Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  “Why did Hume want us to come up here?” Ned asked.

  “He didn’t say but I know he thought we’d like it.”

  “I wonder if Douglas ever came up here.”

  She was sick of everything linking back to Douglas. She was starting to feel like Douglas was Rebecca, ready to come to life and jump down out of a picture frame over the fireplace.

  Ned was still writing. She would leave him alone. She walked around moodily enjoying the ambiance as well as she could.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Oh, well. Do you think you were homophobic in the old days?” She genuinely had no idea why she was asking that question.

  Ned was startled. He closed his notebook. He said, “You’re kind of uncanny, asking me that right now. Because what I’ve been doing is recalling and rejecting stuff, prank-related stuff Gruen might use. We made up gay comic strips. I remember Prince Variant … and Vaseline Alley, and Gene Autre. There was no animus behind it, I don’t think. I don’t remember, if there was.”

  Ned was thinking hard, she could tell. She wasn’t liking herself right then. She regretted the question she’d asked.

  Ned said, “I mentioned Dale, a gay black guy who was part of the group … he wasn’t out of the closet, exactly, but we all knew, and it was irrelevant. He was just part of the group. Sophomore year he transferred to McGill. Wouldn’t you like to have a cabin built right here?”

  “No. And don’t change the subject.”

  “I wasn’t. We’ve talked about this before. You think my brother is gay. You know, Stonewall had happened around the corner just a couple of years before we got to NYU. We weren’t troglodytes.”

  “Was Dale around for Prince Variant et al.?”

  “There wasn’t anything to be around for, you’re talking about a flyspeck, a nothing. And it was freshman year. Maybe it was even before Dale came aboard, and before Gruen, too. That summer Dale got a full scholarship to McGill and we fell out of touch. Gradually.”

  She knew what had started her off in this direction. It had been Ned’s mentioning that he’d phoned his brother.

  She said, “I know you considered yourself feminists, all of you, and we’ve talked about this, too, but there were no women in your group.”

  Ned laughed. “No sane woman ever wanted to be in on our nonsense. Or only one woman did, and I don’t know how sane she was, and that was Claire. At Halloween she bought a fancy harlequin costume and after Halloween she wanted to go around with us, wearing it. Nobody was amused and she implied it was sexism but she got over it.”

  Nina said, “I think we can go now. Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I won’t,” Ned said.

  The descent was harder than the ascent had been. The whole thing had been too strenuous for her. A nice thing about the forest was that there was always something handy to sit on. She found a stump for them, and pulled Ned down to sit next to her. She realized that only one of his buttocks had made it onto the stump, but they weren’t going to be there long. Their minds were on divergent tracks. She could feel it.

  There was something she wanted to say that she couldn’t. She had to know everything about him. The reason behind it was innocent, but she couldn’t tell him because he would think it was emasculating and possibly it was. She was afraid of something bursting out from the cracks in the past and destroying everything. She was trying to protect an arrangement, a consummation, she’d thought she was never going to have. So she needed to know everything and there was nothing he could do.

  “What is this CYO you’re murmuring about?” she asked Ned.

  “I didn’t know I was. It’s the Catholic Youth Organization. Don was important in it as a kid. I loathed going.”

  She thought, Get him a beautiful notebook like Joris’s as a surprise.

  “I’m going to get you a notebook like Joris’s for your birthday,” she said.

  “No, don’t. His is a bound book and you have to tear pages out and that fucks it.”

  “Okay.”

  He tore a page out of his spiral-bound memo notebook, crushed it into a pellet, and put it into his pocket. He said, “You know what that was? It was about a competition we had that ended up in a tie between The Lovo-maniacs by Rona Barrett and The Cypresses Believe in God by a Spaniard whose name I forget. It was about what was the dumbest novel title ever. It doesn’t fit with what Gruen has to come up with.”

  Nina said, “You know what you’re going to say, I guess.”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s good. It’s tomorrow.”

  There were still things she needed to tell him, things she knew, but only one of them was in any way uplifting, and even it came with a disagreeable surround. The good news was that he could forget about the Hare Krishnas wanting to be in the Convergence. Somebody had talked to a receptionist of theirs, not an official person, and it was all a misunderstanding. The bad news part was that Elliot had complained about messages coming through his communications Wurlitzer for Ned, and for her. Somebody had taken down a message from Ma, who wanted her to be sure to save the unusual bug she had found on her pillow in case it needed to be checked out. And the other piece of news she had was that in her detections she’d come across a letter from the Program Against Micronutrient Malnutrition with a six-month-old bounced check Douglas had sent them stapled to it.

  “What is to be done?” Ned said softly.

  “We need to be cheery,” she said. He was leaking anxiety all over the place.

  “What is to be done?” he said again.

  “Oh Ned, you just do your best is what needs to be done. You’ve done enough free-associating about the meaning of life and you need to just go with something you’re satisfied to say.”

  “That’s what you see me doing. The meaning of life is the subject I hate most, unfortunately. And by the way in one of the last emails I got from Douglas he quoted something about the meaning of life. It was the philosophy of a young Frenchwoman quoted in a book on contemporary French culture he was recommending. Anyway, the girl said, For me the meaning of life consists in the ability to meet new people.”

  “I used to feel something like that when I was very young and first left home and was meeting a bunch of new people.”

  “Okay …”

  “I was still looking for you, I guess, all unknowing.”

  “I am not the meaning of anyone’s life.”

  “Well of course you are.”

  “Please stop helping me, Nina.”

  “Okay, I will. But I just want to say that your friend Joris is a lovely man and he told me a sad story. Douglas called him late at night, one night, almost morning, to tell him a nightmare. This happened when Hume was about twelve and things had already gone to hell between them. The boy was standing up to his ankles in a shallow pond, wearing a plaid bathrobe that had been a favorite item from his toddler days. But it was a dream, so even though he was older, the tiny robe fit. In fact, they’d called him Little Captain Bathrobe when he was two. Anyway, the boy is standing there, turning around when his father calls out to him, and then turning away and refusing to look at his father again. That was the nightmare. So the man was suffering over his son, which we know already.” What this story would add to Ned’s quality of life was zero, but she’d felt she had to be free of it.

  She wasn’t helping Ned.

  She said, “Sitting here in the gloaming. It’s nice.”

  “It isn’t gloaming yet,” Ned said.

  40 A sprinkling of lights showed in the manse. She liked it better where they were, at the edge of the woods.

  Traveling on the bus, she had passed by a dead lake with limbless dead trees standing in it. It had looked like a gargantuan bed of nails. They would pass it again on the way home. Leaving would be a pleasure.

  A dilapidated arrangement of trellises half-enclosed an especially noble old tree, doubtless to protect it. She studied her husband. She felt like pressing him up against the tree, so she did
, careful not to be abrupt about it. She kissed him. She pushed a hand through his silly curly hair. What she wanted to tell him, she couldn’t tell him. Later she might try to. She thought, It’s simple. Ned thinks Douglas was sui generis and that he himself is a type, he, Ned, a type … he and the others too, but if I tell him that he’s the sui generis one he won’t believe me. She pulled Ned’s hand under her sweater and blouse and onto her belly. His hand was cold. When she was more pregnant he was going to love her breasts, and then later he wouldn’t, when they fell, but she would do something about it. This I vow, she thought.

  She wouldn’t mind visiting this place again, when it was less like a saturated sponge, say in a hot June or July, with her offspring along. Maybe two offsprings. She reminded herself to do some research on baby carriers.

  She pushed Ned’s hand down into her crotch. She just wanted his hand present, nothing more. He knew that. He was sensitive. She didn’t believe in healing touch or any of that, but his hand on her neck was definitely analgesic sometimes, if she had a headache. She was lubricating. She pulled his hand up and gave it back to him.

  Some things are pleasant, she thought. She was thinking of the rustic moon bridge that would take them back onto the estate proper. It crossed the brook that spilled into the gorge where Douglas had met his death. Other brooks fed into it lower down.

  She saw something else she thought was pleasant. Across the lawn she could make out Gruen and Joris strolling, their arms across one another’s shoulders. It was bonhomie pure and simple. Her impression was that they had been drinking, but still it was pleasant to see.

  41 He loved it when she lubricated. He hadn’t been trying to get there but it had happened and it was nice and he loved her sweetmeats …

  An inner alarm went off. Sweetmeats had been his term for Claire’s labia, and it was one thing she hadn’t objected to when he said it although she’d had a strict list of things never to say during sex, a rather comprehensive list. He had never said sweetmeats to Nina and if he introduced the word she would know like an arrow that it was something from his time with another woman, and she would know it was Claire and she would hate it. It wasn’t exactly like calling out a former lover’s name during intercourse but it was in the vicinity. Labia, the little devils, were like nothing else on the outside of the body. He could use any endearments he felt like with crazy Nina, his Soft Gem.

  Ned said, “Let’s be sure to get to the mess hall before they run out of frankfurters.”

  Nina said, “It’s impossible to get hold of Elliot to talk. He’s never around. And when he’s around he’s always slipping off.” Nina was lingering on the moon bridge and it was making Ned nervous. The infrastructure around this place seemed to need attention anywhere you looked. He motioned her to join him on the other side and she did.

  Ned said, “Well, I can tell you something historical about Elliot and his disappearances but my guess is you won’t think it’s funny. It has to do with flatulence and only men think flatulence is comical.”

  “Okay get it overwith.”

  “When we were all rooming together on Second Avenue it became evident that Elliot had a flatulence problem and he was sensitive about it. He would leave the room for no particular reason we knew of until we figured out what it was. He was sparing us. We witnessed a mortifying thing at a party in a ballroom in Midtown when Elliot slipped off and discreetly farted, away from the crowd, into a column of drapes, safely, he thought, but hiding behind the drapes was a couple kissing and they burst out into the room thinking they’d been the victims of a practical joke. Elliot went to an internist and it got better. I’m just reminiscing. Expressing gas isn’t the explanation for his absences now.”

  “They posted the menu, you know. Maybe he’s afraid of the chili.”

  “The problem was lactose.”

  Dinner wasn’t until seven, so there was time for a nap. Nina seemed not to be interested, saying, “You take a nap. I have some things to do.”

  All this was coming to an end. She was a force of nature and there was nothing he was going to try to do about it.

  Their paths diverged. He went his way, yawning.

  42 Ned was late getting down to dinner. It was the same mob scene it had become. At first he didn’t see Nina. He joined the tail of the buffet queue. And then he did see her, standing with Joris and Gruen, who seemed to be watching people eat, rather than eating, themselves. Something seemed to be wrong. Both of them were holding capacious wineglasses, half-filled. Joris’s eyes were funny. Nina looked unhappy. She had something to tell him. He hoped she had eaten.

  Nina joined him. She’d had dinner. She said Joris and Gruen hadn’t.

  Gesturing at the two, she said, “They’re happy, both of them. That’s what my mother called it.”

  “Let me get something.”

  He filled a plate for himself, concentrating on vegetables. He had no appetite. From a distance, Jacques raised a drumstick to him.

  He didn’t like what he was seeing, with his friends, but he didn’t know what he was seeing. He sat down in a chair and ate half of the rice and eggplant mélange he’d taken. Nina wanted him to do something.

  She disposed of his plate, and said, “I would like to get them out of here.”

  “First, let’s get some coffee.”

  She was impatient. “Maybe I can get them to take some coffee outside. I had a struggle getting Joris to leave the bar. Let me see if they’ll go for it. Joris is very upset. Very. The thing is, he’s spoiling for a scene. He’s talking about going home.”

  She left for the dessert station and organized four cups of coffee on a tray. They would all go outside. They would walk down to the bridge, whose understructure was being reinforced.

  Work was going on at the bridge across the brook on the road up from the Vale. Cables were being wound around the two main stanchions. Watching it happen would be something to do. The workers, four of them, were wet and unhappy. The temperature was dropping. They were cursing the torrent they had to work in and out of. They moderated their language after noticing Nina there. Blindingly bright floodlights illuminated the scene.

  Nina pushed two empty tool chests together to make seating. Joris definitely needed to sit down. In adolescence Nina had been told she was hypoglycemic and she had gotten into the habit of carrying backup snacks around with her, tight little foil packets of nuts, cheeses, crackers, dried fruits. Her condition had gone away but the habit of arming herself against potential gaps in the availability of appropriate food had persisted. Just in general, she always seemed to have needful things with her, like aspirin or Neo-Synephrine. Nina had succeeded in inducing Joris to finish one of the tall paper cups of coffee she had secured for them and now he was eating a roll, in a gingerly way, but eating it. Joris and Nina had their backs to the glare of the work lights. What Ned wanted to do at that moment was say something to Nina like I would always like to be what I am now, with you.

  Gruen wanted a word aside with Ned. Together they stepped away from the lights.

  Gruen said, “Joris wants to go home. I talked to him, but he still wants to. I wouldn’t mind leaving either, but I think we should all be here. You need to talk to him.”

  Ned said, “Isn’t there a story called ‘The Runaway Pallbearers’? This isn’t good. He needs to be here, too.”

  Ned was having a particularly strong reaction to the idea of Joris leaving. Partly it was selfish because he hadn’t finished the task of putting together what they had all been, with what they were now. And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that … that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be …

  He was succeeding in being confused by his thoughts and feeling strongly about them at the same tim
e. This was about what you loved in a friend as a friend. He loved something in Elliot, still. Maybe there was a window in life and then it closed. Nina was asking him if he was all right. He wasn’t, because none of this could be said, really. But there was that window, before anybody had accomplished anything to speak of, when the ingredients, by which he meant the subtle bodies, shone their light. Douglas was only the first of the friends to die. Everything connected with him was foreclosed now, Ned thought. But there are four of us left, and if this is too mystical fuck it … I sound like Ma and Ma sounds like Madame Blavatsky … but so mote it be and fuck it.

  Unexpectedly, Joris came up to them in the darkness. For a moment he seemed unsteady on his feet, but only for a moment.

  “I love your wife,” Joris said to Ned, who came back with, “Watch yourself.”

  The three men sighed heavily in unison, noticed it, and laughed together. Nina was walking toward them.

  “Joris wants to abandon us,” Ned said to Nina.

  “I hope he won’t,” she said. Ned sensed something hollow in her words. He was puzzled.

  “We await his words, my dear.” That was the wrong tone. Everything was delicate.

  Joris squared his shoulders and locked his hands behind his back. He said, “I don’t want to say anything tomorrow and I want to leave.”

  Ned said, “Why?”

  Joris said, “Here’s the why. Why is because the world is a machine that works. It even improves itself. Douglas didn’t know that. And we didn’t know that.”

  This was peculiar. Joris was normally an excellent drunk, if that was the way to put it. This was more than just the wine speaking. There had been a personal event, or a philosophical one, something.