Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  + + + etc etc etc

  She felt like skidding her way into Ned’s sacred ken. She was tired of sitting on her camp stool anyway. A wet black leaf defaced Ned’s right foot. He was ignoring it, concentrating. A bell was ringing downstairs. She walked over to Ned and peeled the dead leaf off his foot.

  38 Ned had driven her off. And now he regretted it. He was making the most risible progress possible with his eulogy. And he was hungry because he’d insisted on skipping lunch.

  He felt like cursing. He worked better when she was in the vicinity but only if she would read something, be absorbed on her own in something. But she was born to comment. And he had no idea where she’d gone. He had checked their room and the bathroom they shared with Joris and Gruen. There had been an alien odor in the bathroom. Nina had said something about letting Jacques use their shower to freshen up. So, obviously that had happened. He had no defensible reason for objecting to it.

  And if he did say anything, he knew what would come next. It would be the next big fun canard. She was going to say that not only was he Mikhail Bakunin but he was a Francophobe. And he wasn’t. For example, he thought the French had the best names in the world like Loik le Floch Prigeant and Fustel de Coulanges and Choderlos de Laclos.

  Fuck me, he thought. The day was bright and mild. The madding crowd of service and media people was still growing. When would it stop? He made out Gruen down the slope toward the gorge talking into his cell phone. Gruen is good and I’m a shit, he thought. Because Gruen called his mother all the time. Ned called nobody except associates, which was all he had, really. And unless he wanted to yank his brother away from his duties giving absolutions and praying nonstop or whatever he spent his time doing, he had no family to speak of, nobody to call about personal things. It was melancholy but it was true. His father had died fast, of cancer, at sixty, just after retiring. He remembered his father signalizing his retirement by unstrapping his wristwatch and declaring that he was never going to wear it again. His father had been the office manager of a company in El Cerrito that made bedsprings. Amazingly, as he’d learned very late in their relationship, his father had gone into factory work as an evangelist for the Trotskyist group he had covertly belonged to for a couple of years in his youth. He’d been elevated from the shop floor to management because he had a knack for it. His main piece of fatherly advice to Ned had been Stick with the Jews, meaning to emulate Jewish rationality and book worship. His mother and father had become more and more alienated from one another as his mother’s embrace of ultra Catholicism had tightened. Not long after his father’s death, when his mother was only fifty-five, she’d been killed in Fruitvale, in a crosswalk, by a drunk driver. His share of the settlement had paid for his tuition at NYU, a place his father had liked the idea of, for him. He didn’t know why but as far back as he could remember his brother had never been friendly to him. Whether it was a question of temperaments or was somehow connected to the fact that their mother had so obsessively been grooming her firstborn for the Church, he didn’t know. His first dried apricot had been given to him by his brother with the information that it was a human ear. His brother had been close only to their mother.

  Ned decided to follow Gruen at a distance. Joris had told him that Gruen would go occasionally to stand meditatively by the gorge, alone, every day.

  Gruen stopped at a high point upstream from the death site. He stood there. Ned halted. It was solemn. He liked Gruen for this. And then, startlingly, Gruen reared back and spat as hard as he could into the air above the stream. It was a jarring thing. Ned walked halfway to Gruen and shouted at him, “What was that?”

  Gruen turned and was awkward for a moment. Ned joined him. Gruen said, “I was seeing if I could spit across.”

  “Thank God,” Ned said.

  Gruen said, “I’ve been wondering about it. The answer is I can’t.” Ned thought, Casually spitting in public used to be a male prerogative, sort of … it could go on Douglas’s list of deprivations that men were experiencing. A campaign against spitting in the street had been conducted in his junior high, and he remembered one of the campaign posters: If You Expectorate Don’t Expect To Rate.

  Gruen was looking much healthier. On impulse, Ned embraced him. “Have you seen Nina?” Ned asked him.

  “I have,” Gruen said, and patted himself on the back of his neck. Ned was not understanding Gruen’s gesture. “Do you know she trimmed me up?” Gruen asked.

  Will she never cease? Ned thought.

  What had happened was that Gruen had found her in an amiable conversation with Hume touching on the problem with his ankle, which was improving, and his hairstyle, which she said she loved but that could stand improvement. So they had all gone together to the house and secured barbering tools and she had been good enough to give each of them a trim. Gruen said, “Man, she razed those humps off his head and I got scared but he seemed to like the results.”

  Ned asked, “Do you know where she is now?”

  “I don’t, but she’s having a rendezvous with that French guy someplace, who by the way tied up the bathroom for half an hour. She’s very busy. She’s got a bunch of papers she wants to show you. Where she went to find the French guy, I don’t know.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Ned said.

  He found her in the physic garden. Her back was to him. He beheld her for a couple of minutes. The sentence I stand here lonely as a turnstile came to him and was unwelcome and he shook it away. It was the pickup line Douglas had used to get Claire’s attention in the Figaro, in the dim past. Nina was standing on the curb of the uninhabited fish pond, slumped, dejected seeming. “Don’t jump,” he said.

  When he and Nina had parted earlier, she’d said You’re being fairly abominable. And then she’d said, Oh you’re all so busy playing into one another’s hands. She’d been irritated, but not seriously. She was glad to see him. She was carrying a clutch of papers.

  “I gave Hume a haircut,” she said. “Wait till you see him. It’s much better.”

  There was a park bench available. He stamped down the weedy overgrowth surrounding it and tested the seat for dryness. Nina looked tired. She sat down, relieved. He sat next to her.

  “I’m liking him,” she said.

  Ned said, “I can see that. Joris has been telling me more about him. Even when he gets into trouble there’s something original about it, it sounds like to me, although original is probably the wrong word. I don’t mean to excuse anything. When Hume was being harassed by an older girl at school he decided to follow her around saying I moan, Naomi. And when the principal yelled at him to leave Naomi alone Hume shouted back Rail, liar! and defended himself by saying he’d just been practicing creating palindromes. The principal had kind of liked Hume before and had said it was clever when the boy introduced the word tomorning into classroom discourse, Hume’s point being that it was exactly like tonight and today, so it stood to reason it was a real word. Now, what have you got there?”

  She selected a sheet of paper from her collection and handed it to Ned, saying, “This was bookmarking a section in the Study Guide to DSM-IV, the part on Borderline Personality Disorder. These other papers were in the book too.”

  He began reading and he grimaced and she said, “I know.”

  What he was looking at was a photocopy of a second-grade English composition of Hume’s. The text was crudely typed. On a letterhead cover sheet, the principal of Tremper Consolidated had written, in a forceful hand:

  Please look over the herewith:

  The names of the lunchroom staff

  are not fictitious. One name has been

  misspelled, where Hume has written

  “Venerable” for “Venable.” I have of

  course passed it to the nurse, but I am

  eager to have your comments or those

  of any colleagues at Mental Health you

  think might shed light. I sent

  you material on this pupil last year

  and you were m
ost helpful. One

  other thing I should mention is

  that it has been reported to me

  that Hume was organizing a raffle

  whose 25 cent ticket would allow

  the winner to go behind a bush with

  one of the female pupils in order to

  watch her urinate, but there were

  denials by the girl, so no evidence.

  Looking to hear,

  Jack Ryder

  Principal

  Tremper Consolidated

  Hume’s composition was entitled THE GREATEST OF ALL LUNCHTIMES AT TREMPER SCHOOL.

  Oh my a hord gathered! Dork

  girls screamed. Ken the mastermind

  of the cretens cried out something

  or other. There are mostly boy cretens

  but a few girls are too. More hords

  came, like lackeys and vermin. Mrs.

  Venerable opened the doors. She

  has one shrinked arm and one regular arm.

  Another hord came in from soccer

  practicing. They were mostly varlets

  with some poltroons and lackwits

  strewed in. The head cook Mrs.

  Murdock stated “Our vegetable

  today is lovely fresh skunk cabbage.”

  So the atheletes began cheering,

  because they loved the breakfast

  of scrambled snake eggs of that

  very morn. “Oh please don’t forget

  the stink weed salad, if you please,”

  said Mrs. Murdock, who also had a

  job as a murderer and stabbed peoples

  eyes out with frozen carrots and killed

  peoples pets by feeding them left overs

  she sneaked into other peoples houses

  with.

  Ned said, “I’m working on my assignment, you know, but what is my philosophy, Nina? My philosophy is No Hitting. I don’t have time for a philosophy.”

  “Ned please don’t tear yourself up. You’re a fine person! You keep forgetting that. Do you want to know something I told Ma when I first met you, when we first started dating? I said, Even his id is nice.”

  “Well, that’s pretty beside the point. Anyway, thinking about Douglas’s philosophy is a laugh. At one point we were all supposed to hate Immanuel Kant because he singlehandedly sold out the Enlightenment. I remember the whole thing. He authorizes religion to be in charge of any question where certainty is impossible. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone 1793. Do you know what stromata means? It’s Greek for rag rug, and that’s what Douglas called his philosophy.”

  “You’re overreacting to this task for some reason.”

  “Okay. Now I’m not.” He resumed reading.

  The cooks have a trick langwich.

  They can talk like humans but they

  can also talk to each other by their

  behinds.

  WE ARE TALL! the atheletes said.

  “Some of you are” the girls screamed.

  Nina said, “That’s only the first page.”

  Ned said, “That’s enough. But does it get worse? Don’t tell me if it does. I blame a lot of this on Douglas. It took him a long time to take fatherhood seriously, I think. When we were in school he said if he had children and one was a daughter he was going to name her Groucha or Tendril. And a boy was going to be Dagwood. He was presumably kidding. And how hard would it be for Hume to pick up that Douglas loved him to be outrageous? I know I told you about the time Hume invented his own personal practical joke, the one where he dipped all the points of the sharpened pencils on Douglas’s desk in Elmer’s Glue. Douglas put it in a fax, he was so proud of it.”

  Nina said, “Your friend had a compulsion.”

  “You don’t see me arguing with you. There were the gallstones. A retired surgeon was a friend of the family and they were visiting him in Kingston. Douglas notices a jar of gallstones in the living room. The old surgeon had been accumulating them for years. The short of it is that Douglas begs the guy to give them to Hume as scientific curios. What Douglas actually had in mind was for Hume to use them in the battlements of the forts he built for his toy soldier armies, which he did.”

  “Grotesque,” Nina said.

  Ned said, “And Douglas would never give it a rest. The four of us would go out walking in the Village on the way to a show or opening and fucking Douglas would jump inside a restaurant we were passing and shout in a giant voice Save room for pie.”

  “Gruen has pranks. Remind him about that.”

  “Good idea. And go ahead and show me anything else you think I can take. I can take anything.”

  • • •

  Nina considered her papers. She said, “I have something from fourth grade. He was in the Steiner school then. I want to read it to you. You’re going to like him better.”

  “I don’t dislike him. I just said I felt sorry for him. And I blame Douglas, anyway. It’s a rant. He was a second grader dealing with rage, letting it out, and it’s not so terrible anyway. And who knows, maybe that’s better than trying to digest a doorknob for twenty years. Read me something, go.”

  The Thanksgiving Meaning

  Twas one of the first Thanksgivings;

  But none of the best, we know,

  For this Thanksgiving, I’m sorry to say

  was full of sleet and snow.

  But this doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving’s bad;

  Or that it has no meaning.

  Thanksgiving’s a wonderful thing;

  For it is a time of feasting and dancing;

  What a wonderful time to sing!

  The Pilgrims came from faraway England

  In a little ship called the Mayflower;

  They came to America freedom to find,

  And could worship every hour!

  Not only could they worship for long,

  But worship as they pleased,

  But good and great as Thanksgiving is,

  The Pilgrims were not quite eased;

  For by the end of the very first winter,

  Half of them were deceased.

  They sat in silence. “There’s just one more,” she said. “It’s not by Hume.”

  “What is it?” Ned asked.

  “It’s a poem by Douglas, I mean the beginning of one, and it’s pretty recent. You’ll be sad.” She handed it to him.

  The poem fragment was in Douglas’s familiar spineless loose cursive hand.

  My son Hume had two

  friends when he was very young

  Belgerman and Johnsont

  Invisible but always on his

  side

  Now he’s lost

  Please go and find him,

  39 She liked Ned in jeans. The two of them were a symphony in denim but it didn’t matter. It was appropriate for what they were doing. They were bushwhacking. She stopped to study the beautifully sketched little map Hume had given her. She had also seen some other artwork by Hume that was lying around in Douglas’s studio, or office, but she wasn’t going to share it with Ned, necessarily. One had been a large cartoon head of a woman who looked something like Iva, wearing earrings that were little globular cages with tiny men trapped in them.

  “Ned, stop brooding.”

  “Let’s get this hike over with,” he said.

  Hume had provided her with a route map to a place he wanted her to see, on, as he’d put it, his side of the mountain. That apparently included the entire reach of forest on the other side of the death stream, all the way up to the next ridge. The ascent to Hume’s Inspiration Point wasn’t exactly a gratuitous thing. It was more an act of solidarity with the boy. The spot meant something to Hume. She wondered if Hume might come to visit them in the future. It was just an idea.

  Ned was scowling into his notebook.

  Nina said, “We can stop for a while if you want. Or do you have something you want to say to me?”

  “Yes, I want to say something, but what? I’m feeling bad. I called Don
at Christmas, but I should do it more. I have a brother who has to get permission to come to the phone. But I’m going to do it more often anyway.”

  She wondered why he was bringing up Don. Ned was estranged from his brother and he didn’t like to talk about it. And her past efforts to get him to be friendlier toward Don had been met with a confused resistance. It was complicated. Her impression from meeting him had been that Don was gay. She’d made the mistake of asking Ned if he assumed he was. The timing was bad, because this had been during one of the surges in the Church’s pedophile scandals when Ned was stomping around referring to the Roman Catholic Church as a criminal enterprise. Ned had been impatient with her. He didn’t care. What he cared about was that he didn’t have a brother.

  “It was good you called Don, but that was months and months ago. And these men … I don’t think you should be complaining about friendship. These are decent, intelligent men, and they’re interesting. And say something substantive to Gruen! Ask him what he’s reading! Half the time he has a folded-up copy of the New York Review of Books in his pocket …”

  Ned said, “I agree with everything you say.” They resumed their climb.

  Their destination had been this overlook, a small clearing open at one end on a fine northwest view of rows of medium hills. A semicircle of hemlocks closed the venue at the back and on the sides. Getting there had taken them through raw brush, tangled deadfall, and, here and there, around stinking sumps. The rough little meadow felt untouched. If you got too close to the view, you could step off into a sheer drop. It was a lover’s leap. They stood for a while watching the grassy field around them creasing in the warm wind.

  Ned said, “Somebody appreciated this spot in the past. There’s an overturned sundial back in the brush, and I’ll bet it was set up here originally.” He was looking melancholy.

  He found a tree to lean against. He brought out his notebook and began to write in it. And when Nina drifted toward him with the intent of being granted a look at what he was writing, he bridled. She was used to it. He had said, “My notebook is my unconscious.” And now he was going to say that he often wrote down things that he couldn’t understand later. We don’t hear ourselves, she thought. Ned said, “Sometimes I can’t even read what I’ve written.” She couldn’t help being curious about what he was writing, but based on his asides on the trip up through the woods her guess was that he had turned his attention to thinking of subject matter for Gruen. She knew him. His own assignment, he hated.