Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  At Miss Lacey’s the pimps, stool-lolling in their wild livery and five-pound shoes, had talked a code as complicated as lying, though their brains were caramel—which clearly these boys’ brains were not. If the two weren’t pimps, which she was sure of, nor yet quite students, which she would bet on, nor merely thieves, then what profession did they belong to which gave them a tinge of all three? And whom did they work for?

  “Let her have the blouse,” she’d said. “Let her have him. If she can wear them. It wasn’t really a wedding, was it?” She glared at them hard, convinced they would know.

  “I sure suspicion not.” The expression of Marcy’s face was quite brotherly. Not like Ali. Like an elder brother for real.

  “If it wasn’t, why’d you go through with it?” The giggler had a pie-face which said nothing. Maybe other parts of him than his bridge were hollow too.

  She scowled hard over his question. Why had she? Outside, strains of music were approaching—that band. And probably all the followers, streaming after it across the fields like in some movie the extras themselves were making, on location the world, and scarier than any Hollywood. “It was on the Agenda, I guess.”

  They burst out laughing. Years later, bumping into them in Amsterdam, she would spend an evening with them in a café on the Singel Canal, learning that they still spoke of her, and that two things only counted with them: money and wit. Who they worked for was no mystery—themselves. After that, anybody. Even Castro.

  “Looky here—” she said on her wedding day, “will you help me get to New York?”

  “Go from Barbados,” Marcy said.

  “Vivie’d never let me. I’d have to finish out the term.”

  Plainly they knew of Vivie.

  “Can’t get to the U.S. straight from here,” Marcy’d said severely, lifting his long, cropped skull and cleft upper lip. Long gray peanut of a boy, with smart-curved principles not good enough for his brain.

  “I’ll go anywhere. On the way.”

  “Like us.” The fat one giggled.

  “I’ve got money.” She fanned out her travelers’ checks and hard dollars. Vivie’d given her the year’s tuition and allowance all at once, to put her on a par with the rich girls whose parents were money-training them. Not that you’re not money-trained, lova-bunny. But to have confidence.

  She’d had it—her own brand of it. She had it yet—what would others call it? Nothing, if they didn’t have it themselves. That deep fund of the will to live, will to express, into which, when trembling, she could dip as into a purse.

  “Whee, lookit what she got,” the sidekick said. “Look at all that lovelly paper.”

  “Lovely,” Marcy said. Absently he waved the money aside. “What say we check with his nibs? About a plane.” She was made to put the money away; on the Singel they’d laughed at how little it had been. Her ticket back to the island was acceptable; the sidekick pocketed it. “Take your bag with you,” Marcy said. “Okay, you want to leave her the blouse?”

  “I’d like to leave something here.” Sky filled the mess hall’s high window. The troupe’s scattered goods, from rush baskets to chromed record players, glinted with a second-sight doubleness. Memory had already painted this.

  “Ain’t you?” the sidekick had said. “Ain’t you already done that?”

  They led her outside the mess hall, across the beat-down grass where cars and trucks were parked hit-or-miss, and out to a break in the road, where they planted her.

  “Stand just here,” Marcy’d said. “Just as you are. Don’t move.”

  Here the road branched. One way led to the village two miles away, where if you were bored with end-of-the-world talk, as some of the flightier Americans labeled the afternoon seminars, you could wander in and out of the sandy bare post office, once a chapel, where only a native could mail a letter anyway—that is if the postmistress was in attendance, instead of only her hound bitch. Or you could go into the café, as Veronica and Lievering had done, and have iceless syrup soda in which floated some slippery berry said to come from palm. The other branch of the road led to the cottage from which she had come.

  Far down the road to the village she could see the trailing crowd, now almost orderly. What they were following was hidden, but must be the jeep. For some reason she felt herself to be watching a battle. Perhaps it was the way the two roads deployed, clean as map tracings under the fiery sun. Behind her, all the random vehicles seemed aimed at the post office and café, at the garbage cans, at her. Scraps of half-known battle words filled her head: advance guard, sentinel. Was that what she was? The sun beat down. The music was only distant noise now; then with a last whang of brass it stopped.

  She’d forgotten her hat. Maybe the woman had found it by now, and adopted it. Or maybe it still lay on the nail where she herself had hung it, watching the departures of people as only objects can. Let it. She hated the thing. She began to cry for it, in hate. There was a handkerchief in her bag but she wouldn’t bend for it. Stand there, they’d said. She bent her head to one of the big sleeves which puffed out on either side of her. The crossroads made a breeze here, lifting each point of cloth on them. The motion of her own dress always seemed to her part of nature’s motion. As much as any of those insects called the Articulata, who were all segments, she too was bodywalk and brainwalk joined together, centered in a circle of its own traversing. She began to laugh.

  Luckily. The staff car, the jeep, emerging from behind its ambush, the crowd, was bearing toward her, creeping so slowly it seemed not to move, only to be steady on the air like a mirage, in its own plane of light. The khaki figure in front, khaki-capped, held binoculars, trained on her.

  Twenty yards or so from her, the jeep stopped. She held steady, estimating the yards—about the same distance she’d once measured from Vivie’s island house door to their landlord’s, after which their own garden could legally begin. The binoculars came on, didn’t lower. She could feel the gaze behind them, not only the one known from movies of the face, or pictures, but brown and intimate, boring into her. The jeep wobbled—bad terrain, your nibs—but the hand and the gaze held firm. So did her sleeves, not billowing. The jeep came to a stop.

  For a minute, she’d thought he was going to motion her into it. Instead he said something over his shoulder, from behind the binoculars. The two thugs, who were in the jeep in back, scrambled down. Then, lowering the binoculars, he doffed his cap to her, and she saw that he, too, was laughing. The brown glance was as she had felt it would be. There was a military name maybe for its mixture of geniality, chill and range. He said something. The jeep wheeled at his signal, ground the dirt and took off.

  The two boys ambled toward her, looking the same as before; they might have just dropped off a bus. They’d stayed that casual the whole time, all the way to the plane.

  “What did he say?” She wasn’t going to leave this to guesswork.

  The sidekick answered for them. “He said, ‘With those sleeves, she should fly.’” He doubled up on the grass, then got up and scampered; his bridgework must be leaking again—he was high.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” she said. Nimbly, so that she could withdraw the joke if need be. “Castro.”

  “Naw, he has a stand-in,” the sidekick said, blowing on a grass blade he’d plucked. “They switch shifts at the barbershop.”

  “Come on, both of you,” Marcy said. Then he did make them run, but only for fun, when they went back to steal Jimmy Odgers’s truck. Locked, but the sidekick had a ploy for it.

  They drove leisurely after that. “Fifteen miles,” Marcy said. “No hurry. They’ll telephone ahead.”

  “Telephone?” she said. “How?” None for miles. The crowd had grumbled. One scared kid had left. Needed his wiring.

  Marcy, who was driving, tapped her chin with his free hand. “Walkie-talkie.”

  This time she was too proud to ask to whom.

  The airfield was ragged with plants, like small airports one still saw on Long Island in tho
se days. Out here it contained itself in its own hard gray air. “This isn’t Havana,” Marcy said to her. “Plane’s an oldie. You game?”

  Three smallish planes were on the runway, each of a different shape. They’re planes in a dream, she thought. I won’t have any trouble. “Where’s it going?”

  “Honduras. You can make New York from there.”

  She smiled. In dreams they didn’t tell you.

  Getting on the plane, while Marcy was in with the pilot making sure, the sidekick slipped her a packet she got rid of her first trip to the lav; it was hash. “Guy sitting next to you’s going to New York,” Marcy said, returning. She hadn’t had to pay. “Compliments of the management.” Neither had the rest of the scanty passenger list. It was a government plane. “So, toodle on, Sister ’Ronica.” Acid-yellow irises, set in his lanky skeleton, gave him a dandy’s look, or as if a painter had arranged him. “Keep up on all points.” He hopped off.

  The plane had been ancient, with velvet couch seats that seated three and braided blinds that pulled down. Her only seatmate, who was Tom Gilpin, caught her noting them. “From the old Tempelhof-Moscow run, the pilot says. New engines. He swears.” She had no idea how far back that dated the plane, or under what circumstances, but was flattered her seatmate took for granted she did. She would later find that the world’s hip travelers had a common fund of round-the-globe information, extending even to certain “in” acquaintances—journalists, photographers and other media people for whom travel remained as much ego as business—and especially so among Americans, who even yet seemed not to “have” their travel as nonchalantly as other nations. Living and working among them, she would acquire some of that ferment. Meanwhile seeing how this same sophistication, adopted in one’s greenhorn years, could emerge in the successful of her trade, often still technically young, as a royally deadened innocence that kept them from those very “sources”—strange roots and sailors’ warnings—which best fed their profession.

  That day, knowing none of this, she’d accepted Tom’s courtesy to the young for what it was, not suspecting in him deeper agonies of kindness. He’d seemed to blend untroubledly with the era of the plane—if he’d had a homburg, as perhaps one of those gentleman philosophers of Karl Marx’s London, dapper with intellect, whose photos were in Lievering’s office at the college. Or like one of D. H. Lawrence’s Laborite-socialite co-weekenders in an English country cottage—on Lievering’s other wall—if he’d had a cap. Later she would know that he always blended. He never wore the homburg. Or the cap.

  When the middied stewardess came by, he’d said quietly, “Note, she has real cartridges in that silly belt, poor girl.” And in a minute Veronica and he were talking, laughing. She told him about the group she’d just left. “They don’t want a revolution,” he said. “That kind just wants to be intimate with one. The way some romantics want to be, with crime. They’re political—prurients.” He wasn’t surprised she knew the word, only charmed when he heard from where—a Sunday-school tract “against lewd and prurient practices,” hung behind the bar at Miss Lacey’s. He was the kind told you true things; you had to be reciprocal. She told him a good many, omitting Lievering. She’d go back to finish at the university later, she said. But for a while, she’d work; she didn’t yet know at what.

  “I was an escapee once, from Harvard.” She was awed. “From there? I don’t see why.” He’d chortled. “You’re right. I’ve always said it that way. But it is pretentious.”

  At the time, he’d had a reddish mustache and beard later shaved—he’d been in the Middle East and acquired a skin infection. He’d been to China early on, also. And yes, this was a government plane. To Honduras, where she could pick up a plane to New York. He hadn’t asked how she had boarded; maybe he’d seen. “You a friend of Castro?” she’d asked. “I met him,” Tom had answered. “He’s easy to meet. No, I just came to observe.” He did that everywhere—“to complete my Harvard education,” he said, grinning. “Maybe my mind’s so open there’s nothing left in it but a draft. Shaw said that, I’ve heard. Probably bamboozling his audience into thinking it a bad thing.” He was like some of the British residents in Barbados, she thought, rich enough to eat cities like candy—and wasn’t startled to hear that before going to New York, where he lived, he was stopping off at Palm Beach. “To settle my mother’s estate while she’s still alive,” he’d said, smiling. “She wants to live in France.”

  What was his regular work? “Settling my father’s.” He sobered. “Not quite the same. He left me an island—in a way. He was a fisherman.” But soon he was going to “gainfully employ” some “boys and girls” to refurbish a newspaper-magazine. “Leftist?” she’d said cannily. He took a pineapple juice from the tray the stewardess was holding out to them. “Left of what?” He pointed to the stewardess’ belt. “Her?” No, he’d said. “Can’t hack anything political anymore.” He voluntarily etymologized “hack” for her. “Afraid some of my vocabulary congealed at the prep-school level. Because I never went to one.”

  Ailpen, she thought he’d said his name was. His voice walked on New England stilts, finickily distant but polite. Telling her, as she sat there with her newly married thighs hugged tight so that their sated wet wouldn’t stain the socialist velvet she was being flown free of charge on, that the Age of Politics—“Capitalize that”—was over. “Outmoded. Gone. Political theory of any kind. Just packing the belly with diamonds real or fake. Can’t feed, can’t cure. Only kill us, throe by throe. No, just give me a news sheet to publish for a while. I don’t want a cause.”

  She sensed he was talking to her the way one might to a person one would never see again. “What’ll you put in it, then?” she said, dazzled. The stewardess was offering them lunch. He waved it aside for both of them, producing delicious sandwiches with some native relish in them, fruit he said was a variety of loquat, and finally a flask, all from the sloping pockets of what she saw now was the softest approximation of an ordinary business suit, mulberry brown, fine-woven to appear coarse, made sloppy with special care. The flask held iced wine. She slid into luxury easily; Vivie’d always said she would. Though hanging onto his words as if to a shelf. Not everybody fed you them. “Now to your question.” He accepted coffee for both of them, smacking his lips over the deep bean flavor, looking at her grampa-thoughtful over his cup. His eyes were red-brown, fox-hazed like the rest of him—like maybe even his tongue. “We have the power,” he’d said. “Ideas will come.”

  Later on she would know, as all the office did, that he talked like that—professionally—only to new recruits or other amateurs, being himself, as he said, the extreme of those. “Part of the open mind, to be that.” With the experts of anything he kept a polite distance. “They’re all old.” But that too was a pose. Or a ploy.

  Originally, his money might have embarrassed him. There were times when he hopped athletically from one non-pose to another. But underneath, like an iceberg—whose chill his own could resemble—he had seemed to her to grow ever solider. Inside him, somewhere in that flickering underwater bulk drilled with light, there was concealed—she was sure of it—a cause.

  “A good question, yours,” he’d said. “But I can see you don’t think mine a good answer.”

  “It scares me.”

  “As it should.” A forefinger smelling of orange rind tipped up her chin. “Run scared,” he said. “We all do. But run.”

  She froze. But only because the last man to touch her had been Lievering.

  The stewardess came over to her, apprehensive.

  “It’s all right,” he said to her, “I’m non-molesting. This is an interview. Cold.”

  The attendant, a ripe girl, tall for these parts, with strained eyes, shook her head at them worriedly.

  “Really not,” the reddish man said rapidly. “I like women. But they fit the anatomy so exclusively. While the males now, they want to own your mind—homosexually. And the world’s.” Ostensibly he was talking to the stewardess, picking up and ref
lecting over each bottle on her tray; of course he was talking through her at Veronica. He set down a juice bottle, shaking his head. “Mind you, I’m not cold. Just thoughtful.”

  His intelligence was reddish, too, the girl had said to herself. Open in manner as a moss rose, but flushed with its own secret pigment. Generous to the blush-point, but furtive on all its inner action, even the best. She had views on what pigment did to thought. (Since then altered some, but maybe not too wrong on Gilpin. He was still fond of the word “cold.”) He’d turned his modest, cool glance back to her. “Perhaps I’m nearest to a—paedophile.”

  In those days, words she didn’t know could make her angry. But also, the trapped stewardess had been near tears. “We no ’ave.” She wailed it like an aria. “We no ’a-ave it. Coke.” Then had fled up the aisle.

  “Listen—” Veronica had said to him. “I don’t care what you are. You know any Cuban Spanish? Whatever that girl speaks? Go up there, then. Apologize to her. Say something nice.” He’d gone and done that presumably; she’d seen him talking up there at the head of the aisle; had heard the stewardess’s Carmen-laugh. So he could speak—something. But when he returned, Veronica was sitting across the aisle instead of next to him.

  “Want to know what I said to her?”

  She shrugged.

  “I said—” His eyes drooped inward. “Maybe I said—I’d kiss her, if she weren’t wearing those cartridges.”

  She’d been sure from his expression that he hadn’t. In after years, once they’d been reunited, he’d continued the joke: “Want to know what I really said to that stewardess?” he’d say, leaning over her desk at the office (never at his home parties, where he was always formal and oddly circumspect). Then he’d manage something outrageous, or interesting.

  On the plane she merely nodded, returning to her scrutiny of the woman on her right, a beautiful mixed-Asian, lithe in a Western black silk shift, on whose bared copper arms and neck yards of eely gold lifted like gills with each rise of the plane.