Underworld

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 fslat 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 I 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.