by Norman Rush
Gruen was up. He was in the broom closet aka bathroom, running water, and repeatedly blowing his nose.
Joris said, “Man you know there’s a toilet on every floor, don’t you? And a shower in the first-floor one. Not very big, though.”
Gruen rejoined them. God he was really plump.
“I would like to add something,” Gruen said, acting stately. “We were friends …”
“I am coming to that,” Joris said, his voice raised.
Gruen got out of his bathrobe and gathered up his clothes. Then, standing facing out one of the great windows, dressed himself. Blasts of rain struck the glass. It was turning black, out.
For sex, Joris went to prostitutes. There were prostitutes of every caliber in Manhattan, and Joris had the money. This had gone on for years, was still going on, no doubt. Joris claimed he had never gotten an STD. And going to whores had given him a Decameron of stories. A drawback was that going to prostitutes meant having to use condoms all the time. Joris rarely saw his sons.
Joris said, “We tried as hard to be friends as anyone. And we were good friends. And what else. We were big moviegoers, cineastes, even, always at the Thalia or the Eighth Street. For a while we were a hiking club. We climbed Storm King. We hiked and then we stopped hiking. The girlfriends took over but we kept on the best we could. We carried books up to the tops of mountains and sat there and read them for forty-five minutes. In the dorm and also on Second Avenue we would sit and listen to good music, records, nobody allowed to speak. You could put it this way, we were a very strict book club run by Douglas. We made jokes. You could say that most of the time we carried out Douglas’s jokes. And here is the thing, my men. Nothing was funny that we did. Nothing. Almost. Stop objecting until you sit down with us, you there.” He meant Gruen.
Over his shoulder, Gruen said, “I’d like to point out that we were also dean’s list, all of us. And that we were getting grades fucking nicely. Everybody moved on, everybody did well.”
Joris groaned theatrically. “I’m almost through. And you’re right about that. There was something else we were getting at being …”
Ned said, “Molecular socialism.”
The other two knew what he meant. It was embarrassing to recall how seriously he had taken the whole thing, the world remade, friendship at the core of everything.
Gruen faced them in his dinnerwear, a heavy Irish white cable knit sweater, wide-leg khaki pants, loafers.
“Where are your socks?” Ned asked him.
“Every pair is wet since I got here.”
Ned went to his rucksack to dig out a pair to lend to Gruen.
Gruen looked flushed. He said, “Also don’t forget it wasn’t boring, the whole time, mostly. In the subway or waiting around for anything, we had games, like the Hollywood stars gave a picnic and Bogart brought the yogurt, you remember.”
Yes, Ned thought, plenty of word games: a bouncer was an excort and graffiti artists were ulterior decorators and Pinot Noir meant don’t urinate at night.
Joris was in the half-bath in the room they were sharing so Ned went upstairs to find the facility in Douglas’s studio. What looked like a narrow bookcase was the door to the micro-bath. It was at the end of the circle of desks by the stairs. It was nice inside. He sat down on the toilet. Taped to the door in front of him at eye level was an eight-by-ten reproduction of a Paul Klee painting, which amounted to a grid of dots of different colors, at the bottom left paling to dimness and then to nothing. It had been torn out of a bound volume by somebody. The painting’s title was DAS GANZE IST DÄMMERNED / THE WHOLE IS DIMMING.
Lo, potpourri in a tray on the toilet tank, a mass of rose petals and other petals. This was Douglas’s workplace bathroom. It was pretty feminine. Ned washed his hands and fingered the hand towels, delicate things. Women who love us, he thought, do things for us in ways they think we’ll love.
They were waiting.
We were so cineastic, Ned thought, but he rarely went to the movies now. Douglas had been serious about Film, writing tart notes to the Village Voice correcting the views of their house movie critic Andrew Sarris. And each of the friends had been assigned a physical double from the world of movies: Douglas’s had been Leslie Howard, Joris’s had been John Garfield, Elliot’s had been an all purpose B-movie villain named John Ireland, and Gruen’s double had been the athlete whose name he couldn’t think of who played Flash Gordon in Saturday serials. And he himself had been informed that he was the double of the wavy-haired leading man Marx Brother Zeppo, until he’d exploded at Douglas over the stupidity of it. He remained without a double. Flash Gordon had been Buster Crabbe.
Ned asked Joris if he went to the movies much.
“No. Not much. I don’t know. I don’t enjoy the experience.”
An intercom said to come to dinner. The effect was institutional.
Everybody got up. Gruen asked them how he looked. The truth was that he looked like a model for Big Man clothing, a handsome fat man. Joris answered by nodding vigorously and Ned did the same.
They descended to leave.
Rain blew in as they opened the tower door. Douglas inserting the word egad into every answer he gave in Cohen’s Medicis class had been funny to him.
They went single file into the night, Joris leading.
9 Even in the dark the disconcerting bulk and reach of the main house came through. The place was lit to the gills—the whole interior flushed with light, walkway fixtures blazing, shrubbery spotlit. And Ned had been told that there was more to the edifice than at first met the eye, e.g., three lower levels were built onto the back of the house, down the far side of the hill. Joris was plying the front-door knocker, a masterpiece of the smithy’s art.
Ned tapped Gruen’s shoulder. He said, “Hey remember the plan to buy an old manse in some rundown neighborhood near a good university and all of us retiring there together? Get a handyman special and work on it?” The idea had been to die together one by one as friends.
No one was answering the door.
Gruen said, “How I got along so well with Douglas was this. I said everything he said was great. I never said anything worse than Food for Thought.”
Ned said, “Probably a good idea, about the insights he kept sending.”
Gruen said, “Some of it was interesting. He had his cosmological scenarios. But I lied to him about following the syllabus. That was too much. I got hold of some of the titles, though, physically, thinking … someday, okay. He knew I wouldn’t read everything. Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery I didn’t finish. And it was short, an essay.”
“Ah, Barrington Moore,” Ned said.
“Barrington Moore. Who wrote a lot. Douglas loved him.”
The door opened and they all went in.
They seemed to be progressing from one waiting area to another. They had taken their coats off. They were in an annex off the front hall and they were still waiting.
There was ambient music. It was Dvořák. Ned said, “Douglas hated background music.”
Elliot appeared but only long enough to say he’d be right back. They were left to study the woodwork. It was like being inside a large armoire with soft lighting.
Since it was a sin to waste time, Ned decided to use the moment to agitate for the Convergence. He took a folded petition and a Bic pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.
Joris unfolded the petition, glanced at the heading, refolded it almost immediately and handed it back to Ned. His expression was apologetic.
Ned was startled. He assumed Joris had misunderstood what he’d given him.
Ned said, “It’s for Senate Foreign Relations. Next week the resolution authorizing force goes up. I’ll get a few more signatures around here and overnight it with the others I have on Monday.”
Joris shook his head. He made a negative sound. Ned stared at Joris. Gruen, not current in the stage their discourse had reached, said, “Another thing I never read was the sort-of-manifesto he wrote. It was against war.
Strike When the Gorgon Blinks! It was a little long. I feel bad about it.”
“I never saw it,” Ned said, “so how long ago was this?”
“I don’t know. Wait, I think Grenada was in it.”
Ned turned to Joris. “They’re going to do it. Unless we—”
Joris cut him off. “I don’t care. Let them.”
Ned felt a pain inside as much like acute indigestion as anything else. It wasn’t indigestion and he was feeling cold.
“I don’t believe you,” Ned said.
“Believe me,” Joris answered, as Elliot rejoined them, beckoning.
• • •
The interior of the manse was a poem to money and woodcraft. What had it been like for Douglas to conduct his life in perfect hand-carved settings. They were being led to the kitchen. He would like to have a name for the style of the rooms when he gave Nina his account of the trip. Rustic modern might do it. I hate money, he thought, which is adolescent of me. Sometime after college, Douglas had fallen into a huge bequest. Had he known it was on the horizon when they were egalitarians together at NYU? Nothing had been said.
They entered the kitchen, a wonder of its own, like a layout for some glossy culinary-supply catalog. On the subject of money again, if he was correct it was Douglas who’d observed that you never had the full attention of someone with a large stock portfolio while the market was open.
There was Iva, and Iva was a splendid-looking woman. She was standing at the far end of the kitchen island, weeping but not sobbing, keeping on with some cooking project. They drew around her. Iva was slicing the poles off many small onions. She seemed incapable of saying more than Thank you, in a murmur, saying it over and over. Bread was baking. There was a pan of fresh biscuits on a side counter. The woman was evidently in a cooking mania. There were platters of sliced meat set out, warm meat, he gathered, because the plastic film covering the platters was fogged.
She embraced each of them. To Ned, she felt overheated. He thought, You blend an undertone of perspiration with a good perfume and it’s erotic. The kitchen was very hot.
Now she was chopping cilantro. Hell she was theatrically beautiful. She had a Tartar face, almost, a face from the image-world of vintage Russian movies or operettas like The Merry Widow. Her skin was tended-looking. Her shaped eyebrows were art. She had suave hair the color of brass. It was pulled straight back and a single heavy braid fell over her shoulder. She was wearing a too-big long-sleeved white shirt with a mandarin collar. About her sturdy bosom the less said the better. She was wearing black elf pants. He didn’t know any other name for them. She was forty-three. Nina was six years younger. Iva was barefoot. She was solid. Nina would say she could stand to lose three or four pounds. Naughty Marietta was another light opera.
That was it for the cilantro. She had expertise. She had moved on to opening jars of pimentos and artichoke hearts. She said, with difficulty, “I know you are all hungry.” Everybody nodded vigorously to vindicate her berserk industry. It was funny to Ned that she still sounded so German after living in America as long as she had. Of course, she was Czech, but Czechoslovakia had been part of the greater German culture-zone, so possibly she sounded Czech, in fact. How would he know?
The grouping in the room was odd. Elliot was standing apart, superintending. The others had all been able to make some kind of personal condolences to Iva, and Ned hadn’t. Now Elliot seemed to be nudging the group prematurely toward the dining room.
Ned touched Iva’s arm. He said, “I loved Douglas. He was my friend and I loved him.”
He’d had no intention of soliciting a second embrace. But possibly he had moved too abruptly, judging by her reaction, a vehement gesture that utterly baffled him. She seemed to be pointing at her armpits.
Elliot interpreted the moment for him in low, tight words, to the effect that she felt she hadn’t had time to clean up properly. It was odd. She had embraced everybody freely a minute earlier. “She’s fragile,” Elliot said.
Iva said, “Tomorrow we can sit.”
“Sure,” Ned said.
“She was in Kingston seeing the body today. She’s exhausted,” Elliot said.
She undid two or three shirt buttons, pulled the front of her shirt forward and shook it. More tears came, and tears and perspiration seemed to be uniting in a yoke around her throat.
Ned wanted to say something about Hume, or rather to Hume. The boy’s father was dead. Ned wanted to tell Hume he had loved his father. Then he would have said it to both of the survivors and he would be easier waiting for the next developments. “Is Hume here?” he asked, keeping any urgency out of his voice.
Iva seemed to be trying to formulate something to say. The effort failed. Elliot was beside her, consulting, and then almost immediately leading her away. He pushed his palms toward the friends, briefly, to enjoin patience. It was confusing. Elliot said something about eating in the kitchen as he left. There were stools that could be pulled up to the island.
“Hume is here,” Joris said, pointing to a doorway.
Iva was gone. Raised voices were coming from somewhere else in the house.
“My boy Hume! Come over!” Joris said. He was being cordial but his voice was too loud.
Standing half in shadow in a doorway in the back wall of the kitchen was the person Ned had glimpsed earlier, the running person.
The boy was strongly built and seemed tall for his age of fourteen or fifteen. He was ruddy. He wore his hair in a double Mohawk, something new to Ned. He was dressed in leather, black pants or chaps and a vest. There was a symbol hanging around his neck, metal, not a cross, large. He stepped out of sight. Joris dashed after him. He returned quickly, defeated. Elliot came into the room. He looked pink. Ned thought, Dislocation everywhere. Gruen had placed stools around the island and was already furling back the plastic wrap on one of the meat platters.
Let’s get in a circle and wring each other’s hands, Ned thought.
“I have to return phone calls,” Elliot said, but sat down and began pushing platters around.
Gruen surveyed the collation and said, “There are scones here someplace.”
Where had Hume gone? Joris was off looking for him again somewhere in the bowels of the woodbutcher’s palace, as Douglas had referred to his house. Again Joris was back. Gruen had decanted pan drippings into a teacup. Now he was rolling slices of veal into tubes and carefully making them au jus before each bite.
Elliot said to all of them, “I know we haven’t had much time to talk, and I apologize. Tomorrow we will. Right now I have the phones turned off, but I have to put the system back on. I have a bunch of saved calls I have to answer. It’s been crazy here. Press is coming, a man named Fusco, Dominique Fusco, might show up tonight. We might see some police around. It has nothing to do with any of you, of course. Loose ends is all. And I’m trying to get a doctor to come in for Iva. But you should eat.”
Joris was at the massive refrigerator. Opening both doors wide, he said, “Looking for the butter.”
Elliot rose and said sharply, “Don’t touch anything in there. She doesn’t like it … because, ah, because everything’s arranged. Everything you need is on the counter.”
Joris said nothing. The exaggerated slowness with which he closed the refrigerator doors was his reply.
Ned said, “What about Hume? Can we do something? Shouldn’t he eat?”
Elliot said, “He’s so upset now it’s hard to talk to him. He has a room here and he, well, he has his own place outside, too, his cabin. And he also stays up in the woods in good weather, in a, well, a yurt. But not in weather like this, usually. Have to be careful with him.”
“Elliot, you look bad,” Ned said.
“She can’t sleep. I’m staying over here. Maybe she’ll sleep tonight.”
Ned said, “You need to come over and talk to us.”
“I know. I want to. Maybe tonight, if I can’t sleep, if it’s okay and you’re all still awake or if it’s okay if I wake you up if I com
e over late.” Elliot was showing anxiety, which wasn’t like him. He had suddenly decided to load crackers with brie, like a hostess, but when he saw that he had overproduced, he stopped.
Joris was eating standing up. The meal array was top-heavy with meats—Black Forest ham and Virginia ham, both, along with the roast veal and a selection of Italian charcuterie. Joris was addressing a clod of rice salad. There was pickled okra. There were sliced heirloom tomatoes the color of raw liver. There was nothing green. The okra was khaki-colored. There was wine, red and white, in carafes. Joris discovered a stick of butter thawing on a saucer under a napkin.
A timer rang and Elliot leapt to the oven and frantically extracted a large loaf, barehanded, which he deposited in the empty sink. “I got it, it’s okay,” he shouted.
Elliot said, “Really, I have to go.”
Ned said, “If you can, come on over.”
Gruen wanted some of the fresh, hot bread, so there was a brief interval of comedy as he mangled the loaf in tearing away his portion of it, leaving a crushed rump for the others. It came back to Ned that Gruen had always inordinately loved the interior of freshly baked French or Italian bread.
Ned and Joris looked at each other with the same intent, to register forgiveness for their old friend Gruen. They loved the man. They were being reminded of it. He had been the most hapless and the most naked about showing he was honored to be part of the group. And Gruen had always been weak in the presence of good eats. Ned thought, We are what we were, but more so under stress, in extremis, like now. Death was fucking with the bonny boys of 71 Second Avenue. And they were dealing from strength, with death. Everybody had life insurance. A metal device wasn’t dropping screaming out of the sky to destroy them and their families forever. There was a Greek word for the category of promising people who met untimely deaths. One of his professors had used the word when he’d announced the death of a young colleague, weeping. He had called them the aoroi.