Don DeLillo - Underworld

She watched the blood slide out from the cut and noticed the creases and whorls in her finger and heard the music in the next room, it's Esther's husband Jack playing one of his old 45s, the swing-band music that drives his guests out onto the roof.

The garbage was down there, stacked in identical black plastic bags, and she walked home past a broad mound that covered a fire hydrant and part of a bus sign and she saw how everyone agreed together not to notice.

Miles Lightman showed up late for dinner on a roof uptown, carrying a box of the black cigarettes she smoked, queen-sized and extra-mild and slow-burning, and a baggie of marijuana, which he liked to call boo, a term he'd heard in some bar in Harlem maybe twenty years ago.

They were on the roof of a new building, forty stories, it loomed over the reservoir in the park and they stood a while watching runners in the night. The runners went around the reservoir in fair numbers, faintly lamplit, and Miles thought they resembled fleeing crowds in a Japanese horror film. He had a thing for fleeing crowds. He wanted to do a picture book on the subject. He collected publicity stills from obscure productions-fleeing crowds of Asiatics looking up at something awesome.

They stood on the roof and looked across the park to the silhouetted buildings named like ocean liners. The Beresford, Majestic and Eldorado. The Ansonia and San Remo.

Fleeing crowds always included a mother with a baby and a woman with bulging breasts and a man with his arms flung up to shield him from some terror in the sky.

Miles looked at the runners going around the reservoir and he came up with a name for the forty-story building that loomed over the park, so tall and massive it made its own weather, downdrafts nearly strong enough to topple people walking by.

Godzilla Towers, he thought they ought to call it.

It's women, usually, who take the lead in recovering lost careers. When you begin to hear about a writer reemergent or a painter lovingly disinterred, it's usually because women have shown extraordinary interest, even when the artist is a man. Usually the artist is a woman, but even a man-we specialize in forgotten lives, Klara said.

She was talking to Acey Greene. Acey did not need to be reclaimed, of course. She was young, smart, ambitious and so on, and interestingly sweet-mean, playing with juxtapositions as a form of ironic dialogue with herself-a device to help her confront the prospect of being famous.

Acey grew up in Chicago, where both parents were teachers, and she began to do pen-and-ink sketches, she began to do West Indian collages pretty much in the tritest manner possible, according to her own account, and had a sexual adventure with a member of the Black-stone Rangers, a very sizable street gang, and eventually packed a bag and went to Los Angeles, where she married a professor of sociology and enrolled at Cal Arts and got a divorce and found her karma as a painter.

When Klara first saw her work she told people how good it was and word reached Acey on the Coast. Eventually she followed her paintings east. She was living at the Chelsea Hotel for the time being and sharing studio space in Brooklyn somewhere.

"What about you?" she said.

"Me, I had to make a career before I could worry about losing it. That was not easy. I pay and pay."

"A family," Acey said.

"I broke up a family, yes. I went away, I came back, I took my daughter for a while. She was better off with her father and I understood that but it consumed me, being separated like that. I had a very bad time. Of course we all did. She came down to see me on weekends or whenever. He rode the subway with her and left her at the door because he didn't want to set eyes on me."

"What would it do to him?"

"And then he came and picked her up and I was not allowed to walk all the way down the stairs. I walked her down to the first floor. I was living in a ramshackle building way downtown and it was arranged and agreed that I would walk her to the first floor and let her go the rest of the way herself because he might otherwise set eyes on me. What would it do to him? Something, I don't know, catastrophic."

"But you talked on the phone."

"We talked on the phone. In monosyllables. We sounded like spies passing coded messages. It was a very hateful time. But once she was older, that stopped, the phone calls. She and I made our own arrangements/Albert was gone for good."

"And her?"

"Teresa doesn't hate me. Maybe worse. I think she hates herself. She was part of the failure somehow. Let's not talk about this."

"We'll go for a walk."

"We'll walk across the bridge. Ever do that?"

"I'm new here, lady. You forget."

Acey's best work was part of a series about the Blackstone Rangers. Chicago winters, young men in hooded sweatshirts, morose and idly violent, hunched in front of barred windows or sitting on a broken sofa in the snow, and Klara thought these pictures were utterly modern in one sense only, that the subjects seemed photographed, overtly posing or caught unaware, sometimes self-consciously aloof, a housing project massed behind them or here's a man with lidded eyes and a watch cap and one of those bloated polyester jackets and a gun with banana clip-you see how Acey belies the photographic surface by making the whole picture float ineffably on the arc of the cartridge clip.

People on the roof, Esther's guests fleeing the swing band on the record player in the apartment and Esther's husband coming out as well, Jack, because he's the kind of man who melts away if he's left alone for twenty 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."