Underworld

I heard the dialogue from the movie at the other end of the house.

Her skin was Camay-pure and her hair was dark and straight and she usually wore it short because short was easy. Her voice was shaped, it was deep and toned, sort of vowel round and erotic, particularly over the phone or in the bedroom dark, with brandy static in it or just the slightest throaty thing of night desire.

She used to sing in a church choir in her Big Ten town, she liked to call it, but quit over some belittlement, some perceived slight-how she would hate to hear me say perceived.

I handed her the mineral water and she said something about Brian. I thought she might be trying to preempt my own Brian remark. She'd felt it coming in the routine reading of signals in the marriage sensurround.

'Did he recommend another movie where everybody ends up in a storm sewer shooting each other?'

'This is how Brian relieves the pressure of being Brian.'

I remembered a party where she stuck herself in a corner of the room with a man we both knew slightly, a university poet with long raked hair and stained teeth, laughing-he talked, she laughed, innocent enough, you say, or not innocent at all but completely acceptable, a party's a party, and if the huddle went on far too long, who is to notice but the husband? And I said to her later. This was a long time ago when the kids were small and Marian drove a car without a pencil in her hand. I said to her later, self-importantly because this was the point, to speak with exaggerated dignity, to speak to the depths of my being and make fun of myself at the same time because this is what we do at parties.

I said, I suffer from a rare condition that afflicts Mediterranean men. It's called self-respect.

I stood in the doorway watching the movie with her.

'Will Jeff be living with us forever, do you think?'

'Could happen.'

'The job at the diet ranch. Fell through?'

'I guess.'

'He didn't say?'

'I'm watching this,' she said.

'Did you do the newspapers?'

'I did the bottles. Tomorrow's bottle day. Let me watch this,' she said.

'We'll both watch it.'

'You don't know what's going on. IVe been watching for an hour and a quarter.'

'I'll catch up.'

'I don't want to sit here and explain.'

'You don't have to say a word.'

'The movie's not worth explaining,' she said.

'I'll catch up by watching.'

'But you're interfering,' she said.

'I'll be quiet and Til watch.'

'You're interfering by watching,' she said.

The remark pleased her, it had a tinge of insight, and she stretched smiling in a sort of coiled yawn, hips and legs steady, upper body bent away. I guess I knew what she meant, that another's presence screws up the steady balance, the integrated company of the box. She wanted to be alone with a bad movie and I was standing judgment.

'You work too hard,' I told her.

'I love my job. Shut up.'

'Now that I've stopped working too hard, you work too hard.'

'I'm watching this.'

'You work unnecessarily hard.'

'If he tries to kill her, I'm going to be very upset.'

'Maybe he'll kill her off camera.'

'Off camera, fine. He can use a chain saw. As long as I don't have to see it.'

I watched until my glass was empty. I went back to the kitchen and turned off the light. Then I went into the living room and looked at the peach sienna sofa. It was a new piece, a thing to look at and absorb, a thing the room would incorporate over time. It took the curse off the piano. We had a piano no one played, one of Marian's Big Ten heirlooms, an object like a mounted bearskin, oppressing all of us with its former life.

I turned off the light in the living room but first I looked at the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the peach sienna sofa and the Rajasthani wall hanging and the books on the shelves. Then I turned off the light. Then I checked the other light, the light in the back hall, to make sure it was still on in case my mother had to get up during the night.

I stood in the doorway again. Marian watched TV, body and soul. She lit another cigarette and I went into the bedroom.

I stood looking at the books on the shelves. Then I got undressed and went to bed. She came in about fifteen minutes later. I waited for her to start undressing.

'What do I detect?'

'What do you mean?' she said.

'Between you and Brian.'

'What do you mean?' she said.

'What do I detect? That's what I mean.'

'He makes me laugh,' she said finally.

'He makes his wife laugh too. But I don't detect anything between them.'

She thought about ways to reply to this. It was an amusing remark perhaps, not what I'd intended. She looked at me and walked out of the room. I heard the shower running across the hall and I realized I'd done it all wrong. I should have brought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room.

6

We laid in a case of the flavored seltzer she liked and we set her up in a quiet room, Lainie's old room, with the resilvered mirror and the big-screen TV

It wasn't long before Jeff stopped wearing the baggy shorts and turnaround cap and began to resemble himself again. His personal computer had a multimedia function that allowed him to look at a copy of the famous videotape showing a driver being shot by the Texas Highway Killer. Jeff became absorbed in these images, devising routines and programs, using filtering techniques to remove background texture. He was looking for lost information. He enhanced and super-slowed, trying to find some pixel in the data swarm that might provide a clue to the identity of the shooter.

The device weighed only three and a half ounces and it showed the distance I ran and the calories I burned and even the length of the strides I took-clipped to the waistband of my trunks.

I was eleven years old when he went out for cigarettes, a warm evening with men playing pinochle inside a storefront club and radio voices everywhere on the street, someone's always playing a radio, and they took him out near Orchard Beach, where the shoreline is crannied with remote inlets, and they dropped him into the lower world, his body suspended above the rockweed, in the soft organic murk. Not that I really recall the weather or the card players. There's always a radio and someone playing cards.

At home we wanted clean safe healthy garbage. We rinsed out old bottles and put them in their proper bins. We faithfully removed the crinkly paper from our cereal boxes. It was like preparing a pharaoh for his death and burial. We wanted to do the small things right.

He never committed a figure to paper. He had a head for numbers, a memory for numbers.

We fixed her up with the humidifier, the hangers, the good hard bed and the dresser that belonged to Marian when she was growing up, a handsome piece with a history behind it.

In the bronze tower I looked out at the umber hills and felt assured and well defended, safe in my office box