Underworld

seconds.

She loved the little temple across the street, a top-floor facade with a set of recessed windows between the fluted columns, and does someone actually live there?

She felt good. She felt lucky for a change. She was sleeping well and saving money and seeing friends again.

'What's she reading?' someone said, talking about the woman on the ledge with the child's drinking glass and paperback book.

'Looks like detective fiction from here,' Jack said. 'Lots of moral rot. That's what people read in summer.'

He was a tall florid guy, Jack Marshall, a Broadway press agent who was on the perennial edge of dropping dead. You know these guys. They smoke and drink heavily and never sleep and have bad tickers and cough up storms of phlegm and the thrill of knowing them, Klara thought, is guessing when they'll pitch into their soup.

She wore a bandage on her finger and waited for Miles to show up with her cigarettes because he was more reliable than she was.

She grubbed one from Jack for now.

And people on the street, when did Klara begin to notice how people talked to themselves, spoke aloud, so many of them and all of a sudden, or made threats, or walked along gesturing, so that the streets were taking on a late medieval texture, which maybe meant we had to learn all over again how to live among the mad.

'You have a boo-boo, Klara.'

'You can't kiss it, so go away.'

'I don't want to kiss it. I want to lick it,' Jack said.

'Does someone live, I'm very curious about the thing across the street there.'

'Inside the little Greek temple? I think it's an office.'

'I would love to get a job there.'

'Import-export.'

'I could do either.'

'So could I. But I want to lick it,' he said.

Acey had an oval face and high forehead. Her hair had the barest cinnamon tinge. If you looked at her, if she sat across the aisle on a bus and you sneaked a glance every other stop, it was probably because of her mouth. She had a tough mouth, a smart mouth-it had a slight distortion of shape you'd probably call a sneer although the look shifted and moderated all the time and gave her smile a windfall quality, like a piece of unexpected news.

'I didn't have to leave my husband to paint,' she told Klara. 'I had to leave him because I didn't want to be with him anymore.'

'What was the problem?'

'He's a man,' Acey said.

Klara noticed, midbridge, how the younger woman checked the human action, the bike riders and runners and what they wear and who they are and the thing they develop together of a certain presentational self. Not like Chicago, Acey said, where the action near the lake is all unself-conscious sweat, people who are busting to run, to shake off the film of office and job, the abnormal pall of matter. Here the film is what they're in, the scan of crisp skyline, and she seemed ready for it, Acey did.

'And you're here now. And maybe for good. So the sense of starting over must be doubly strong.'

'I probably started over a long time ago. Unbeknownst, basically, to everyone but me.'

'You worry about the consequences?'

'Of breaking up? Had to happen. I'd worry if it hadn't.'

'What about the husband?'

'What about him?' Acey said.

'I don't know. What about him? Does he know you have women lovers?'

'He gets off on dykes. I told him. I said, James, I'll send you some action snaps, baby.'

'You're a gangster,' Klara said.

'Gangster's moll. Gang moll. That's what they called me in L.A. You know, the Blackstone paintings. Middle-class Negro groupie.'

'Very nice. They called me the Bag Lady.'

They laughed and crossed to the Brooklyn side, where Acey worked in an old warehouse not far from the bridge approach. She did not want to show her current work prematurely and they only did a tour of the space. There was a Marilyn Monroe calendar on the wall, the famous early pinup called Miss Golden Dreams, a high- angle shot of the nude body posed on a velveteen blood-red bedsheet.

'This can't be here accidentally, can it?'

'Okay, it's something I'm looking at,' Acey said.

'And thinking about.'

'Something I'm working out for myself, little by little by little.'

'Interesting. But I hear you're doing something completely different.'

'Oh yeah? What do you hear?'

And Klara swung an arm toward the far wall, where canvases stood on a low shelf or were bracketed on easels, some with strips of construction paper she'd glimpsed earlier-paper taped to unfinished work as color- mapping guides.

'I hear you're doing a Black Panther series.'

Acey did her scornful smile, slow and elaborate.

'Oh yeah? Well you know what? That's what I hear too.'

This was supposed to be a postpainterly age, Klara thought, and here was a young woman painting whole heat, a black woman who paints black men generously but not without exercising a certain critical rigor. The frontal swagger of the gangs, a culture of nearly princely hauteur but with bodings, of course, of unembellished threat, and this is what Acey examined surgically, working the details, looking for traces of the solitaire, the young man isolated from his own moody pose.

They walked back across the bridge.

'They still call you that? The Bag Lady?'

'Not so much anymore,' Klara said. 'There were a few of us then. We took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I'm still doing it, only deeper maybe.'

'It's not my thing. Maybe I don't trust the need for context. You know what I mean?'

'I guess.'

'Because I understand up to a point. You take your object out of the dusty grubby studio and stick it in a museum with white walls and classical paintings and it becomes a forceful thing in this context, it becomes a kind of argument. And what it is actually? Old factory window glass and burlap sacking. It becomes very, I don't know, philosophical.'

They reached the other side and Acey wanted to walk some more and Klara was nearly beat. They looked at old sailing ships moored off South Street. She was trying to dispel the little hurt, the small delayed disappointment of Acey's casual slighting of her work. First she delayed her reaction, then she tried to smother it.

'I was the type girl,' Acey said, 'I was always in a hurry to grow up. Now I guess I'm here, officially. This city is the ticking clock. Makes me panic but I'm ready.'

What Klara admired most was the seeming ease of address, the casually ravishing way Acey laid down paint. Saturated undercoats and beautiful flesh browns, skin strokes in every sort of unnameable shade and many grays as well, glaucous and sky smoke, because it's always winter in Chicago and the gang members belong to their terrain, to the pale brick and iced-over windows, and in this sense they could be brothers to the olive-skinned men in the frescoed gloom of some Umbrian church-Acey had the calm and somber eye of a cinquecentist.

She was talking on the phone to Esther Winship.