She was near the ledge talking to a woman she didn't know and at some point she understood that the building she was facing, about ten blocks uptown, an oldish tower with a massed midsection and mosaic summit, was the Fred F French Building.

And she tried to listen to the woman but could not concentrate because the name lit up her brain, one of those deep sheer flashes that take forty years to happen.

Fred F French. She had to tell the story to Miles because it was funny and screwy and she wanted to give in to it completely, get it out and work it around and pile on the details. Boy-crazy Rochelle and the horny boy in the backseat and she was in it too, of course, Klara Sachs without the x, how she walked and talked, how things were real and she was real in ways she'd forgotten how to be.

From the tall windows of her loft she saw fire escapes angled and stepped, this was her principal view, dark metal structures intersecting in depth over the back alleys, and she wondered if these lines might tell her something.

Lofts were maybe dangerous, she thought, but not for fires-spacious and pillared and memoried and grand. She had to watch for ego creeping in. She had to ask herself would you do this piece a truer way if you worked in a stunted garret somewhere. She tried to scale her work to the human figure even though it wasn't figural. She was wary of ego, hero, heights and size.

That was the stuff of rooftop eloquence. Admire but do not emulate.

Her daughter was in town and they walked around the cast-iron district and had lunch in the Village and they shopped a little bit and it was hard. It was always hard with Teresa, she had an air of deprivation and a plainness that seemed obstinate-she was overweight and willfully unpretty and seemed to be saying that daddy loves me exactly the way I am but my mother doesn't, my mother thinks I can be better and smarter and know better and smarter people.

She heard those shots and then looked up and saw the Cinzano awning and realized the fringes were flapping in the river wind.

Teresa was twenty-five but looked ageless and shapeless and the hardest part of the visit for Klara was sitting in the loft talking, or waiting out the silences, or finding out her daughter took sugar in her tea and not having sugar in the house.

"You should visit daddy," Teresa said.

And this is spoken as a provocation, a form of censure that has nothing to do with a train ride to the Bronx.

"That's not a good idea. Trust me."

"I can't believe you live in the same city and you never once."

"Frankly I could live on the same street. It's not a question of where we live, you know? There's nothing to be gained and he knows it and I know it."

She leaves unsaid the fact that Teresa knows it too.

"Why does something have to be gained? Why is there always this thing of a gain?"

"So many years, Teresa. What's the point?"

Another silence now of tea things clinking and trucks at the loading platforms along the street, those trucks with dented metal sides and no company names.

"You don't have any Sweet 'n Low, even?"

Klara looked out the windows at the fire escapes, the backsides of gray buildings, what a gleaning of sheened iron and rust fungus and scaly brick.

"How is he?" she said.

"What? He's all right. He won't move to a new building. That building is getting to be ridiculous that he's in now."

Everywhere they walked there was garbage stacked in black bags. They were seven days into the strike, which included a number of violent incidents and one private hauler nearly beaten to death. Teresa said nothing about the mounds of trash, fifty bags in some places, because she lived in Vermont and what could she say? But she used the trash against her mother. The trash was another form of accusation, it passed telepathically between them, a hundred bags on one corner and a smell so summer-lush it enveloped the whole body, pressing in like a weather system.

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.