Underworld

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