How did that make you feel, Honey the therapist asked him. He wiped his eyes but the chortling wouldn’t stop.
Let me tell you what I think, he began, and guffawed.
Never mind what you think, she interrupted. Let’s stay with what you feel.
Shetty, unable to countenance the hilarious idiocy of this remark, got up and walked out, still laughing.
The trouble was, he tells me ruefully, Vina thought the piñata was a great idea, so she felt like I was laughing at her. After that we, ah, re-experienced our previous unresolved relational negativity. We remained on friendly terms but we didn’t engage any more. This was classic avoidance behavior. We didn’t confront. We sidestepped. We didn’t heart-to-heart.
There is a great deal more he wants to confess: how his long decline from successful butcher to down-and-out hobo began the day after he took the young Vina to dinner at the Rainbow Room and then packed her off to live with the Doodhwalas in Bombay. He wishes to speak of fate, of a self-imposed curse, of having suffered the consequences of his failures as a parent deeply enough and for long enough. He is preparing to ask me for the expiation he never fully received from his dead daughter. Doorman Shetty is pursuing a dead Vina too, like all the rest of us he needs to raise her from the dead to give him peace.
Still too shaky myself to carry his additional weight, I cut him off in mid-flow. So as not to appear too rude, I inquire after his son-in-law, Ormus. How is the rock legend dealing with his loss? To my surprise, my pro-forma inquiry occasions a savage tirade.
Listen, this was all in the National Enquirer! This was in People magazine! What, you didn’t hear, you were out of town?, I’m guessing on the moon?
Almost, I reply, thinking of the sea of forgetfulness, the sea of storms, the white white sand and the sea.
Shetty snorts, and dishes.
Ormus Cama, the notorious recluse, has added to his list of bizarre obsessions the growing imitation-Vina industry, making a full collection of the available pornographic film and video material, and showing up unannounced and surrounded by burly Sikh bodyguards at nightclubs and strip joints, to check out the quality of the impersonations. He is believed to be a patron of certain brothels and élite “home delivery” services specializing in celebrity look-alikes. On one occasion he was actually caught in flagrante with a counterfeit Vina in the back of a super-stretch, but when the sharp-eyed cop who saw the hooker responding to a signal and entering the limo understood what was going on, whose surrogate was doing what to whom, he didn’t have the heart to take the matter further and let the participants go without further ado. (The whore in question, Celeste Blue, subsequently tried to parlay the incident into a financially beneficial little scandal but was foiled by the absence of any charges. Clea Singh, commenting on Blue’s interview in the Enquirer, said only: It sounds like the lady has a big mouth.)
For many years the most private of men, Ormus—eye-patched and earmuffed—is now, says the Doorman, a regular attendee at the mushrooming Vina conventions, often agreeing to adjudicate at the look-alikes’ beauty contest, stipulating only that he should be the sole judge. The winning Vina, if she is thought to be of a sufficiently high standard, is sent up to his suite after the contest, and afterwards escorted out by a firm-jawed Clea Singh and compensated so handsomely that, thus far, there have been no complaints.
Ormus has also—reversing the attitudes of a lifetime—been visiting a guru. Her name is Goddess-Ma, and as the upheavals of the age have become more numerous and dramatic her popularity among the élite of New York society, who are always easily alarmed by global instability and loud noises, has increased by leaps and bounds. Goddess-Ma is from India, allegedly illiterate, made her name in Düsseldorf and arrived in the United States “by a miracle.” It is rumored that there is no record of her journey to New York in the files of any airline or shipping company. Yet her immigration status has never been investigated, which would indicate to the skeptical observer that the truth is more conventional than it is being made to seem, but is treated by the Goddess-Ma people as further proof of her existence within an impregnable aura of blessing and safety. Goddess-Ma is very small, but young and beautiful enough to be a movie star, and has powerful—and anonymous—backers who have installed her right in the Rhodopé Building, three floors down from Ormus. From this splendid residence she has issued a number of “Goddess Sayings” that have reverberated in the rarefied air of the city’s better locales. India-blah, Bharat-burble, the so-called Wisdom of the East, is definitely back in fashion. In fact, India in general is hotter than ever: its food, its fabrics, its doe-eyed dames, its direct line to Spirit Central, its drums, its beaches, its saints. (When India explodes a nuclear device, the notion of Holy Mother India takes a few dents, but it is quickly agreed by le tout Manhattan that in this matter India’s unwise political leaders have betrayed the land’s true spirit. The valuable Oriental Wisdom concept suffers little lasting damage, unlike the much-shaken planet.)
Unsurprisingly, Goddess-Ma has been commenting on the Vina phenomenon. Beneath the unstable earth, she Says, there has always been a woman keeping things together, in all cultures. Our Indian earth mother parted her lips to receive pure Sita, falsely accused of having been defiled by Ravana, after Lord Ram rejected her on his spin doctors’ advice. Our Greek mother Persephone sits beside Hades in his subterranean kingdom.
Now Vina, our beloved Vina, has joined these women, the greatest of women, who hold up the earth from below as mighty Atlas holds up the sky.
O dancing Earth, Says Goddess-Ma. In our Indian Puranas we learn that Lord Shiva danced You into being, He, the Lord of the Dance. Whereas the Greeks tell of Eurynome, the goddess of everything, who loved dancing and created the sea and the land so that she had someplace to groove. I Say that such also are We!, Men and Women!, dancing our world into being. I Say, Dance! And if the earth shakes, think that Vina dances, too, and see what new miracles She unveils.
As Goddess-Ma’s popularity grows, as her beautiful face and her feel-good Sayings do their irresistible work on that city in which beauty and congratulation are the surest roads to success, there are dissenting noises, from the followers of older spiritual Paths and from large segments of New York’s Indian community When asked about her critics, Goddess-Ma is sharp. Mine is the true Indian way, she Says with complete assurance. These converts and long-term expatriates are happier peddling and swallowing their glamorized exotica.
(Goddess-Ma has already learned the laws of spin. Take the worst thing that is said about you, accuse your accusers of the selfsame fault, be more beautiful and media-friendly than they, and you will carry all before you, like a storm.)
Writing this, I think of Darius Cama. I think of William Methwold. I remember their attempts to build bridges between the mythologies of East and West. I remember my own hours in Darius’s library, my seduction by his storehouse of ancient tales. I wonder what the old gents with their love of scholarship and uninterest in hocus-pocus would have made of Goddess-Ma and her brass-bold bid for transcultural divinity, which includes a shameless attempt to co-opt dead Vina, to hijack her popular tragedy. New York, where you go to make it big, has no problem with Goddess-Ma’s hard-sell tactics, which are, in fact, admired and increase her following. Also, the city’s dance venues report a significant increase in numbers. The young of Manhattan are following the pint-size seer’s terpsichorean advice.
Shetty is even-handedly contemptuous both of pretty, ambitious Goddess-Ma and of those who follow her. That Ormus Cama has been going down three floors to visit her a couple of times a week only proves that he’s totally lost it, in the Doorman’s forcefully expressed opinion.
And there’s worse to come. Ormus is apparently chasing dead Vina down every rabbit hole he can find. It is Shetty’s contention that the rock god is now a heavy user of major narcotics, pursuing his dead wife along trails of powder, reading her smoke signals, feeling her needle in his veins. The Singhs manage everything, the businesses, the r
oyalties, the women, the drugs, they have enclosed him within their fierce loyalty, it’s even harder to get anywhere near him than it used to be. It is probable that his devoted retinue—determined as its members are to fulfill his every whim, to slake his every thirst, to offer him whatever partial compensations might momentarily offset his irreducible loss—is in fact killing him with love.
It’s the coward’s way, Shetty tells me, and I’m surprised by the sudden brutality of his words. If he wants to be with my poor girl so much, then why not be a man and shoot himself in the mouth. Yeah. Why doesn’t he just blow his head off and to hell with everything. Then they’ll be together until the end of time.
I liked you better when you were cheerful, I tell him. When you were rolling with the punches, I liked you fine.
And the same to you, he says, leaving. Don’t think you’re the only SOB who can remember when.
Doorman Shetty doesn’t know it, but he’s echoing Plato. This is what the great philosopher has Phaedrus say in the Symposium’s first speech about love: The gods honor zeal and heroic excellence towards love. But Orpheus … they sent back unfulfilled from Hades, showing him a phantom of the woman … because he seemed to them a coward … [who] didn’t venture to die for the sake of love, as did Alcestis, but rather devised a means of entering Hades while still alive. Orpheus, the despised citharode—the singer with the lyre or, let’s say, guitarist—the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries, between Apollo and Dionysus, man and nature, truth and illusion, reality and the imagination, even between life and death, was evidently not to austere Plato’s taste. Plato, who preferred martyrdom to mourning, Plato the ayatollah of love.
The pursuit of love beyond death is a harsh and joyless chase. I judge Ormus less harshly than would the Platonic Phaedrus, or that other, rather less eminent thinker, his personal gatekeeper and his dead wife’s dad. I know what he’s going through, because I’ve been down that tunnel too. I’m there.
Here he is, Ormus: unable to work, succumbing to Vina’s weaknesses—the drink, the drugs—hoping to find her in her faults, by making them his own. And these are his chemically induced visions of her, of Vina in many guises. Here she is bearing the thousand faces of the women in whom he searched for her after she fled Bombay, also the thousand faces of all the women he gave up for her sake during the ten celibate years. They are all Vina now.
Here she is as herself. He looks on her and feels himself turn to stone.
As the Vina phenomenon swells and grows, he feels himself losing his grip on the truth of her; his Vina is slipping away for ever, dying a second time. The earthquake has already claimed her but after the earthquake comes the tidal wave, drowning Vina under the tsunami of her selves.
As she becomes all things to all people so she becomes nothing to him—nothing he knows or loves. And there is a worse thought: as she slides ever deeper into the abyss, buried beneath an avalanche of versions, as she enters the halls of the underworld to take her seat on her dark throne, is it possible that she is forgetting him?
Rilke’s Eurydike, entering the nether realms, grows quickly forgetful of the light. The darkness stains her eyes, her heart. When Hermes speaks of Orpheus, this Eurydike terribly answers: Who?
The name Eurydice/Eurydike means “wide-ruler.” The first recorded use of this name in tellings of the Orpheus story occurs in the first century B.C.E. It may therefore be a relatively recent addition to the tale. In the third century B.C.E. she was called Agriope, “savage watcher.” This is also one of the names of the witch goddess Hecate; and of wide-ruling Queen Persephone herself.
Which precipitates an avalanche of questions: Did Eurydice—of whose origins we know little, although the official version is that she was a wood nymph, a dryad—actually bubble up from the Underworld to capture Orpheus’s heart? Was she an avatar of the Queen of Darkness herself, hunting for love in the illuminated world above? And therefore, in being swallowed by the earth, was she merely going home?
Is the failure of Orpheus to rescue her a token of the inevitable fate of love (it dies); or of the weakness of art (it can’t raise the dead); of Platonic cowardice (Orpheus won’t die to be with her; no Romeo he); or of the obduracy of the so to speak gods (they harden their hearts against lovers)?
Or—most startlingly—is it a consequence of the reassertion by Eurydice of her true identity, her dark side, her citizenship of the night? And Gayomart, Ormus’s dead twin, his own night self, his Other: is he her true husband, who sits beside her upon her obsidian chair?
Here’s my answer. In the obsessive contemplation of death we may begin to hear, from the dead, whispers of how they lived. Hades, Persephone, all that belongs, for me, to the realm of the so-to-speak. But Vina’s hidden self during her lifetime was no metaphor. The person she hid with was me, the self she concealed from her husband she revealed to me. Forget Gayomart; I was the flesh-and-blood Other beside her. I was her other love.
Maybe this is what Ormus can’t admit to himself: that the Vina he doesn’t know is not a construct of her death or afterlife. What he can’t stand is the mystery of her earthly hours. Her nights above the ground.
This is a riddle I can solve but will not. Yes, it was me, I could say, she was going to leave you, you crazy bastard, she was on the point of ditching you and your eye-patched visions and your whistling ears and your ten-year gestures and your famous grand passion, and making a beeline for my big brass bed.
I am the King of her Underworld, I could tell him. She belongs to me.
I can’t tell him this because I’ve lost her too, and now we’re burning in the same fire. O Ormus, my brother, my self. When you scream the noise bursts from my throat. When I weep the tears seep from your eyes. I will not hurt you more.
And because I can’t, I won’t, he slides deeper into the bottomless pit: not Vina’s abyss, but his own. He can’t believe in her soiling, though she lie ever so deep in the soil. He sees her glowing up through the fog of earth and stone. He imagines her corpse as a blazing candle, phosphorescent, undimmed. His love illuminates her. He seeks her through the night.
He hopes each night to wake and see a familiar figure standing at his window, looking out at the shadowed park, the park before dawn. How often he pictures himself slipping out of bed to stand silently beside her sweet shade and watch the fingers of first light slip across the tall houses and the trees.
I know all his fears, all his hopes, all his dreams, because they are also mine.
Earthquakes, scientists say, are common phenomena. Globally speaking there are around fifteen thousand tremors a decade. Stability is what’s rare. The abnormal, the extreme, the operatic, the unnatural: these rule. There is no such thing as normal life. Yet the everyday is what we need, it’s the house we build to defend us against the big bad wolf of change. If, finally, the wolf is reality, the house is our best defense against the storm: call it civilization. We build our walls of straw or brick not only against the vulpine instability of the times but against our own predatory natures too; against the wolf within.
That’s one view. A house can also be a jail. Big wolves (ask Mowgli, ask Romulus and Remus, ask Kevin Costner, we don’t have to rely on the Three Little Pigs) are not necessarily bad. And anyhow, this new time of shocks and cracks is out of the ordinary, as even the seismologists agree. The number of tremors is up to over fifteen thousand a year.
Everybody reads the papers, right, so I don’t have to spell out in too much detail how the world has changed in these last years, the sudden decrease in the height of the Himalayas, the crack across the Hong Kong-China frontier that turned the New Territories into an island, the sinking of Robben Island, the raising of Atlantis at Santorini-Thera in the southernmost Cyclades, the transformation of rock ’n’ roll into a weapon that blasted Panama’s dictator-on-the-run out of his hideout, and so forth. Everybody gets the new rolling-news stations, so we’ve all watched the earthquakes together, the old order falling, live, as it happens, we have see
n the jails bursting open, the breaking of the so to speak seventh seal was a major breaking news story, and we’re all wondering who those four horsemen are. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when the Pinkerton men just kept on coming after them, we turn to one another and ask, wonderingly, Who are those guys?
So to speak.
These frontier earthquakes are the wonder of the age, aren’t they? Did you see that fault that just ripped out the whole iron curtain? “Unforgettable” doesn’t even come close. And after the Chinese opened fire in Tiananmen, did you see the rift open up along the entire length of the Great Wall of China? So now there’s nothing in China (but there’s a big new airport in Japan) that can be seen from the surface of the moon, that’ll teach ’em, right? Right.
Oh, man, the things these quakes are throwing up. Poets for presidents, the end of apartheid, the Nazi gold buried for fifty years deep in Swiss bank accounts, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Titanic, and we guess communism just got buried in the rubble there somewhere. And those Ceaujescus? So not missed.
When the changes are this big, you can be sure there will be politicians lining up to take the credit. Seems that the iron curtain quakes were the result of years of covert Western activity underground. Seems we found where the pressure points were and used our best efforts to build that pressure until the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Seems that earthquakes, the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, are now at our disposal. Somebody gives us trouble, we literally pull the rug out from under his feet. This is what just happened to Saddam Hussein in what is quickly becoming known as the Shake of Araby. No, that’s right, if you’re being picky it hasn’t been one hundred percent successful, he survived et cetera, but did you see it? You’ve gotta give our boys credit, they put on one hell of a show. Whoo-hoo! Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on. And, as we hope you noted, no damage at all to the superstructures and infrastructure of that all-important Saudi oil. Nada. Zilcho. Zip.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 60
