Don DeLillo - Underworld

Or possibly the case could be stated thus. He was totally wrong about Acey's work but maybe she wanted him to be right.

In Sagaponack she dropped her bag in the guest room and went to visit painters all over the local map. They painted in sheds, whitewashed studios and renovated potato barns and she went mostly alone, borrowing Esther's car because Esther was on the phone trying to deal with landlords and lawyers.

At dinner Jack got dizzy and lay on the sofa and the evening more or less went on around him.

She stood on the sand and watched the waves barrel up and come snugging beach ward.

She called Miles, who was leaving the next day for Normal, Illinois.

She met a sculptor with a face full of burst capillaries, English, his wife was dying, and she had a long talk with him, a completely intense conversation about the way in which their work exposed them, layer by layer, as inadequate, and they took solace one from the other, seeing how such things can be shared no matter how seemingly unique. And embraced when she left.

Esther said, " You're looking sexy lately, you know that?"

"Says who?"

"Old Jack."

Klara typically grew tired of old Jack and then took his side, sympathizing, saying Jack has a point and finding him funny and then finding him tiresome again, even pathetic at times, but he loved Esther in the sweetest way, spoke about it openly and didn't care who heard and told waiters and doormen how good she was in bed and Esther knew it wasn't possible to stop him and probably didn't want to. They both needed the drama of public avowals because how else could their vividness survive?

Things flew out of her hand. A glass flew out of her hand when she was standing on someone's deck. Alone in Esther's car she talked about left turn and right turn, reciting directions aloud, telling herself to stop on red.

On the phone Miles said, "People don't think it's totally, you know, bizarre that a woman can get sick every time Henry Kissinger gets sick, a thousand miles away. We the ungreat have to get our diseases any way we can."

A wind started blowing and would not stop and it carried a faint taste of summer's end and Esther said, "It's like the tramontana " and Klara thought oddly of Albert, or not so oddly-he loved the Italian words for different kinds of winds blowing off the Alps and up from the African littoral.

And she didn't really like the English sculptor's work if we're going to be honest about it, whatever their affinity of ominous doubt.

"No, seriously, you look great," Esther said.

The nights so breezy and clean. Shadows, whispers, a man's chin-line, his hair, how he holds a wineglass.

Esther said, "Jack's a baby of course. That's why he stayed on the sofa when he was feeling out of sorts the other night."

"He wanted to be with people."

"He's the biggest baby ever but if he dies on me I'll go to pieces in a tenth of a second."

She loved them both and told them when she left and meant it the way you always mean it after four blowy days and nights and good food and talk and the potato fields running clear to the dunes under high swift skies.

Such luck to be alive, she thought, and took the train back, humanly invisible in her roomy seat, where she smoked a cigarette and looked forward to being home-home alone, surrounded by all the things and textures that make you familiar, once again, to yourself.

Her father used to say, The best part of a trip is coming home.

But when did they ever go away? Only rarely, and briefly a rented bungalow on a lake, with another family because godforbid we shouldn't feel crowded, her mother said, and let's hurry back before someone steals the note we left for the milkman.

When Klara's mother found a business card in his jacket -she was taking his suit to the cleaner and found a business card with his name but no company and the name was spelled Sax and of course she asked him about it.

He told her it was for trips he might take. He wanted to have a card to give to someone he might meet on a train.

Her mother said, That's not what I'm asking. Never mind such a trip is strictly I don't want to say what.

So then what you are asking?

I'm asking the spelling. Her mother said, Sachs is not a hard name.

He said, It's not a question hard or easy.

Her mother said, What is s-a-x ? This is what? You're changing careers , this means? We have a jazz musician in the house?

He said, It's a small thing, never mind.

Her mother said, It's not so small.

He said, The names are pronounced the same. It's a small thing. I only changed the spelling so it's easy for someone to pronounce on a train who's accustomed to easy names. Which most names in business they're easy if you'll notice.

Sachs is an easy name. Her mother said, This is not a hard name unless the train you're talking about is full of people who are a little funny, let's say, in the head.

Her mother's maiden name was Soloveichik.

He said, It's not the name is easy or hard. It's what the letters say. That whole business of the c-h .

Her mother said, What whole business?

And her father made a sound that Klara would not forget. She thought about it many times in the years since he made the sound. He made a sound, a harsh guttural produced at the back of the mouth, rattling and metallic, filled with rancor, and at first she thought he had the card printed because he did not want people to make the mistake of thinking he was German and then she thought he had the card printed because he did not want people to know he was a Jew.

People on trains. Businessmen with their own cards and shaving kits and private compartments on the most important trains out of Grand Central Station.

And how curious, what a distance he sought to travel from the grating sound of that c-h with its breadth of reference, its guttural history and culture, those heavy hallway smells and accents-from this to the unknown x, mark of mister anonymous.

And the change provoked Klara's loyalty precisely because it made no practical sense, because it exposed the mind spirals of a certain kind of torment.

Her father was a billing clerk in a department store. Then he was an insurance agent working on commission in the drearier reaches of the Bronx. They gave him the Negro neighborhoods and Chinese laundries and the immigrants from everywhere, just off the boat. He painted signs for a while, company names on frosted glass doors, applying gold leaf with a sable brush, a thing he did well but hated.

It's only a business card, he said. I didn't go to a judge and get my name changed. On my tombstone you can carve the regular spelling to your heart's content.

Her mother said, How come I never knew you played an instrument?

And when Klara's divorce from Albert became final, she changed her name from Bronzini back to Sachs but made a point of spelling it with an x y if only publicly in her emerging identity as an artist-it was how she signed her work.

" Yes , well, maybe it's true. Seven teen's a man," KJara said. 'And I've asked myself was the thing more important than I was willing to admit?"

"In other words did it show you a way out?"

"Did it point a way out?"

"Which you didn't want to think about at the time."

Acey didn't want another drink and Klara still had half a glass of wine and they talked away the afternoon, one of those dead summer days in a dark and empty bar.

"And he didn't seem to make too much of it himself. He was, I thought, remarkably unconfused and even-keeled was my impression. My second husband sailed a yacht but was not so even-keeled and I don't know why I'm bringing that up."

She laughed and sipped her wine.