"Some kind of secret fraternal order, sounds like to me."
"Perhaps," he said. "But all banking is secret, I think."
And she could believe it, with all the granite and limestone massed around them, and the newer towers, curtained sheer, of reflecting glass and anodized aluminum, and every office empty of human trace today, except in basements maybe where paper was spun through microfilm machines, a billion checks a second.
His name was Carlo Strasser. He lived on Park Avenue and collected art with an amateur's clumsy passion, he said-an apartment on Park and an old farmhouse near Aries, where he went to do his thinking.
And of course she said, "What do you think about?"
And he said, "Money."
She laughed.
"I sometimes wonder what money is," she said.
"Yes, of course, exactly. This is the question. I will tell you what I think. It is becoming very esoteric. All waves and codes. A higher kind of intelligence. Travels at the speed of light."
He was dressed very well, he was turned out, he had presence and manner and she felt a little shambly, but not uncomfortably so, in her denim and old sandals. The man confirmed her in her partialities and she was marvelously, in fact, at ease, talking to him.
They heard foghorns in the bay and paused to listen and the sound had an element of formal awe, it rolled and caromed down the narrow streets, collided with itself, an organ work that swelled the air and sent pigeons beating out of the tower clocks.
He asked questions about painters and she did something she almost never did-she expounded, she did detailed analysis, a thing she'd tended to avoid even when she used to teach. She heard herself go into explanations so ardent and newly struck that she realized she'd been withholding them from herself.
"Louise told me once, Nevelson, that she looked at a canvas or a piece of wood and it was white and pure and virginal and no matter how much she marked it up, how many strokes and colors and images, the whole point was to return it to its virgin state, and this was the great and frightening thing."
Klara could not connect this remark to her own work but she liked to repeat it to herself anyway-she liked the idea of a famous artist being frightened by what she does.
"I have a small Nevelson," he said. "Very small piece, I bought it years ago, and now you have given me a reason to look at it in a different way, and this is something I will do with pleasure."
"I'd go into her studio and she'd show me a black sculpture, a wood sculpture painted black, and I'd comment on the color and I'd comment on the material and she'd look at the thing and she'd say, 'But it's not black and it's not wood.' She thinks reality is shallow and weak and fleeting and we're very different in that regard."
Miles showed up later and Carlo Strasser faded gracefully into the cluster, eight or nine people standing around a table filled with cheese and fruit and wine, those lion-blood Bordeaux, those damson plums and blue-black nights and how the thunder sounded dry and false.
Standing in someone's kitchen, slicing a lemon, she understood that the knife would slip and she would cut herself and she did.
It was one of those microseconds that's long and slow and nuclear-packed with information and she knew it would happen and kept on slicing and then it happened, she cut her finger and watched the blood edge out from the knife line and slide unevenly down her knuckle.
She watched people sunbathing, they did it so completely, dominating the experience, a woman flopped on a ledge with a blanket and a pitcher of iced tea and a child's drinking glass appliqued with flowers and a paperback book that Klara tried to spy the title of-they did it without conceding anything to the stone ledges or pitched roofs or breathless tar surfaces, it was the spectacle of here I am, and there's a window washer's empty rig scaling the side of a slab tower. She saw a brick facade flushed with coral light, more or less on fire with light, and the brick seemed revealed the way only light reveals a thing-it is baked clay of some intenser beauty than she'd ever thought to notice. And there's the old lady again sitting in her webbed chair with the Sunday papers scattered, so familiar and encouraging-she holds a reflector under her chin and faces sacrificially into the sun, a plattered head going mummy-brown in the deeps of a summer day.
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."