Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  6 The bridge was well behind him. It had seemed sturdy enough.

  He was almost there. It was a whole hilltop, green, treeless, broadly convex, like the top of a cupcake. It was extensive. His feelings reminded him of what Nina had said about Cézanne’s landscapes, that when you see them, you relax. Now he could see the tower, four stories tall, like a stone hatbox. Tower? he thought. Oh, a short one. And roomy-looking. A gravel path branched off from the road and led to the summit, and the tower. He couldn’t believe the tower. It was short and it had a parapet notched for archers or shooters, defenders. He couldn’t imagine anyone he knew living in such a setting.

  He was agitated. But maybe something good could come out of this. This disaster. Their group had been talented. Letters they had written to the Aegis in college had always gotten attention. Maybe the others and he could collaborate on a statement against the coming invasion, in their old style. Their letters hadn’t all been on the frivolous side. Some hadn’t.

  7 “Hi, Ma.”

  “Hi yourself. To what do I owe the honor of thisum.”

  Nina sighed. It was her mother’s way to break off her sentences once she was satisfied that her respondent knew what she was obviously going to say next. Thisums and theums were major building blocks in Ma’s discourse. It was odd. Her mother was an odd woman, an odd woman but lovable and she loved her. Her mother didn’t trail off as though she were trying to think of the next word. It was just laborsaving. That was how her mother saw it.

  “I’m not calling to honor you, I’m calling to give you my whereabouts, such as they are, so you won’t worry.”

  “Yeah, but Nina, what about theum?”

  It sounded Greek, but Nina knew what she meant. It was the march, the demonstration, the Convergence. Her mother was a sentimental communist, a very nice old communist living in El Nido, a nice old lady communist apartment complex owned by a nice old rich lady communist widow. It was a family, there. Ned called it Birobidjan after the ghetto province Stalin had tried to corral all the Jews in Russia into, to raise chickens. And in fact in El Nido, they had raised chickens, until the city made them stop. They still had a victory garden. Her mother was a communist and a practicing astrologer. She had slept with John Garfield before she got married. Nina’s father had been proud of it and would drop it into conversations.

  Nina said, “Where I am is in Kingston New York in a bus station and I’m waiting for a bus to take me to Phoenicia New York. You can only get me on my cell phone, do you understand? And don’t worry, the march is going to be enormous. I’ll tell you about it. I’ll call you when I can.”

  “Hey, don’t hang up Neen! I don’t know where you are in New York. And why are you in New York?”

  “Ma, I wish to God you would get a computer and take a course. I’ll pay for it. It’s so much better for keeping in touch.”

  “I have no time. I’m too old.”

  “Listen to me while I explain where I am. I can’t talk to you forever.”

  “How I wish you could!”

  That was her mother being ironical. It was kind of funny.

  “Ma, okay, why I’m here. We’re supposed to be getting me pregnant. You know. So Ned gets a phone call saying that an old friend died, died, not even dying, dead. But Ned just ran out and got on a plane and left town. I got this in a message on my answering machine …”

  The thing was to not keep getting enraged over it.

  Ma said, “Oh Nina, was it yourum?”

  Sometimes her mother baffled her.

  “My what?” Nina asked. And then she had it. “Oh my sharp tongue, you mean? No, there was no argument, so not my sharp tongue, Ma. What sharp tongue, anyway, you absurd person.”

  “You have a sharp tongue, Nina.”

  Her mother never took anything back. Her usual move was to repeat what she’d said but in a tiny voice.

  “I didn’t get a chance to use my so-called sharp tongue. Now listen. Ned’s friends at NYU were—call them a clique—all top students, a clique but serious, this is hard to explain, they were wits, too, according to them …”

  “What do you mean by that? Wits?”

  “My very question. Here’s an example. They’re in with other people having a regular conversation on some subject. And one of Ned’s friends inserts a line from a popular song. Right in the middle of things, and with no ado at all Douglas might say to Ned, I don’t care what people say Rock and Roll is here to stay, and Ned would say You dig it to the end. And the conversation would just go on. It’s just adolescent, Ma.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Anyway, the bandleader of this wonderful group died suddenly and his widow, also known as the most beautiful woman you ever saw, begged Ned to come. So he went. Because she was upset. Everybody from the group was going, so he called me at work and I was out so he left a message informing me, Ma. And we’re working on a baby …”

  “Nina, you shouldum.”

  Nina had to control her tone. “I know. We should adopt. I know your position … So I got on a plane myself. He doesn’t know that yet.”

  “Who died?”

  “Ma, I never met him. He turned out to be rich. And boy was he a whiner. I live in a dying forest, he wrote to Ned. I read that over Ned’s shoulder and I felt like saying, Well, move then, you can afford it.”

  Everything was getting to her. She was looking at a block of identical posters on the bus station wall. Each of them had been neatly defaced with the word faggot inscribed in italic marker pen on the forehead of the lead singer of a group called Blue Papa.

  Her mother loved Ned. “I love Ned,” Ma said. Who doesn’t, Nina wanted to say. Ned and her mother had been on the same page in the matter of adoption. She’d had to fight to convince Ned they should have their own child. Christ, what a battle. Finally she had won. What she wanted was Ned’s essence, what he was, because he was a lovely man. And face it, she wanted her own essence to go on, too. She was okay, and went well with Ned, as the harsh angel he needed. He should really be a Christian. He was. Be anything, but hold me in your arms, she thought. And then she remembered how much he had laughed last week when she’d said Let’s go lie down and call each other honey. She wished sometimes that Christianity was real and that there was a heaven so he could go to heaven, and she would be willing to go to hell for her transgressions. There would be a God and Ned would believe and he would be safe. But he couldn’t be a Christian because science was true. And his good friends were all secular. She wasn’t religious herself, but for some reason she had pushed Ned to go with her to a couple of Quaker meetings. Society of Friends. She was attracted to what they called themselves. But it hadn’t worked. It had to do with the silence at the end of the proceedings where people are supposed to speak as the spirit moved them. The spirit had moved Ned to argue with some of the things the spirit had moved other people to say. And that hadn’t been appreciated.

  “Don’t be hard on Ned,” Ma said.

  “Okay I won’t. I’ll take it out on his friends.”

  “Nina, you’re going to get pregnant. I know it.”

  “You’re seeing the future again?”

  Her mother did think she could see the future, and not only the economic future, with socialism just around the corner. She had intuited that Nina was going to grow up to be a writer because as a tiny child she had liked the smell of freshly sharpened pencils. I’m still waiting to become a writer, she thought. She wouldn’t mind that.

  “Don’t worry about the future, Neen,” Ma said.

  “Maybe I should see a shrink,” Nina said. This was teasing. Her mother was dead set against psychotherapy. In adolescence when Nina had once proposed that she might need to talk to a psychiatrist, Ma had said You don’t need a psychiatrist, it’s all in your head.

  Nina said, “Ma I love you.” She thought, His enemy friends can go to hell. Ned was under an illusion. He thought friendships between men were superior. Because—and he had said this!—men didn’t want anything bac
k from their true friends, it was all affinity. They didn’t, for example, want a baby from them, want them to be a provider for babies, or need them to be on-call confidants. Men are simple, she thought.

  “Neen, I love you all the time,” Ma said.

  “I know you do. I’ll call you. These people don’t think Ned’s important, Ma. They know nothing. They don’t know anything about the Fair Trade movement which he’s practically a god in. He’s helping poor people, the co-operatives …”

  “Oh honey I know and I lost the catalog you sent me, the coffee catalog.”

  “I’ll send you another one.”

  “Oh and Nina, I know you have to go, but don’t wear buckskin,” she said with real anxiety. Ma was referring to a buckskin jacket, fringed, that Nina loved.

  This never dies, Nina thought, because with the long black hair that you want me to cut and because I’m so fierce and all, and because looking Sicilian makes me look like a Cherokee in the buckskin. “I don’t even own that jacket anymore, Ma,” she said, which wasn’t true.

  “Okay then, that’s good. And go easy on the cursing. Remember if you’re working with a lot of men you get used to cursing. If these people where you’re going live in a castle they might not like it. You told me that his friend lived in a castle. I remember that.”

  “My bus is here, Ma. Be good.”

  8 Closer up, the tower looked a little ragged in outline. It was built out of shale flags. There were big windows in every story. It would be hell to heat. It was a major thing, this dark edifice, not a toy, not a tree house. You could put a few families in it.

  A running figure, a young man running, flashed twice across Ned’s field of vision. The runner was circling the tower. Ned waved vigorously, but the sturdy figure kept running and then failed to reappear. He had been barechested, strangely, given the weather. He had been wearing torn jeans, and on his head, a red bandana, like a pirate or rap singer. He looked tall for fourteen or fifteen, but he had to be Hume, Douglas’s boy, who of course would be upset. Probably that was why he was running. I would want my son to be upset if I died, not to mention my daughter, he thought. He was going to be an old father, the kind kids wouldn’t prefer, which couldn’t be helped. There had been trouble with Hume. Elliot would know, Ned thought. I pray to god it isn’t something ugly and predictive of hell. People who had children assuming they were creating future friends were rolling the dice.

  The gravel creaked under Ned’s boots. The tower’s grounds were, Ned now saw, not entirely treeless. A quince tree stood at one corner of Douglas’s famous physic garden, which lay behind a gated wire fence. Douglas had alluded to his quince tree more than once. This garden would be where he had raised herbs and other exotic botanicals, presumably for fun.

  Someone darkly dressed was squatting next to the quince tree. This figure’s back was toward the tower path, toward Ned. It was his friend Elliot crouching there, smoking. Ned called out and Elliot stood up and, turning, shot his cigarette butt away—furtively, Ned thought. Ned began to trot toward his friend. He was full of feeling. Elliot was a decent man. Ned’s eyes felt charged, not ready to let any tears out, but close. From this vantage, Ned could see other buildings set lower on the descending far side of the hill—a vast rustic ranch-style house with smoke rising from a chimney … a wide garage, sheds, other structures. Elliot was waving. He shouted, “Ahoy, polloi,” an ancient nothing from their student days.

  “Ahoy yourself!” Ned said. It was the same Elliot, still thin, professionally tan, now. His dark hair flowed back from not quite the center of his head. He pressed his hair down. He was working up a smile for Ned. It always seemed to take a little effort for Elliot to erect a smile. The group had accepted the responsibility to keep Elliot, with his default permanently resigned expression, cheered up. His long, serious actorly face was unlined. He undoubtedly had the same effect on groups that he’d had in olden times: when he arrived, people would be concerned to place him, figure out who he was, exactly. His height was part of it, of course. Elliot’s smile came, and his teeth, Ned noted, were a la mode, that is to say unnaturally white. Nina had perfect godgiven teeth, like her mother. Nina was goodlooking. But compliments made her nervous. The whole subject made her nervous. Maybe because your appearance was so luck of the draw. She turned away questions touching on her looks. Someone had asked her what color she would say her green-brown eyes were, and she had said they were olive drab. Elliot was rich. The two men embraced.

  They stood back from one another. Both said, “Ah, man …” with feeling.

  Elliot was wearing a black leather trench coat worth a fortune. He had the collar up for drama, or possibly protection against wind. There was no wind. A dead calm prevailed. The sound of water draining from the tower’s downspouts stood out in the stillness.

  Elliot smelled of cigarette smoke. It had been understood among the friends that smokers were the ultimate fools. But the fact was that Elliot had smoked modestly and privately back then. And considerately. It was up to him. Ned doubted that smoking was popular in Douglas’s household. In truth, Douglas had been generally intolerable about it. At one point, he had picked up some anti-smoking flyers featuring medical photographs of specimens of leukoplakia, the condition just prior to oral cancer, and had dropped them around in lecture halls and the Commons room. But he hadn’t harassed Elliot, or not very much.

  They embraced again. Each told the other he was looking great.

  Ned was finding it hard to talk normally. He said, “I came right away after you called, this is so fucked. God. Fuck. It’s terrible. What happened? What happened that I don’t know about?”

  Elliot put his arm around Ned’s shoulders. He started to say something but then stopped, clearly considering his words, which made Ned a little uneasy. Elliot was a stockbroker and a juris doctor. He had given financial advice to Douglas, and legal advice, too. Ned was prepared for Elliot letting it be felt that he was in a different, or even official, relationship with Douglas’s family. This was going to be something more than the usual benign reserve Elliot projected and that intrigued people and made them want to reassure themselves that it wasn’t caused by anything they might have done. Ned supposed he had to live with it.

  Ned said, “I want to see Douglas.”

  Elliot shook his head, saying, “No, you can’t. They took the body to Kingston.” The special relationship had made its appearance.

  “Okay, but I want to see him anyway, the physical Douglas.”

  Elliot nodded rapidly, but signifying understanding and not assent. Ned didn’t like it. Ned said, “Have you seen his body?”

  “I did, before they took him.”

  “Well. What’s going on? Is there going to be a wake? A funeral service, what?”

  “Right now I don’t know. I don’t know what Iva can take. Douglas is going to be cremated. She’s fragile. We’re trying to figure this out.”

  Ned said, “And what about Hume? I just saw him running around back there, around the tower, if that was him, without a shirt on.”

  Elliot grimaced. He said, “He’s upset and he’s out of control. To some degree. He has an exceptional arrangement with his parents. He … lives outdoors a good deal, and he has just about agreed to home schooling, after a debacle, two of them, with private schools. Douglas built a cabin for him last year. For his independence. He rejected it. He let them do it and then rejected it.”

  Ned said, “How could this happen?”

  Elliot said, “It was a complete accident. He drove the mower too close to the edge of the ravine. That’s what happened … the autopsy was today.”

  Ned felt himself shaking, and to quell it, clutched his hands together behind his back and clenched his arms.

  “Take that thing off and give it to me,” Elliot said, pointing at Ned’s rucksack. “Christ, is that the same one you had when we climbed Storm King?”

  “It is,” Ned answered. “Storm King and the Shawangunks and all of them. It’s the only one I’v
e ever had.”

  “You’re loyal to your possessions,” Elliot said.

  Ned felt a moment of trivial puzzlement. Was Elliot being critical? All it could be was a reference to the fact that he didn’t, had never, thrown things away wantonly, while they still had some use in them.

  “You’re a masochist. Give it to me,” Elliot said, guiding Ned toward an ornate door in the base of the tower. Ned held on to his pack. Elliot scrutinized him. “Ned, you need to rest. Come in and rest. We’re all here.”

  Elliot had the door open. Ned was moving reluctantly. It was a concession to go in instead of mobilizing somehow to get to Kingston. He was tired. He murmured something about Kingston but without force. He knew it was in the nature of a reproach to Elliot.

  Elliot said, “It makes no sense to go to Kingston. All this is being worked out, Ned.”

  Elliot patted Ned’s shoulder, then pressed him forward, being less patient. Ned said, “All of us are here?”

  Ned stopped abruptly, putting Elliot off his stride. Elliot stumbled slightly and began coughing. The coughing went on. Ned was alarmed.

  “Why are you coughing?” is what he came out with, surprisingly to himself. Maybe it was anxiety that something was wrong with this friend, too, now, someone trying to do his best under stress. He knew what Nina would say. Ned, she would say, you’re displacing. Displacement behavior meant getting aggrieved about something that was standing in for something else.

  The ground-floor room was sizeable, with a high wood-beam ceiling. The walls were lined with blond wooden filing cabinets, to a height of five feet or so, and above the cabinets ponderous shelving held oversized books and binders. Everything was fitted to the curve of the walls, and all the woodwork was polished to gleaming. The books here seemed to be in the reference category—serials, in bound volumes, quartos, sets. Ned wanted to look more closely at them and also at the items laid out on an oceanic work table pushed against one of the three broad windows. He could see a lightbox on the table, and an array of optical instruments. How long would it take, Ned wondered, to get used to the postcard-quality vistas of placid nature the windows provided? The temptation would be to drift into witless contemplation and then wonder where the time went. And who dusted and cleaned and polished all this? Someone.