Underworld

and lights. And the stepped pyramid atop a building on Wall Street and the machined-steel spire of the Chrysler Building and the south face of the Hotel Pierre like some scansion of rooftop Paris, only elongated many times, shot versingly skyward.

She realized how rare it was to see what stands before you, what a novelty of basic sensation in the grinding life of the city-to look across a measured space and be undistracted by signs and streetlights and taxis and scaffolding, by your own bespattered mind, sorting the data, and by the energy that hurrying people make, lunch crowds and buses and bike messengers, all that consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan so that it becomes impossible to see across a street to the turquoise tiles of some terra-cotta facade, a winged beast carved above the lintel.

Klara conducted dialogues with her body, reminding herself before she got out of a chair where it was she wanted to go, to the kitchen maybe for a spoon, and exactly how she would have to get there. She needed to locate her body in a situation, tell herself where she was, sometimes looking back as if she might still be sitting in the chair.

She had a full mouth that was too bunched and puckered and also slightly askew, designed to speak asides, and her voice had tonal changes that were interesting, it had dips and hollows and husky undertows.

Me and my friend Rochelle, who taught me how to smoke.

She had drinks with a few people on a high roof planted with fruit trees and scarlet runner and they watched a woman jogging on a track on top of an office tower and it made them all feel happy, the jogger in day-glo sweats and the medieval turrets in the distance and the smokestacks beyond that and then the river lying silky just off Brooklyn.

Klara had a slender neck and wore a chain with an amulet from North Africa, a charm against bad luck, which her second husband gave her, Jason, when they were divorced.

Miles had a fancy deck of Italian cards and taught her a game called scopa. They played it late at night after a dinner somewhere and a session in her bed beneath the tall windows of her loft with the intersecting steps of the fire escapes running a deep perspective down the alleys.

He asked her about the stack of floorboards in the far corner. Floorboards, burlap, lengths of rope.

She had a former student who gathered materials for her. She'd taught a class in sculpture for some years and one of her young men went to abandoned buildings, to boatyards, glazieries, he scoured the outer boroughs, went to garages and bowling alleys and came back once with a dozen old pillows from a condemned hotel, stained gray by how many transient heads-such sad and eerie objects to have around.

'You don't mind working and living under one roof?'

'It's one thing,' she said.

'But don't you have to get away from it? All this stuff in here. You can't escape it. It's everywhere and it's work and you have to look at it all the time.'

'I am lying here with someone whose own abode.'

'I know but I don't work there. I talk on the phone at most. That's the actual extent of what I do workwise. We're screening a thing you'll want to see. Next week. I'll call you.'

'Good. The movies.'

She loved to swim, she went to the Y nearly every day and stroked invisibly through the water, delivering herself to the laps, the soothing pool lengths, monotonous and restoring, like the rote recitations in early school- stiffens your sense of who you are,

'The thing about summer is you feel you have the city to yourself.'

'I'd like to take a few days in Sagaponack. But Esther wants me to show her the Bronx before she invites me out there.'

At some point she realized that the card game she played with Miles, the game they played with the expensive deck of attenuated knaves and queens, figures of a certain sinister minimalism-she understood gradually that scopa was the same game she'd seen boys playing on the stoop of the building where she lived when she was married to Albert, they were Albert's own students, some of them, Mr. Bronzini's boys, and they played the game with an ordinary dog-eared deck, of course, and called it sweep.

'What's in the Bronx?' he said.

'There's a kid she's looking for. Graffiti artist.'

'Graffiti writer.'

'Yes, well, it's so completely everywhere, this writing.'

'Tell me when you find him,' Miles said.

'What for?'

'I've been thinking about a film where we follow a kid day and night into the paint stores, into the train yards, into the trains.'

'Sounds like a film they've already done even if they haven't.'

'They haven't,' he said.

'What happened to Normal, Illinois?'

'We're going ahead, pushing to get a grant. But she's sick now.'

'Of course she's sick. This is what she does, isn't it?'

'I mean sick-sick. Independent of other sources,' he said.

But the laps were more effective when she was busy on a project. She didn't love swimming nearly so much when she was idle. The laps were an attachment to rigorous work, the interval that completes the octave.

When Esther gave advice and Klara submitted to it, there should have been an element of reciprocal condescension. Because Esther was usually overbearing and Klara a little offhand and glib. But in fact she needed to hear whatever Esther had to say Esther said a number of useless things but she needed to know someone was out there preparing a space, making time for her and uttering her name and passing on stray accolades from whatever shadowy source.

It didn't always help. When Klara heard praise it sounded weak and tentative to her, badly rehearsed, and when she was criticized in the press or through the intimate roundabouts of rumor and half news, she had to struggle against the feeling that they might be right, she was doing shallow and meek and dismissable work.

'This is the Darwin dog-eat-dog,' Esther liked to say, said incessantly, enjoyed saying because she knew it scared people like Klara.

She loved the floorboards stacked in the corner. Streaked brown wood, sort of drenchingly dark brown like the staved towers on the rooftops, the tanks filled with water and mostly bare to the elements but sometimes enclosed in elaborate churchly structures with lancet arches and great eagled ornamentation.

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from.this.

She watched her friend Acey Greene on TV, a new friend, young and talented, interviewed late at night on a local cable outlet. She looked great-you look so great, Klara thought. Modestly afro'd, in a torn dinner jacket and red bow tie.

Miles called and she met him at an old sail-making loft downtown. The film group he belonged to showed rare things, mostly unrunnable in theaters for one reason or another, and the screenings were a floating affair- wherever Miles could secure a space.

Fifty or sixty people were here to see a Robert Frank film, Cock-sucker Blues, about the Rolling Stones on tour in America.

Klara sat in the dark and spooned yogurt from a carton. She realized she'd been seeing Mick /agger's mouth everywhere she went for some time now. Maybe it was the corporate logo of the Western world, the leer and pout that follows you down the street-she liked to watch him dance and devil-strut but found the mouth a separate object, sort of added later for effect.

She told Acey, who sat next to her, she said, 'I think everything that everybody's eaten in the last ten years has gone into that mouth.'

She loved the washed blue light of the film, a kind of crepuscular light, a tunnel light that suggested an unreliable reality-not unreliable at all in fact because you have no trouble believing what you see but a subversive