Underworld (52 page)

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 shown 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 doing 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.

“I was the type girl,” Acey said, “I was always in a hurry to grow up. Now I guess I'm here, officially. This city is the ticking clock. Makes me panic but I'm ready.”

What Klara admired most was the seeming ease of address, the casually ravishing way Acey laid down paint. Saturated undercoats and beautiful flesh browns, skin strokes in every sort of unnameable shade and many grays as well, glaucous and sky smoke, because it's always winter in Chicago and the gang members belong to their terrain, to the pale brick and iced-over windows, and in this sense they could be brothers to the olive-skinned men in the frescoed gloom of some Umbrian church—Acey had the calm and somber eye of a cinquecentist.

She was talking on the phone to Esther Winship.

Esther said, “Dear god why?”

“Because it's easier and quicker.”

“But I haven't been on a subway in thirty years.”

“Good. I want to feel superior.”

They took the Dyre Avenue line. The train was marked with graffiti outside and in, slapdash and depressing, Klara thought. She did not like the idea of tagging trains. It was the romance of the ego, poor kids playing out a fantasy of meretricious fame.

“I thought it would be stifling hot,” Esther said. “I thought I'd suffocate in my seat.”

She said this in a grim whisper, afraid that someone might overhear and take offense somehow. In the subway, words have a charged quality they don't carry elsewhere.

“It's called air conditioning,” Klara whispered back.

“I'm completely stunned.”

Esther liked to sound stupidly out of touch—it sealed her in a safer frame of reference.

Two stops into the Bronx their train took on passengers and another train pulled into the downtown side and Klara felt a poke in the ribs. It was Esther, thrusting an elbow to get her attention because the other train was one of his, Moonman's, every car spray-painted top to bottom
with his name and street number. And Klara had to admit this particular kid knew how to make an impact. The train came bopping into the old drab station like some blazoned jungle of wonders. The letters and numbers fairly exploded in your face and they had a relationship, they were plaited and knotted, pop-eyed cartoon humanoids, winding in and out of each other and sweaty hot and passion dancing—metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens.

Esther whispering out of her clenched jaw.

“That's him, that's him, that's him.”

That was his train all right but they never found the young man himself. They looked for the address Esther had acquired from a reporter who'd done a story on graffiti writers. Moonman had not told the guy what his real name was or where he lived—only his age, sixteen. The address came from another kid, who claimed to be in Moonman's crew, and the two women searched it out, walking across a terrain of torched buildings, whole blocks leveled by arson, and there were buildings still burning in the distance. They stopped and watched. Three or four buildings oozing lazy smoke. No sign of fire engines or anxious people grouped behind barricades. Just a few passersby, it seemed from here, routinely occupied. They watched in silence and it was hard to bridge the distance. They couldn't quite place the thing in context. It was like a newsreel of some factional war in a remote province, where generals cook the livers of their rivals and keep them in plastic baggies. A thing totally spooked by otherness.

Esther finally spoke. “This is where you used to live?”

“No. I lived about a mile north of here.”

“Still, I have to show you more respect.”

“Thank you, Esther. But it wasn't like this at the time.”

“Still, I have to make an effort to be nicer to you.”