Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  The noise broke over them and washed past, nearly taking them with it, and Janet was looking at him. Her mouth made a small smooth lonesome oval.

  Matt was intently absorbing the news. He was sorting through. He was looking toward the mountains, ready to be happy. Then he saw the twin glint just before they disappeared, a pair of F-4 Phantoms in silver skin reaching the top of their arc before leveling off—just thought they’d skim the desert on a quiet morning.

  He was happy, hearing the echo carom off the ranges now, a remnant thunder that cross-called from the Little Ajo Mountains to the Growler Mountains to the Granites and the Mohawks and out into the towns and truck stops. Yes, he loved the way power rises out of self-caressing secrecy to become a roar in the sky. He imagined the sound waves passing over the land and lapping forward in time, over weeks and months, cross-country, eventually becoming the gentlest sort of rockabye rhyme in a small safe room where a mother nurses a baby and a man stands with his arm over his head, a research fellow, not in fear of shattered plaster and flying glass but only to draw down the shade—the sky is going dark, and a tangy savor drifts from the kitchen, and there is music in the house.

  But it was the steroid jolt he experienced now, the gooseflesh, the prickling thrill that traveled over his body as they sat trembling in the little jeep. They were not yet ready to talk to each other. They needed a moment to collect themselves, speechless in the wake of a power and thrust snatched from nature’s own greatness, or how men bend heaven to their methods.

  5

  * * *

  First there was an empty room. Then someone appeared and began to put things on a table, to move the magazines and picture books and put out bowls and crocks and cut flowers and then to reinstate some of the picture books but only the ones that claimed a status of a certain sumptuous kind. Then a few people arrived and there was sporadic conversation, a little awkward at times, because not everyone knew everyone. Then the room slowly filled and the talk came more easily and the faces shed some layers. Klara spoke with someone in a corner, half aware that the spirit of being friendly and funny and well-met was overtaking the place, and isn’t it one of those things you never consider but might find amazing if you did, how the details of contact, the eye movement and hand waves, the smiles of recognition, the catch-up lives that propel the early dialogue—how this becomes an energy that moves among the guests like a circulating angel, inspiring stories, rumors, flirtations and misconstrued remarks, basically the makings of human history, even though people don’t drink the way they used to, so you can’t say it’s the gin that makes them happy and natural. It’s mainly the encouragement of others.

  It was the rooftop summer, the summer of sheet lightning, and she watched thunderheads go white in the gunned flash. Threat of rain, said the Weather, but it rarely rained. She waited for Miles to show up with her cigarettes and thought that being alive had never seemed such luck, although she was getting nervous about her work because it just wasn’t coming.

  In a corner of the room she talked to a man who complained about people keeping large dogs in small apartments and after guests began to leave she took the elevator to the roof and a young woman said, “I semi lost my mind”—I sem-eye lost my mind—and there was a man, a painter Klara knew, with a great-looking necktie, and she thought that keeping dogs in small apartments was one of those subjects nobody talks about and then everybody does, abruptly, it comes flowing out of doors and windows, should you or shouldn’t you, only to stop one day with a ruthless sort of suddenness, leaving the dogs undiscussed, rare Siberian breeds in studio walk-ups.

  She watched the runner on the track on top of an office tower, a woman in day-glo sweats, at sundown, with smokestacks in the distance. Three or four people stood at the ledge with drinks, watching with matched pleasure, and the jogger went around the track, alone, thirty stories up, and it was a beautiful thing to see, the woman’s lightsome stride and the great faded day that shows burningly in the glass slabs and then the power-company smokestacks down near the river, blowing gorgeous poisons.

  She walked through Times Square with Miles and he made her stop to admire a pimpmobile parked in a towaway zone outside a topless pinball parlor. The car was painted rose and mauve and the side windows were protected by iron grillwork—guy’s got an urban sense of humor. Tourists took pictures, posing each other in front of the car, taking turns snapping and posing, and there were Krishna skinheads with handbells, young and pale in ocher robes and high-top sneakers, jumping devoutly up and down.

  Acey Greene had a grandmother act she did, mostly vocal, in which she referred to Klara as child. Reprimandingly. Oh child please, don’t be such a fool.

  They were in a SoHo bar.

  “It’s impossible,” Klara said. “A woman doesn’t even think of marrying someone like Miles.”

  “Who you wouldn’t want to marry whether you thought about it or not.”

  “Give him a little credit.”

  “That’s what I give him,” Acey said.

  “No, Miles is great. But you’d have to be crazy to try something permanent or even halfway binding. Can’t be done, either from your viewpoint or his.”

  “Just the word cohabitation.”

  “That’s right.” And Klara laughed. “The word alone.”

  “He’s a little evasive would be my general, you know.”

  “He’s a little unready,” Klara said, and the more she talked about his irresponsibility, the more affection she felt for the man. “There is always a plot potential, you see.” And she laughed again. “He sees things closing in and becomes defensive and withdrawn. But it’s not an issue. There are no issues between him and me. We get along great.”

  Things flew out of her hand. A coffee mug flew right out of her hand and over the kitchen counter. She could not find the veal cutlets she’d just bought. Then she looked around for the extra key to the downstairs door. The key could only be in one of two places, there were no other possibilities, worldwide, but it wasn’t here and it wasn’t there and she stood at one end of the loft staring through the tall windows opposite and she wondered if the fire escapes, if those dark lines intersecting in depth over the back alleys could tell her something about her work.

  “You be whistling dixie, child,” said Acey in the bar.

  For a while she used house paint, radiator paint. She liked rough surfaces, flaked paint on metal, she liked puttied window frames, all the gesso textures, the gluey chalks and linseeds that get mixed and smeared, that get schmeered onto a weathered length of wood. And it took her years to understand how this was connected to her life, to the working-class grain, the pocked sidewalks, beautiful blue slate in fact, cracked and granuled at the corners, and the tar roofs, and the fire escapes of course, painted green and then black and how the flowoff of drips and trickles became elements of memory, and the aluminum paint on the whistling radiators, and the paint her father carried home to recoat the kitchen chairs, a chair upended on a newspaper page, and the spidery plash of white paint on the inked page, and the spattered page on the old linoleum.

  At Esther and Jack’s she held a glass of wine and listened to Jack talk in his friendly sandpaper voice. She liked his voice and she liked his jokes. Old ruddy grayhair Jack, somehow still alive, waving his cigarette and ever on the verge of forgetting your name. Jack was greatly given to robust jokes that Esther hated and Klara kind of liked, the kind of joke you’re supposed to like in spite of yourself, outdated stories with stupid stereotypes and a range of dialects, but sly in the manner in which they welcome the listener’s complicity—Jack told jokes in which nothing ever changes.

  At some point she realized she was putting down paint mainly to take it off, scrape it with a kitchen tool—she liked the veiny residue.

  And her radius of endeavor, her smallish ambition, what she saw as a clustering in her work, a familial thing, determinedly modest. She was only now beginning to wonder if she wanted to ensure herself a life unlaureled, like her father�
��s.

  Albert used to tell her in his slightly didactic way that the Italians of his experience, his Harlem and Bronx upbringing, his Calabrian heritage, tended to be wary of certain kinds of accomplishment, as immigrants, people who needed protection against the cold hand of the culture, who needed sons and daughters and sisters and others because who else could they trust with their broken English, their ten thousand uprooted tales, and he came home one day, the thirteen-year-old son, and saw his parents huddled on the sofa in one of those dolorous southern states of theirs, his mother’s eyes dark-pocketed, drained by betrayal, and his father helpless and bent, a forty-year-old man who could double his age, in an eyeblink, through membership in some cooperative of sorrow, and they were looking at Albert’s report card, just mailed from school, and he thought he’d failed everything, flunked out, been expelled, D’s at best and funereal F’s, but it was just the reverse, wasn’t it, a row of A’s with little gold stars stuck to the margins of the card, and young Bronzini eventually understood the nature of their distress, that they didn’t want to lose him, the shopkeeper and the shopkeeper’s wife, to the large bright world that began at some floating point only blocks away.

  Klara did not see herself sharing this state of mind even remotely, until now, sitting alone in the loft, knowing how guarded she was about certain accomplishments, not other people’s but her own—how distrustful and slightly shamed. She needed to be loyal to the past, even if this meant, most of all if this meant incorporating her father’s disappointments, merging herself with the many little failures he amassed like faded keepsakes. She thought of his View-Master reels of the Grand Canyon and the great West, the unreachable spaces he clicked into place on his stereoscope, and she recalled so clearly the image of the Hopi scout posed on the edge of some rimrock, and whatever it was out there in the 3-D distance, the Painted Desert or Zion Park, and how her own smallness, her unnoticeability was precisely the destiny she’d assigned herself.

  Acey was drinking tequila and Klara took her usual humdrum ration of white wine because she liked white in the afternoon on the days when she had a glass before six or so and red with dinner, and a dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

  “What are you doing that I should know about, workwise?” Acey said.

  “I’m going to Sagaponack to hide out.”

  “Hide out. You don’t hide out there. You hide out here.”

  “Depends on what you’re hiding from.”

  “Start working. Just start working. What are you sitting here for?” Acey said. “You ain’t making history looking at me.”

  It was so humid you had to put your shoulder to the door or it would not close. She heard those shots on a terrace somewhere and then she saw the striped awning, Cinzano, and knew the sound was only canvas snapping in the wind.

  Klara talked about her early days painting, trying to paint, and how it was small-scale hell in a number of ways but was beginning, now, to seem late bohemian and sort of pastel-edged until she made herself remember more rigorously.

  “Men treated us, male painters, let’s face it, the big names, as if we were dumb little would-be artists. Students forever, you know, in kneesocks. At best,” she said. “And speaking of work.”

  “What?”

  “I gave you some public praise the other day. I was talking to a woman doing a piece on younger artists. I told her who to watch. And in return.”

  “And that’s not the first time and I want you to know it means a lot.”

  “Shut up. In return,” Klara said, “you’re required to give me a verbal preview because if I’m going to sit here and be envious of someone who’s working, at least you can tell me what you’re doing.”

  Acey’s mouth did its sneery lift and curl. She looked at Klara and finished her drink and issued a kind of scorched sigh.

  “Okay. You remember the Marilyn Monroe calendar you saw in my studio.”

  “Sure.”

  “And you know how it is when you’re starting on a project, how you sometimes have to start with a series of misunderstandings.”

  “I always start that way.”

  “I thought and worked and sketched and did small oils and large charcoals and finally I realized. It’s not Marilyn I want, it’s fake Marilyn. I wanted a packaged look. I didn’t want Monroe, I wanted Mansfield. All bloated lips and total boobs. I mean it was so obvious and it took me fucking forever.”

  “Have I ever seen a Jayne Mansfield movie?”

  “Nobody has. Doesn’t matter. She was uncontainable in a movie,” Acey said. “And there were all the other Marilyns. On the one hand you can never have too many Marilyns. On the other hand the minute Marilyn died, all the other sexpots died with her. They were like philosophically banned from existing. Jayne outlived Marilyn by only five years and for about four and a half of those years she was bummed-out, washed-up, beat up by husband number whatever-he-was and there was nothing left but exploitation movies and heavy drinking.”

  “You’re crossing over. White women,” Klara said.

  “Jayne was a white whale. I had to shake off a lot of higher-minded shit before I got to where I am with this work. And I’m doing some things with color I want your opinion of.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Because you’re the one I trust.”

  “Paying phony compliments is hard work,” Klara said. “That’s why I don’t do it.”

  It was the summer of Nixon waving on TV, clutching Ike’s wrist in the fifties clips, or the hand-jerk over the head, sudden and neurologically odd, or the final wave from the helicopter on the lawn, arms shooting out, fingers shaping a sad pair of V’s, or the clips of the late sixties that showed his arms wantonly flung in the winged gesture of victory, of resentful writhing triumph—here I am, you bastards, still alive and kicking.

  Miles talked her into going to Bloomingdale’s to help him buy a gift for his mother because she’d be thrilled and slightly shamed, his mother would, wrapped in happy chagrin, outside Toledo, to own a thing from Bloomingdale’s. They went through a vast area of reflecting surfaces and little knobby bottles and the cling of a hundred teeming essences and Klara finally found something, a batik blouse and vaguely Persian slippers, and they were headed out through the menswear area, touches of autumn decor and many tables and displays, racks of field coats and fleece liners, and Miles said, “Wait.”

  What is it, she wondered, and he put a hand to her arm—wait, look, do not speak. Then she saw what he meant. Eight or nine boys, black kids moving among the suits and knit sweaters, maybe a dozen now, adolescents mostly but some no older than ten. Then she saw a guard coming from the perimeter, summoned by walkie-talkie, and the younger kids were trying to go unnoticed, among the mirrored surfaces, somewhat comically, their eyeballs doing surreptitious scans, and they must have felt the pressure by now, the full weight of observation. One of them grabbed a jacket, half hurried, and one of them said something and they all moved now, converging on one display. They grabbed and ran, jackets flying off hangers and hangers bouncing on the floor, and they grabbed what they could, two-three jackets, some of them, or only one, or two kids snatching the same jacket, and ran for different exits. There were two guards coming fast and another semicrouched by the main door. The customers stood motionless and alert, fixed in neutral zones, and one kid was pinned by a guard and Klara had a sense of half a dozen others scatter-running through the store, weaving and shying off, all the jacket arms flapping.

  And Miles said, “Leather,” in a voice that rang with broadest joy.

  He said, “They take the subway down to Fifty-ninth Street and come up the stairs right into the store and they flood one area and grab what they can and then they’re outta here, man, in a dozen directions.”

  He said, “Security gets ahold of two, maybe three kids at most.”

  He said, “Notice, they didn’t take the big insulated parkas, they didn’t take the warm stuff or the hooded stuff or the down vests. Only leather. They to
ok the leather,” and his voice was musical with admiration.

  Acey leaned over her empty glass.

  “How old was he?”

  “I don’t know. Seventeen, eighteen. I don’t think I wanted to know.”

  “Seventeen’s a man.”

  “I was teaching kids to draw, part-time. And I had a baby, two or three years old, and this was awesome enough, and my husband’s mother who was bedridden, although maybe she’d died by then, and my husband of course as well.”

  “And this juvenile delinquent in his what—did they wear pegged pants? He came on to you.”

  “I don’t know who came on to whom. Only thing I know, we’re in the spare room next to where my mother-in-law just died.”

  Acey’s eyes went humorously wide and she let her mouth hang open.

  “Maybe you’re right. Seventeen’s a man,” Klara said. “Because one thing this was not. This was not a case of sexual initiation. It wasn’t at all tender. And he didn’t need instruction especially. And you’re also right about juvenile delinquent. Except the term doesn’t do justice to the thing he eventually did.”

  She looked down the cornice line of Park Avenue to the New York Central Building with its traffic arches and great clock and floodlit summit and she wasn’t sleeping well lately and someone stood next to her looking at the same thing she was looking at and she went inside to watch Nixon wave.

  Esther Winship’s apartment was lavishly understated, beiges, off-whites, great staid sofas that did not give when you sat, and expanses of dunnish rug, deep-piled, and almost no pictures, and the few pictures Esther elected to hang were self-effacing to the point of who cares, and the place had so much attitude, all tension and edge, that Jack seemed largely lost here.

  Esther said, “I haven’t given up, you know. I’ve sent agents into the field.”

  “For what?”

  “Moonman.”