Underworld (28 page)

It would have been easier to believe she deserved it. He left because she was heartless, foolish, angry, she was a bad housekeeper, a bad mother, a cold woman. But she could not invent a reliable plot for any of these excuses.

But it was the sweetest intimacy, his whispered stories of the gamblers and the police, lying in bed the two of them, his days with the garment bosses and bellhops. He made her laugh, telling these stories late at night, love nights, whispering to her afterward, lying close in bed, and even when he was flat-pocket broke he told her funny screwy stories in the night.

She began to drift into sleep now and said a Hail Mary because this is what she always did before she went to sleep. Except she wasn't always sure anymore whether the last Hail Mary she said was a Hail Mary from last night or from two minutes ago and she said this prayer and said this prayer because she mixed up the time and didn't want to go to sleep without being sure.

She had more material things than most people she knew, thanks to sons who provided. She had nicer furniture, a safer building, doctors left and right. They made her go to a gynecologist, with Janet calling and then Marian calling, women of the world hooray. But she still couldn't say, Who's better than me?

She got the Italian without the family, the boy who just showed up,
like a shadow off a wall. She didn't mind that at first. She liked it. She didn't want relatives turning up with pastry in white boxes. She liked his slimness, his lack of attachments. But then she began to see what this meant. The only thing preserved in the man's dark body was a kid in empty space, the shifty boy on the verge of using up his luck.

Then she slept and then the car music woke her up. She heard their voices again, the cupboard doors shutting.

She did not show her love. She showed it but not enough. She was not good at that. But it was partly his doing. The more she loved him, the scareder he got. He was scared in his eyes, telling funny stories in the night.

She heard them opening and shutting the cupboard doors. They'd never known where things belonged. Why should they know now? Jerks. She scratched the back of her hand, fiercely, and said another Hail Mary in case the last one she said was last night.

This is how she was brought up. Go to mass, mind your parents, marry the hardworking boy, the ordinary boy, the ham-and-egger they used to say. And the nuns used to say, You're a child of Mary and you don't have to kiss him. But he wasn't ordinary and she kissed him.

She could not bear to think that Nick might be right. Someone came and got him. This would make her Jimmy innocent. Which Nick believed from an early age. But maybe the other was worse, the truth was worse. It did not happen violent.

She slept and then woke up. She listened and knew that Nick had left and Matty had gone to bed and then she listened for noises in the street and she thought of the animals in their cages and habitats, lions near Boston Road coughing in the night.

They were showing the videotape again but Nick wasn't watching. He stood by the window in his hotel looking at cars move soundlessly on the avenue, sparse traffic in the sodium glow of the streetlamps.

He was waiting for room service to show up with his brandy.

On the trip down here the cabbie had driven left-handed all the way, a Dominican in a net shirt, his right arm extended across the seat
back. He told Nick about the murders of gypsy drivers, a regular event lately, a game of chance you play every night.

Nick did not like cats. Once he got her to say yes, the cats would have to be sent into retirement.

Either they rob you and kill you or they rob you and let you live or you take them somewhere very efficient, the man said, and either they pay you or they don't.

I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix.

Once he got her to say yes, they'd be able to spend untrammeled time remembering together.

He'd tipped the man nicely. What do you tip a man who risks his life when he answers a call? Nick was confident he'd tipped him nicely, handsomely, but not ridiculously, not in a way that would have exposed him as a stranger here.

He looked at the TV screen, where the tape was nearing the point when the driver waves, the crisp wave from the top of the steering wheel, and he waited for room service to knock on the door.

When Matty was real small and his brother used to sit on the pot and read comics to a peewee audience, neighbor kids ages four and five supposedly being minded by a grown-up somewhere near, with Matty in the doorway ready to shout out
chickie
, which was the warning word, and there's Nick on the pot reading to them from Captain Marvel or the Targeteers, his pants hanging limp from his kneecaps, and he did lively dialogue, declaimed and gestured, developed a voice for villains and for women and an airy stabbing screech for gangster cars cornering tightly in the night, scaring the kids at times with his intensity of manner, then pausing to loose a turd that would splattingly drop, that would plop into the water, the funniest sound in nature, sending a happy awe across the faces of his listeners—it was the creepiest delight of all, better than anything he might deliver from the paneled pages.

Matt walked through the neighborhood to see the old building, number 611, and wondered idly who lived in their third-floor apartment, what language spoken, how many grinding lives, but mainly he thought of nine-year-old Nicky asquat the glory seat. Who else would
read the comics to them, acting out those vibrant dramas of crime fiends and bounding heroes?

He went to see Bronzini, his old chess mentor, a sweet-natured man and not-so-willing drillmaster. Living now in a sad building with an entranceway marked by specimens of urban spoor—spray paint, piss, saliva, dapples of dark stuff that was probably blood. The elevator was not working and Matt made his way up five flights. A child's sandal on the landing. He knocked and waited. He sensed an eyeball on the other side of the peephole and he thought of his own street and house and the life of the computer suburb, those huddled enclaves off the turnpike, situated to discourage entry, and the corner store that sells eleven kinds of croissants and twenty-seven coffees, which are somehow never enough, and the life he led before this, the weapons he studied and helped perfect, the desert experience, so completely unconnected to root reality, compared to this man, he thought, on the other side of the peephole, who watches the ruin build around him on the actual planet where he was born.

The man's smile was in his eyes, a warm fizz that had an eagerness in it, a desire to know. This is what remained, his curiosity. He looked too old, too spare, his face a boxy outline, an underdrawing of the original likeness, the fleshed-out and tinted-in Bronzini. A couple of days of gray stubble surrounded his untrimmed mustache and Matt thought the man had seized upon old age, embraced it with a kind of reckless assent.

“Please, no misters. It's Albert now. And you look well. Robust, I'm surprised. I remember a matchstick. A matchstick with a fiery head.”

Evidently the man had forgotten more recent meetings. They sat at a table near the window and drank brewed tea. Bronzini lived with his sister now, who'd never married, who sat in her room and spoke in chants, he said, of reduced informational range. Such compression. But once he'd learned to be patient with her repetitions and attenuations he began to find her presence a source of enormous comfort. A rest, he said, from his own internal rant.

He said, “Sometimes I take the train downtown. There's a chess club that's also a coffeehouse, in the Village, and I play a game or two. I lose but I don't get embarrassed. Or I play down there, in the playground, with a neighbor. We share a bench. They leave us alone, the kids.”

“I don't play,” Matt said in a voice emptied of any shading.

“I used to wonder about your father. He taught you the moves but was he a serious player, I used to wonder. I didn't know him well enough to bring up the subject, any subject. He was not a man who encouraged, shall we say, inquiries.”

The eyes fizzed like carbonated water.

“He taught me quite a bit. We practiced openings and played many games. We played speed chess for fun. He called it rapid transit.”

When his father went out for cigarettes Matty was finishing first grade. He found a book of chess problems Jimmy had kept in a bureau. It was a major discovery and he worked his way through the book and sat in front of the board, squares and pieces, pushing wood. His brother used to walk into the room and knock the pieces off the board and walk out of the room without a word. Matty picked up the pieces and set them on the board exactly as positioned earlier. He'd study black's defense. His brother would walk into the room, knock the pieces off the board and walk out again.

“Your mother petitioned me. But you were a problem,” Bronzini said. “I needed help to deal with you.”

“Hard to handle.”

“Volatile, yes, and very quick to dismiss my advice. Of course you saw things I did not. You had remarkable skills and insights. It was exhilarating for me but also humbling. I lacked the deep feel of the master player.”

“As a team we were maybe a little shaky. But we managed to last a few years. We tasted a little glory, Albert. I can tell you I don't like that little boy. I don't like thinking about him.”

“I study theory now and then. I read a little in the history of the game. The personality of the game. This is a game of enormous hostility.”

“I came to hate the language,” Matt said. “You crush your opponent. It's not a question of win or lose. You crush him. You annihilate him. You strip him of dignity, manhood, womanhood, you destroy him, you expose him publicly as an inferior being. And then you gloat in his face. All the things that gave me such naked pleasure, I began to hate.”

“Because you began to lose,” Albert said.

It was true of course and Matt laughed. All that concentrated power,
the implosive life of the board, black and white, the autocratic beauty of winning, what a chestful of undisguisable pride—he defeated men, boys, the old and wise, the vigorous and quick, the bohemian café poets, friendly and smelly. But then at ten or eleven he saw his edge begin to muddy and he took some losses, suffered consistent reversals that made him sick and limp.

“The competition changed. We found better opponents for you to play.”

“And I slowed down.”

“Your development hit a wall. Not a wall. But it no longer grew exponentially.”

Matt looked out at the playground, surprised at the desolation, the basketball court potholed and empty, only one backboard still standing. Directly below him the old boccie court grown over with weeds. Everything empty. Up on the second level the softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved—he didn't think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

He said, “I've been walking around. It's a complicated thing. I find myself trying to resist the standard response.”

“You don't want to be shocked. You're reluctant to blame anyone. But you went to the old streets.”

“Yes.”

“You saw your building. The squalor around it. The empty lot with the razor wire.”

“Yes.”

“The men. Who are they, standing around doing nothing? Poor people. They're very shocking.”

“Yes, they are,” Matt said.

“And these were your streets. It's a curious rite of passage, isn't it? Visit the old places. First you wonder how you lived so uncomplainingly in such cramped circumstances. The streets are narrower, the buildings smaller than you ever remembered. It's like coming back to Lilliput. And think of the rooms. Think of the tiny bathroom, shared
by the family, by the grandparents, by the uncle who's slightly
u'pazz'
. But what else do you see? These people that you barely glance at. How can you see them clearly? You can't.”

“No, I can't.”

“And you want to ask me why I'm still here. I see your mother in the market and we talk about this. We want nothing to do with this business of mourning the old streets. We've made our choice. We complain but we don't mourn, we don't grieve. There are things here, people who show the highest human qualities, outside all notice, because who comes here to see? And I'm too rooted to leave. Speaking only for myself, I'm too rooted, too narrow. My mind is open to absolutely anything but my life is not. I don't want to adjust. I'm an old Roman stoic. But then I was always too old, too narrow. Klara used to attack me on this subject. Not attack me. Chide me, urge me to see things differently.”

“Do you talk to her at all?”

“No. Go to Arthur Avenue, Matty. Look at the shops and the people shopping and the people weighing the fish and cutting the meat. This will restore your spirits. I took your mother into the pork store the other day to show her the ceiling. Hundreds of hanging salamis, such bounty and fullness, the place teeming with smells and textures, the ceiling covered completely. I said, Rosemary, look. A gothic cathedral of pork.”

They shook hands at the door.

“You used to wear glasses, Albert.”

“I didn't absolutely need them. I needed them a little. They were part of my schoolteacher's paraphernalia. My accoutrements. Take the elevator.”

“It's not working.”

“It's not working. Then I guess you'll have to walk. But don't tarry,” Bronzini said, eyes bright. “There are dangers in the woods.”

Matt went shopping for dinner and then headed back to his mother's building, walking directly toward the western end of the zoo. Out over the trees he saw the residue of a jet contrail, the vapor losing its shape, beginning to spread and rib out, and he thought of the desert of course, the weapons range and flypaths and the way the condensation
in the sky was the only sign of human endeavor as far as he could see, a city boy out camping, taking his soul struggle to the back-country, and the mach-2 booms came skyclapping down and the vapor formed an ice trail in the heavens.