Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  One thing she knew and Ned did not, was that there is no permanent friendship between men, among men. Something goes wrong, somebody marries the wrong person, somebody advances too fast, somebody converts, somebody refuses good advice or bad advice, it didn’t matter. It went up in a flash, it went up in a flash like magnesium paper set on fire in a magic show. She thought, It’s not always great with women, either, but it can be. Women can have friends, it’s more personal, she thought. Although in the great design of things, women were getting to be more like men. There were more tough cookies around, and liars.

  Well, Ned was her friend, her deep friend. He didn’t realize it, exactly. He thought everything was love with them, but it wasn’t. She would have been his friend whenever. It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering. It was a pure friendship fantasy. Not sexual.

  And that was why she was enraged at the man, enraged. She had to get this rage out of her, so she could kill him when she caught up with him. He was an idiot. He was reckless. He was hopeless. He had shit for brains. He couldn’t be counted on. He was a fool. These people had hurt him in the past, Douglas had. She only knew some of it.

  She was moving around too much in her seat. The woman next to her was unhappy.

  She offered the woman her uneaten dessert, an industrial brownie still in its packaging. Nina had watched the woman devour her own brownie in two bites, earlier.

  “No,” said the woman, quite forcefully.

  She thinks I’m affiliated with Satan, Nina thought.

  3 His great friend was dead.

  Ned wanted to embrace his dead friend. An imaginary burning feeling ran across Ned’s chest and down his arms. He wanted to embrace his friend. Where Douglas’s body was, even, Ned didn’t know. No clue whether it had been removed from the estate, no clue what shape it might be in wherever it was. Nobody could have gotten there from the West Coast any faster than he had. And still he was late. Except that when the call had finally come from Elliot, it had already been too late, whatever he meant by that. He meant something. Your thinking is choppy, he thought.

  Douglas had died when his riding mower had pitched him down into a ravine, the mower on top of him, when the ground at the edge had given way. So he had been buried once already.

  These were the Catskills, all around. The upward road he was walking on ran through terrain jammed with trees still dripping from a monster rainstorm he had just missed. It was trees, trees, and glimpses of hills farther off, also burdened with trees, as Douglas might have put it. The ruts in the unpaved road were running like brooks. It was all uphill. There were regular trees in their last leaf, intermixed with unwelcoming, bristling evergreens. It was four in the afternoon.

  It was muggy. This was not where he would choose to die, in a ditch in this vicinity. What had Douglas seen, dying, his neck broken and mud sliding over him? No friend near, no one around, black mud engulfing him.

  Ned shrugged off his rucksack and, holding it against his chest to give his shoulders a break, continued on. He had brought too much reading matter and had so far only managed to get cursorily through three recent issues of The Economist. That had been during the San Francisco–to–Houston leg of the trip, before guilt had shut him down. He was agitated about the war that was coming and guilty that he’d been forced to drop the little he was doing in the effort to stop it. There was going to be a march—the Convergence was what they were calling it—to protest the rush toward war in Iraq. It was looking immense. Feeder marches from all over Northern California would culminate in San Francisco. Contingents were coming from as far north as Yreka, for Christ’s sake. There was a coalition for the Convergence, his coalition. It was funny, the anarchists were the easiest to deal with and the Quakers were the most difficult. Oh and of course he felt like shit about leaving Nina with so little notice, and leaving exactly when the timing on their personal project was so critical. He couldn’t think about that.

  4 He had come to a rude plank bridge across a gully occupied by a roaring brown torrent. Spray was coming up through gaps in the planking. The bridge meant that he was better than three-quarters of the way up the road to Douglas’s estate. He supposed it had to be called an estate. It did, after all, have a whole variety of buildings on the property, including a stone tower. And this had to be the bridge that some of the taxi services in the area would go no farther than when delivering visitors to Douglas’s. He had been given this piece of information by the Trailways driver when he dropped Ned on the highway between his scheduled stops. The driver had also mentioned the tower, and, overall, that the locals didn’t like Douglas, or hadn’t liked him.

  Ned started across the bridge and then stopped. It came to him strongly that he needed a better idea of how he looked before he arrived, and there was no sign of a mirror in the roadway. His eyes itched. Visine, he needed. There was none in his toiletries. In fact, his toiletries amounted to a toothbrush and deodorant picked up in an airport shop.

  Maybe he looked all right. He was wearing a new tan corduroy hacking jacket, a good blue dress shirt straight from the cleaners. Nina had found the jacket in a Junior League thrift shop she surveilled like a spy. He had all his hair, curly, graying, but still. Somebody in their group, he couldn’t remember who, had said it was a fact of life that people tended not to take people with curly hair seriously. But curly or not, he had his hair. He remembered that it was Douglas who had made the crack about curly hair. My weight is okay, one seventy-two is good, he thought. The Timberland boots he was wearing gave his five ten and a half a little help. Elliot was the tallest in their group, six four and an ectomorph. The boots had been purchased by Nina and never worn. She had a mission to get everything together they would need when they went camping at Stinson Beach. They were going to be serious about camping. They had gone once. Stinson Beach was a good choice for starters because it wasn’t that far from Berkeley. So camping there could fit neatly into weekends and not protrude into their insane work life. They wouldn’t burn up hours getting to where they were going to rusticate.

  He kept calling Nina. At some point she was going to talk to him. And she would forgive him. Because she was forgiving. She would be getting deluged with calls for him, emails, faxes.

  He should have brought a novel, plucked something from Nina’s shelves of uppermiddleclassics. She called them that. Something by Louis Auchincloss or Barbara Pym or Frederick Buechner or Thornton Wilder, people he was not uninterested in reading. He felt guilty over not reading a piece of worthwhile fiction when the constraints of travel made it a completely justifiable waste of time, which was not what he meant. He should have brought along something with a story to it. Well, he hadn’t. And he hadn’t really tried to pay attention to the Ulster County countryside, either. Why Douglas had chosen to settle in this particular part of the forest was a question. The bus trip had been a montage interrupted by naps and daydreaming: sharp hills, thick forests crowding down close to the road, motels and restaurants and trailer parks, an inner-tubing center, a splat-ball drome, gun shops, a pottery studio with a huge stucco golem in front holding a sign saying Feats of Clay. A lot of the businesses seemed to be shuttered. It was the end of September. Maybe everything was seasonal. And on the subject of not paying attention, he remembered a couple of years ago when they had been flying over the Rockies on a brilliant clear day and he had chided Nina for not paying attention to the grandeur below and she had said I find scenery beautiful but repetitive.

  He was at a halt, there at the bridge. His pant cuffs were drenched dark. He was forty-eight. Of the friends who would be there, Gruen was the youngest. Nina was thirty-seven. He would be meeting Douglas’s widow for the first time. She would be a wreck. Douglas’s son was fourteen, and Ned had met him briefly when he was a toddler. Elliot would be there, stooping down
for embraces, and Joris, all of them.

  He was hesitating. He wanted to go back down to the general store. It seemed urgent.

  He needed to hurry. There could be more rain. The forest didn’t offer much prospect of shelter. Visible here and there among the trees were boulders, huge and mottled with great scabs of lichen. A little lichen goes a long way, he thought. As shelter, the boulders were irrelevant.

  He was proud of his life but he wasn’t enjoying it as much as he should. The thought surprised him. It was his own formulation, not an echo of a quote. It was probably true a lot of the time. Recently, though, he couldn’t complain.

  He turned back.

  5 This was a store Douglas must have frequented for years. The Vale, it was called. It was clearly from the nineteen twenties or so, a shrine to the period, in its way. The signage said they sold Sundries, along with Bait, Lotto, News, Coffee, and Adult.

  The Vale was a collection of disparate buildings populating a flat, boggy strip of land fronting the highway. Going up, Ned had skirted the place. If he’d known he was going to come back down, he could have parked his rucksack at the place. He liked his Swiss Army–issue rucksack. He liked carrying the rucksack of an army that had never fought a war. His enjoyment of that fact was enough to outweigh the pack’s unwieldiness.

  The Vale’s centerpiece was the general store, a barnlike log structure set on an unusually high stone foundation, with verandas along the sides and a deep front porch on which was arrayed a miscellany of seating—barstools, a piano bench, a porch glider, car seats, a church pew. A cinderblock annex housed a propane sales and service operation. Adjoined to that was a decommissioned sky-blue double-wide trailer connected to the annex by an improvised tunnel formed by stretching plastic sheeting over a succession of metal arches. Strings of ancient faded blue-and-yellow Grand Opening pennants encircled the three buildings at the roof line, drawing the elements of the Vale together. Western music and occasional indications of hilarity leaked from the trailer.

  Ned set foot on the broken lattice of planks and duckboard that had been laid out on the mud in front of the store entrance. Splendid single lodgepole pines stood at the four corners of the general store. Ned had observed, coming down the mountain, that the personal hinterland of the Vale was essentially a dump site for derelict machinery and other ejecta—there were cairns of hubcaps, short columns of discarded tires, piles of scrap lumber, huge bins wreathed in vines.

  Ned mounted the front steps. He stepped into a fluorescent blaze. He felt at first that he was alone in all the light and music of the cavernous establishment. Nina called fluorescent lighting lighting for robots. Music from a ballroom dancing exhibition showing on a TV set fixed high in an angle of the room contended with pop singing from someplace else. A police scanner interjected occasionally. The pop music was, he saw, due to a radio on the checkout counter behind which someone was sitting and watching. Ned had missed him initially because he was half hidden by the monumental antediluvian cash register and he was seated in a wheelchair.

  The place was packed with things. Shelving rose almost to the ceiling. The aisles were narrow. Overhead a web of clothesline had been strung, to which articles like swim fins, butterfly nets, snorkel tubes, packs of sparklers, and saw blades had been clipped. An umbrella stand held a collection of gripsticks to be used for securing items from the web or the top shelves. In urgent printing, the sign on the container warned that these devices should be used only with the help of staff, and that any injury, damage, or product breakage resulting from unsupervised use would be the sole responsibility of the customer. There seemed to be no organizing principle: a display case contained fantasy knives and stuffed animals. A rotatable cylindrical rack bore condoms, sunglasses, shrink-wrapped jerky, and pink plastic cap guns. He had to conquer his distraction. He needed to be a customer if he was going to use the toilet. He had to buy something. All of the newspapers that were left were local. But he needed … Visine. And he needed a comb. He needed to check himself out before the encounter with his friends. Ridiculously, that was why he had turned around on the road and come back to this place. Men weren’t allowed to carry pocket mirrors around with them.

  He approached the cashier, a delicate old man, handsome, with perfect silver hair, someone who could be a spokesman for dignified old age, except of course that he was in a wheelchair. On closer inspection, he seemed to be a mouth breather. Tacked to the wall behind the old man was a POW/MIA flag showing a GI prisoner, in silhouette, hunched over in dejection. Ned took off his rucksack and set it down where the old man could see it, to reassure him.

  “Hello,” Ned said, suppressing an impulse to extend his hand to this person who was so neatly gotten up. He was wearing a starched dress shirt buttoned to the neck, a red cardigan without a spot on it, and he gave off a pleasant scent of aftershave. Ned knew what the man reminded him of. He was the patrician Dutchman, the old burgomaster, or even Count, who stands up to the Nazis in a movie written by Lillian Hellman.

  Ned said, “I wonder if you have Visine. Eye drops. And a pocket comb.”

  “Acourse,” the old man said. So not the patrician, then, Ned thought.

  Ned was directed to the bottom shelf where the Visine should be. It was somewhere among the goods in the shelving directly opposite the cashier. Ned understood that there would be another place to look if the Visine failed to be there. The Visine he found was actually Murine. The shoulders of the tiny bottle were coated with grime. It would do. He quickly paid for it and the comb that had appeared on the counter next to it. He wondered if the old man had procured it from his own pocket.

  Paying for the purchases, Ned understood something correctly that he’d misinterpreted. There were two black streamers hanging down, one on either side of the MIA flag. Ned had perceived them as something like crepe, something to emphasize the message of the thing. But in fact they were ribbons of tape black with dead flies. Little cylinders of flytrap tape were also counter-top impulse items. He collected his change.

  Ned said, “The other thing is the New York Times. I’m going to be around here for a few days. I’m staying up the hill …” He waited to see if this information brought any reaction from the old man, who pursed his lips and held them pursed for what was arguably an unusually long time.

  Ned established that the Times came most days, early afternoon, and that the old man would try to save a copy for him, if it came. Ned sensed a little coldness now, coming toward him. By asking for the Times, Ned had obviously identified himself as a beloathed liberal. This man was concerned with the victims of war and now there was going to be another one. There could be more MIAs for him. Ned was tempted to say something useless.

  A large soft mouse-colored old dog, a Labrador, came out from behind the counter and stared at him.

  “Could I use your restroom?” Ned asked.

  “Acourse,” the old man said, gesturing unclearly to his right. Ned worked it out. The restroom required a key, which was hanging on a hook at the end of the front counter. Ned reached for the key without realizing that the fine chain running through the hoop of the key also ran down through holes punched in two tire hubs. So there was a certain clangor, of course. Ostensibly this arrangement would be to keep the key from being lost or mislaid, but probably it was also for merriment when the uninitiated grabbed for the key without paying that much attention, as he had done. The restroom was straight back and to the left. He had to pass a vast display of periodicals taking up all the wall space between the counter area and the cross aisle at the back.

  He scanned the selection as he passed. Pornorama! he thought.

  There was everything. A man could want. Naughty Neighbors through Gent through Plumpers through a startling one, Whorientals. Breasts for all. Back near the counter the main newsweeklies formed a thin right-hand margin to this field of pink plenty, and there the Weekly Standard predominated, with the last three issues preserved for sale whereas only the current issues of Time and Newsweek were available
. Interestingly, a shower curtain shielded the last quarter of the array of porn. It could be slid aside. The design on the curtain represented the world: through the blue translucencies between the continents, images of handsome male heads and muscular bodies were discernible. Picturesque as all this was, Ned couldn’t linger.

  A bald, youngish man, very heavy, was seated behind a workbench in a slot punched into the middle of the back wall. Ned crossed in front of him and nodded. The man was repairing a fly rod. As he slumped back in his chair to notice Ned more comfortably, and as his chin sank into his fat throat, his dense, short-cropped yellow beard presented as a sort of Elizabethan ruff along the bottom of his face. Ned thought he had an intelligent look. His arms were lavishly tattooed. He wondered if this could be the fine old man’s son. He hoped not, back there all day and probably expected to keep an eye on porn browsers in case they were tempted to take something or whisk something with them into the toilet. Not much of a life for this fellow.

  Ned couldn’t help but be curious about the tattooed images the young man was displaying, which led straight to a question of etiquette, which was whether it was polite to look at the demons and crosses and daggers decorating his giant arms. On the one hand, they were put there to be noticed, and on the other hand, it would make you look gay. If that bothered you. It was best to treat it like wallpaper.

  On the restroom door was a primitive cartoon of a figure that was female on one side, half a skirt, and male on the other, half a top hat.

  In the restroom, Ned was quick about everything. He was pointlessly a little proud of the thick, shaggy limb of urine he produced. He rinsed his face with cold water, which was all there was. He decided he looked okay. A little red, white, and blue sticker in the corner of the dull mirror read Pataki? Ptui!