by Norman Rush
Don’t ever leave me, Ned thought.
36 They were all convened, again, in the conversation-pit room. It wasn’t clear why. The mutiny had taken place and it had been successful and it was supposed to be free-form when it came to the tributes they were going to give. But now it felt like Elliot wanted to take it back. Elliot was entering the room back first, attempting to close the door on some insistent person he was being emphatic with. It was Iva. He leaned against the door and he got it closed. He locked it behind his back.
Iva seemed to have departed. Ned was seated on the leather sectional at the end closest to the left-hand door. Joris was next to him but Gruen was still standing up in an apparent trance. Ned had felt faintly embarrassed when Nina said to Gruen, Did you get that cold you were getting? He reminded himself that people all up and down the cultural ladder said dumb things, like the young woman who had come to him about a homeless panhandler wandering around inside the co-op, saying of herself that when she’d seen him she’d become visibly moved, or like the Oakland Tribune intern who had introduced herself by saying, I’m a young journalist.
Gruen, one ear plugged with cotton, his inhaler momentarily abandoned in his right nostril, was studying what was for Elliot a strange new gait—Elliot was moving slowly and appeared to be placing his feet carefully as he proceeded, rather than ambling in the standard automatic mode. Joris tugged on Gruen’s pant leg and Gruen sat down. Joris sighed, because lively knocking at the door had resumed. Tediously Elliot retraced his steps and minimally opened the door. Iva thrust an aggrieved sliver of herself into the room. It appeared that she was wearing a Day-Glo blue velour track-suit. Nina on the other hand had been excruciating herself to dress appropriately for the different tones and phases of the moment they were caught in. A hissed exchange between Iva and Elliot ended and Iva withdrew, still angry. No doubt she wanted to be included. So did Nina, but she wasn’t beating her fists on doors. What was going on would make a good libretto. Elliot began his modern-dance-like return to his station, a cubical black club chair set closely opposite the sectional. The coffee table had been dematerialized. Elliot was dressed in a well-cut high-end dark business suit. His slab-like shirt cuffs were held together by ornate cuff links featuring a gem that might well be tanzanite. In his right hand Elliot was clutching a couple of sheets of yellow legal-pad paper that had been tortured into the shape of a carrot or cypress.
Ned felt a pulse of alarm. Just for an instant, Elliot’s eyes seemed magnified. Was he sick? Circumstances had conspired to make Elliot the majordomo of everything that was going on. Ned wondered how unfair he had been to Elliot. He’d really done nothing to separate the man, Elliot, from the whatever they should be called, the odious duties he’d been called on to perform. And Elliot had been just as much his friend as any of them, in the old days. With relief, Ned realized that the alarming moment had only been tears pending, but not yet sliding free, as they were doing now. Elliot was holding himself stiffly. Unexpectedly, he raised his paper creation and flicked his tears off his cheeks as they got there. It would stop. Here we are, we need to do more for Elliot, Ned thought. Ned looked into himself and concluded that he was using Elliot’s long-term intermittent trouble with his back as a cover for not asking why he was walking so peculiarly.
Ned said, “El, are you okay? Is it your back?”
Elliot said, “It is, and I’ll be okay. I was doing too much lifting, is all. But now I’ve got plenty of help and I have meds.” He took tissues from a pocket and blew his nose.
Ned had an explanation for what was happening to them. It was that they had been recalled, after outbursts from Iva, which were continuing, to get them to take back their mutiny and do what they had been instructed to. They were scheduled for a tale of woe. Elliot was going to build a platform of personal stress to stand on and appeal to them from. I forgive you, Ned thought.
Elliot began. It was not a supremely well-organized presentation they were getting. He had never seen a Windsor knot as monumental as Elliot’s. The emphasis was on the physical, the medical, all of which was depressing and a lot of it new to him. His own life had been lived on the West Coast, away from the scene. He was feeling bad.
As the friends all knew, a couple of years after Elliot married her, Muriel had been diagnosed with ALS. Her decline was rapid. It nearly killed Elliot. Five years after they were married, the poor woman was dead. They had had only a brief period of normal married life. Muriel had declined rapidly: to a walker, to a wheelchair, to bedridden, to a nursing home. She was an only child, and had expected to be an heiress, but her father had died leaving behind a substantial burden of debt. That had been a surprise.
Something confessional was coming.
Elliot was a stockbroker. Under the pressures he was describing he had been pulled toward more and more risk in the deals he was making, which had worked out bigtime initially, he was saying, with a stress on initially. “Emphasis on initially,” Joris muttered, and then he said something Ned didn’t understand. He repeated it for Ned. “Qualcomm.”
Ned knew what Qualcomm was. It was a stock that had soared and then crashed. He hadn’t known that it was a major holding of Douglas’s and Iva’s. Joris knew a lot. If fascism ever came he would pick Joris to be in the maquis with, and, okay, Gruen if he lost weight. Ned wondered if Joris had been put into Qualcomm by Elliot, too, and Gruen.
At forty-five, Elliot had undergone a prostatectomy. This was new. Apparently it was new to all of them. There was a group murmur of sympathy. Ned felt something in his genitals, not his physical genitals but in the idea of his genitals.
There was a bevy of details on the protracted healing process. One detail that was tough to hear was Elliot’s account of discovering, through an embarrassing incident, that he had become insensitive to a faint odor of urine it seemed he was carrying around with him although he was faithful about changing his pads. Changing them timeously, Douglas would have said, during the phase when he was pointlessly trying to lard Briticisms into everyday discourse at NYU. Arvacado. They all wanted to hear the grim minutiae of Elliot’s path back to continence. Or rather, they didn’t and they did. It could all go under the heading of cautionary information because every man in the room was entering the prostate trouble zone. And of course crouching there was the other thing.
The other thing was impotence. Of course impotence would probably be the universal masculine fate if you lived long enough. But everything is timing, Ned thought. On the plane he’d read in something that the human body stops aging at ninety. So … something to look forward to. Elliot had the traditional open prostatectomy. Now there was the robotic option. Ned had read about it. Elliot had suffered postoperatively. He was not giving them the Reader’s Digest version of his tribulations, either.
Elliot said, “What you realize is that it takes away something you were used to and depended on.” It was difficult for him, where he was going with this. Ned was full of sympathy. Elliot was grimacing. The friends waited.
Elliot was saying, “You lose the stupid imaginary availability of the women you run into. I was a widower when this struck, and I had been for a while, so I was single, you could say. Also the example of getting my continence back in less than a year turned out to be misleading. But this thing about women, until it’s gone, you never realize how calming, automatically calming, it is, to have these fantasy images running in your head, this imagery. And then the material basis of the imagery is gone and of course you have the history of getting lucky in the past in the fairly recent past that supported the imagery.”
They were all uncomfortable. Ned wanted urgently to think about something else, something amusing if possible, and felt cowardly. Nina would find Elliot’s existential discoveries, or discovery, interesting. But he knew if he told her she would say, So how well does that describe your inner life, by the way?
His mind wasn’t wandering, it was resisting. He didn’t want to think about death or impotence, either one. Since Nina, he had been l
iving in almost a burlesque show with sex and comedy going on nonstop after the years when it had been so otherwise. Take blubalub, for example, he thought. Blubalub was a conceit of Nina’s. One summer they had stayed for a month in a cottage near Stinson Beach. And the cottage’s Dutch door had opened directly on the driveway. So once when he was coming back from the mailbox she had opened the top section of the Dutch door and stood there topless and invited him to put his face between her breasts and nuzzle side to side, which she’d referred to as blubalub. Trees kept anyone in the vicinity from seeing. So then she’d said blubalub was something for the UPS driver, something she had worked out with him one day when Ned was off swimming, and that when Ned had come to the door just then and she was topless, it had been a mistake because she’d been expecting the UPS guy, with whom the deal was that he would come to the Dutch door and she would let him have blubalub and he would give her the parcel meant for them and then she would get to go out to the truck and take her pick of any other parcel she wanted. Ned wanted it all to go on forever. On his very tall tombstone he wanted inscribed at the top Fun Had, and all the rest would be a list of things dating from Nina coming into his life. He knew he had to keep it to himself.
He got back to Elliot, who apparently was doing pretty well with erections. He was saying that getting used to orgasms that produced only a puff of air had taken some doing. Ned was a little unprepared for the degree of intimacy Elliot was providing. Their life together on Second Avenue must have been more decorous than he remembered.
Now this is interesting, Ned thought. Elliot was implying or imparting something that seemed cryptic. It was about a woman who had been his lover. He was being flowery. He was being obscure and intricate in his references to whoever she was. Nobody knew what to say.
Ned got up, feeling he had to. He said, “What a thing for you, man.” He wondered if others would want to say something, too, but Elliot was moving rapidly on. The pitch was coming. Ned sat down again.
Elliot was retracing the part of the story that had to do with Douglas’s economic situation. It was a crisis. There was nothing else to call it. A lot of his investments for the family had been under-hedged, as he put it, and Douglas had plowed much more into the physical estate than he should have. He was profligate. And Douglas had done that on his own, not letting anyone grasp the dimensions of it. Even Iva had been left out of Douglas’s finances. This place they were in was surrounded by collapsing walls of debt, was the way Elliot expressed it. And here was the Elliot who had been a star in the Drama Club at NYU, always in character parts because of his unusual height. Emoting, was what he was doing.
Elliot wanted it to be about friendship. Their friend Douglas was an important figure in European political culture, because of the Dreyfus carnets, and the Kundera journal, and a string of other less-well-known interventions, he wasn’t exactly sure what they should be called, Elliot said. A documentary on Douglas for Eurovision that was being made now, here, all around them, was going to be essential to saving the day for Iva and Hume. Two German foundations and two Israeli foundations were this close to setting up a research center on forgery as propaganda, right there, funding it and setting Iva up to superintend and represent it, which he thought they would have to agree she was superbly qualified to do. Douglas had been in discussion with them for over a year. Elliot paused.
Ned had been correct. The pitch was on. Elliot was saying that he had to be frank. And what he meant by that was that Douglas had not always been polite or politic in his dealings with people in his realm of contacts, in his performances at colloquia and so on, in Europe. He had made some enemies. And there were certain names that had been expected to come over for this event who weren’t going to. Douglas had made enemies on the far right in Europe and as they all knew things were shifting and the right was coming back in spots here and there in Europe. So the picture was changing.
Ned willed Elliot to get it over with. He knew what was happening, but he resented having to concentrate to see the inner mechanism exposed. Elliot was blunt about what he wanted. They were supposed to humanize Douglas. Elliot even used the word. Joris said sotto voce, “He means sell him,” just before Elliot said, “It’s our job to sell Douglas for Iva and Hume.”
Elliot wanted to go back to the plan as it had originally been. He wanted the friends to divide up Douglas’s life in a particular way. He wanted them to rescind their prior refusal. He gave his ideal division of labor to them quickly, and with a certain amount of shame showing. Joris would do something on Douglas as an outdoorsman, referencing all the camping and long-distance hiking and the Appalachian Trail forays of their student days. Joris looked absolutely astonished but said nothing. Elliot would supply Joris with some other information relevant to that, environmental groups Douglas had supported, or been affiliated with, and so on.
Ned was sorry for Joris. He wondered what in hell he himself was going to be asked to take up. If they’d devoted time to camping on six weekends over four years that would be a lot, unless Elliot was counting climbing up onto some of the larger rocks in Central Park and sitting there reading in the sun for a while. They’d joined the Outing Club and quit after one semester. The club had included non-student participants from the school’s neighborhood and they had found themselves in a hiking party led by a vigorous old woman who, pointing eastward from the top of Storm King at a line of smoke rising from some valley, had informed them that that was the location of hell.
Elliot had managed this pretty cleverly, and Ned felt disarmed, and Elliot had, after all, signed his petition.
Gruen’s assignment was to give a brief appreciation of Douglas as a friend. And then Elliot said that he wanted a few of Douglas’s pranks mentioned, which he would consult with Gruen on, as to which ones, exactly. Ned couldn’t look at Gruen and was now busy feeling dumbfounded at his own assignment. He was expected to give a short paper on Douglas’s philosophy, call it, and Elliot had a paper already prepared for Ned to read or refer to. In fact, Elliot had drafts and notes for everyone. They were going to keep things crisp. It would be a panel. Elliot would go into the highlights of Douglas’s career, the great cases.
“All for one,” Ned heard Gruen say.
Elliot took three number-ten envelopes containing their scripts from an inside pocket and handed them out.
It was interesting to Ned that he, Joris, and Gruen understood without exchanging a word that they were all going to participate in this travesty.
The meeting was over. Ned led the way and opened the door, to find Iva standing close, directly in the way, a pained, anxious smile on her face. She was waiting for a sign from Elliot and she must have gotten it because her face relaxed.
37 Nina was telling herself that she was pregnant more or less constantly, but sometimes she slipped and it came out audibly and it was beginning to annoy Ned. She was hungry. There was to be no more fine dining. She’d been told by her friend Nadine Rose that meals were going to be mess hall style now and Nadine had also told her that Iva and Elliot would be eating privately. If, in their frenzy, they were eating at all, Nina thought.
Ned was in a bleak mood. Apparently the group’s decision to mutiny had been overturned and he didn’t want to go into it and now he had to write something about Douglas’s philosophy. And Ned was saying, mostly to himself, things like What philosophy? Antifascism?
All this brooding around wasn’t good. She said, “You think the self is something like a hardboiled egg. That’s your image of it. But it isn’t, it’s something like a deck of cards.”
He ignored her.
They had made their way to one of the manse’s highest decks and Ned was at work, stretched out on a patio lounger, talking brusquely into his microrecorder. He was getting agitated, she could tell. Because he was occasionally making a fist. He wanted her to be quiet and read something until he was through. Earlier he had said to her My darling you’re going to have to talk to yourself for a while. He’d removed his shoes and socks and was
hanging his feet out into space, his ankles supported by a crossbar of the railing. His feet looked like small wings. And they would look more like wings if he would stop wriggling his toes like a mental patient.
Ned said, “Don’t talk to me.”
“I’d love to.”
Really she wanted to provoke his attention. It wasn’t fair, because he was struggling to write something he didn’t want to. But maybe a break would help him. She would try to get his attention only once. She had plenty of ammunition. She could tell him about Jacques offering her a joint but wouldn’t.
She said, “I wish I could get my karma overwith in a week or ten days instead of my whole life.”
Ned frowned at her.
“Okay then,” she said.
She was starving. Ned had perfect feet, more like drawings of feet. She had a hilarious little toe, as in hideous. Two things were annoying at present. She knew she was going to make a pest of herself at the buffet because Nadine Rose had told her that franks and beans were going to be one of the main dishes and she was going to ask if they were the nitrite kind of franks. She wouldn’t eat those, on behalf of her baby. The other thing that was bothering her was that she had something substantial to offer to Ned that might be useful for his discussion of Douglas’s philosophy, so called, or not. Jacques had revealed to her the essence of a fairly recent piece of polemic by Douglas, called—and she had written it down on her copy of the Times—THE CONSENT OF THE UNGOVERNABLE. pub. Fr? Germ?
Now she had to try to make sense of her scrawled notes:
Inner Secret of Fascism!
D. deconstructs fascism as the
incarnation of the heresy that
men shld exercise sex selectn
choice not females. This goes
w/ men losing long term! Divorce
easier. Illegit babies ok. Fear of
losing guns. Can’t smoke in bars.