Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  He was keeping an eye on the cottage. Nina must be almost dressed. She knew where he was waiting and that the paper-covered windows would let her put on a shadow play for him. She was doing it. They could doubtless get some actual curtains from the manse, if it mattered.

  He stretched. It was still misty. He wanted Joris to sign the petition, and the others, too, but especially Joris. He shouldn’t be assuming he knew where his friends stood politically, based on the past. If only his personal dark sense of what it was going to be like this time could be instilled in other minds by some kind of contagion, that would help. But he didn’t have that gift. Douglas had once had it. He himself could help once the ball got rolling. He could help with the arrangements and he was always willing to be on the cleanup committee. He felt his pilot light was back on. The standard munitions the U.S. Army used were made from recycled radioactive metal. He hadn’t mentioned that to Joris, the new the hideous permanent consequences of just blowing things up. The only bad news he’d gotten during his calls was that some absolute idiot had approached ISKCON about joining the East Bay march and ISKCON had seemed interested. He was not going to have the Hare Krishnas involved if he could help it.

  He walked up to the bedroom window, tapped on it, and then stepped back. Nina posed, making a cruciform shadow, which meant, he guessed, that she was ready for her debut.

  He wanted to delay everything. He wanted to get up on a big rock and hold his arms out like Nina, like the Gandhi of the Catskills or the Jesus overlooking Rio de Janeiro.

  Three of the nine people he’d talked to on the phone had asked him if he was all right. He’d explained about Douglas’s death to everyone, but still what they wanted was some more evident elation out of him when he got the repeated majestic estimates for participation in the Convergence. He was elated, but apparently not enough. Rise, he said to himself. A day of streets like rivers of fists was from a poem.

  After Nina’s ablutions, Ned had gotten the shower to work better by unscrewing the head and clearing it of a clot of matted leaf shreds. He should have done it before she’d used the thing. It had been a simple task. Nina was always nice about showing gratitude for small tasks, and it wasn’t flattery. Ned knew he was benefitting by comparison with her all-talk ex-boyfriend Bob.

  They were both cleaned up and ready, or thereabouts. In fact she was still busy on her hands and knees behind the bed.

  “You know what I hate?” she said.

  “I already do.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Puncture wounds.”

  “No. What I hate is when you lose your shoes and have to look all over the place and when you find them it’s just your shoes.”

  The deodorant she had brought smelled like pine. She apologized for its not being their customary scentless type. Ned said, “That’s okay. In fact I like to use this kind once in a while. It makes me feel regular.”

  “Like the masses?”

  “Right.”

  “Where are the masses when you need them?” she said.

  “You’ll see. Just wait.”

  They were both wearing jeans and black sweaters, which made no difference at all to her. Claire would have complained that they looked like twins. Hume was on his mind, still. Douglas’s original plan had been to name his son Godwin, after William Godwin the cosmocreator of anarchism, ignoring the static the abbreviation of Godwin would have brought down on the child. Now Gruen was saying that in fact Douglas had been claiming in the last couple of years that his son hadn’t been named for David Hume, as they all knew he had, but in honor of Hume Cronyn, the actor. What was the point of that? It was annoying.

  It was time to go. There was something he wanted to tell Nina first, an item he was carrying around from his adolescence. Sometimes certain memories just emerged from his consciousness and if she was around, he could vent and be done. She had gotten used to it.

  There was a secret he was going to keep from her, though. Before he had gotten into the shower they had tried again and to get hard he had resorted to an image of Iva, naked except for her apron, bending over and presenting a rear view to him.

  Nina was finalizing the placement of barrettes in her hair. It was pulled straight back. She was looking at herself in the mirror. She said, “I need beauty treatments of some sort.”

  He approved everything about her appearance. He said, “Something I want to tell you. It doesn’t exactly relate to Hume.” Bringing this up from nowhere might soften the light on Hume, it occurred to him.

  She sat down on the bed.

  “Okay, I would shoplift paperback books from display racks in drugstores, mostly. Mostly science fiction. The racks were usually near the door and you could slip out quickly. Once I was getting set to take Slan, I think, but I got flustered and stole the wrong book, which turned out to be a thick little compendium of the plots and librettos of the great operas, something I had zero interest in. So but when I got home I was seized with the feeling I had to read the damned thing to justify taking it. I took science fiction for the pleasure of reading, so since I had this opera book in my possession some Catholic notion said I had to read it.”

  Nina said, “Aaah, so that’s where you get all the minutiae about operas that you use when the subject comes up. You impressed me, you know!”

  “Well then my crime was providential. Composer biographies were in there, too. A lot stuck. Is there anything you want to know about Donizetti?”

  “Not right now. Are you saying this in defense of Hume, by the way?”

  “I don’t know.” She would want to know more about his criminal past later. She identified him with a sort of unfailing law-abidingness.

  “Was that the last one? Did you stop then?”

  “No, I stole one more. From Holmes Bookstore in downtown Oakland. A big hardcover book, a history of stage magic by Ottokar Fischer, with big gorgeous plates. It was the maximum size I could fit down my pants. I wanted it and I put it down the front of my pants and pulled my stomach in and zipped my jacket over it and walked out of the place almost fainting. And that was the last, forever. I stopped before I was ever caught.”

  He could see that she was relieved.

  She said, “His first name was Autocar?”

  He said, “No, Ottokar, with an O and a K. Funny. Say that’s your name and you end up working as a mechanic in a garage? You know what that’s called?”

  “No.”

  “Nominative determinism. We collected examples. There was an insurance agent on Mercer Street named Justin Case. Douglas found them everywhere. The last name of a famous embezzler was Overcash. And there was a sewer commissioner whose last name was Dranoff.”

  “My life was uneventful. Shouldn’t we go?”

  23 There was the big house, all lit up in the gloaming. Nina seemed almost lighthearted. He imagined, just before they went in, Nina jumping up on his back and putting her legs around his waist, going in that way. She was so light and compact.

  He didn’t want to track water into the house. They both conscientiously ground their boot soles into the doormat.

  24 She hoped she was ready. There were some particular facts in Ned’s thumbnail portraits of his friends she should keep in mind. A cousin of David Gruen had died in the 9/11 horror. What else? Gruen was a Zionist. Elliot had been raised Bahai. She didn’t know what was sacred to them, though. Supposedly Joris believed in nothing, so possibly she shouldn’t insult the memory of Nietzsche or Robert Ingersoll, haha. Recently at lunch in a two-star hotel a colleague of hers had come back from the men’s room to rejoin the group, saying It smells like the Ganges in there. There had been two Hindu gentlemen among the diners who had ceased contributing to the conversation.

  She wanted the friends to like her. She wasn’t going to rub some holy foible the wrong way if she could help it. Be mindful, her mother would say. Once, after she and Bob had had a meal at Ma’s, her mother had said Drive mindfully. Bob had been in the midst of a mildly New Age phase in his life and thou
ght she was making fun of him. She had stayed with Bob mainly because leaving him would have revealed how she felt—about his being boring, oh God. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to Bob, judging from how often he mentioned it, had been finding a rubber band in his soup at Denny’s. And then by the grace of God, he had cheated on her, so hosanna. She thought she was ready for the friends.

  No one answered the door so Ned let them in. Here we are, she thought. Inside, Ned seemed to know where he was going. She wanted to have a relaxed look at the glamorous living room and its furnishings, but Ned took her quickly through a door and into a small room that felt like the world’s greatest conversation pit. Around the walls ran continuous black leather sofa seating interrupted in only three places where there were doorways. Ned’s hand was steady on her shoulder. This would be a good place for committee meetings. The back angle of the sofa would keep the committee members sitting up straight. And there was nice ivory ambient light, nothing like the bleaching fluorescence in library basements and union halls. The wood paneling suggested good acoustics.

  She got it. The catlike way Ned was leading her along and why he had let them in after only a derisory bit of knocking on the door was so that he could surprise his friends with her, which was flattering.

  He inched a door open and in effect popped her into the dining room ahead of him, saying, “Here she is.”

  And here they all were, standing around. One of them, Gruen, the heavy one, immediately began applauding in a friendly way. They had been contemplating the groaning board and waiting to eat. This was another perfect room. Ned’s three friends came toward her, but moving much more quickly was Iva, who had entered from the kitchen bearing a loaded platter. She slid the platter onto the dining room table and then deftly got ahead of the men, holding her arms out to embrace her fellow woman. Klimt! Nina thought.

  The brocade tunic, black and gold, and the black satin headband, Tartar eyes, multiplicity of finger rings, were Klimt, while not-Klimt were her sturdiness and her impressive and unfair bosom. I hate you, she thought.

  Nina was saying how sorry she was about Douglas as the others were saying how glad they were to meet her and what an enormous and pleasant surprise it was to see her there. Iva stepped back. As she released Nina, she said, “I want your hair.”

  Nina felt a moment of involuntary alarm. For a stupid instant, Nina had believed her hair was being requested as a hostess gift.

  “Oh thank you,” Nina said.

  Iva’s strong perfume was Klimt, to Nina. No, it was just European. The embraces all around ended. Iva’s workout-calves looked very good. She was wearing snug Capri pants cuffed just below the knee.

  Nina thought, Unfortunately some people are more like art objects than others and this woman is in that category and the category of people you find yourself not wanting to look away from because you might miss them in some fleeting and splendid moment. This woman was not a toy. Her face showed the marks of suffering, and something else, some iron drive. She was fully mobilized, was what Nina would say. Iva was grieving. She was grieving. And it was unfair to keep reading her. Nina looked for the faintest sign of age-parching in her grainless complexion. She saw nothing, and then she stopped. Iva was tall, but shorter than Ned, she could tell, who had thank God stopped answering, like a child, Five ten and a half, when he was asked his height.

  Iva maneuvered people into the seating pattern she wanted. It was an enormous table. Iva was alone at the head, fanning herself with one hand and undoing the top of her tunic with the other. To her left was Joris and to her right, Elliot. Iva beckoned Nina to a place next to Elliot. Gruen was opposite Nina. Iva had put Ned next to Gruen. Ned got up, brought his chair around the end of the table, put it next to Nina, and went back for his place setting. There seemed to be acres of unemployed table space.

  There was an actual wait-staff. Two older women were serving. The younger senior brought in two jumbo Erlenmeyer flasks into which wine had been decanted, red in one, white in the other. She began filling glasses around the table. The wineglasses were the capacious kind—Bordeaux glasses. Nina said no to wine. Gruen encouraged his server and ended up with two full glasses of red. Ned had a glass of white of which he would drink half. The enduring mystery of Hume … endured. She was not going to be the one to ask about that, but it was weird.

  She felt the need to concentrate whenever Iva was speaking. Nina hadn’t figured out what Iva was up to, yet—she was up to something. Her voice was on the low side, with a darling texture in the bottom ranges. A smoker’s voice? It was easy to imagine Iva seductively wielding a cigarette during her adventures in intimate combat.

  Nina was well aware that it was up to her to say something. She was blanking. Go, she thought. She tumbled into a formulation that began oddly with a statement about how sad she was to be there. She kept on. At one point she was asked to raise her voice. And she got through it, conscious the whole time of how much of the truth of her feelings she was leaving out. Everybody was looking at her, as she finished, with normal expressions. What she had wanted to convey was that she felt apologetic about inviting herself to the wake but that she’d felt that she had to do it in order to be with Ned when he was dealing with the loss of his great friend. That wasn’t the true reason she was here, and this wasn’t a wake, either. She didn’t know exactly what the fuck kind of event it was supposed to be. Somebody was going to tell them soon.

  Iva, in the midst of saying something reassuring to Nina, snapped her head around and hissed over her shoulder—startlingly to Nina—as a signal to the servers to bring in the salads. Nina wondered if the hissing was another European thing, because otherwise it was rude as shit. The salads came, bowls of bouffant butter lettuce and other good things.

  Nina was asked about her trip. She avoided temptation and understated unpleasantnesses along the way, like the deficits in amenity at the motel in Kingston where she’d spent the night. When she was through, she felt she’d gone on too long about the roadside distractions like the kaleidoscope as tall as a silo, the golem on display outside the ceramics studio, and the vast size of the two paintball dromes, the crumbling book barn where fallen siding let shelves of abandoned books show.

  Everything was delicious. The conversation was normalizing, but Nina sensed that Iva was gathering herself for an act of some kind.

  And it came. Iva stood up and rather violently unbuttoned her tunic and roughly shook herself out of it, complaining that it was too hot, she was having stress, it was too hot. Under the tunic she wore a low-cut black tank top, a little sprung along the neckline. Clearly they were all expected to join the complaint about the heat, but in fact no one else seemed to be too warm. Nina didn’t feel too warm, in fact, the room felt a little chilly to her. Was Iva menopausal? She was forty-three, kind of young for it, but it was possible.

  “I apologize,” Iva said.

  Joris was a good person. He took his jacket off in sympathy. He had a strong build, Nina thought. Then Ned annoyed her by taking his sweater off. God damn you, she thought.

  Elliot tapped on a glass. He got up.

  Under her breath, Nina said to Ned, “He’s ashamed of something.”

  “Ashamed of what?”

  “How do I know?” Nina said, regretting her observation.

  “You brought it up.”

  “Can you keep your voice down?”

  Elliot had a strong, carrying voice. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I have to ask everyone to move again. We have press, we have other media, we have some … individuals, as you’ll see. A lot of people coming. Only a few are here yet. Today is Thursday, Friday and Saturday we prepare, Sunday the memorial. There’ll be video people at work. Anyway.

  “Tomorrow we need to sit down and plan. Saturday we go over what you’ve written and you rehearse.”

  Nina thought, The otherness of men but why go into it. He needs to say something personal about Douglas, but first, it has to be logistics.

  Restiveness was developi
ng among the friends. There was tension all over the place.

  Elliot wasn’t through. “Now about housekeeping …

  “We need all of you in the manse. We need to use the whole tower, too. Nina and Ned, you come out of the cabin and there’s a bedroom for you next to the bedroom Gruen and Joris are going to share. Sorry about the cabin but we need that, too. We have people to help you move after dinner. Anyway the beds over here are an improvement.”

  “Where are you sleeping?” Gruen asked.

  Elliot was impatient. “You want to know where I’m sleeping? I’m sleeping on a futon in the media room with the phones, if you could call it sleeping.”

  Joris knocked on the table for attention. Nina wondered why this man had to go to prostitutes. He didn’t seem the type, but possibly there was no type.

  Joris said, “I’m telling you now I’m not writing something. I’ll talk. I’ll get up and talk, of course. You can put it on TV if you want to, fine. I’m talking not writing.”

  Elliot held his hands in the air. “Well we can sort this out. I don’t know. Maybe you can read something.”

  “No,” Joris said, half standing.

  Iva put her hand on Joris’s arm and leaned toward him. She had something for his ears only, apparently, and in the act of getting closer she hunched her shoulders forward minutely. Nina caught it.

  “Oh my,” Nina said to Ned, softly. But it was over before Ned could be a witness.

  Something was mollifying Joris. He had kept his eyes in a proper direction during Iva’s encroachment. Nina had seen him blush.

  Nina realized she didn’t know what she’d been eating. Everything had been delicious but her mind had been elsewhere. If she had to compliment Iva she wouldn’t know what to compliment.

  She told herself to grow up. She thought, We had butter lettuce salad cups with something in them and clam appetizers and green bean casserole and lobster risotto.