Don DeLillo - Underworld

In the loft Teresa said, "He listens to opera all day long. All summer until school's back in. He wants Aunt Laura to move in with him. She's getting, I don't know, not senile, just a little shaky, Laura, but I think she'd rather live alone."

Klara could hear the drag in her daughter's voice, the old mauled vowels, and how odd to hear these neighborhood noises so close to hand and from her own child, who seemed to exaggerate the slur, the loitering quality of the accent, a form of inflection and pronunciation her father and mother had escaped-that is the word, escaped-as if the young woman needed to go one boundary farther back, one level deeper into the life of the streets to make some point about constancy and faith.

She'd been pulling color out of her work for years. For a while she used bitumen and house paint. She liked to mix colors in clamshells she'd brought back from Maine a dozen years ago. But there was less color to mix now. It felt right for her to pull it out.

She walked down to the market past another new gallery, there were galleries and shops now but the cast-iron facades were safe from the wreckers, that was the main thing-the old factories where immigrants made buttons and suits, women and girls working eighteen-hour days, and she bought a box of sugar in the market before she forgets and ten months go by and Teresa turns up again.

Art in which the moment is heroic, American art, the do-it-now, the fuck-the-past-she could not follow that. She could look at it and respect it, envy it, even, in a way, but not, herself, place hand to object and make some furious now, some brilliant jack-off gesture that asserts an independence.

She said to a friend on the phone, her friend and dealer Esther Winship, who was always ready to advise a painter or sculptor, to bully the washy artist into a sound strategy, some plan for clear action, when in fact it was Esther who needed help, Esther in her bosslady trousseau, her pearls and pinstripe suits, who was losing painters and getting squeezed by her landlord uptown and feeling sorry for herself, and she said to Esther on the phone, "Hey, look, I'll start working again if you'll invite me to the country."

"Never mind the country I want you to take me to the Bronx."

"What's in the Bronx?"

"A kid who does graffiti. He does trains, subways, whole trains, he does every car in a subway train. I want to sign him up and show his work. But I have to find him first."

"How do you show his work?"

"I'll give him a wall," she said.

Klara had to admit she liked the sound of that. Maybe it was the first stage of saying, I'll give him a building, I'll give him a city block. That's the way Esther wanted it to sound. You live longer and sleep better if you can say things like that. I'll give him a train with a hundred cars.

"Why do you need help finding him?"

"I don't know his name. I only know his tag. Moonman 157."

"Sounds familiar," Klara said.

"ibu've seen it. Everybody's seen it. The kid's a goddamn master."

She loved the water tanks she saw from the roofs, perched everywhere, old brown wood with tops like coolie hats. They often built the tanks right on site, the way you make a barrel, grooved staves bound with metal hoops, and of course the twin towers in the distance, a model of behemoth mass production, units that roll identically off the line and end up in your supermarket, stamped with the day's prices.

Miles was younger than Klara, eight or nine years maybe, and looked even younger than that, so free of responsibility, engagement with real things, that he struck her as an ever welcome and weightless state, someone who happens by, almost always late but it almost never matters kind of person.

He was usually in jeans and lizard-skin boots and he had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose and wore his hair raked straight back and lived in a room and a half on the Upper West Side with reels of film and things from his life still packed in boxes-just things, you know, stuff you carry with you and keep because it's a form of mind clutter that you are comfortable with.

He worked for a movie distributor part-time and also produced documentaries, or coproduced, or made phone calls, and it was a process that carried just enough slanting light to make it renewably futile. He arranged screenings for a film society as well. And he saw everything, collected movie posters and lobby cards, could recite the filmographies of the obscurest directors because the more obscure the figure, of course, the more valuable the knowledge. This has always been a point of honor in the business.

And this summer he was trying to put together financing for a documentary about a woman who contracted the illnesses and diseases of celebrities. Through some odd form of neurohypnosis, or whatever the term, this woman, who lived in Normal, Illinois-this made her irresistible-showed the symptoms of whatever illness Elizabeth Taylor was suffering at a particular time, or John Wayne, or Jackie Onas-sis, or name your star, from a fluey sort of fatigue to the skin eruptions of herpes simplex and the wasted frame of cancer.

It was the modern stigmata. And doctors sponsored by the tabloids were studying her. And Miles wanted to title the film, if he could put it together, nice and simple- Normal Illinois .

Her hair fell freely to both sides of her face, more or less untended to, sort of chop-cut at the bottom and going noticeably gray at the parted top. She had eyes that were set wide and bulged slightly and her brows slanted away toward her temples. She had a shy look-not shy but private and if you'd seen her alone on a roof that summer you might have thought twice before sidling up with small talk.

It was the summer of sheet lightning and red wine, those deep Bordeaux that resemble lion's blood, and she stood on rooftops and terraces and wondered how all these things could have been here so long without her ever knowing.

She loved the biplane sculpture on a roof downtown, an old mail plane maybe, full-scale, with a landing strip 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.