided allegiance, to all those people and things.”

  “And it gets stronger.”

  “Sometimes I think everything I’ve done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don’t know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely—what—fictitious.”

  It was an offhand remark that didn’t begin to interest her until she got to the last word.

  “This is a long way, Nick. We’re a long way from home.”

  “The Bronx.”

  We laughed.

  “Yes. That place, that word. Rude, blunt—what else do we call it?”

  “Crunching,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s like three words they’ve crunched together.”

  “It’s like talking through broken teeth.”

  We laughed again and I felt better. It was wonderful to laugh with her. I wanted her to see me. I wanted her to know I was out of there, whatever crazy mistakes I’d made—I’d come out okay.

  “So strong and real,” she said. “And everything since then—but maybe that’s just a function of getting older. I don’t read philosophy.”

  “I read everything,” I told her.

  She looked at me with something like renewed surprise.

  “Maybe I should save this for the French,” she said. “But didn’t life take an unreal turn at some point?”

  “Well, you’re famous, Klara.”

  “No. It’s not unreal because I’m famous.” Annoyed at me. “It’s just unreal.”

  She pulled a box of Nat Shermans out of her blazer and lit one up.

  “I’m not pregnant so I can do this.”

  Another person came and went, a young woman with a schedule change, and Klara’s face went distant and tight but not at this news at all. Something else upset her, something stirred and entered and she tilted her head as if to listen.

  “Strange you should turn up now. God, how strange and awful in a way. And I didn’t make the connection until this minute. What in God’s name is wrong with me? Did I forget he died? Albert died two weeks ago. Three weeks ago. Teresa called me, our daughter.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We were not in touch, he and I. Three weeks ago. Congestive heart failure. It’s one of those illnesses, you sort of know what it means even if you don’t.”

  “Where was he living? Back there?”

  “Yes, back there,” she said. “Where else would Albert die?”

  Albert was Klara’s husband when I knew them both. He was a science teacher in my high school. Mr. Bronzini. Years after I’d seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms, and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts. Albert and Klara among them. He was the husband, she was the wife, a detail I barely thought about at the time.

  Two people leaned over Klara muttering something simultaneously and then one of the crew asked if she was ready to resume.

  She said to me, “Your brother.”

  “Living in Boston.”

  “Do you see him?”

  “No. Rarely.”

  “What about his chess?”

  “I don’t see anyone. He gave it up a long time ago.”

  “But what a pity.”

  “We couldn’t have two geniuses coming out of the same little neighborhood.”

  “Oh bullshit,” she said.

  I put a hand on her arm and felt a softening. She looked at me again, eyes protuberant, bloodshot with seeing. I found it deeply agreeable to sit there with my hand on Klara’s arm and to recall the younger woman’s turned mouth, the kind of erotic flaw that makes you want to lose yourself in the imbalance—mouth and jaw not quite aligned. But this was the limit of reflective pleasure. These were all the things I could put through the squeezer. We’d said what we were going to say and exchanged all the looks and remembered the dead and missing and now it was time for me to become a functioning adult again.

  Another person said something and I got up and moved away, feeling Klara’s hand trail along my forearm and across my palm. I found a place farther back this time, nearer the opening. It took the audience a moment to assemble and settle down.

  The interviewer crouched and spoke.

  “Maybe you can tell us why you want to do this thing.”

  “It’s a work in progress, don’t forget, changing by the day and minute. Let me try, I’ll try to circle around to an answer and maybe I’ll get there and maybe I won’t.”

  She held her right hand near her face, the cigarette tilted up, eye-high.

  “I used to spend a lot of time on the Maine coast. I was married to a yachtsman, my second husband this was, a dealer in risky securities who was about to go bust any day but didn’t know it at the time and he had a lovely ketch and we used to go up there and cruise the coastline. We sat on deck at night and the sky was beautifully clear and sometimes we saw a kind of halo moving across the star fields and we used to speculate what is this. Airliners making the North Atlantic run or UFOs you know, that was a popular subject even then. A luminous disc slowly crossing. Hazy and very high. And I thought it was too high for an airliner. And I knew that strategic bombers flew at something like fifty-five thousand feet. And I decided this is the refracted light from an object way up there, this is the circular form it takes. Because I wanted to believe that’s what we were seeing. B-52s. War scared me all right but those lights, I have to tell you those lights were a complex sensation. Those planes on permanent alert, ever present you know, sweeping the Soviet borders, and I remember sitting out there rocking lightly at anchor in some deserted cove and feeling a sense of awe, a child’s sleepy feeling of mystery and danger and beauty. I think that is power. I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people’s sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power. Because 1 respect power. Now that power is in shatters or tatters and now that those Soviet borders don’t even exist in the same way, I think we understand, we look back, we see ourselves more clearly, and them as well. Power meant something thirty, forty years ago. It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing. It was greatness, danger, terror, all those things. And it held us together, the Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things. You could measure hope and you could measure destruction. Not that I want to bring it back. It’s gone, good riddance. But the fact is.”

  And she seemed to lose her line of argument here. She paused, she realized the cigarette had burned down and the interviewer reached for it and Klara handed it over, delicately, butt-end first.

  “Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.”

  And she paused again and thought.

  “I don’t want to disarm the world,” she said. “Or 1 do want to disarm the world but I want it to be done warily and realistically and in the full knowledge of what we’re giving up. We gave up the yacht. That’s the first thing we
gave up. Now I’ve got these airplanes down out of the sky and I’ve walked and stooped and crawled from the cockpit to the tail gun armament and I’ve seen them in every kind of light and I’ve thought hard about the weapons they carried and the men who accompanied the weapons and it is awful to think about. But the bombs were not released. You see. The missiles remained in the underwing carriages, unfired. The men came back and the targets were not destroyed. You see. We all tried to think about war but I’m not sure we knew how to do this. The poets wrote long poems with dirty words and that’s about as close as we came, actually, to a thoughtful response. Because they had brought something into the world that out-imagined the mind. They didn’t even know what to call the early bomb. The thing or the gadget or something. And Oppenheimer said, It is merde. I will use the French. J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is merde. He meant something that eludes naming is automatically relegated, he is saying, to the status of shit. You can’t name it. It’s too big or evil or outside your experience. It’s also shit because it’s garbage, it’s waste material. But I’m making a whole big megillah out of this. What I really want to get at is the ordinary thing, the ordinary life behind the thing. Because that’s the heart and soul of what we’re doing here.”

  The wobble in her voice. And the way the sound came cornering out of the side of her mouth. It was scary-seductive, it made us think she might trail into some unsteady meander. And the pauses. We waited out the pauses, watching the match tremble when she lit another cigarette.

  She said, “See, we’re painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we’re trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there’s a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct—to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. The way the nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage.”