Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  Elliot was a puzzle, with his long, waxy face. He was the tallest and the thinnest, but he had dog eyes.

  She realized she had gone robot with her food because her mind had been on her inner sanctum. She could swear that she was having a faint prickling sensation there, which was impossible. But there was something physical. No more wine, no X rays. Maybe she was imagining it. If it persisted, she would call Ma.

  The help were clearing.

  Oddly, Gruen had left lumps of lobster on his plate. He’d eaten only the rice. And his clam appetizer was untouched and she wanted it. Was he being observant when it came to shellfish? Maybe he just wasn’t hungry. She was worried for Ned that Gruen might not want to sign the petition. Hussein was the Bank of America for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Maybe nobody would sign, none of them. That was all Ned needed. It shouldn’t hurt him but it would. She looked at Elliot again. Could she see any indications that he might not sign? How could she? She was being ridiculous. Well, he was wealthy and he was in the business and finance upper tier so it was possible that he wouldn’t want to stand out, say, if the names of the signers got printed up in a Times ad. She didn’t know if that was the plan. Elliot was being remote. But from everybody, not just Ned.

  She could feel that Ned was preparing to say something to the group.

  Ned said, “I think we should just speak out. Free-associate. Get a timer and we each say what we have to say.”

  Nina wanted to know what that might be. I am shuddering, she thought. Don’t let it be some ghastly remake of their idiotic exhibitionism.

  Gruen said, “Yes, we could read things. Anything. From emails he sent to that thing he wrote about comedy. You said you wanted something about that, Elliot.”

  “What thing about comedy?” Ned asked.

  Joris said, “It wasn’t something he wrote, it was an interview in Der Spiegel about fifteen years ago. It was his explanation of what we were doing in those days. The interview was about Kundera and Dreyfus but it was after the Germans caught a neo-Nazi mental patient wanting to kill Douglas, in Stuttgart. But he talked about his NYU life, for some reason. He talked about what he called Abstract Comedy. Abstract must mean not funny. We were young, of course.”

  “I was never told about this interview,” Ned said.

  “It’s in German.”

  “So let’s forget it,” Ned said.

  “Forget it,” Iva said.

  “We could be a panel,” Gruen said. “Reminisce.”

  Elliot raised his voice. In his official tone, he said, “This is important. It has to be done right. There is a German foundation involved …”

  Gruen broke in. “Wait I remember what Douglas said he wanted when he died.”

  “Stop interrupting,” Elliot said.

  “But this is what he said. He wished if we all outlived him we would go to some park and hide in the trees and when somebody came by we would shout Great Pan is dead. He said that.”

  Joris groaned. Iva looked at Gruen coldly. Nina whispered to Ned, “He thought quite highly of himself.” Elliot heard this. He pressed his hair down with both hands and said something about coming to talk to them one at a time that night, late, or tomorrow.

  The last course arrived. Nina murmured to Ned, “Oh. A dessert trolley.”

  25 It was pouring again. Ned batted at the strings of rainwater trailing from the bulky cornice above the front door.

  They were waiting for a wheelbarrow to be brought to them so they could go down to the cabin and transfer their belongings to the new room in the manse. The scene before them had changed a little. A substantial white trailer had appeared down the lawn, off to the side. A lit-up sandwich sign set up next to it said Serv-U. Flashlight beams swung in the darkness.

  A young black man in a Serv-U uniform—yellow jumpsuit, knee-high yellow rubber boots—was accompanying Gruen and Joris to the tower to help in their relocation. Another of the Serv-U men ran up and abandoned a wheelbarrow directly in front of Ned and Nina, saying nothing. He hurried away. He had been an old black man with one milk-white eye, wearing a drenched watch cap. Serv-U was probably one of the minimum-wage day-labor outfits that raked up workers from among the homeless and unemployed in Kingston, which was richly supplied with them. He and Nina seemed to be on their own. Nina would hold up the golf umbrella while Ned pushed the wheelbarrow. They set off.

  As they were turning the corner of the manse, Nina told Ned to stop. He was confused.

  “Wait,” she said sharply, startling him. Gesturing unclearly, she led him to a spot close to the house and pointed upward at a deck two floors above.

  She spoke into his ear but she was too close. He pushed her away and quietly asked her to say it again so he could understand.

  She said, “There’s a traveling fight going on. You don’t pay attention! It started back in the middle of the house and now it’s here.” One of the sliding doors leading to the deck was in play. It had been slammed shut and then opened and slammed shut again.

  Iva and Elliot were fighting. Elliot was better than Iva at keeping his voice under control. She was in a volcanic state, threatening to call someone, apparently weeping. One of the two of them made a sound closer to a growl than Ned had ever heard anyone make.

  “I shall talk to him, and he will come.” That was Iva.

  “Pressure him, and not only will he not come, he won’t even send the video.” That was Elliot. It was very intelligible. Something that sounded like rough body contact, or someone falling, was happening now. Then the traveling fight evidently moved off into other venues in the house. A voice distantly yelling was Iva’s. Ned was holding his breath.

  “I have no idea what this is,” Ned said.

  “I do,” Nina said.

  “You just got here,” Ned said.

  “Somebody important is not coming.”

  “I guess,” Ned said, “that would be Kundera not coming.”

  “They’re upset. And Dreyfus won’t be coming either,” Nina said.

  “That’s not funny,” Ned said.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, and strode off with the umbrella. He followed. Over his shoulder he could see that Serv-U workers were unspooling electric lines from the trailer to the tower and the manse. It looked as though they were going to be around for a while.

  The Serv-U worker with the white eye crossed their path. Where was Dale Coy, now? Ned wondered. He hadn’t thought about him in years.

  “For about six months,” Ned said, “there was a black guy named Dale in our group, freshman year.”

  “He left the group?”

  “He did.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t remember,” Ned said. But he did remember. He thought, Coy hated one of Douglas’s Christmastime song parodies like “It’s Beginning to Look a Bit Like Kwanzaa,” and Doug hadn’t spared the substitute Christmas promoted by Ron Karenga and the black nationalists in those days. But Douglas had done parodies of regular Christmas carols, too, lots of them. Ned thought, You can’t call everything that’s funny, funny, without losing friends.

  He said, “We weren’t that enlightened about race. I guess we assumed that bad race incidents were destined to be like firecracker explosions after the Fourth of July. They’d get fewer and fewer and then stop.”

  “I think that old man had a bleeding cut on his hand. There was blood on the wheelbarrow handle. None of them are wearing work gloves. It’s cold, too.”

  “I could say something,” Ned said.

  “I’ll remind you,” she said.

  26 Nina was out in the rain again, with her umbrella, standing near the hump of rock she and Ned had been calling Moby Dick, and she was there because it was one of the few places she was sure of getting a good cell phone connection.

  Her mother answered. It would be about seven p.m. there.

  “Okay tell me,” her mother said.

  “Everything’s okay. Everything’s working. I got here and nobody seems to mind.”<
br />
  “Where are you staying? What kind of place have they got you in?”

  “Well we were in a sort of dollhouse, which I liked, but now we’re moving to a new place in the main house. I just had a look at it. It’s a nice room, pretty big, like a good motel room, everything you need, except we have to share a bathroom with Ned’s friends Gruen and Joris. They’re in the bedroom next to ours. It’s a good big bed, and the room is built over a rollicking stream pretty much like Niagara Falls. Directly underneath us.”

  “Oh that’s so good, Neen!” Her mother’s sudden enthusiasm puzzled her. But that was Ma.

  “Why is it, especially?”

  “Negative ions, don’t you know anything? It’s good for theum … negative ions are pouring up from the mashing water.”

  “Okay.”

  “You pay plenty to get a negative ion generator, a machine. You’re getting it free.”

  “Do I have to inhale a lot perchance?”

  “No. It penetrates by itself. You’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll feel wonderful, like running around, and Ned too.”

  “Good. He needs a lift. By the way, we did it on time.”

  “Thank God then.”

  “And Ma, listen. I think that a couple of hours afterward I felt something new like a very refined I don’t mean refined I mean fine, as in … fine thing like a … fizzing, in there. I feel it right now.”

  “Okay, I’m going to go out on a plank and say you did it.”

  She wanted to believe Ma. It was sad, but she wanted her to be right. Her mother had called herself a dialectical materialist until she decided to learn astrology, which wasn’t a good fact to be thinking about now.

  Nina said, “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am. In your voice I hear something.”

  “You didn’t used to believe things like this.”

  “I still don’t. But I can do it. I got attuned. So listen to me for your own good. And by the way since you’re being smart with me I’ll tell you something else you have to do. You have to watch where you sleep from now on.”

  “Oh God, what does that mean?”

  “It means you have to be head north feet south.”

  “Well if your head is north the only place your feet can be is south, right?”

  “Okay, be smart with me. It’s alignment. If you grow carrots in a tray of dirt and grow them athwart the axis you get crummy short carrots but if you align the dirt bed along the axis you get tall sweet ones. And don’t laugh, this is in a decent book by a man René Dubos, an MD who was supported for years by that bloodsucker Rockefeller at the Rockefeller whatever it is medical foundation. So align your bed.”

  “I’ll do my best. I’ll take care of it.”

  “The march, howum,” Ma said.

  “We’re still getting good news. How about you?”

  “Don’t worry about Los Angeles, but something is wrong, I can tell, you’re not telling me.”

  Nina sighed. “I’m trying to think of what it might be.”

  Ma said, “You know.”

  “Well the only thing it might be is the son of Ned’s friend who died, he’s a peeping Tom. I know this because he peeped at me. He’s fourteen or fifteen.”

  “I knew it,” Ma said.

  “Well, you didn’t know it.”

  “You told Ned. Ned will take care of it. You be careful.”

  There was more from her mother about the LA march. Lots of unions were in. Stars were going to be in it. It was going to be bigger than the Tom Mooney demonstrations, whatever they were. I can’t listen, Nina thought.

  “The only other thing bothering me is that Ned’s friends haven’t signed his petition, and he cares.”

  Ma was outraged for Ned. “What? Why not? What kind of friends? Get out of that place then.”

  “I can’t. We can’t. There’s one in particular he wants to sign. So Dear Abby here’s my question: I could go behind Ned’s back and beg this person, which is what it would come down to …”

  Ma was emphatic against it. She said, “Absolutely not. You’d have to make him swear never to tell and then it would be a secret and it would be like rubble under the bottom sheet you could never get rid of …”

  “Ma you just convinced me.”

  “How big a deal is it? I could run the cards. I know I know. But they help me think.”

  “No, I said you convinced me.”

  “You need to cheer him up. You know how. Get his mind off this.”

  Nina laughed. “I know what you’re talking about but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m wearing him out in that department, poor guy. When we get through with this he won’t want to come near my chocha for a year and a half. I can see it, Get that thing out of here, he’ll say.”

  “You’re right, because of theum. Okay so forget that.”

  “Okay, time to go, my cell is almost dead anyway. I have to go help Ned with our stuff.”

  “Call me anytime,” Ma said.

  There was an argument for trying to get some hijinks going here in the cabin rather than in their room in the manse. It was quiet and private in the cabin and it was mental up in the manse. There were interruptions. Ned was looking at her in a nice way. He had liked it earlier when she’d told him that the reason she’d first gotten interested in him was because he was so verbal looking. He had brightened up. But she had decided that easing up was the best idea.

  Something was heating up Ned’s confessional impulses.

  Ned felt he should peel the paper off the windows before they left the place. She wanted to leave it to Serv-U. He wanted her to help him. It wouldn’t take long. Ned uncovered the first pane and went rigid, staring out into the night. She knew what it had to be.

  She ran to the cabin door, threw it open, and stepped out onto the little porch and shouted as commandingly as she could, “Come here, you, Hume, you come here. Hume!”

  Don’t do this, she was thinking. At the side of the house, it was Hume, rising. When he saw her coming at him, he lost his footing and fell back against the side of the building.

  She hesitated. She was going to arrest him! Where was Ned? She stood over the boy. “You,” she said. She pressed an open hand over her crotch, ridiculously, to protect herself there. Unhelpful rain blew into her face. She sensed that something was wrong with the boy. He’d surely had time to run. He was wearing the same odd leather ensemble as before and he was drenched. Ned arrived and pushed her aside. And then Ned was hauling the boy around to the porch. Hume wasn’t resisting.

  “Don’t be rough with him,” Nina said. She resisted the impulse to take hold of Hume’s clothing somewhere.

  Hume and Ned stood apart from each other, and Ned, almost courteously, made an ushering gesture to the boy. They entered the cabin. Hume seemed to be limping. He had strong body odor.

  Nina thought, How can this be? He was handsome and solid. He had a cleft chin, cut to just the right slight depth. He was a rugged boy with fine shoulders. He should be beleaguered with girlfriends following him around. He was as tall as Ned.

  Hume was being compliant. Everything remained to be seen. Apparently she was the only one he would make eye contact with, for now. He was something like a fine animal, a fine horse, which was a stupid thought. Whoever had cut his hair was a criminal. The two cropped dark ridges running back were like dorsal fins. There were scabs and scratches in the shaved areas of his scalp. He wasn’t taking care of himself. His eyes were maybe the best color for a man to have, a pale blue, which she thought of as a bitter color. He had accepted a seat on one of the kitchen chairs. Ned was sitting opposite him. There was no chair for her so she leaned against the wall.

  How she could bring this into the discussion she had not the slightest idea, but she thought it might improve things for this kid if he could comprehend the bizarre image of a woman he’d stumbled in on, naked, upside down, legs stretched up the wall. She thought, This is the definition of hopeless.

  Ned seemed uncertain. S
he knew what was happening—he had too much to say and he didn’t want to start off with clichés. And he was sitting too close to Hume. It made it inquisitorial. So what she could do was go over and pull on the back of his chair a little. He would get the point. She did it and it worked.

  Ned said, “I’m Ned and this is my wife Nina and I am an old, old friend of your father. And I, I want to say something to you: I’m really sorry.”

  Hume was rolling his right pant leg up, with difficulty because it was leather and it was wet. A grossly swollen ankle was emerging.

  “Okay,” the boy shouted, stunning Ned with the violence of his delivery. Hume was picking bits of something off his flesh. Nina thought, You cannot run around over boulders in the rain in shoes like that. He was sockless, wearing what appeared to be espadrilles in the last stages of disintegration.

  Ned stood up. “Why are you shouting at me? I mean God damn you anyway, Hume, you know what you did this afternoon, God damn you …”

  Nina took Ned by the arm. Ned was shaking. Nina mouthed the word Stop.

  Ned wouldn’t. “Now God damn it, you violated my wife’s privacy. Who are you? Why do you think you can do that? You can go to jail for that …”

  Nina said, “Hume, nobody knows about it. We haven’t told anyone.”

  “I’m sorry I looked at you,” Hume said, slowly, in a tone that seemed to deny what he was saying.

  Ned detected slyness and couldn’t control himself. “Now God damn you again. Listen, what is going on with you? What are you doing besides running around in the woods, for Christ’s sake?”

  She thought, I hate it here, the whole fucking area: it’s dank and I hate the boring trees and the towns are decrepit … and peculiar without being in any way picturesque … somebody said that about someplace. In Kingston she had seen the ghost of a nineteenth-century sign on the side of a brick building in white letters barely legible, CORSETERIA.

  “What about your mother?” Ned asked Hume harshly.

  “What about her?” Hume answered.

  “Your mother was devastated—is, I mean. Why aren’t you helping her?”