Underworld

in their game stalking. Mostly I sat on the porch and worked on speeches for McHenry but I gleaned from the boys what it must be like to grow into this kind of world, how commensurate to one's expectation of what is due-the world that money makes and erect bearing and clear speech and college emblems on the beds and a sense of birthright and usable history. At dinner we talked about things, about their schools and sports, and I took pleasure in all this effortless youth, rude youth in the best sense, robust and vigorous and unfinished. I took secondary pleasure, felt myself walking in their angled strides, felt what it was like to cast a line in the sun with nothing obtaining in the world but the rub of the boat's burred wood and the early heat on my arms, and even when I felt something drawn up out of me, some cornered shape, I was able to pull it down in the table talk and lose it in the throbbing fires that burned inside the great fieldstone hearth.

I took notes and introduced myself around, walking the floor, a crowded couple of acres-cranes and grapples, hydraulic units for heavy balers and then the hauling equipment, the refuse trucks that seemed toylike for all their bulk, innocent in shiny paint, unprepared for the nasty work ahead.

I was standing by a model of a confidential shredder called the Watergate, talking to a sales rep about some technical matter, educating myself, jotting notes as we talked, and that's when I saw the woman in a row of new computer products, dressed in tense denims and carrying a shoulder bag with a satin applique-not one of us.

When she raised her head and looked my way, I knew who she was. I'd watched her walk across the lobby with her husband, a day earlier or two days or whenever it was, walking high on the balls of her feet, camera- selected in the liquid mingle of loiterers and bellmen, and now she stood looking at me dead-on, secretly amused by something.

We had coffee by the pool. It was ten in the morning and the pool man and the gardeners drifted along the edge of the conversation.

'Among the waste machines. Strange way to spend a morning, Donna.'

We'd exhanged first names only.

'Change of pace,' she said.

'From what?'

'From what. From being here to do what we're doing.'

She sat on the shady side of the table, hands flashing when she reached for her coffee, and when the umbrella edge lifted in the breeze her face caught contour and warmth.

'You're beginning to feel restricted?'

A slight twisty smile.

'You think the program's too confining?'

She was dark-haired and had a way of pursing her lips demurely to plant a curse on a remark she didn't like.

'Where's your husband?'

'Sitting around somewhere with a bloody mary.'

'How do you know he's not fucking one of the wives?'

'Or he's fucking one of the wives.'

'This is what you're here for after all.'

'Exactly,' she said.

She watched a maintenance man test a sliding door on a balcony.

'Why aren't you there while they're doing it? He's in bed with another woman and you're not allowed to watch? There must be a review board you can talk to.'

'It's a nice day. Be quiet.'

'They're all nice days.'

'What's your name again?' she said flatly, teasing out a casually Complex irony- mocking herself and me and the swimming pool and the date palms.

'Donna, I like your mouth.'

'It's my overbite.'

'Sexy.'

'So I'm told.'

'What if you and I decided? Or do you have to stick to your own kind?'

'Barry saw you watching me yesterday. I didn't see you but he did. And last night at dinner he pointed you out.'

'Does he think that you and I?'

'We decided we know who you are.You're the ice-blue Aqua Velva man.'

'And who are you?'

'We're two swing clubs getting together.'

'No, you. The mouth and eyes.'

She watched the maintenance man slide the door back and forth.

'I'm a person if you ask me questions. You want to know who I am? I'm a person if you're too inquisitive I tune you out completely.'

She kept looking into the middle distance.

'Private person who fucks strangers.'

'Where's the contradiction?' she said, smiling warmly over the spume of her cappuccino, not looking at me. 'Actually you sort of hate us, don't you?'

'Not true.'

'And I know why. Because we make it public.'

'It's business. Why shouldn't it be public?' I said. 'We're all busi-nesspeople here to make contacts, expand the range of possibility.'

'Yes, it's true, you hate us.'

These were movie scenes, slightly elliptical in tone, with the shots maybe a little offhand, slurred by incidental action. First the wordless moment in the exhibit space, where the characters trade looks amid the truck bodies. Then the poolside exchange with close-ups and pauses, the people a bit detached from their own dialogue, and a sense throughout of morning languor in the standard birdsong, in the rhyth mic motion of men with hedge clippers and the shimmer of perfect turquoise in the background.

The long lens insinuates a certain compression, a half-lurking anxiety that serves not only the moment but the day and week and age.

And now the scene in the room, my room, where she took off her jeans, mainly because they were too tight, and sat on the bed in her shirt and briefs, legs stretched toward the footboard. I pulled up a chair and sat alongside, in a posture of consultation, my hand around her ankle.

She was not so pretty in direct light, with a sad wash under the eyes and a spatter bruise on her upper thigh, like an eggplant dropped from a roof. But I liked the way she looked at me, curious, with a tinge of challenge. It made me ambitious, this look, eager to decondition the episode, make it intimate and real.

'Icbu hate the fact that it's public. You can't stand us coming out here and saying it and doing it and acting it out. We talked about this at dinner.'

'You and Barry.'

'We play a game.'

'The two of you. You and Barr'.'

'Where we study people in a restaurant. And he is really good at this? And we do their habits and secrets and favorite whatever, right down to underwear.'

'Want to tell me what I'm wearing?'

'Actually with you.'

'You didn't get that far.'

'No. Because we found there were more important things. Like why you hate us.'

I watched and listened, trying to locate the voice and manner, place her in some small industrial city, maybe, a Catholic girl growing up by the dreary riverfront, in a house that looked falling-down drunk.

'You know what I like about you? You make me aggressive, a little reckless,' I said. 'I'm having a relapse just sitting here. I'm backsliding a mile a minute.'