Underworld

  The wine was not so drinkable this time. It was the shoemaker’s own wine, Guido, and this was not wine weather anyway, and Albert wanted to be more responsible. He wanted to be a dry wise soul (Her-aclitus), less slipshod and indecisive, more willing to see into the core of a complicated matter.

  He needed to take a leak and the super told him there was a utility sink he could use and gave him directions through the maze of passages.

  He went past storage rooms and empty garbage cans. Then he came out into a courtyard and saw the door the super had described and went into the next building.

  For a long time he wanted to believe that she had ambitions on his behalf. But now he wasn’t sure of this. He thought she wanted him to campaign for department head, for assistant principal, make the moves, play the game, buy a car, buy a house. And he thought these ambitions were going unfulfilled, which made her angry and distant at times. But now he wasn’t sure.

  He walked through the cellarways under rows of copper piping. He found the utility closet and peed in the sink. His childhood was back there, in the voices of his mother and father, guarded, suspicious, scared at times, and in the sissing noises they made to mark distrust of the unknown world around them.

  He heard a radio playing round the next bend and decided to follow the sound, music, sweetness, strings, his head clear and his bladder empty, the ever gregarious Albert, curious to see what sort of company he might encounter here.

  He turned the corner and stopped next to a discarded table with a missing leg.

  George Manza, George the Waiter, sat in a chair in a shabby room. There was something about him. He was not dozing or deep-thinking but there was something. He was awake but unresponsive. And there was something that kept Albert from speaking.

  He stood in the doorway watching.

  The room had a certain anonymous squalor. It was a room you could probably spend some time in without registering clearly what was in there. A strew of lost and found and miscellaneous things, and anonymous faded colors, and things that were stored here not for future use but because they had to go somewhere.

  George sat in profile, hunched a little and breathing through his nose, slow-breathing, drawing in and letting out at long intervals, a small life in every breath.

  The door was ajar and Albert watched. There was only a three-inch space between the door and the jamb, three, four inches only, but this was enough to see whatever there was to see. He didn’t know exactly what this was.

  The man directed a dead stare at the facing wall. There was something so stark about him that Albert thought he had no right to look. He hadn’t seen George in several months, or longer even, and George looked different, thinner, smaller, severe, sitting under a radio on a shelf, the music so foreign to the figure of the man that Albert felt a need to turn it off.

  But he stayed where he was in the dim passage. He was seeing something completely concealed, an unwhisperable thing under the standoff man, the taciturn man hard to befriend. He felt guilty looking into the room and guilty again moving away, backing away, but he backed away quietly and turned toward the light of a dangling bulb.

  He went down the wrong passage and into a narrower place, pipes running horizontally along the walls and a cloacal stink beginning to emerge. He walked over a grated drain where the smell was profound, a sorrowful human sewage, and it took him a while to find a door that led outside.

  Mike the Book had a flourish he did with his hand. It was broad and Roman, a flat hand moving parallel to the earth as a gesture of burial or a way of writing finis to something significant.

  That night Albert and Klara made love in the moonlight. It was sweet and easy and seemingly endless, a love so lost to time he felt they’d found a spirit-life that would protect them from human flaw, with a small fan buzzing in the corner and an aria drifting from a radio on a fire escape somewhere.

  He wasn’t sure who she was, lying next to him in the dark, but this was something they could overcome together.

  8

  * * *

  Up on the roofs, the tar beaches, they put suntan oil on their arms and legs and sat on blankets wearing shorts, the girls did, or jeans rolled to the knees, and they oiled their faces and sat listening to a portable radio until the heat was too intense to bear and then they sat a little longer.

  They sang the week’s top songs along with the radio, down the list from forty, and they got the words, the pauses, the dips and swerves, every intonation point-blank perfect, but only the songs they liked of course.

  The tar softened and fumed and the heat beat down and the green gnats stuck to their bodies and across the way the pigeon kid sent his birds into spiral flight with a bamboo pole, and waved a towel at times, and whistled like a traffic cop, and his flock mixed in midair with a rival flock from a roof three blocks away, a hundred-birded tumult and blur, and younger birds flew with the wrong flock and were captured and sometimes killed, dispatched within the rules by the rival flyer of the other roof, and after a while the girls had to leave because the sun was just too smoking hot, singing lyrics as they rolled their blankets up.

  • • •

  They took the bus out to the beach and people kept crowding on and Nick got jammed in the back with Gloria instead of Loretta. They stood hanging from the straps and every time the bus turned or stopped there was a certain amount of body contact that was unavoidable, except they could have avoided it, and Nick reacted deadpan and Gloria smiled and this was a ride that took approximately forever.

  Section 13 was the pickup section at the beach but they put their blanket down at the first available space because they were here with each other and the beach was just as crowded as the bus.

  Guys rode the shoulders of other guys and hand-fought, the riders, in shallow water.

  Blankets with radios, food, rented umbrellas, sand bodies crammed together, cardplayers, sailor hats, suntan oil.

  Loretta came out of the water and he threw her a towel, the only towel they’d brought, four people, and he watched her stand above the blanket, in a vast sand nation of blankets, the horseshoe beach stretching to a rock jetty in either direction, and he watched Loretta shake the water off her hair and finger-stick the towel in her ears.

  A guy stood on his hands before toppling into a blanket he didn’t belong to and there were looks and words and people brushing sand.

  JuJu stood up to put oil on his body.

  “Let them see you,” Gloria said.

  “The weight lifter,” Loretta said.

  “Show them your forearms, JuJu.”

  “It’s funny what you can do on a beach,” Loretta said, “which if you did it on a street corner, they’d throw stones.”

  “Flex for them, they’re watching,” Gloria said.

  An ice-cream vendor made his way among the blankets, wearing all white, his face gone pink in the high sun, and if you bought a two-stick pop you’d never get to the second half before it melted in your hand.

  Nick hit the water and went deep and felt the shatter-shock when he emerged, lungs tight and eyes salt-burned, the bracing change of worlds.

  Women removed the wet bathing suits of their children with the kids wrapped in towels and then dressed the kids, underwear and all, still in towels, like writhing magic acts in the desert.

  Loretta was facedown on the blanket, asleep, sand sticking to her back, and he rested on an elbow next to her, blowing softly on her shoulder.

  They had the rear seat of the bus to themselves on the ride back, the motor right below them, heat beating up, and they dozed on each other’s shoulders, faces sun-tight and eyes stinging slightly, tired, hungry, happy, the bus belching heat beneath them.

  He stood in the dark hallway and watched her.

  “Gloria, you’re so bad.”

  “I’m not bad. You’re bad.”

  “You’re so bad.”

  “If I’m bad, what are you?”

  “Gloria, come here, Gloria.”

  “What do you w
ant?”

  “Come here a minute.”

  “What for come here? Come here for what?”

  “You’re a cunt, Gloria.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You’re a cunt, Gloria.”

  “Say something nice, Nicky.”

  She was smiling, he wasn’t.

  “You’re so bad. You’re really bad.”

  “I’m bad? Who’s bad?”

  She was rolling her hips under his hands and smiling.

  “You’re a cunt in and out and up and down. You’re an all-over cunt through and through.”

  “Try and say something nice for a change,” she told him.

  • • •

  Nick carried the last crate of empties up through the hatchway and slid it into the side of the truck. Then he sat in the truck with Muzz the driver, who had sweat running through his shirt and eating up the colors, turning the whole shirt gray.

  “I say all right.”

  “Let’s move.”

  “I say all right. But this is ridiculous,” Muzz said.

  “Let’s go, let’s go.”

  “I got up this morning. I cun’t believe it. I said to myself.”

  “Drive, drive, I’m dying.”

  “You take your salt pills? Take your salt pills.”

  When they were stopped for a light a car nudged them from behind.

  Muzz looked into the side mirror.

  “You hit my bumpah you fuck.”

  The guy in the car said something.

  “You hit my bumpah you fuck.”

  The guy said something.

  “You trying to do?” Muzz said.

  The guy spoke into his windshield.

  “Tell him,” Nick said. “Where’d you get your license?”

  Muzz put his head out the window but did not turn toward the car behind them.

  “Where’d you get your license to drive that piece of shit?”

  The guy said something into the windshield.

  “Tell him Sears Roebuck or what?” Nick said.

  Muzz looked into the mirror, his face an inch from the glass.

  “Sears Roebuck you fuck?”

  The light changed and people began to blow their horns.

  “Get mad,” Nick told him. “Tell him you’ll ram your tire iron up his ass.”

  Muzz had his face an inch from the mirror, enunciating slowly into the glass. Sweat was running along the crease in his lower back, down into his pants. They were blowing their horns back there.

  • • •

  The school was empty now and Sister walked the halls sometimes, looking into classrooms. Others were gone, they were spending the summer at the motherhouse or visiting relatives somewhere or doing doctoral studies on some campus, sharing pathways under the shade trees with atheists and pinks.

  Sometimes it was hard, with the silent classrooms and the halls so lifeless, for Sister Edgar to know who she was. There were a couple of other nuns, they came and went, and there was the Filipino janitor, Miguel, who scrubbed the hall floors even when they were untrod upon for days, a practice Sister admired of course, because you could never clean a thing so infinitesimally that it didn’t need to be cleaned again the instant you were done.

  Alone in her room she wore a plain shift and read “The Raven.” She read it many times, memorizing the lines. She wanted to recite the poem to her class when school reopened. Her namesake poet, yes, and the dark croaking poem that made her feel Edgarish again, contoured, shaped, bevoiced, in the absence of her boys and girls.

  Her fan mags were stacked in the closet. There was a picture of Jesus propped on the candlestand. A small mirror used to hang above the washbasin but she took it down because it disconcerted Sister to see herself unveiled. Hair, neck, shoulders, full face—these were things she’d left behind to enter sisterhood. The shock of the body, revealed. The subsistence individual, with cropped hair and bony shoulders. This was a sight to guard against, starker, even, than the empty classrooms of summer.

  She memorized the lines and worked the rhythms and repetitions. She paced the floor, organizing a system of gesture and inflection. The sixth grade was hers and she wanted to scare the kids a little. She was their nun for the year, drilling them in eight subjects. A drawing teacher came every two weeks and a music teacher likewise, with a pitch pipe and a fruity perfume. All the rest was Sister.

  She even gave them marks in Health, based on days absent and late, and times requesting trips to the lavatory, and amount of dirt and grime stuck under their fingernails and squeezed into the creases of their palms.

  And she wanted to teach them fear. This was the secret heart of her curriculum and it would begin with the poem, with omen, loneliness and death, and she would make them shake in their back-to-school shoes.

  She paced the floor and walked the empty halls and memorized the lines. Soon they’d come back, uniforms blue and white, notebooks crisp, fountain pens filled, schoolbags swinging from their soft fists, and she would arrange them along the walls in size places and she would seat them in alphabetical order and she would inspect their hands and nails and crack their palms with a ruler when it was called for.

  They would know who she was and so would she.

  And she would recite the poem to them, crooking her finger at their hearts. She would become the poem and the raven both, the roman-nosed bird, gliding out of the timeless sky and diving down upon them.

  These summer nights the women on the upper floors could not wash the dishes because the johnny pump was on, kids dancing under the fanned spray, and there wasn’t enough pressure to move water through the building.

  All movement toward the air, the night, heads sticking out windows, women eating peaches in darkened windows, laughing in the dark up there, women waiting to feel a breeze and men in undershirts down on the stoops with radios going, a ball game from breezy Cleveland.

  Kids running, sweating, shirtless, a kid with a boxful of bared ribs down the front of his body. Other kids on line at the rear of the Bungalow Bar truck, fudgsicles and orange pops, and there is the kid with ink on his tongue, there is always a kid with an inky tongue. Waterman’s blue-black. What does he do, drink the stuff?

  Women on the porch of a private house, sitting in the dark talking.

  Older kids on rented bikes, ten cents an hour, and girls riding with some of the boys, sitting sidewise on the crossbar, and the boys riding into the gushing water, making everybody happy, the stoop sitters, the window heads, the shrieking girls on the bikes and the smaller kids who separate to let the bikes pass, all happy together, and finally the kid in his brother’s bathing suit who holds a coffee can at the nozzle to flare the stream of water, geyser it high and wide.

  Later the young men will stand on corners smoking as the lights go out, bullshitting the night away, and people will sleep on fire escapes, here and there, because there’s a breath of air outside. Finalmente. A little bitty breeze that changes everything.

  Nick sat reading a magazine with the hollow knocks volleying back from the far wall, across eight lanes.

  “Nicky, what’s the word?”

  “Hey Jack. You’re a married man, I hear.”

  “Went and did it. No regrets.”

  “She lets you out to bowl?”

  “Only to bowl,” Jack said.

  Lonzo was crouched down there at the end of the alley, about the only black person you could see, regular, in a radius of five or six blocks. He was an ageless man, hard to tell if he was twenty-five or forty-five, and he worked setting up pins, just about every night, soft-footed, fine-featured and slightly out of tune. A little stunat’, Lonzo, and they were careful not to treat him badly, the regulars at the alley, because he wore the same clothes for many days and nights and seemed to have no regular place to sleep and carried a whiskey-stink sometimes, soft-footing past the counter on his way to the lanes.

  JuJu came in and sat next to Nick.

  “What’s the word?”

  “You
r turn’s coming,” Nick said. “I see you married with three kids. Getting paunchy and going bald.”

  “Come on, we bowl a few lines.”

  “Forget about it. Not my sport. She’ll let you out to bowl once a week.”

  “People get married and have kids. This is not normal?”

  “Bowling, to me, it’s like lifting weights.”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “It’s something I rather be bad at it than good at it.”

  “But do me this one little favor.”

  “Because being good at it means there’s something wrong with you.

  “Forget I mentioned it, all right?”

  “I rather die the death of a thousand cuts.”

  “Everytime you see a Charlie Chan movie. Which, come to think of it, don’t you owe me five bucks from the last time we bowled?”

  “It’s a brouch,” Nick told him.

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m not trying to win. Because winning insults my dignity. Beat me in pool I’ll pay you the five dollars. Otherwise u’gazz’. I’m pulling a brouch.”

  The regulars taunted each other constantly and said things to the girls who showed up now and then and they always looked a little narrow at strangers walking in. But they were careful to be patient with ageless Lonzo even when he was slow or clumsy setting up the pins, a birdlike figure hunched aloft down there at the end of the lanes, white-eyed in the spatter of flying wood.

  JuJu found someone to bowl with and after a while Nick put down the magazine and left.

  “Hey. Be good okay?”

  “Be good, Jack.”

  “Be good.”

  “Be good,” Nick said.

  It was dark and quiet now and he went up the narrow street toward his building but then swung into a gateway on an impulse and went down the steps and into the yards.

  There was no light in the outer passage and he felt along the walls for the door that led inside. He smelled wet stone where the super had hosed the floors. He went inside and walked past the furnace room to the door at the end of the passage.

  He still felt uneasy about the basement room, about the needle and strap and spoon, but it was passing little by little into faded time, half lost in the weave of a thousand things.