"This can't be here accidentally, can it?"
"Okay, it's something I'm looking at," Acey said.
"And thinking about."
"Something I'm working out for myself, little by little by little."
"Interesting. But I hear you're doing something completely different."
"Oh yeah? What do you hear?"
And Klara swung an arm toward the far wall, where canvases stood on a low shelf or were bracketed on easels, some with strips of construction paper she'd glimpsed earlier-paper taped to unfinished work as color-mapping guides.
"I hear you're doing a Black Panther series."
Acey did her scornful smile, slow and elaborate.
"Oh yeah? Well you know what? That's what I hear too."
This was supposed to be a postpainterly age, Klara thought, and here was a young woman painting whole heat, a black woman who paints black men generously but not without exercising a certain critical rigor. The frontal swagger of the gangs, a culture of nearly princely hauteur but with bodings, of course, of unembellished threat, and this is what Acey examined surgically, working the details, looking for traces of the solitaire, the young man isolated from his own moody pose.
They walked back across the bridge.
"They still call you that? The Bag Lady?"
"Not so much anymore," Klara said. "There were a few of us then. We took junk and saved it for art. Which sounds nobler than it was. It was just a way of looking at something more carefully. And I'm still doing it, only deeper maybe."
"It's not my thing. Maybe I don't trust the need for context. You know what I mean?"
"I guess."
"Because I understand up to a point. You take your object out of the dusty grubby studio and stick it in a museum with white walls and classical paintings and it becomes a forceful thing in this context, it becomes a kind of argument. And what it is actually? Old factory window glass and burlap sacking. It becomes very, I don't know, philosophical."
They reached the other side and Acey wanted to walk some more and Klara was nearly beat. They looked at old sailing ships moored off South Street. She was trying to dispel the little hurt, the small delayed disappointment of Acey's casual slighting of her work. First she delayed her reaction, then she tried to smother it.
"I was the type girl," Acey said, "I was always in a hurry to grow up. Now I guess I'm here, officially. This city is the ticking clock. Makes me panic but I'm ready."
What Klara admired most was the seeming ease of address, the casually ravishing way Acey laid down paint. Saturated undercoats and beautiful flesh browns, skin strokes in every sort of unnameable shade and many grays as well, glaucous and sky smoke, because it's always winter in Chicago and the gang members belong to their terrain, to the pale brick and iced-over windows, and in this sense they could be brothers to the olive-skinned men in the frescoed gloom of some Umbrian church-Acey had the calm and somber eye of a cinquecentist.
She was talking on the phone to Esther Winship.
Esther said, "Dear god why?"
"Because it's easier and quicker."
"But I haven't been on a subway in thirty years."
"Good. I want to feel superior."
They took the Dyre Avenue line. The train was marked with graffiti outside and in, slapdash and depressing, Klara thought. She did not like the idea of tagging trains. It was the romance of the ego, poor kids playing out a fantasy of meretricious fame.
"I thought it would be stifling hot," Esther said. "I thought I'd suffocate in my seat."
She said this in a grim whisper, afraid that someone might overhear and take offense somehow. In the subway, words have a charged quality they don't carry elsewhere.
"It's called air conditioning," Klara whispered back.
"I'm completely stunned."
Esther liked to sound stupidly out of touch-it sealed her in a safer frame of reference.
Two stops into the Bronx their train took on passengers and another train pulled into the downtown side and Klara felt a poke in the ribs. It was Esther, thrusting an elbow to get her attention because the other train was one of his, Moonman's, every car spray-painted top to bottom with his name and street number. And Klara had to admit this particular kid knew how to make an impact. The train came bopping into the old drab station like some blazoned jungle of wonders. The letters and numbers fairly exploded in your face and they had a relationship, they were plaited and knotted, pop-eyed cartoon humanoids, winding in and out of each other and sweaty hot and passion dancing-metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens.
Esther whispering out of her clenched jaw.
"That's him, that's him, that's him."
That was his train all right but they never found the young man himself. They looked for the address Esther had acquired from a reporter who'd done a story on graffiti writers. Moonman had not told the guy what his real name was or where he lived-only his age, sixteen. The address came from another kid, who claimed to be in Moonman's crew, and the two women searched it out, walking across a terrain of torched buildings, whole blocks leveled by arson, and there were buildings still burning in the distance. They stopped and watched. Three or four buildings oozing lazy smoke. No sign of fire engines or anxious people grouped behind barricades. Just a few passersby, it seemed from here, routinely occupied. They watched in silence and it was hard to bridge the distance. They couldn't quite place the thing in context. It was like a newsreel of some factional war in a remote province, where generals cook the livers of their rivals and keep them in plastic baggies. A thing totally spooked by otherness.
Esther finally spoke. "This is where you used to live?"
"No. I lived about a mile north of here."
"Still, I have to show you more respect."
"Thank you, Esther. But it wasn't like this at the time."
"Still, I have to make an effort to be nicer to you."
"You do that," Klara said.
They knew it wasn't a good idea to stand around indefinitely and when they reached 157th Street and looked for the young man's address, they found there was no such number.
They went into a couple of bodegas and asked at the check-cashing place.
People said, "Mooney, who's Mooney?" They said, "What kind of Mormon? There's no Mormons here."
And the women said, "No, no, no, no. Moonman. Moonman uno cinco siete." And they made spray-paint gestures and said, "Graffiti, graffiti."
And Esther wore a safari jacket like some network correspondent looking for rebels in the smoky hills and who could blame her, really.
"You look a little Chinese tonight," Miles said.
"Jason used to call me the chink."
She said this in her small voice. She looked and sounded small to herself. People were getting bigger, she was getting smaller, going more or less invisible. If Miles were not here, how long would it take the waiter to wait on her?
"Jason. I know a Jason?"
"Jason my second husband. Jason Vanover."
They were eating seafood on Mulberry Street in a place Miles liked to come to because a mobster had been killed here, shot in the head by a couple of guys from a rival family, or his own family maybe, or a family from out of town.
"You're always mentioning people that I don't know and that I never heard of and you mention them," he said, "in a way that makes me think I'm supposed to know who you're talking about when as a matter of fact I couldn't possibly."
"It's true, I do that."
"People go by me in a blur."
"It's just that I feel if I know someone, it's automatic that the person I'm talking to about that individual should also know him, by some human arithmetic," she said.