Don DeLillo - Underworld

"He drank Tanqueray martinis, Jason did. He took a bottle of Tan-queray every time we went to Maine, or a couple of bottles, I guess. We were allowed to forget the vermouth but not the gin but we didn't forget the vermouth either and I loved going up there but I used to wonder sometimes in the most detached sort of way."

"How it happened."

"How did it happen that I'd marry a man who says what he says and thinks what this man thinks?"

"And drinks martinis," Acey said.

They talked about other things. They talked about work.

"See, Marilyn hated being Marilyn. But/ayne loved it," Acey said. "She was born to be Marilyn. She lived in a pink palace that had a sizable zoo. And the way these things happen, the discount sex queen becomes famous and famous and famous and finally she's the most photographed woman in the world."

"And she died how?"

Acey lowered her head to her chest, doubling up her chin and doing a southern sheriff's voice.

"Ho-rrific car crash. Like/immah Dean."

"Are you painting the wreck?"

"No, I want a /ayne that's a living threatening presence. This is one greasy peroxide blond. Constant secretions from every quarter. This is a woman with a heavy flow. Atomic /ayne."

"Anytime you're ready to show it," Klara said, and the sun had cleared a building nearby and was beating on the street.

"You worry too much," Acey said. "You worry about the work you're not doing because you feel deeply obliged to justify. I think you're always justifying in your mind. And you also worry about the work you've done because considering what you gave up and took away, considering the damage you caused, if we tell it like it is, child, you need to convince yourself your work is good enough to justify this."

They paid the bill.

Acey put her hands on the older woman's shoulders and pressed tight, sort of macho motherly, and the bartender brought their change.

In Sagaponack Esther wore safari outfits and talked on the phone.

She said to Klara at breakfast, "Who cuts your hair? Did they arrest the mass murderer who cuts your hair?"

At someone's house Klara talked with a woman it turned out she used to know, a painter from the early days, the industrial spaces on the East River, near the ferry terminal, where Klara lived after her divorce, with a makeshift shower and no stove, fifty dollars a month, and met painters and sculptors, people who worked with found material, and the street was paved with old stone blocks, once used as ballast perhaps, and they used to gather on the roof sometimes, three or four painters and a wife or husband and a couple of kids and a dog someone was keeping for someone else, and the two women remembered how Klara never sat on the sloped part of the roof, on the tar-paper surface that sloped up to the edge because she was afraid of edges, and there was a sense of sea passage and new work, and off to the north, situated beyond the rooftop, between the rooftop and the great bridge, was the polyhedral mass of towered downtown.

The wind blew day and night and Jack said, "I'm reasonably sure that's what's-his-name over there who used to be married to the paper bag woman. It was a great scandal. She was the paper bag heiress and I sat next to her at dinner-this was, godhelp me, twenty-five years ago. Esther knows who I'm talking about. It was a major scandal. Esther, help me out here."

The thing about Jack is that he sounded drunk when he wasn't and then made beautiful and courtly sense absolutely blotto.

They were in a small basement place in Chinatown eating broad noodles that were very tasty chow fun or chow fon, the menu was spattered-a place with formica tables and spattered menus and no liquor license and Miles with a mint toothpick in his mouth.

"I've got a movie to show you that you Ye going to hate me for this movie."

"We can't be talking about Normal," she said.

"We shot about eleven hours in Normal. She was inexhaustible, this woman, because she was born that way She comes across like a law of physics but I still don't know what we've got. Could be crap."

" And in the meantime."

"Ibu're going to hate this other thing but there's no question of not seeing it because you have to see it."

He deferred to Klara in a number of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, and forced soft arguments he knew he could not win and played certain subjects toward her strength, which should have annoyed her but didn't, and was otherwise thoughtful, carrying her brand of cigarettes and talking her through this dormant period in her work, a time of small despair.

He had his cold, it was always there, voice a little woofy his eyes dimmed by medications, and after Acey's show they all went to a disco somewhere and she watched Miles and Acey dance and they looked completely great together and how curious, of course, because there was no love lost, or maybe not so curious-the lights were flashing and the music shook the walls.

It was the rooftop summer, still, and she sat in the dense shade of a grape arbor on a Chelsea roof, redwood posts and rafters and a latticework of cedar that was weathered bony gray.

A poet walked across the roof, he came from the far end of the roof over the thin slate surface.

He said, "They're writing the name Marie."

And Klara looked out through the opening at the front of the arbor, fringed with broad puckered leaves, grape leaves of whatever variety of native grape, and she saw the smoke from a skywriting plane, spelling the name Marie.

And the World Trade Center rising at the southern rim, the towers siamesed when you see them from this angle, joined at the waist by a transit crane.

What an encouragement it was that someone built this thing, lugging so much wood and soil up five narrow flights, raising the posts and joists, and vines growing out of half barrels, old whiskey barrels great-girthed and stained, and she sat with three others at the table eating nachos and drinking sangria, the others did-Klara liked her wine unmixed.

It was the summer of blue-black nights, ambiguous thunder to the east, hoarse and false, and the city grid below-a guy beheads his lover, puts the object in a box and takes it on the train to Queens.

And don't forget the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench and the small strange woman who photographed him obsessively.

Klara watched the skywriter's smoke begin to attenuate and drift. A cat walked along the ledge at the far end, a stray from the alleys and back gardens, and she didn't know why, you never know why, but her mother was part of this moment, angry about something, and a neighbor with a special shoe, a man with a high shoe, an orthopedic shoe, things, shapes, masses, memories, all the braidwork of unmatching states.

Even the poisoned air floats a woman's name.

Miles took her to the studio of a video artist he knew. Not a studio, okay, but an ordinary set of rooms packed with equipment and TV sets, where the guy lived and worked. People started arriving. There were people already there and others started arriving and there was a pungent trail in the air, the root aroma of marijuana rolled and toked communally, and a sense of some event not unlike the showing of a midnight film, only not SO loose a group-a little beady-eyed, these people, wary of their own anticipation.

" " They sat on the floor mainly. There were a few folding chairs and a sofa in one room and a number of people stood huddled in corners but most of them sat on the floor, which was covered with soda stains and unspeakable scuz. TV sets were arranged in stacks everywhere in the flat and other sets were parked individually on TV tables with copies of TV Guide and there were sets with rabbit ears and a few old mahogany consoles and every size screen from the smallest imported eyeball to the great proscenium face of the household god.