Underworld (39 page)

“What do we know?” Sims said.

Choppers in formation, ten or twelve, coming at us right over the road, large assault transports lighted like manic angels, and they passed above us with a rackety blast that sucked the air out of the car and left us limp and ducking.

“That everything's connected,” Jesse said.

Not that I completely disliked my previous job. I wrote speeches mainly for corporate chairmen, ruddy white-haired guys with big ravaged noses, patriarchs of this or that industry. They tended to be sportsmen who flew in company planes to remote lakes in Canada, where they fished the last unspoiled waters of the continent. I went along on one such trip with a chairman named McHenry, a sweet and decent man in fact who owned a number of software companies that had contracts with the government. And his grandsons were at the lake, a pair of whitebrowed boys in down vests, primed for blood sport. And I stood and
looked at the old lakeside house with its cedar shakes and tall chimneys and all the shabby and splintery porch furniture of a backwoods retreat. I looked at the house and missed it on some curious level. It might have been some object of my own past, some augury in reverse, stately rustic and high-ceilinged and mothballed in the unused rooms, with thick scratchy blankets on the guest beds, bearing college emblems—the promise of things I'd never had but somehow seemed to know, collectively, at the edge of memory. And the way the boys handled their shotguns, born to it, you see—they were kids and I was a man but I think I took a measure of instruction from them, Johno and Todd, not that I joined them in their game stalking. Mostly I sat on the porch and worked on speeches for McHenry but I gleaned from the boys what it must be like to grow into this kind of world, how commensurate to one's expectation of what is due—the world that money makes and erect bearing and clear speech and college emblems on the beds and a sense of birthright and usable history. At dinner we talked about things, about their schools and sports, and I took pleasure in all this effortless youth, rude youth in the best sense, robust and vigorous and unfinished. I took secondary pleasure, felt myself walking in their angled strides, felt what it was like to cast a line in the sun with nothing obtaining in the world but the rub of the boat's burred wood and the early heat on my arms, and even when I felt something drawn up out of me, some cornered shape, I was able to pull it down in the table talk and lose it in the throbbing fires that burned inside the great fieldstone hearth.

I took notes and introduced myself around, walking the floor, a crowded couple of acres—cranes and grapples, hydraulic units for heavy balers and then the hauling equipment, the refuse trucks that seemed toylike for all their bulk, innocent in shiny paint, unprepared for the nasty work ahead.

I was standing by a model of a confidential shredder called the Watergate, talking to a sales rep about some technical matter, educating myself, jotting notes as we talked, and that's when I saw the woman in a row of new computer products, dressed in tense denims and carrying a shoulder bag with a satin appliqué—not one of us.

When she raised her head and looked my way, I knew who she was. I'd watched her walk across the lobby with her husband, a day earlier or two days or whenever it was, walking high on the balls of her feet, camera-selected in the liquid mingle of loiterers and bellmen, and now she stood looking at me dead-on, secretly amused by something.

We had coffee by the pool. It was ten in the morning and the pool man and the gardeners drifted along the edge of the conversation.

“Among the waste machines. Strange way to spend a morning, Donna.”

We'd exhanged first names only.

“Change of pace,” she said.

“From what?”

“From what. From being here to do what we're doing.”

She sat on the shady side of the table, hands flashing when she reached for her coffee, and when the umbrella edge lifted in the breeze her face caught contour and warmth.

“You're beginning to feel restricted?”

A slight twisty smile.

“You think the program's too confining?”

She was dark-haired and had a way of pursing her lips demurely to plant a curse on a remark she didn't like.

“Where's your husband?”

“Sitting around somewhere with a bloody mary.”

“How do you know he's not fucking one of the wives?”

“Or he's fucking one of the wives.”

“This is what you're here for after all.”

“Exactly,” she said.

She watched a maintenance man test a sliding door on a balcony.

“Why aren't you there while they're doing it? He's in bed with another woman and you're not allowed to watch? There must be a review board you can talk to.”

“It's a nice day. Be quiet.”

“They're all nice days.”

“What's your name again?” she said flatly, teasing out a casually complex irony—mocking herself and me and the swimming pool and the date palms.

“Donna, I like your mouth.”

“It's my overbite.”

“Sexy.”

“So I'm told.”

“What if you and I decided? Or do you have to stick to your own kind?”

“Barry saw you watching me yesterday. I didn't see you but he did. And last night at dinner he pointed you out.”

“Does he think that you and I?”

“We decided we know who you are.You're the ice-blue Aqua Velva man.”

“And who are you?”

“We're two swing clubs getting together.”

“No, you. The mouth and eyes.”

She watched the maintenance man slide the door back and forth.

“I'm a person if you ask me questions. You want to know who I am? I'm a person if you're too inquisitive I tune you out completely.”

She kept looking into the middle distance.

“Private person who fucks strangers.”

“Where's the contradiction?” she said, smiling warmly over the spume of her cappuccino, not looking at me. “Actually you sort of hate us, don't you?”

“Not true.”

“And I know why. Because we make it public.”

“It's business. Why shouldn't it be public?” I said. “We're all businesspeople here to make contacts, expand the range of possibility.”

“Yes, it's true, you hate us.”

These were movie scenes, slightly elliptical in tone, with the shots maybe a little offhand, slurred by incidental action. First the wordless moment in the exhibit space, where the characters trade looks amid the truck bodies. Then the poolside exchange with close-ups and pauses, the people a bit detached from their own dialogue, and a sense throughout of morning languor in the standard birdsong, in the rhythmic motion of men with hedge clippers and the shimmer of perfect turquoise in the background.

The long lens insinuates a certain compression, a half-lurking
anxiety that serves not only the moment but the day and week and age.

And now the scene in the room, my room, where she took off her jeans, mainly because they were too tight, and sat on the bed in her shirt and briefs, legs stretched toward the footboard. I pulled up a chair and sat alongside, in a posture of consultation, my hand around her ankle.

She was not so pretty in direct light, with a sad wash under the eyes and a spatter bruise on her upper thigh, like an eggplant dropped from a roof. But I liked the way she looked at me, curious, with a tinge of challenge. It made me ambitious, this look, eager to decondition the episode, make it intimate and real.

“You hate the fact that it's public. You can't stand us coming out here and saying it and doing it and acting it out. We talked about this at dinner.”

“You and Barry.”

“We play a game.”

“The two of you. You and Barr'.”

“Where we study people in a restaurant. And he is really good at this? And we do their habits and secrets and favorite whatever, right down to underwear.”

“Want to tell me what I'm wearing?”

“Actually with you.”

“You didn't get that far.”

“No. Because we found there were more important things. Like why you hate us.”

I watched and listened, trying to locate the voice and manner, place her in some small industrial city, maybe, a Catholic girl growing up by the dreary riverfront, in a house that looked falling-down drunk.

“You know what I like about you? You make me aggressive, a little reckless,” I said. “I'm having a relapse just sitting here. I'm backsliding a mile a minute.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means all the interesting things in my life happened young.”

“If you fuck me, it'll be a hate fuck. This what you want? This what you mean by aggressive?”

“No. But what do you want? You're in my room half undressed.”

“Maybe this is what Barry wants.”

“To put you in bed with a man who hates you?”

“We're here to stretch ourselves.”

“This is for him then.”

“Maybe.”

“Carry out a command.”

“No, share a fantasy, carry out a fantasy.”

“What does Barry do for you?”

“None of yer business, bud,” and she says this in a rural barroom twang.

I didn't want to understand her too quickly. It was possible she wasn't here for sex at all but only back matter, the kind of supplementary material that fills out an experience. We would talk a fuck but not do it and she would go back happy to her swapmeet. I looked at the bruise on her thigh. It was depressing to think she might be an agent of her husband's will, here to do the thing and run it back for him, and old Barry a sometime screenwriter, probably, who makes his money over the phone, selling real estate to retirees. When I leaned forward to kiss her, she turned away with an expert shrug, minimal, impersonal, that managed to place me on the outer brow of the perceivable.

“Maybe you're not completely wrong about me, Donna. Maybe I have a theory about the damage people do when they bring certain things into the open.”

“Go on. We're always interested in constructive criticism.”

“But I don't think you want to hear this. Too personal.”

“Oh but I do.”

“I'll probably make a fool of myself.”

“Oh make a fool. I want you to.”

She took off her watch and dropped it on the bed beside her. I felt an urge to fuck her now and risk the malaise of bleak bargain sex that might drift into the room from the boat show of the swingers. Because I didn't know how dumb I'd sound, how schoolboy earnest, or what exactly I'd be giving up with this digression into personal history.

“Go on. We want to be enlightened,” she said.

I moved into a kiss and she did not lean away this time but returned a certain tepid sip, a hint of distances we'd yet to cross.

“A long time ago, years ago, I read a book called
The Cloud of Unknowing
. Written by an anonymous mystic, I'm not sure, fourteenth century maybe, whenever the Black Death was—he was writing in the days of the Black Death. A priest gave me this book. This was the priestly part of my life. He pressed this book upon me. And I've forgotten most of this book over the years. But I know that it made me think of God as a force that withholds himself from us because this is the root of his power. I remember one sentence.”

“Neat title.”

“I remember the title and I remember one sentence.”

I stopped here, letting the words take shape and sequence, my hand around Donna's ankle, and I sensed a certain receptiveness, a thing I needed to beat back the incongruity. What the hell, I thought. Take a chance.

“The sentence appears near the beginning of the book and it made me feel I was being addressed directly by the writer, whoever he was, a poet maybe, a poet-priest, I like to imagine. ‘Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.' See, that was me, sort of incisively singled out, living in a state of pause and stocktaking, twenty years old and stupider than my fellows and desperate to find a place for myself. And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God's enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability. Maybe we can know God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can't know him through the intellect.
The Cloud
tells us this. And so I learned to respect the power of secrets. We approach God through his unmadeness. We are made, created. God is unmade. How can we attempt to know such a being? We don't know him. We don't affirm him. Instead we cherish his negation. We wretched weaklings, you see. And we try to develop a naked intent that fixes us to the idea of God.
The Cloud
recommends that we develop this intent around a single word. Even better, a single word of a single syllable. This was
very appealing to me. I became preoccupied with this search for the one word, the one syllable. It was romantic. The mystery of God was romantic. With this word I would eliminate distraction and edge closer to God's unknowable self.”

“What kind of word?”

“I searched. I thought about it. I took it seriously. I was young.”

“Love would be a word. But not for you. Too namby-pamby,” she said.

“Help would be a word. But even for a weakling, this was a little pitiful. And I thought the problem is the language, I need to change languages, find a word that is pure word, without a lifetime of connotation and shading. And I thought of the Italian word for help because this is what my father used to say when we annoyed him, my brother and I, he'd clasp his hands and wag them and roll his eyes toward heaven and he'd say,
Aiuto
. The way his own father or grandfather probably did. A word to penetrate the darkness.
Aiuto
.”