Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “Yes, my father tell,” Manouch said tenderly. “Four months. And such a pretty girl…he see her. On her motorcycle…I did not see her. But all our women talked of it.”

  “Middling pretty,” Wert said. “One of our—girls. Nothing out of the ord—” Though sometimes in bed, in that silly-soft gilt gondola, as he leaned over that thin profile of hers, which was like a slash of indelible ink on the afternoon-shadowed sheets, the breasts like two small inverted cups, and the patch of pubic hair he and she had called her “mouse,” he’d actually felt his heart stop, wondering if love-embolism could kill. “She shouldn’t have been on a motorcycle at all in that city; I don’t know how they sanctioned it, really. But she worked for the consulate, a kind of courier.” And in those days the whole world was deferring to our American machine-style—even those wily thousand-year sailors the Venetians, with their brigand doe-eyes. “She was so proud of knowing all the streets she could use it on—a whole backyard network. Sometimes she had to part with it, though, and use a vaporetto.”

  One noon he and she had run into each other on one of those, and putting a finger to her lips she’d flirted with him until he picked her up, to the siropy outrage of two well-dressed sixtyish signoras behind, who kept Cara!-ing each other like machine guns. Cara, can you tell which of the Americans are whores? I never. Answer: Psst, Cara. Maybe they all wear yellow, like the putanas in Russia. When all four were getting off, Jenny, who was wearing yellow, turned to them, saying in Italian, “He’s my husband, we’re going home for siesta.” Everybody laughed like crazy, and they all ended up for a drink at where the signoras had been heading—Harry’s Bar. Where it was their habit to sit for hours in the smart leather hats one of them had made, clicking their bracelets, gradually removing an arsenal of cigarette holders, lipstick cases and other frippery from their handbags, and being persuaded by table acquaintances to take orders on all of them. Cara Marcella, cara Tonia; he remembered them yet—and how, when Jenny’d said to him, I parked the Vespa on the Zattere, they’d rolled their eyes at each other. Chic!

  Nobody ever stole the motorcycle, no matter where she left it. Probably the whole of Venice knew whose it was, she’d said, giggling. “Such privilege, ain’t it orful,” she’d sighed. “And four months ago I was a radical.” Seriously discussing their progress, they’d both concluded they hadn’t yet compromised on any principles. But they’d meant to keep a sharp lookout.

  “She’d only exchanged the trusty old Vespa for the Lambretta that day.” Wert’s thumb pressed his teeth: “She hadn’t wanted to.” But a requisition had been put through, in the lavish embassy style. And the order had come through. My darling old Vespa, she’d sulked—couldn’t we keep it somewhere? “If she’d been riding the old one, maybe—But it was junked.”

  “No it wasn’t.” Manoucher sat up. “The hotel head porter salvage it. My father buy it from him. For me. It go all over Europe with us, for years. Our gardener in Teheran has it now.” He pushed the tea away; China tea meant nothing to them. “You see, you were so romantic, to us. Both of you. So young. Together—in a marriage. So dashing. And no children…To the women especially, she was. And so odd. Riding that machina like a horse. Astride.” He was reddening. “And in those thin clothes.” The flush deepened. “I was still with the women. When they heard that—sound—they all rush to the windows. I was not allowed to look. Never. But I already hear it wasn’t the same machine. I used to sneak out to where she kept the old one. The porter let me.”

  The old Vespa. And Wert had kept nothing. Not even the samovar.

  So romantic they were—and so practical. The porter must have been bribed; Wert remembered him. A bow for the Americans, but for the Iranians almost a salaam; he’d probably been on their retainer the whole time. Which hadn’t prevented him from being the first to run out from his little office and pick up Jenny, or the doll bleeding from the nose that she’d become. Such thin, gauzy stuffs she wore that steaming summer, that day a green-and-red dress, picked up for a song at those stalls near the synagogue in the ghetto, which fell from her waist in points like a handkerchief. No helmet; in Italy then nobody did. She’d loved the way Italian men on foot sometimes paced her, running alongside her back wheel crying Bella, bella until with a wave she outdistanced them.

  “Yes, the women saw it,” Wert said. “And ran to your father. When I came in from the office for lunch, not fifteen minutes later, he met me at the door. He didn’t want to let me talk to the women—but not because of your customs—not at all. He led me in there, when I asked.”

  He’d never forgotten the sight of that group of women, their veils rimmed beneath their eyes, clinging to each other in bas-relief, or as if in these quarters which they never left singly, some daily applied nougat paste kept them even from moving their limbs separately. One of them, on command from Bakhtiary, had been persuaded to drop her veil for Wert, giving her account. “The cobblestones spat her up,” she said, to her husband, not dreaming Wert knew Farsi. “High in the air, with her place showing.” Their word for Jenny’s “mouse.” “If she’d worn chador like us,” the woman said, meaning the shawled wraps, without which in spite of the heat there, these women never left their rooms, “maybe the head would have been spared.” Then like one of the Fates she’d raised a draped arm and shut her face from Wert’s sight.

  Once outside again, the old man—if one could call him that as the spry septuagenarian in a silk suit he was then—had apologized. “Fateh sours, from only having girls.” When they went back to Wert’s room and saw the Italian doctor in pince-nez and black ribbon, leaning over the pillow and the fall of hair on it, as in one of those Victorian lithographs—“A Medical Call”—old Bakhtiary had dropped on one knee slightly in front of Wert but still linking hands, so that Wert, forced down with him in that Christian posture, stayed for a minute there hand in hand, staring at the backs of Bakhtiary’s shoes. Then his hand was released, so that he could go nearer. There Jenny was—or wasn’t. In the silly gondola bed.

  “Does your father still have shoes made to his own last in Jermyn Street, and then wear down the backs of them like carpet slippers?” he said smiling, and stopped short. Manoucher was again staring at him in that bug-eyed, Coptic way which made one realize that all the frescoes, from Persepolis to Greece to the Pyrenees, stated a simply observed physical resemblance.

  “What—what…?” Wert said, and stopped short. How much of this conversation had been said aloud. How much only thought? And for how long had he been speaking in Farsi?

  “Ye-es.” Across the dinky cocktail table Manoucher took Wert’s hand and held it. Wert let it stay. The ill-lit lounge was occupied only by one other couple and a foursome, all of them British and busy at it, and the club was after all—thespian. And he did feel; what did he feel?

  As if he was reporting on glory, a small tincture of it. And that Manoucher knew.

  “She was so terribly nice, you see,” he said in English. “Jenny. So—nice. And so terribly—” Close. The pacts they had had, the jokes—all so interwoven.

  Jenny hadn’t fenced him in by dying; she’d left him irresponsibly freer than he’d meant or hoped to be. She and he had meant to keep such a sharp lookout.

  “Do you have a picture, Beel?”

  “No. I kept nothing. Except something your father gave me, afterwards.”

  “She is a dark-haired, my father say. With a good white skin. And features not dick.” His tongue made an effort. “T-thick. And she sometime play ‘Für Elise’ on the hotel piano.”

  “Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song.’”

  “He say she does not have the blond nose American. Like this.” Manoucher pronged his own narrow nose into a pug. Wert burst out laughing. This time the English people did look up, and away.

  “More like this,” Manoucher said, making a two-fingered aquiline line on the air.

  “Not quite. A slight wave to it. Like this.” Wert guided him. “There.” He sat back. He felt nearer that bed than he’d ever
dared go since. “Actually, she wasn’t that other kind of American, but one generation only. Her folks came from Bulgaria but were Armenian; her maiden name was Arkanian.”

  “So.” The eyes glowed.

  “Now’s there anything else your connoisseur father would like me to tell you?” Like: height five foot six, waist small, weight I dunno, have a try at one-twenty, shoe size seven—large. And a head with a great cave-in from which a cockade of brain protruded. Bakhtiary, who measured all women, hadn’t seen her at her best.

  “There is. But I weiss not how to say it.” Manoucher threw up his hands. “Promise you will not be angry,” he said in Farsi. “Please believe me. My father requests for reasons most serious.” The Farsi word was actually nearer “real” as Wert remembered. Or real-to-life.

  “Yes? What?”

  Manoucher leaned toward him, a forefinger raised like a priest’s. “‘Be sure to ask him,’ he said on the phone. ‘I forgot to. I trust you to, Manoucher. I can trust you to the end of the world. Haven’t I done so?’” Manoucher took time to smile at himself holily but Wert still couldn’t help liking him. Loving him was nearer the truth. “Go on, then.”

  “What was the color of her pubic hair?”

  When Wert didn’t answer, young Bakhtiary stood up.

  Wert stood also. “This wedding of his—must have addled him.”

  “I could wish it even. Because of the pain he has. But no.”

  Tears rise so readily to their large, already moist eyes, Wert thought, but is that bad?

  They went out to the entrance and got their coats.

  The doorman handed the red-faced, almost blubbery Bakhtiary his coat, but helped Wert, whom he knew. Or because Wert was senior. Outside, the London evening glittered like channel water, always a puzzle to him how the nights here shone so, with so little light; must be the wet. Through the portico they could hear this most obsequious doorman in town, out on the steps now, letting in a latecomer. “Gu-u-ude evunning, sah—” like a wipe-down from a masseur. But if you asked to hire him or his wife to masticate food for an old man, they’d have you up at the assizes. What was enlightenment, that it could patronize a young man for the tear in his eye?

  “I get it,” Wert said hurriedly. “I’m his bequest to you, isn’t that it?” He raised a hand to the boy’s shoulder, higher than his own. “I’ll do my best to act like one.”

  The eyes above his veiled. When they were about to take refuge in oratory, they often lowered their eyes like this. To let you know. “It is my father’s nature. To make gifts.”

  All of their natures. The cronies had come arms laden to the train on which Wert left Meshed, though he’d been there scarcely a year. “Come back,” they said knowingly, more to this year out of their lives than to him, for they must have known he wouldn’t. Raining on him pictures they had taken six months to paint, silver ashtrays marked with their own names, they had wailed it: Come back.

  He should have sent flowers to Manoucher’s hotel even though the wife wasn’t with him; perhaps he still should. The sexual allocation of flowers meant nothing to them; there was a ritual. Not in tribute to people; he saw that now. To that sacred, irrecoverable time which had been between them.

  “Have you a picture of your wife?” He should have asked at once.

  He was proffered it. He took the thick cardboard to the light. Odd how in the Middle East they still managed these nineteenth-century photographs, with that same cold purity of line which used to come from plates which took hours of soaking to develop—and a long time to pose for. In Tabriz he’d seen ancient German tripod cameras. Though perhaps in this case it was in the purity of the sitter. On a polished white glare the head of a handsome girl perched in cameo. If that huge space between the eyes wasn’t touched up—no, they hadn’t minimized the thick brows—she must be beautiful, even with a mouth so severe. The glare wasn’t entirely from the paper.

  “Soraya.”

  “Soraya.” Like the Shah’s former queen. Whom it hadn’t been polite to mention. “And like all your own father’s brides—is she, too, sixteen?”

  “She is twenty-four.” Manoucher looked him straight in the eye.

  “Ah, Jenny’s age,” Wert said too quickly. But very late, for them. Or used to be. In fact the respective ages of both were all wrong. Or more like us.

  “Will she be joining you over there for your father’s wedding?”

  “She stays in your country. To make the house.”

  A German-style one, by the stern lift of that face? The Iranians had always admired German expertise.

  “We are married only three months.”

  “Still time then,” Wert said, knowing these jokes were in order. “To make him a grandchild.” Oh he was trying. This time he knew he was speaking Farsi.

  Manoucher put the picture away in an inside breastpocket. He had clouded over again. “She is—Universität graduate.”

  “Ah…so you met there.” Wert had done this evening all wrong; he was years out of date on modern Iran. He should have asked Manoucher to meet him in the bar; maybe, in spite of the Koran, they knocked back their scotch like anybody—maybe the two of them should go for a nightcap even now.

  “No. I never meet her there.”

  “Ah. You were engaged to her before.” Before he was sent away. But would even that explain the age of the girl?

  “No, I never meet her. She say she think she see me once, somewhere from far away. Before I leave Iran. But until she see me the wedding day, she is not sure.” Manoucher put on his overcoat. Preening? Yes, a little. “It was I.”

  “Do you mean—?” Of course it was meant. A young man five years away in the raw city they all wanted to conquer. But where girls were merely met. A boy who was important enough to exile, or whose family was. For nothing bad, he’d said. If you were all that and a learner too at the Western arena where for all their public scorn they carefully sent both their richest money-splashing aristocrats and their finest talk-dragons, no, you wouldn’t take just any wife. Amazing how they could act from conventions thousands of years old and still appear inventive. Confidence did it, roiling in this boy’s veins as bright as blood.

  The “boy” was fastening his overcoat, regally. The doorman rushed to adjust its collar, receiving his tip by a sleight-of-hand so fast Wert only knew of it from the man’s face.

  Manoucher nodded, standing tall. “I write my father, yes? And he send her to me.”

  Just then the maîtresse appeared. In the umber light of the old entrance she came toward them on neat feet, all the time seeming to move deferentially backward. Her gold watch swung from her blouse on its rose-velvet bow-knot, pinned to her collar, not to her breast, as a woman not in service might. She would always know her place. Yet the gold chains, which he now saw ended in a bunch of functional keys at her waist, stirred in reverse, faintly sexual. In her hand, held out to Wert, was Manoucher’s button, the one he had popped.

  Wert took it and passed it on. Bakhtiary kissed her hand.

  “Mrs.—Vrouman.” Wert wasn’t after all surprised he remembered her name. These things had a way of storing themselves up for him. “My—godson.”

  Surely no member had ever introduced her before. She took it prettily. Perhaps she’d never before brought any of them a button either. “Vrouman—” Wert repeated. Though the “Mrs.” might well be complimentary, in the same way that the British dubbed their cooks. “I had fancied you yourself were Viennese—” They exchanged looks. He had fancied. She noted it.

  “No sir, I’m Dutch.”

  She left, thanking them with excess, Wert thought, even for what he now recalled the English would call her—a manageress. Until he glimpsed, in the kissed hand trailing behind her, a clutch of bills. He laughed. “So you noticed her, too.” Manoucher joined in.

  Out on the steps, “Gu-gude night, gentlemen,” rolled down them like suet. “Shall you have a cab?”

  “There are no cabs anymore and you know it,” Wert blurted. Ashamed of
himself at once, he passed the doorman a coin. “Where you staying, Manouch—the Savoy? My car’s down the alley. I’ll drive you there.”

  “The Dorchester.” His eyes glinted.

  Of course. Islam had bought it.

  And miraculously, here was a cab. What’s it doing, creeping up to them from where it had been waiting? Marvelously gleaming cab—the cabbie had a cloth still in his hand. “’Ere you are, guvnor.” Allah had dispatched him—having been applied to beforehand. The cab, on weekly hire for one night, belonged to Manouch.

  Wert pressed his hand. “I’ll be in New York shortly. Shall I speak to your wife?”

  “I will not yet be home. But call on her,” Manouch said in Farsi. “Please.”

  “Of course,” Wert said, in English.

  “My mother is with her.”

  “I always wanted to meet that lady.”

  “She knows all about you. Also, there is the other wife.” Manoucher’s teeth, suddenly shown, are magnificent. “My father’s, Mr. Beel…But Soraya does not like it.”

  “Ah well, two mothers-in-law.” But shouldn’t an Iranian girl—a girl who would still submit to being married as this one had—be used to such leftover polygamous households?

  “My mother and the other wife, they tell everyone in Teheran they come to New York to wait for our child. Except my father. They do not tell him.”

  “Why not?”

  “There isn’t yet a child,” he said, gloomy.

  “Manouch. Only three months.”

  “And if Soraya—if there should not be, I could not tell him,” he said distractedly. Suddenly he is a wild man, pulling at his tie, raking his hair.

  “Manoucher. Why not?” Hadn’t she been a virgin? Wert dared not say it. “Manouch, control yourself.” It was what one crony back there had said to another, after the story of love unrequited, love hopeless, and more usually, love untold. He patted him.