Underworld (30 page)

“Eddie, look, he wears slippers under his boots. The man is undescribable.”

He embraced the woman and the coat and then moved into the living room rubbing his hands like a man treading across a Persian rug toward a birch fire and a snifter of rare brandy. Eddie sat there smiling, the real Eddie Robles who lived inside the imposter, inside the haunted likeness, arthritic, emphysemic, with ulcerated veins in his legs, retired more or less from everything.

“I woke up this morning and I knew it,” Bronzini said.

“You knew it.”

“Time for Eddie's haircut.”

“In a blizzard. You woke up but you didn't look out the window.”

“It's a gentle snowfall. Old-fashioned. You should go walking.”

“Walking,” Eddie said. “You have any idea what you're saying? Sit down, you're making me nervous.”

“I can't give you a haircut sitting down. Where are my tools of the trade?”

“I should give
you
. You're the one who needs his hair cut. You should carry a violin, Albert.”

“You don't want to play chess with me anymore. There's no one left in the world I can defeat in chess, trounce—I can trounce the way I trounce you. So you have to submit to the barber's moves. It's a beautiful snowfall from out of the past. Incidentally, Mercedes. Where is she? Your doorbell's not working.”

They sat drinking hot chocolate. What Albert wanted was a shot of
hootch from an imported bottle. He imagined the warm wincing sting of a trickle of scotch. Durable, that was the beauty of the thing. It hit you so it lasted. The chairman scotched rumors of a takeover. A wedge you stick behind a wheel to keep a vehicle from rolling. That's a scotch. So is a line drawn on the ground, as in hopscotch, he thought.

“Doorbell. Only the doorbell?” Mercedes said.

“The elevator of course. But we know about the elevator.”

“You know about the plaster?” she said. “I put newspapers in the cracks. Someday they find this place and they know exactly when the trouble started, from the newspapers.”

“Let the man live,” Eddie said. “Talk about something else.”

“My own elevator, this is a problem,” Bronzini said. “Periodic breakdowns.”

“Four flights?”

“Five flights.”

“Let the man live,” Eddie said.

“Five flights with his heart?”

“Talk about something else.”

Mercedes was heavy, disposed to gesture, swaying in the chair, hand-sweeping, but ably taking care of feeble Eddie, the imposter, the aching and stiff-jointed and gasping man. The old Eddie of the subways was a robust guy, selling tokens from a booth in that cinema dimness of bad air and sprocketing trains, immune to the hell rattle of the express, and she tended him now with expert love, with knowledge and command, and when she got mad at something it made Albert want to hide because he was a coward of blunt emotion, things met head-on and direct.

“They put up the bobwire to save us from drug dealers. But what about the water when it rains? Comes right in. I don't want to see winter end. I rather be cold. I rather jam newspapers in the cracks. Because when the snow melts.”

“The man is happy. Let him live,” Eddie said.

She got a kitchen chair for Eddie to sit on. She got the cigar box and put it on the table and opened it. She went away and came back with a bath towel, which she placed over her husband's upper body and then spread down around his knees. She fastened the two upper
corners at the back of his neck, loosely, and then she looked across at Albert, who shared her satisfaction with all the collateral matters, the stir of preparations, crucial to the business of the haircut.

Albert took the implements out of the cigar box. He set them on the table a couple of inches apart. The short black rubberized comb, tapered for sideburns. The tortoiseshell comb with a handle and three missing teeth, called a rake comb. The beautiful pair of scissors, made in Italy, a family possession for generations, one of those things that turns up among the effects of the deceased, suddenly seen anew, an everyday treasure, filigreed shanks and a spur attached to one loop, a curved projection to support the middle finger. You put your index finger in the loop and rest the middle finger against the suitably shaped appendage. What else? The shaving brush, not needed. The nose scissors, let him do his own nose. The electric clipper, heavy and black, Elk Grove, Illinois, blade still a little wispy with Eddie's shorn hair of six weeks ago. What else? Tube of lubricating oil for clipper. Five-and-dime whiskbroom, soft-bristled.

He had no idea how to cut hair. He'd done Eddie's hair a number of times but hadn't worked out a method. He paused often to study the effect, snipping, stepping back. Mercedes did not stay around to watch. Working slowly, snipping. The idea was to get the hair off the guy's head and onto the floor. Mercedes did not seem to think this was a thing she had to see.

“They have a new thing, maybe you heard,” Eddie said. “Called space burials.”

“I like it already.”

“They send your ashes into space.”

“Sign me up,” Bronzini said.

“They have orbits you can select. There's an orbit around the equator. This is one orbit. The earth turns and you turn. Not you, your ashes.”

“Is there a waiting list?”

“There's a waiting list. I saw it on the news. Plus the premium shot. This is way out there.”

“Deep space.”

“Way out. You and the stars.”

“But you don't go up alone.”

“You go up with about seven hundred other ashes in the same shot. Humans and their pets.
You
call the company, they'll put you on the list.”

“What if you're already dead?”

“So your children call. Your lawyer calls. The important thing is how much do your ashes weigh. Because this is costing you—guess.”

“I can't guess.”

“Guess,” Eddie said.

“You have to tell me.”

“Ten thousand dollars a pound.”

Eddie worked this line with a finality that had a grim pleasure in it.

“A pound. What do we weigh, in ashes, when we're dead?” Albert said. “I think it sounds reasonable myself.”

“You think it sounds reasonable. Then you ruin my story.”

“A pound of ashes, Eddie. That could be a whole family. For burial in space. Preserved forever.”

“You ruin my story,” he said.

Albert used the rake comb, working the top of his friend's head. He combed in sweeping motions, letting the hair settle, then combing again. He loved this work. He used the scissors sparingly up here because a mistake might show. He moved the comb softly through Eddie's thinning hair. He lifted the hair, then let it fall. Mercedes played the radio in the kitchen, making dinner or maybe lunch. Albert was vague, lately, on the subject of time. A heartbeat, a wrist pulse, a tapping foot. This was discernible time. He lifted the hair, then let it fall.

“You miss the booth, Eddie.”

“I liked my job.”

“I know you did.”

“All those years and never once.”

“They never robbed you.”

“Never even tried,” he said.

That's the genius of New York. Eddie Robles with a miniature chess set practicing moves at two in the morning in his token booth and don't think people didn't pop their faces in the slot and challenge him to a game, and don't think he didn't play them because he did, behind five layers of bulletproof glass, with trains blowing by in the night.

“I never thought today's the day they rob me. I never had this
thought. And it never happened. I had a woman vomit in the slot. My worst incident personally. I never thought what I would do if they tried to rob me. I had the psychology you plan for it, then it happens. She puts her hands on the ledge and out it comes.”

“Middle of the night?”

“Just her and me. You have to vomit, why can't you do it on the tracks? Her and me alone in the station, she comes right over like the coin slot they intend it just for this.”

He plugged in the clipper and did the back of Eddie's neck. He went down under the towel and the shirt collar and did the hair that grew up from the shoulders. He cleared the neck completely and dusted with the brush and asked Mercedes for some talcum powder, which was the one thing he did not have in the cigar box, and he made a mental note to resupply, for next time.

Space burial. He thought of the contrails on that blue day out over the ocean, two years ago if that's when it was—how the boosters sailed apart and hung the terrible letter Y in the still air. The vapor stayed intact for some time, the astronauts fallen to sea but also still up there, graved in frozen smoke, and he lay awake in the night and saw that deep Atlantic sky and thought this death was soaring and clean, an exalted thing, a passing of the troubled body into vapor and flame, out above the world, monogrammed, the Y of dying young.

He wasn't sure people wanted to see this. Willing to see the systems failure and the human suffering. But the beauty, the high faith of space, how could such qualities be linked to death? Seven men and women. Their beauty and ours, revealed in a failed mission as we haven't seen it in a hundred triumphs. Apotheosis. Yes they were god-statured, transformed in those swanny streaks into the only sort of gods he cared to acknowledge, poetic and fleeting. He found this experience even more profound than the first moonwalk. That was stirring but also a little walkie-talkie, with ghosted action, movements that looked computerized, and he could never completely dismiss the suspicions of the paranoid elite, the old grizzled gurkhas of the corps, that the whole thing had been staged on a ranch outside Las Vegas.

•    •    •

In the spring they were still there, Albert and Laura. How was it possible his sister had not fallen into some calamitous illness? You sit there, you let your body go weak and slack, you don't walk, you don't see people, or mingle, or feel the bloodflow of inquisitive interest.

But he was grateful for her presence. There had always been a woman close to him, one woman at least, a woman or a girl, sharing the bathroom, the kitchen, long ago the bed. He needed this company. Women and their pride of time, their vigorous sense of a future. He married a Jew and loved her but Klara's future did not include him. He took care of his mother, a Catholic of the old eloquence, wearing a scapular, blessing herself and touching her thumb-knuckle to her lips, and he loved her and watched her die. He raised his daughter to make her own fate, to be a worthy individual outside compliance with religious rites, and he loved her, she lives in Vermont now, very much. And his sister, drifting in and out of the past but knowing him always in uncanny ways, seeing straight into his unadorned heart, and he loved her for all the stammered reasons you love a sister and because she'd narrowed her life to a few remarks that he found moving.

He had a portable phonograph, sleek-seeming once, advanced design. Now looked drab and squat but still played music after all these years. He found the record he was looking for and polished the vinyl with a treated cloth and placed it hostlike on the spindle. Saint-Saëns, piano works, gentle and pensive, a change of pace from the gorgeous torment of Bronzini's operas, the tabloid sensation that shatters teacups. He turned to make sure Laura was here, shapeless in the armchair, head resting against the hand-knit antimacassar, face lifted to the chords. He clicked the dial and watched the tone arm rise and the record descend, a jerky downslide to the turntable. Then the tone arm shifted laterally and the disc began to spin and this series of laboriously linked actions with their noises and pauses and teeterings, their dimwit delays, seemed to place him in some lost mechanical age with the pendulum clock and hand-cranked motorcar.

The needle slurred some notes but he was used to that. He sat at the edge of the room, where he could feel the kitchen sun and look at
Laura's face. The music joined them edgewise. He believed he could enter her reverie. He could know her, almost know her, feel her innocence through the music, know the girl again, the spinsterly twelve-year-old who walked behind her parents in the street, he could see her in the face of the somber older sister, she was almost there, the girl, in the pouches and moles and smoky hair. There was a brief moment in one of the pieces, after passagework of mellow recollection, when something dark seemed to enter, the soloist's left hand urging the tempo, and it made her raise an arm, slowly, a gesture of half shock, thoughtful and fraught—she'd heard a boding in the bass notes that startled her. And this was the other thing they shared, the sadness and clarity of time, time mourned in the music—how the sound, the shaped vibrations made by hammers striking wire strings made them feel an odd sorrow not for particular things but for time itself, the material feel of a year or an age, the textures of unmeasured time that were lost to them now, and she turned away, looking past her lifted hand into some transparent thing he thought he could call her life.

“You have to tell me, Albert, when you're going out. So I know.”

“I did tell you.”

“You never tell me.”

“I do tell you.”

“I don't know if you forget or what's the reason.”

“I will tell you.”

“If you tell me, then I know.”

“I will tell you. I will be sure to tell you.”

“But I forget, don't I?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“You tell me and I forget.”

“Sometimes. It's not important.”

“But you have to tell me.”

“I will. I will tell you.”

“So this way I know,” she said.

•    •    •

He took his coffee black with a stab of rye in the morning, a nip, a pin drop, and with anisette in the afternoon or early evening, a shot, a jolt of the licorice sap, and maybe a beady tongue-taste of rye again before retiring, without coffee this time, medically forbidden of course but just a driblet, a measured snort, the briefest swig in the history of guilty drinking.