Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  They should probably clean up the kitchen before they left for the tower. There was plenty of help associated with the place, but still.

  He didn’t feel like it.

  10 It was medievally cold in the tower. They were all wearing their day clothes in bed. A leg had come off the card table they had been using previously. A staff member, an older man, had wrestled a replacement table up the stairs. This table was pine, and its surface featured black rays left by untended cigarettes, ringmarks in the original veneer, all preserved under laminate. The ghosts of careless drinking days clung to the table, had been invited to cling. Ned wondered if Douglas had acquired the table from one of their haunts in the Village, like the Cedar. There was a battery-powered hurricane lamp on the table, also courtesy of the older man. Any one of them could reach it easily without getting up when it was time to put out the lights.

  Ned’s spirits were low. Nina was still refusing to answer his calls. Gruen had announced that he was through talking for the night. That was fine.

  Joris said, “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to talk about anymore: what I think about all the comedy we kept trying to do. What I think about it is … it was about having fun and the truth is we felt a bit superior, you know.”

  Ned said, “Vietnam was over and none of us had had to go to Canada. No we felt like we could play around. So we did dada, I suppose, warmed over. I was a raw youth. I thought dada meant Salvador Dalí. I didn’t know anything. And did you know by the way that Douglas did a paper on dada for Mouvement des Idées? He actually studied it.”

  “So enough about that,” Joris said.

  “So okay, then I want to talk about Iraq. I want all of us to sign my petition,” Ned said.

  Joris sighed. He said, “Okay, let’s get down to preliminaries.”

  Before Ned could begin, Joris said, “You can’t stop mass stupidity. We keep having wars. They never make sense. One thing might help. Somebody beats the shit out of us worse than Vietnam did. If the streets were so full of cripples it fucked up traffic possibly the government would notice.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am. Listen, when there was conscription there was a chance you could stop them. But they figured that out. Now it’s mercenaries and the unemployed, a lot of them. And women who want to get in on it. War is like the stock market. I know about this. People spend their whole lives showing what the crooks are doing every day in the market and nobody pays attention, and I will tell you this, you can spend your life on it, and you can die, and the next day the market is doing the same thing. Maybe you’ve seen some of my letters to the Financial Times.”

  “But Joris. Let me tell you this. It’s different, this protest. It’s going to be in every country, practically. And I know about this. I know what’s coming in Europe. It’s more like the Resistance. Wait until you see the marches. We can stop it this time.”

  “Okayokay.”

  “Will you sign, then? We all have to sign.”

  Joris said nothing.

  Ned said, “Just think about it, and don’t forget that every war is men trying to kill each other who have nothing against each other …”

  Joris cut in, his voice hot. “Douglas said one true thing. He said War is the continuation of business as usual by any means necessary. So let’s stop there.”

  “Okay then, later. I’m not through.”

  “Oh Jesus how well do I know.”

  They yawned synchronously. Ned had another subject, not as important but still important, he wanted to take up with Joris. He wanted to tell the story of Claire, and what had happened on that front. He had to do it right and not put Claire down. Gruen knew most of the Claire saga. He wanted to tell Joris about Nina, too, but not until Gruen could be part of the audience. And he was reluctant to go into the pregnancy question. It might not work. It was Joris who had said in the old days that babies were the only form in which we can love mankind. Now he had two grown sons.

  Ned said, “Briefly about Claire …” Douglas’s stellar fiancée manquée Claire had turned up in Berkeley five years after graduating from NYU after Douglas had dumped her over something still unknown. Ned was managing the Pacific Cooperative Market on Telegraph Avenue when he saw her again, for the first time. She was brought to him in his office for shoplifting a couple of packets of saffron. She was a wraith, then. The breakup with Douglas had been catastrophic. She was at Cal doing graduate work in musicology and then it had happened and they had lived together for the next seven years. They’d had different reasons for not wanting to have children, hers temperamental and his, big surprise, ideological. Post Claire, with Nina, he wanted children, or a child. The idea had been to start an adoption process after they had gone through whatever the fertility clinic proposed. She was willing to adopt.

  “Talk about Claire,” Joris said.

  Ned said, “The situation was that Douglas dropped Claire and she was in bad shape when she came to Cal and we found each other. And we stayed together for a few years and I heard from Douglas through the usual group communiqués, but he never said a word about Claire. And I felt like I didn’t have any reason to bring it up either. So anyway, I finished my master’s on the decline and fall of the ejido collective in Mexico. I liked Mexico but I couldn’t stand to be there for long. I couldn’t see teaching. So I worked with the co-ops in the Bay Area. And then got into Fair Trade. Which I do now. Claire traveled a lot. She was in a recorder consort the whole time. She got tenure at Mills College. She traveled both to perform and teach. Anyway, she traveled for her business and I traveled for mine.”

  “I like what you do for a living,” Joris said.

  “I like it too.” Ned felt like saying thanks. “About Claire, seven years seems like a long time. But the substance of living together kept getting thinner. She was so beautiful that I never got over that she was mine, even if what I had was really a shrinking percentage of her. Go to a party and people would still stop talking when she came into the room and shift around so they could keep looking in her direction.”

  All the friends had had serious girlfriends at college, at one time or another. And Claire’s liaison with Douglas had been almost a marriage. They had been aiming, all of them, at the sublime of work, the sublime of love, the sublime of deeply comprehending the world. It had been essential not to be a fool in any of those departments. And it had looked like Douglas had landed the love-sublime ahead of everybody, with Claire.

  Ned went on, “Then she and I had run our course. And since Claire I’ve been with Nina. Married for the last three years.” He paused. “So now Claire lives with a woman in Sonoma County. Her partner is an art photographer, and also commercial. She does high fashion, local celebrities, and so on. Her work is collected. Museums buy her stuff. In fact she did a gallery show with lots of nude studies of Claire in it. We got an invitation. I didn’t go. Nina went.”

  Joris grimaced. He said, “We all loved Claire. She must be bi. That’s stupid, what else would she be? And … financially. I hope you don’t mind if I ask. How did it come out?”

  “Fine. We never married. She always earned. And her partner is rich.”

  Ned thought, The impulse is to tell the story of your life to a friend, so you know what the story is … Nina knows a lot … but you edit. She’s sensitive.

  He felt tired. He hoped that was enough to say. Joris said something to himself. Then there was silence.

  They brought up the subject of Hume at the same time. Ned let Joris go first. “I don’t know what Douglas was thinking, with this boy. He always wanted him to be a joker, like he wanted us to be the Marx Brothers. Why? When Hume was little, Douglas got him the Johnson Smith Catalog and every birthday said to him to spend a hundred dollars, two hundred, whatever he liked … the boy is very wild. But hell, nothing we can do that I can think of. He has a mother … tomorrow we can talk about your wife, maybe.”

  “After breakfast,” Ned said.

  It was all right. Ned turned the lantern off.
He would lower himself into sleep down a ladder of thoughts of Nina, his honey monkey. He would imagine he was hearing somebody singing “Ombra mai fu.” He liked opera, thanks to Nina and not the patrician Claire, he might add. He believed Nina liked opera and Kurosawa movies for the same reason, they were all out. Nina was small but not really petite, and very brunette, next to Claire, whose yellow hair was so fine it looked luminous. Claire treated her breasts like blisters, you had to be so gentle. But Nina would play with you, and she might say, Okay, you can feel me up, but only one breast, take your pick. Yes, and the time Claire had stared coldly at him when he’d cupped her breast and pushed her nipple with his thumb-tip and asked Is the missus home? Terrible violation. Undo me, Nina knew how to say in a way that made his hair stand up. With Claire never anything even close.

  I need to live forever, Ned thought.

  11 “I don’t know why we’re here,” Ned said to Gruen as they stood in the living room, waiting for the sliding doors to the formal dining room to open and reveal the sumptuous breakfast they all expected. Preparations were still in progress. Premium coffee was plainly going to be on the menu.

  “She’s going to tell us why we’re here,” Gruen said. He was medicated. The day was warm and everyone had gotten into jeans and sport shirts. Joris’s shirt was tucked in. He was showing off a little. He was the only one of them in short sleeves. He had been a little late in joining them to wait for breakfast, delayed by his push-up regimen and whatever else he did without fail.

  At the end of the sofa was a woven African basket the size of a washtub containing a midden of scholarly quarterlies, most still in their mailing sleeves. Ned thought, After NYU we were supposed to keep up with the quarterlies because they represented a worthy stream of thought nobody was paying much attention to. He had tried, in a sampling way, until the branch libraries in Contra Costa County had stopped letting periodicals circulate, meaning readers would have to sit in a chair at the library and fit the experience into the ever-shrinking hours the library was open. And then the subscription list had dwindled down to the Sewanee Review. Vandalism had been the announced reason for cutting back on periodicals, something he had difficulty imagining applied to the Explicator or Celtic Studies.

  Gruen asked, “Got any water on you?” which was not exactly a normal question. Gruen had a pill bottle in his hand which he rattled in explanation. Just then the doors slid open.

  It was indeed another feast. Places were set around an exaggerated refectory table. Iva was in black. She was at the head of the table. Elliot was directing two women servers, new people, older women. Elliot was wearing a black business suit. He was scheduled to meet with the authorities. Joris made some effort to secure the seat on Iva’s right.

  Iva was repaired. She seemed calm. All the food was hot. There were warming panels in use. Ned’s scrambled eggs were hot. Even the tomato and scallion garnish was hot. Ned sat down next to Gruen, mid-table. There were four or five media people present, to whom he hadn’t been introduced.

  “Don’t miss the mushroom thing,” Gruen said.

  Ned realized that Iva was looking with some intensity at him. A strong and unwelcome feeling came over him. It was the conviction that he could help this woman, that the accidents of his life had peculiarly qualified him to help her in her sadness. It was unsettling.

  Ned concentrated on eating. He thought that these might really be the best scrambled eggs he’d ever had. It couldn’t be just the fines herbes because Nina used them routinely on eggs. Nina loved food but she didn’t like to cook, which wasn’t that unusual. Unexpectedly, Iva rapped on the table.

  She said, “I don’t know how I can thank you for coming so quickly here … as you can see I am lost. Here.”

  Ned wanted to kill Gruen, who was taking a large second portion of eggs for himself but doing it with an excruciating slowness intended to make what he was doing less obvious. Part of the maneuver was to keep his eyes fixed on Iva while his arm worked independently like an animal for which he had no responsibility.

  Iva said, “I present myself to you.

  “I must do something.

  “My life is black …”

  Elliot intervened. He said, “Iva will talk individually later to you, one at a time, later. In the sun room.”

  “What sun room?” Ned asked Gruen in a whisper.

  “I’ll show you,” Gruen said.

  But Iva wanted to say more. She said, “You, you were his true friends. I won’t stop now, Elliot. And you were more his friend than I was, you men, I have to say. I have to say that, yes.” She began wringing her hands. Elliot was walking distractedly around the table, driving his hands deep into his pants pockets. He appeared to be talking to himself.

  Iva said, “We must make a … book.” She was imploring them.

  Elliot said, “Well she doesn’t mean a book per se, she means a memorial collection … statements …”

  “Yes, but in a book,” Iva said.

  Elliot said, “She means she wants it bound. That’s what she means.”

  “Eulogies?” Joris asked.

  Iva said, “Yes, but more. We must say them, and it must be the truth, you see.”

  Gruen said, “I think she means a ceremony.”

  Joris was saying something calming to her, and it seemed to be helping. Iva rose and the guests followed suit. The breakfast had been very truncated.

  Now Elliot was saying that individual meetings with Iva would start in half an hour. Ned joined Iva and took her hand. He said, “Why don’t you take me second or third so I can take care of something first.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing, just something I need at the Vale. The Times.”

  Iva covered his hand with hers and squeezed with a certain ferocity. She said, “You can go. You can go if you have to. But just be sure you don’t take the top paper on the pile he has, but take the next under. You see they let their filthy dog sleep on the papers.”

  Elliot said, “Man there is no problem. We’re getting the Times delivered here starting today. Washington Post, too. And one last thing, you’re all coming out of the tower and over here.”

  Introductions to the strangers, most of whom were from Deutsche Welle, were managed by Elliot. Ned knew that he wasn’t going to remember the names. They all looked young to him.

  12 Elliot was leading Ned to his meeting with Iva when something disconcerting happened. In a recess in the living room wall between the end of the interminable sofa and a door to somewhere else in the Winchester Mystery House that this was, hung a framed full-length portrait of Iva and Douglas in late youth, in oil. Elliot veered off toward it and seemed to be brushing its surface smartly with his open hand. But that wasn’t what he was doing: he was flicking away a pushpin that someone had stuck into it. There was a lamp fixture on the top of the frame. Ned halted in front of the painting. He fiddled with the fixture but the bulb seemed to be dead.

  Anyway, there he was, Douglas. There seemed to be lots of punctures in the surface. Who would have done that? Elliot was pulling at him. Recently Nina had said, Know what I hate?… puncture wounds.

  Elliot said to come on. “Who did this?” Ned asked. Elliot was impatient and pulled at him.

  Douglas’s ludic period had extended well beyond NYU. The double portrait, done in a photorealist mode by some artist whose name he should doubtless know, was a goof. There he was, Douglas, in safari kit, shirt and shorts and boots and thick socks up to the knee, standing unnaturally straight, separate from and not touching his wife, a miniature umbrella of the kind they put in mai tais held between the thumb and forefinger of his languidly dangling left hand. In back of the couple it was sea and cumulus. Iva was wearing sunglasses. Light blond, he would say her hair was then, and it was swept up and fixed in a sort of fan. She was wearing a black caftan with fragments of mirror sewn into it. And there were images of interest showing in the fragments if you had the time to look. He identified Mick Jagger in one of them, and, su
rprisingly to Ned, he saw an image of Claire. Douglas was his thin, willowy, standardly handsome second-lead self. His hair was combed straight back, flat against his head, and glistened with something like pomade. The artist had caught the quality of latent surprise that was always resident in Douglas’s main expression, had always been there. Nobody was smiling. Ned thought, Fahn fahn fahn on the autobahn. And the name for Iva’s sunglasses was harlequin. Nina would be interested in the details.

  He and Elliot moved on.

  It was nice, this new room. The main vista was of a wooded gorge. Iva had her back to it. She was seated in a voluminous rattan armchair and pointing to its twin, which was set close to hers, at an angle and at a fairly intimate distance, in his opinion. She had a stack of papers in her lap. There were more papers in an accordion file between her bare feet. Iva’s all-black outfit was, he thought, a little shiny for the circumstances. Maybe it was satin. She was wearing silver bracelets.

  Elliot was in a corner using his cell phone. Ned had gotten a look at what Elliot was calling “the hub,” a room loaded with telephones, fax machines, and computers. He waved to Ned and left them, still engaged in his phone work.

  “Have you a cigarette?” she asked Ned, in a hushed voice.

  “Hey I’m sorry. I don’t smoke. Due to Douglas, by the way.” It was something he was grateful for, genuinely.