Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  “She wants me to leave,” Hume said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Hume said, “She does. You don’t know anything about my mother.”

  “And that’s all you have to say about spying on my wife?”

  “Sorry. Apologize.” The sly tint would not leave his voice.

  Ned said, “What does your father mean to you, nothing? I want to know. Was he not a good father to you?”

  “You don’t know anything. My mother is stupid.”

  Nina bent over Hume and took him by the shoulders. She said, “If you want to be a monster, be one, but now you have to come up to the house and let somebody take care of your ankle. How did you do that?”

  “Crossing the creek.”

  “I knew it,” she said, looking meaningfully at Ned. “I told you it was dangerous.”

  Nina wanted to give ibuprofen to Hume. She had some in her purse, which was atop the load of their belongings in the wheelbarrow parked on the corner of the porch. She went to get it.

  Hume was following her movements and was already shaking his head. She brought a glass of water from the kitchen and tried to hand it to him along with two pills. He rolled his eyes. She rolled hers.

  “Now we’ll go up the hill,” Ned said.

  It was tense. Ned tried to support Hume, who said that no one should touch him. They let him go on ahead, limping.

  “I was completely ineffective,” Ned said quietly to Nina.

  “No you were not. But anyway, so was I.”

  “It wasn’t up to you, it was up to me.”

  She thought, Oh you poor man. He was concluding that he had failed as a father, that it had been a tryout, and he had failed to, what would you call it, improve on Douglas as a father, who had clearly been a dud and miserable at it.

  “Now where is he going?” Ned asked. Hume had broken away, taking a path that would lead him around the back of the manse and presumably to some entrance not known to them. There had been no goodbye, unsurprisingly.

  Nina said, “You know what you’re doing—you’re chain-sighing, a thing you accuse me of. You make me stop doing that, so you stop. It’s noticeable.”

  Hume was gone and she was glad he was gone. She was going to relax now. They had said what they had to say. She was sorry for men. She pitied Hume. Puberty is torture, she thought, depending on where you are when it happens, and who’s around. Ned was sad.

  27 “Where’s your better half?” Joris asked Ned.

  “Interior decorating. Rearranging the deck chairs.” Ned looked around the bedroom assigned to Gruen and Joris. “Your digs are identical to ours.”

  “Same nice big bed. We have to sleep together, like you guys. Head to toe because I don’t want his cold,” Joris said, pointing at Gruen, who said, “I don’t want it either.”

  Ned sat down in an armchair at the foot of the bed. His two friends were lying on the bed a yard apart, under the spread, drinking, their heads on pillows propped directly against the glass of the great window looking into blackness. The rumbling brook below was a presence in the dull room. This wing of four rooms was cantilevered directly over it. There was no reading lamp, only an amber fixture in the ceiling shedding the sort of light he associated with hotel corridors.

  Gruen said, “You know I bet those people who lived in what was it called, yeah, the Falling Waters House Frank Lloyd Wright built them moved out in about six months. It was just like this place. I can see the wife saying I’m going mad I tell you, mad.”

  “Where did you get the sambuca?” Ned asked. There was a liter bottle of sambuca two-thirds full on the floor next to Joris. They were drinking from paper cups.

  “We stole it,” Gruen and Joris said in unison.

  Joris said, “And you can’t have any. Yes you can.”

  “No thanks,” Ned said.

  “Right now we’re lounging,” Gruen said.

  “We like it,” Joris said.

  Gruen gestured vehemently for Ned to lock the door to the room, or at least that’s what the rotary motions of his right hand seemed to mean.

  Ned got up, turned the lock, and resumed his seat.

  He said, “For your information, if you don’t aim your bed north/south you’re going to turn into a stunted carrot. Or something. Because you’re thwarting the earth energies that make you big and strong. I just moved our bed.”

  “Beg pardon?” Gruen said.

  “Nina gets these things from an advanced thinker, her mother. Nina doesn’t believe them but I have to execute anyway.”

  Gruen said, “Joris is in the middle of something that will make your hair stand on end. His life in the whore world. He doesn’t care. He is fucking telling all about it. It’s the best fucking story you ever heard. And we don’t want any interruptions.”

  “Jesus, what have I missed?” Ned said.

  Joris said, “You missed when I was telling about when I first became a whoremonger …”

  Ned said, “Well wait a minute. A fishmonger is somebody who sells fish, isn’t it?”

  “Oh shut up,” Gruen said.

  Joris said, “I have to say this for Douglas. He did make me think behind words. But on that one if you look in the OED you’ll find that a whoremonger is somebody just like me, who goes to whores. I’ll tell you, a pretty amazing moment was when I figured out that your highness meant your way-up-aboveness in physical space and nothing else. Also Douglas pointed out that revolution doesn’t mean the most pissed-on rising to the top forever, it means one more turn of the wheel, turn the crank and revolve the oppressors. Also exclusive neighborhoods is funny. It means exclude poor smelly bastards … and very exclusive neighborhoods means exclude more of them. And the most exclusive neighborhoods means exclude all of them.”

  They were all silent for a while, giving Douglas credit, Ned understood.

  “I decided I had to go to a therapist to find out what it was with me and married women and also to see if one would have anything persuasive against the way I was going to whores. I was liking it. I mean, it made me happy. The first shrink I went to seemed a little too interested in making me get married again. He’s divorced now.”

  Weirdly, Gruen sang out, in a clear voice, “Tournent, tournent, mes personnages …” and then stopped. Joris repeated it. That was the intro music from supposedly the greatest movie of all time, La Ronde. They’d seen it three times at Douglas’s insistence, to get its essence.

  There was more about the brothel world that Joris inhabited. Ned tried not to feel sordid at the close attention he was paying and he thought it made him look bad to ask for elucidations so he didn’t. There were nineteen women in an extremely comfortable six-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. There was turnover, but not substantial, and some of the women were permanent fixtures and had developed long-term relationships with certain men. It was all middle class, clean, the madam was a wonderful cook. If a girl used drugs she was through. Two doctors were clients. They supervised the health of the women, who accepted the protocol that spot checks for either drugs or STDs would happen at random times.

  Joris’s narrative was a lumpy arc. He was going back repeating some things he’d already described to Gruen. He was saying that he’d never gotten to the bottom of his fetish, if that was what it was, for other men’s wives. And he was saying that he couldn’t tell anyone about his personal life, because he had no friends. He had business associates but no friends. He had acquaintances but no friends. And he said that probably the nature of his personal life made him wary about the idea of friends. He didn’t know.

  Gruen said, “Wait. I have no friends either!”

  Ned laughed. “It doesn’t seem to bother you that much.”

  Gruen drained his cup and said, “I don’t think it does. I’m busy.”

  Now Joris was going back over his preliminary study of the whorehouse possibilities in Manhattan. Ned didn’t need to be convinced that every variety of sexual taste would find its supplier in a big city and he was alre
ady convinced that there was no accounting for tastes. He was glad that Joris had found a comfortable bordello.

  Everything that Joris had to say about whores was fascinating. There was a whole lore there, no rhyme intended. Gruen was maintaining himself in an abnormally still state lest any inadvertent move derail Joris’s revelations. The brothel women, the older ones, naturally, resented the pressure to present young, as they called it, and they particularly disliked the whole new waxing imperative. The pressure went beyond that. There were mothers among the women, and more of them were getting half-zips, vaginal tightening. On the other hand, there was an older john constituency for natural escutcheons, the bigger and thicker the better, and some felt uncomfortable or self-conscious with partners so much younger than they were, and chose the oldest of the women. And there was a new house specialty, participatory labial shaving, that some johns were willing to pay a premium for. Condoms were mandatory. Joris swore that he had never had an STD. It was collegial in the brothel, although there was some rivalry, Joris had to admit, over his attentions. There were four or five women who were very happy to see Joris step into the place. He had accommodations at the brothel, minimal, to use when he felt like it—a bed and informal office space. He dispensed legal advice gratis from time to time, helpful to them despite the fact that they were not seagoing vessels. The talent, which was what Joris sometimes referred to the women as, used diaphragms to prevent bleeding when they had their periods. His wife had done that, too. And so had Nina, Ned thought. Men had their preferences. An occasional one was for the talent to put on eyeglasses, and there was one client who paid extra, now and then, to have any of the women who were free come into the room he was using and applaud as he approached his orgasm. There would be cheers and gratuities all around.

  Joris fell silent. They waited. The trace of foreignness in his speech was still there, but faint. Ned remembered telling Joris I said to me was impossible English in probably the first week of their friendship. No one could claim they hadn’t all been helpful to one another.

  Gruen was fumbling around distractingly under the spread. Intoning, he said, “A man, a plan … a banana,” and pulled one out from the bedclothes.

  Joris helped himself to more sambuca. He was having a contemplative interlude. It ended. “I live in pain,” he said, in a flat tone. He followed the words with a smile, obviously meant to be rueful but registering with Ned as desperate.

  Cancer, Ned thought. He sat up in his chair, rigid. Gruen violently reorganized the pillows behind his head so that he could turn on his side and look straight at Joris more easily.

  Ned said, “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not medical. Relax,” Joris said.

  “Thank Christ,” Ned said. So then it would be depression.

  Joris said, “And also it’s not depression. I am not depressed and I tell you absolutely there’s nothing a shrink could do. It’s not all the time. It’s like this, it’s like an insect sound that comes up when I think about my life. My life so far. And the insect sound has pain connected to it. It’s like tinnitus that hurts when I consider certain things …”

  Ned said, “I thought it was going to be cancer. Jesus. It does sound like depression to me, actually …”

  Joris said, “I thought it wouldn’t come when I got here. Don’t ask me why. But.”

  Gruen said, “Remorse, it sounds like to me.”

  “For what?” Ned said, irritated.

  Gruen was ahead of Joris in the sambuca department and the result was that pretty soon everything he had to contribute would be a non sequitur. Ned could see that coming, Gruen turning into an impediment. It was something that happened when Gruen drank.

  Joris said, “The truth is I have nothing to complain about. My sons are okay, and they’re good very good to their mother.”

  “Then don’t complain,” Gruen said.

  Oh no, Ned thought. Drink also brought out a censorious side of Gruen. It was an odd thing. It was contrary to the normal Gruen.

  Gruen said, “It’s remorse, it sounds like.”

  “You said that. What is?” Joris said.

  “The way you feel that you were just complaining about.”

  “What’s your point, if there is one?” Joris was getting angry.

  Gruen said, “Okay, you go to whores and it’s friendly but underneath they are doing it with you against their real wishes … That’s whoring. They do it with people they might reject in a free state of mind. I’m not saying anything you don’t know.”

  This was wrong, Ned thought. Joris had arrived at some kind of personal adaptation to a problem, an unfortunate fetish for married women, and it was working, and his friends should support him. It was simple.

  “Wait a second,” Ned said. “It’s not your business. You get paid for what you do and you don’t only do what you would do for free. And it’s working for Joris, and it’s presumably working for the women who’re happy to see him show up at the door.”

  Beyond that, Ned didn’t know what to say. Douglas’s death was bound to bring out all the anxieties that go with looking back and summing up what a life came down to, the choices made, what the verdict would be if life ended suddenly without any warning or chance to do the things that were left to do that could improve the judgment an existence got. That was the downside of sudden death. A downside, he meant. But the moods Joris was talking about had been going on long before Douglas died.

  Gruen was not through with Joris. Ned could tell because Gruen was running his tongue over his upper teeth. That meant he was about to say something important. It went with alcohol.

  Ned wasn’t satisfied with what he himself had said, so far. There seemed to be no place to go with Joris’s declaration, his confession. Joris had trusted them.

  Gruen said, “I’m sorry. I can be wrong. In fact I am. So I’m sorry.”

  Ned thought, It’s too late.

  Joris said to Gruen, “Thank you, David.”

  Ned thought, I wish Joris could just be for something. Or against it … how pointless of me, but it could be the Anglo-Saxon Invasion, if he would let it.

  Ned said, “We all have our dark moments.” In some dark moments—visited by sins of omission, mistakes … Ned would say aloud, Mutual Aid. It was a trick. Ostensibly he was reminding himself of a classic he had pledged to read years ago, and hadn’t. It was a trick that in a disguised way acknowledged the stab of regret and in the same breath knocked it away. What Is to Be Done? was another title he used. Nina had figured it all out, of course.

  What the friends needed was to be back at the round clawfoot table in their Second Avenue place, everybody sitting up alert, a decanter of red wine on the table, somebody saying This is the issue before us, bringing his fist down like a gavel, Elliot usually, or Douglas, or he himself, often enough.

  They were in a conversational eddy. Gruen had gotten out of bed, dispensed with the sweater he’d been wearing, and begun to stalk aimlessly around the room in his boxers. Ned thought, Man I love you but you need a regimen. Between sips of sambuca Gruen seemed to be free-associating about his wife, Helen, more to himself than for the benefit of the group. He was proceeding as though it was his turn to talk about his intimate life. If they think I’m going next after Gruen in this area, they can forget it, Ned thought.

  Gruen’s disclosures were on the pastel side, after Joris’s. Helen always wanted certain music on during sex and Gruen had to have just gotten out of the shower and he had to be sure to remember to see that his nails were groomed. His wife always wore a negligee for the occasion. He couldn’t complain. She had to sort of elevate the thing in order to let go, for some reason. It didn’t matter. She put her heart into it. She was taking a plunge, each time. For her it was like going off a dive tower.

  “You have to give her credit,” Gruen said, wanly.

  “We do,” Joris said, which was a peculiar thing to say. But then what Gruen had said was peculiar, seeming as it did to take the position that his wife d
eserved credit for having sex. Ned thought, You can ask about certain facts of life but not others. And evidently that was all Gruen had to say for the moment.

  And Joris was dormant. In fact, both of them were looking expectantly in Ned’s direction. I love group dynamics, Ned thought. The body language directed at him was saying he should now give them the minutiae about Claire. He didn’t want to. He would tell what he had to.

  Joris startled him by saying, “I loved Claire. And then I hated Claire. Watch me speak freely on this. When in the future history of the world I am ever going to find a group of people interested in my opinions on this subject is never. So here’s the truth. She was a shit. With all respect, because I know you got together with her on the coast and then you were together for those years, she was no good. And she was so pale I always wanted to buy her a steak. Douglas was her tool. She made little things disappear. When she came into the room everybody had to try to ignore her beauty so anything separate from her could get done, which she knew. And she wasn’t a nice person. She was passive. She was so passive that anything anybody proposed that didn’t work out was somebody else’s fault. She was the one who got us banned from the Alliance Française. I forget what she did …”

  For Ned, there was shock to digest. It was a subject that could trap him into ugliness in what he said. But he had to say something. He thought he knew where to go. He said, “I’m not going to say anything about Claire, really. Although it’s interesting to hear that she had itchy fingers even back then. You know we connected over a shoplifting incident when I was at Pacific Co-op for a while and then lo and behold. This was three or four years after NYU. Gruen knows about it already. A clerk caught her shoplifting. I took care of it and that’s how it started up with us. A Nation of Shoplifters, somebody said back then …”

  Suddenly he knew clearly where to take this. The problem with going into detail about Claire was that it made him look like a fool and a dupe. He didn’t want to revisit any of it, and Joris’s contribution had made the picture even worse. So he was going to talk about Nina. They knew nothing about Nina.