by Norman Rush
Ned said, “Wait a minute. Something’s going on. And you’re not saying the world is perfect as is, I take it. That ideology …” Joris shook his head over-vigorously. There was a silence.
Ned continued, “So Joris, what is this? Is it something you just realized? What? Go ahead. Talk.”
Joris said, “We have this thing, evolution. S’okay … and we have us, this nasty primate. S’okay we have this nasty primate who keeps trying to build an order … a safe order different from the beast world only there are problems. Because the male part of the species goes insane over three things, just like the other animals. It goes crazy over those three things, which are sex, death, and goods. Or say money. Or say status, which money is for.
“S’okay by evolution of course we are talking about social evolution. And social evolution plays around and finds an antidote for the fear of death, which is religion, the churches, the sects, all that. And it keeps opening up in new forms like a perennial. And they don’t pay taxes, we subsidize it. They all deny death and the people are happy. Religion helps them, most of them, and that keeps it rolling.”
Ned said, “Come on, what does this have to do with you leaving? You’re drunk. There’s a damned memorial tomorrow. We can talk about these cosmic issues after it’s over.”
Nina said, “Maybe he should just talk now. It isn’t going to be too long, is it, Joris?”
“No it’s not. S’okay, take sex, where the males happen to want to fuck anybody they feel like. Somebody has to keep the babies coming and raise them up. Evolution tries lots of things. Religion helps but not as much as it did, with death, which I said before. Sorry. So … okay, social evolution gives us easy divorces, serial marriages, okay to be a single mother, pat yourself on the back.
“Money. Greed, easy. Capitalism! The universal raffle! Overhead to be paid, of course, unemployment insurance …”
Nina said, “Joris, that’s enough for now. The things you really want to say you can’t say tonight. You’ll explain it all tomorrow. After the memorial. But you have to stay.”
Ned said to Nina, “What is he saying? I guess I’m tired. Is he saying that Douglas didn’t have this big world machine concept he’s giving us? Why are we even talking about this? Look. Douglas had an attitude that looked like an idea, to us. We were children. Now he’s dead and here we are.”
Nina, Ned, and Gruen all said they wanted to go, but Joris insisted on checking the progress of the work gang at the bridge. They went with him.
43 Ned wondered what was going on. Nina had been next door for almost an hour, and then talking in the corridor with Gruen. It was time to sleep. He wanted the day to be over, but he knew she was containing some news for him. And there was something he wanted to say.
She came into the room. He held up his hand before she could start to speak. Ned said, “I want to explain that thing with Joris. You have to see it as more like a seizure than like an epiphany or a theory he was presenting. I’ve been there before with Joris, drinking, both of us. When he’s drunk he’s like that. He’ll be fine tomorrow.”
Nina said, “I know, I know. And I have a lot to tell you but I want to take up something really important first, to wit, would you ever say I have a short face? What I mean is, would that ever occur to you?”
“No, of course not. Where is this amusing question coming from?”
“Well, from Jacques. He said something I believe was a compliment but I think it translated like that.”
“Unfortunately you can’t believe anything the man says, my dear. And by the way did you know he’s a moon-landing denier?”
“He is not. Don’t make things up.”
“Okay, but he might as well be.”
“Oh please. He’s very sympathetic. Do you know that he forged the most perfect, the most beautiful name tag, using machines or whatever they are that Douglas had? Press credentials.”
“Why is he discussing your attributes?”
“Oh you mean my assets? I think he said I had a brief and short face, but I’m not sure. I’m taking it as a compliment. Why don’t you ever tell me I have a brief and short face?”
“I’ll try to remember. You think he’s an outlaw, yay! and I’m not.”
Nina was looking for something.
“What are you looking for?”
He couldn’t quite believe that she meant it when she said she was looking for a radio to play so the sound would cover what she was going to say.
“You mean like spies?” he asked.
“Exactement.”
She was serious. Defeated, he joined her search for a radio and found a clock radio on a shelf in the closet. He set it on the bedside table, plugged it in, and it worked. He tuned it into something religious, in fact Pentecostal, because the preacher would occasionally break into episodes of glossolalia. She was delaying.
She said she was cold and he proposed that they get into bed together, keep their clothes on until they were warm, and talk. It was cool, not cold, in the room, in his opinion. She had plenty of layers on, a denim windbreaker over a heavy sweater and tee shirt. She had on her famous boots, jeans, and a floppy black beret that might be hers or not, he didn’t know. He’d noticed that the women staff seemed to be offering her articles of clothing on loan. She sat on the edge of the bed and clapped her thighs together and jammed her hands between them.
He could tell she liked the idea of getting into bed. He hoped she understood that it was not going to be a case of once more into the breach tonight. He had a headache.
“First, what I’m going to tell you is mostly just recent. Not all of it is. And I had a reason for not telling you right away.
“Which is the following. Wait a minute, I was just going to lie to you about why I’ve been holding on to this. Let me start over.
“I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to tell you all this because of the way it makes Joris look. Not sordid or anything, but not great, either. And Ned I feel I’ve made friends here, strange as you may think that is. I like the man. I like him the best. Or no, I like him about equally with Gruen. I have to tell you that the story is going to make some other people seem sordid, but I don’t care about them.
“What I know is from Gruen …”
Ned said, “Please tell me what in hell this is, and why is he talking to you about it and not me?”
“If you listen you’ll understand. Oh God. Well here it is. Iva about a year ago initiated a peculiar kind of affair with Joris. Yes.”
Ned said, “And he told Gruen. Everybody talked to Gruen.”
Nina said, “The affair was rather intermittent. Joris told Gruen it started when she just sought him out. Joris couldn’t have been more surprised. She showed up and collapsed on him in misery. First she went to his office and then came to his apartment, collapsing. She was trapped and unhappy with Douglas is what she said and a divorce was going to come and she had always felt something for Joris, i.e., was in love with him. She was saying that.
“So an affair began. Previous to the affair Joris said he had seen Douglas and Iva twice a year, tops, at dinners, events, in New York City. Joris was overwhelmed. The logistics of the affair that developed were built around a convenient historical fact—she had been going to a particular hairdresser in Manhattan for years.”
Ned said, “Take your time. Get your breath.”
Nina pulled off the beret. She continued, “She was definite about it. She wanted to marry him once she got divorced. It was all going to be soon.
“Now. Now. The immediate cause of the break with Douglas was that she had caught him cheating with someone in a long-distance scheme. There was a woman he would hook up with whenever they could arrange it. Both of them traveled a lot. And the worst is that Iva found out that it was a deal to get this woman—he never named her—pregnant. And it was just intolerable. He was passing it off as a favor he was doing so someone could be a single mother, or just a mother period. So he was halfway claiming it wasn’t sex, it was an altruist
ic endeavor.”
Ned thought, Don’t speculate. But he had a hideous idea of who it might have been, must have been. His heart hurt, speculating. He coughed elaborately to get himself a break, a minute to stay sane and reliable.
Nina said, “All this came pouring out of Gruen. David. I don’t see why I shouldn’t call him David. I do call him David. Because David knew about everything that had happened, he didn’t want to leave, because he felt he owed it to you, and to Joris, and especially to Hume, to stay and do his best. He had only nice little stories about Hume to relate, nothing bizarre. One was at a picnic someplace, and Hume said, when a bag with three beer bottles in it was brought out, Oh the little things are trying to keep each other cold. David and Helen have no kids and he went out of his way to do things with Hume when he could.
“Really, she overwhelmed Joris. When she got to the apartment the first time she was topless under her blouse and within minutes she had dropped her coat where she stood and jerked up her blouse and mashed Joris’s hands all over her magnificent breasts. And that was step one.”
44 Ned was listening to Nina but he was losing some of what she was saying. She had just made a reference to Lincoln Center. He could ask her later.
Of course the individual soliciting Douglas to get pregnant had been his own Claire, who was on record with him as not wanting children. If the plan had worked, he would have had a baby to raise with her and would have assumed it was his, and that would have made for a life of its own kind. Nina must know it was Claire. It was kind of her not to treat it like what it was. It was going to be nothing. He was going to make it be nothing. Because it was going to be just one of the many things from his past with Claire that were going to be nothing forever. Were nothing now.
Claire was devious, so the question of whether her game had been to get pregnant and then use that fact to get money or some unimaginable arrangement out of it from Douglas was real. Or had it been the sincere game of wanting to have Douglas’s offspring because in her heart of hearts Douglas was the one she loved and revered and whose essence she wanted to reproduce? He could think of other permutations but didn’t want to. He had to concentrate on his luck in escaping something profoundly wrong, and not on the insult and not on his self-esteem. Nina takes care of my self-esteem, he thought.
“You don’t look like you’re listening,” Nina said.
“I wasn’t, for a second. Now I am. It was Claire, wasn’t it? In your opinion.”
“Ned he didn’t use the name. I think it is pretty obvious and I hate her. I hate her. Ah, don’t look so hurt. Don’t. You escaped something that would have gotten worse and worse. I thought of not telling you, but it would’ve come out because that story was the fuse burning underneath Douglas’s marriage and that was what blew up and led Iva to go after Joris. Also, Ned, I wanted to be the one to tell you and not have you get it from some other source and say How could you not tell me? Say, How weak do you think I am? Say that to me instead, Ned.”
“I have to digest this.”
“No you don’t, Ned. Or if you do, digest it. Do it. Do it now. You know I don’t like to talk against her but this is more than just something to add to the wrongs she did you, my man. But now I have you. You have me.”
“Claire was a feral person,” Ned said.
“Perfect word.”
Ned took his jacket off. He said, “Let’s take our shoes off and get under the covers.”
“You look cold,” Nina said.
“I’m not, or just sort of, but I want to get under the covers.”
Ned took her boots off for her. She reached to help him unlace his boots but he declined her help. He appreciated the offer.
“You do feel cold,” she said. They got into bed and held each other.
She said, “Anyway …” There was more.
In a way, Ned didn’t want to hear whatever more there was. But he had no choice.
Nina said, “So anyway Iva was insistent that she wanted to marry Joris. She apparently thought she could overcome his big problem, which was that he was never going to marry again for all the reasons we know. But of course she was kind of perfect. She was married, something he found attractive in women. And she was willing to work with that, including the prostitutes. She believes in herself, as you may have noticed.
“Now, what David says is that there were two parts to what was going on. Douglas was in financial ruin and Joris was rich. And she was infuriated with Douglas over his infidelity, which he refused to call it. Elliot had told her bankruptcy was coming. And Gruen—David—is sure that Iva figured she could rush Joris into marriage and then she’d be all set.
“This had been going on for eight or nine months before Joris talked about it to David, who was astounded and couldn’t think of anything helpful to say so told Joris to go to a relationship counselor! Joris thought he might be falling in love. And she was hitting all the keys on the piano, saying that Hume needed a better father and blaming Douglas’s numerous absences for Hume’s problems. And there was flattery involved. David said that Iva was praising Joris for his, what did he call it, his sexual strength.
“And this was the way it was going for almost a whole year and Joris was wavering, wavering.
“But then the signals changed in some way he didn’t understand. The only thing he could think of that he’d done wrong was not to promise to sign on the dotted line if she got her divorce.
“But she was turning it off. It ended with a phone call saying she had thought everything over and the affair would have to stop. She said she was very sorry, but she couldn’t go into it. Oh, she did express some sadness. But that was the end and he was left with a mystery.”
Ned got out of bed without explaining why. He needed to pace. He said, “That’s something like the way it ended with Claire. A sudden announcement. Maybe that’s getting to be standard now. Except Claire did say there was another person, which makes it not the same kind of mystery. I need to pee.”
Mainly, he needed to think about something else, say, like why the French let Rodin freeze to death after they kicked him out of the storeroom he was pathetically squatting in at the Louvre and what about his friends who promised to send coal?
“I didn’t pee,” he said.
“What?”
“I couldn’t. There is someone in the bathroom taking a shower who doesn’t answer.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
Ned looked around the room. There were his petitions. There were plenty of people on the premises he should bring petitions to. But he had no heart for it.
“You could go downstairs. Or if you move the bed a little, you can pee out the window.”
“No, I’ll just wait for Godot to get finished in there.”
“Well sit down. I’m not quite through talking anyway. But first I want to say that I hate it that they’re serving these heirloom tomatoes.”
“Why? They’re delicious.”
“That’s why. Because when you go back to regular tomatoes it’s like eating with plastic silverware.”
“Thank you for trying to help me. You are a dear person. Say what you wanted to say.”
“Okay, Ned. So the situation just sits there for a few months. And then death takes Douglas. Joris feels vile even thinking it, but he wonders if it means anything for him and Iva. He’s probably thinking of sex more than marriage, but he’s still angry, and kind of messed up and thinking about her. So then comes the summons to the group. He shows up, and here we all are, and hark, the shower just turned off. Go and come back.”
He was more grateful to her than he could say. She was trying everything, but he was dropping inward.
Ned said, “I know you want me to get into bed, but I feel like not doing it. I’ll just sit here.”
He could see that she was trying to proceed brightly with him. She was sitting up. She said, “Well you know you’re welcome to sit on the end of the bed as long as you like, but it’s warmer under the covers.
“So
back to my adventures—and try to look interested—I was stirring up the ashes in the downstairs fireplace in the tower and there were a few intact edges of pages that had been burned there, enough so I could tell that the typescript was about fringe science stuff of the kind he was interested in. The magnetic poles are going to reverse in case you’ve forgotten. And I found one whole page on the sun getting dimmer. So then I had the idea to go upstairs. I still can’t get my breath, wait a minute …
“I look at that row of binders on his shelf, all empty, and my guess is that somebody wanted to get rid of the exotic science because it’s embarrassing. After Douglas died I think somebody got rid of this mass of science fiction and Elliot has been saying the plan was to publish all his social science writings of which there were plenty. And it was going to be under the heading Unde Malum, which means where does evil come from. What do you think of me?”
He said, “The same thing I always think.” But he was dead, sitting there.
45 Help him, Nina thought. She had to get him away from himself. But she also needed to keep calm. Maybe it was ridiculous but it felt like she was pregnant, in fact he was acting like she was pregnant more than she was herself. She had to do something. She was afraid of momentum. And momentum meant an episode of shock and humiliation taking hold and rolling and rolling and rolling and you can only watch.
She had to do something. He was not going to be interested in sex tonight, not in the state he was in.
“Listen,” she said. But then nothing came to her. There had to be something to distract him. The racket coming from under their wing of the house was less, if she wasn’t mistaken. She had gotten to like it, it was soporific, like ValueVision. He was just sitting there in a slumped state she couldn’t bear. Once Ned had talked about maybe losing it and collapsing all the way down and then joking that then he could become a motivational speaker and make a million, which wasn’t that funny.