Don DeLillo - Underworld

The wobble in her voice. And the way the sound came cornering out of the side of her mouth. It was scary-seductive, it made us think she might trail into some unsteady meander. And the pauses. We waited out the pauses, watching the match tremble when she lit another cigarette.

She said, "See, we're painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we're trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there's a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct-to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. The way the nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage."

She said, "Some of the planes had markings painted on the nose. Emblems, unit insignia, some with figures, an animal mascot snarling and dripping juices from the mouth and jowls. Wonderful, actually, cartoons. Nose art, they call it. And some with women. Because it's all about luck, isn't it? The sexy woman painted on the nose is a charm against death. We may want to place this whole business in some bottom pit of nostalgia but in fact the men who flew these planes, and we are talking about high alert and distant early warning, we are talking about the edge of everything-well, I think they lived in a closed world with its particular omens and symbols and they were young and horny to boot. And one day I came across one of the oldest planes in the ranks, very weathered, with a nice piece of nose art that was faded and patchy and showed a young woman in a flouncy skirt and narrow halter and she was very tall, very blond, she had amazing legs and her hands were on her hips very sort of aspiring-pinup-you knew she didn't have quite the skill to bring it off-and her name was lettered under the painting and it was Long Tall Sally. And I thought, I like this girl because she is not amazonian or angelic or terrifically idealized. And I thought about her some more and this is what I thought. I thought even if she has to be painted over, and maybe she will be and maybe she won't, I thought we will definitely have to salvage her name. I thought we will title our work after this young woman, after the men who fixed her image to the aircraft, after the song that inspired them to do it. Which I recall only vaguely, the song. But there was a song and I thought there is probably a real and original Sally somewhere in the mix. She inspired the songwriter or the nose painter or the crew that flew the plane. Maybe she was a waitress in an airman's bar. Or somebody's hometown girl. Or somebody's first love. But this is an individual life. And I want this life to be part of our project. This luck, this sign against death. Whoever she is or was, a waitress bedraggled you know, hustling a ketchup bottle across the room, and never mind the bomb, I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we've done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I'm sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues."

I could see her on television in France, dotted down to reconverted waves. I could hear her voice distanced behind a monotone translation. People watching in every part of the country, their heads clustered in the dark. I could see her flat-screen face buzzing at the edges, her eyes like lived-out moons, half a million Klaras floating in the night.

She said, "Not long ago I saw an old photograph, a picture taken in the midsixties, and there is a woman at the edge of the picture. The picture is crowded with people and they are in the doorway, it looks like the entranceway to a grand ballroom, and they are all wearing black and white, men and women both, and they are wearing masks as well, and I looked at the picture and I realized this was the famous party, the famous event of the era, Truman Capote's Black amp; White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York in the dark days of Vietnam, and I was completely sort of out-of-body looking at this scene because it took me maybe half a minute to understand that the woman at the edge of the frame was me. Absolutely. And I'm standing next to a man who is either Truman Capote or J, Edgar Hoover, one or the other because they had heads that were shaped alike, and the mask and the angle and the shadows make it hard to tell which one it is, and I am wearing a long black sheathy dress that I simply can't believe I ever wore although there I am, it's me, and a little white feline mask. And I thought, What is it about this picture that makes it so hard for me to remember myself? I thought, I don't know who that person is. Why is she there exactly. What is she thinking about? What sort of underwear is she wearing under the stupid dress and I can swear to you that I don't know. Surrounded by famous people and powerful people, men in the administration who were running the war, and I want to paint it over, paint the photograph orange and blue and burgundy and paint the tuxedos and long dresses and paint the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel and maybe this is what I'm doing, I don't know, it's a work in perpetual progress. And let's not forget pleasure. The senses, the pleasures, the body juices. But strata blue yes. But yellow and green and geranium red. Maine geraniums that thrive on cool damp air. But magenta yes. But orange and cobalt and chartreuse."

And someone in the small crowd called out, "Better red than dead."

And we all laughed. The remark had a resonance that seemed to travel on our voices, caroming off the facing walls of the space we shared. We stood and listened to our own laughter. And we all agreed together that the evening was done.

I was walking to my car when I saw the New York taxi. Someone was getting in and when the light came on I saw it was the same young woman who'd been driving.

"Hey thanks," I said. "Back there."

"You're the Lexus."

"Lost and wandering. Good thing you came along."

"We were saying I bet he thinks this is the Texas Highway Killer getting ready to claim another victim."

"I knew you weren't the Texas Highway Killer because this isn't Texas."

"Plus I doubt if he drives a yellow cab."

"That's the other reason."

"Here to help out?" she said.

"Wish I could. But I'm due back at the office tower in the great capital city."

"Could be your last chance to make art history."

"Or whatever it is you're doing here."

"Or whatever it is we're doing here."

She sat in the driver's seat with the door open, broad-bodied, not quite the levitated sylph she'd appeared to be in the bucking dust of that earlier moment.

"This your car?"

"I volunteered it more or less," she said, "so I guess I'm stuck with a taxi, which is slightly inconvenient. But to see the look on Klara's face I'd have to say yeah it was worth it."

Broad and open like a summer waitress who says There you go when she deposits the food in front of you.

"Been here long?"

"Going on seven weeks and I'm sticking it out if it takes forever, which it actually could."

"Not homesick?"

"Now and then. But this is a one-chance thing. You been out there yet?"

"In the morning," I said.

"Go early. The heat is mean."

"I know about heat. I like heat."

"Where you from?"

I didn't tell her I lived a quiet life in an unassuming house and so forth. Instead I told her where I was spending the night and I let her tell me how to get there although I already knew.

I let her tell me about her hometown.

I asked her about the work she did at the site and she said she applied a metal primer and sometimes she hand-scraped paint and sometimes she sanded with a machine.