by Norman Rush
He had to be all right. She wanted to grow old with him and she didn’t care if growing old meant shuffling around in a house that could be neater and looking for things and shouting over and over What? She thought, I embrace the end.
Someone was knocking at the door. Not now, she thought.
Ned looked wildly at her. He was shaking his head.
She went to the door. It was Jacques. He was being decently circumspect and apologetic. He handed her a damp towel and a sheaf of papers and withdrew, thanking her.
46 He knew she was doing her best. She was bringing light into dark places. It would be fine, later on. He would be fine. Gene Gene made a machine, Joe Joe made it go, Doug Doug pulled the plug, he thought. He was regressing and it was counterproductive and he had to stop.
Nina said, “Have regular facial expressions.” That was a command from their inventory of facetious devices they used to josh one another out of bad moods. She would put on a chicken suit if it would make him laugh.
Nina got out of bed. She removed her jeans and sweater. She worked her bra off under the tee shirt. She would sleep in that and her panties. She waited for him. She shook the bedcovers in a way she hoped was inviting. Down to his briefs, Ned got in with her.
Nina turned on her side to face him and said, “I’m sorry but I have more to tell you.”
“Why am I here?” he asked no one. He meant several things. One was why he was giving this time to his meaningless personal history when the country was getting ready to burn people to death in large numbers. The mental volume of the thought had been equivalent to a shout. That was odd. He was screaming at himself, it seemed. His personal history would amount to nothing, would amount to a surplus of painful feelings worth nothing, in the balance. And another thing, he had been a fuckwit. His documented stupidity was set in stone for the friends he loved, still loved, to put into the balance when they thought of him. And another thing. Why hadn’t somebody kept him up to date? But he knew the answer to that and it was because it was unimaginable for either of them, Joris or Gruen, to tell him man to man. No, it was the accidental availability of Nina. If she hadn’t been there, what he was to Claire would have remained secret, apparently. His thoughts were killing him.
He got out of bed without explanation. He needed to move around while he was suffering.
“What else is there?” he asked.
Nina said, “Well this is from Jacques. Who got it off the Réseau Voltaire, which is on the internet. It’s an aggregator site. How do you like my pronunciation?”
Ned made an aggrieved sound, but motioned to her to continue.
She said, “The story is that Douglas made a critical discovery that I don’t understand. It sounds really technical to me and I don’t know how much he knew about advanced optics, etcetera, but apparently he did, because what he invented or discovered was the answer to a problem that had been unsolved all during the rise of digital reproduction … which as you know very well is the problem of distinguishing between real and fake in digital images and products. Every intelligence service in the world was working on it, according to my source, Jacques. By the way, there’s all sorts of complicated equipment in the tower basement. Jacques says that Douglas was negotiating with the Mossad to give the thing to them and they would use it jointly with the CIA, but he wanted to be taken care of forever, if you get my drift. And it was important that no evidence of the transfer, such as a sale or big payments to him that could be traced, would ever surface. And listen to this. The sheer existence of the invention if that’s what it was had to be kept secret. It was going to be worked out through foundations in Germany and Israel. Money would go for some kind of institute for forensic justice. I told you about the similar thing that had been done for him earlier for some lesser service or discovery where he got paid a staggering fee for the Tambov movie script. Someone named Bondarchuk was involved. That payment to Douglas was called a pass-through …”
She was leaning down and feeling along the floor near the bed. She found her boots. She threw first one and then the other at him, not hard, at his knees. He had almost no reaction.
“Please come back to bed,” she said, raising her voice. He sighed and obeyed. He wanted her to finish her presentation so that the sermonizing on the radio could end forever.
Nina took his hand. “There’s not much more to tell. The deal over his invention was on and then it was off. There was constant negotiation going on. The invention was never patented because that would show the thing existed. The deal looked like it was off, I guess, when Iva was after Joris. But who knows? And then it was on again and then suddenly Douglas was dead, out of it, unable to go out and promote himself and this new institute, so now there’s this public relations spectacular. Which is really all it is, but you’d figured that out. So now tell me what you think.”
“I don’t know if it’s true,” Ned said.
“Neither do I, but it’s what I’ve been told and it’s credible to me.”
Ned covered his face with the blanket briefly. He lowered it and said, “I think I’m not going to have an opinion on this. It’s a pretty good example of a fait accompli. We were talking about that the other day. If Douglas came up with something you can use to defend the better countries against the worse countries, fine. We can never make it up to the Jews, anyway, Americans can’t. It goes back to the beginning, beginnings. Benjamin Franklin wanted to deny Jews citizenship. Roosevelt’s policymaker on Jewish refugees from Germany was a horrible anti-Semite. So you might say, Well, his invention is defensive except when it isn’t. That’s true. I’m making the decision to be okay with it if it’s half defensive, half something dark. Nobody will leave the Israelis alone. It’s a fight in the Convergence. It’s the Palestinians we’re supposed to be for, first of all, but the Palestinians won’t leave the Israelis alone and remember how everybody at the Labor Center was outraged when the Israelis started putting up their great walls because they were tired of being blown up in their cafés? Everybody said it was an outrage but voilà the bombings stopped. The Palestinians had grievances in spades but they fought back like … like monsters. I know it’s not simple, but that’s all I have to say.”
He could tell that there was something else she wanted to say to him.
“Do you remember the first joke you made to me when we were dating, or not even dating, when we were still in the taste-exchanging phase and you asked me what kind of movies I liked and I don’t remember what I said. And then you asked what kind I didn’t like and I said, westerns, violence, and suspense, and you said, Does that mean you don’t want to go with me to see Kill the Horse Slowly?”
He said, “I’m not sleeping in my underwear no matter what you say.” He got out of bed, went to the chest of drawers, opened it, and took out a pair of pajamas and held them up for her to see.
He said, “These may be Douglas’s pajamas but I don’t care. Tonight I’m wearing them.”
She said, “Ned, you’re funny.”
“I once was.”
47 Ned couldn’t sleep. Nina’s penlight was under her pillow. He extracted it with care, managing not to disturb her. There were the papers Jacques had handed Nina earlier. They were on the floor next to the bed. Thinking about the old days was difficult, tonight. It was like looking at events through a dark mist. I hear as through a wall, poorly, one of them had said once. Certain times had been amusing. Like Douglas’s impromptu heckling of the Venceremos Brigade reunions in Washington Square Park. Douglas thought Castro was a clown and he referred to Cuba as the Brave Little Police State. Ned remembered it all, Douglas shouting Páredon!, the cry the Cuban rebels used in their salad days when they were sending their enemies to the firing squad. And of course by the seventies the volunteer sugar-cane-cutter brigadiers had forgotten what the word means and just took Douglas as encouraging them when in fact he was both reminding them of something shameful and insinuating subtly that they themselves could go to the wall, for all he cared. Douglas’s mind had
been a dungheap of the left’s past transgressions, which had gone well with his occasional appearances as the conscience of the left, or one of them, anyway.
Jacques was obviously trying to help him. And obviously Nina had let Jacques know about his trouble with the encomium for tomorrow. It wasn’t Jacques’s fault that he got his information from a stream, the internet, that ran alongside a membrane that only let bits of it through into the mainstream media flow. There was truth on both sides of the membrane.
Jacques had done some work on the internet, for him. Jacques was all right. He had printed out a poem, “Men on Earth,” by Robert Desnos. Nina would know who Robert Desnos was. He read the poem.
Men on Earth
There were four of us at a table
Drinking red wine and singing
When we felt like it.
A wallflower fades in a garden gone to seed
The memory of a dress at the bend of an avenue
Venetian blinds beating against a sash.
The first man says: “The world is wide and the wine is fine
Wide is my heart and fine my blood
Why are my hands and my heart so empty?”
A summer evening the chant of rowers on a river
The reflection of huge poplars
And the foghorn from a tug requesting passage.
The second man says: “I discovered a fountain
The water was fresh and sweet-smelling
I no longer know where it is and all four of us are dying.”
How beautiful are the streams in small towns
On an April morning
When they carry rainbows along
The third man says: “We were born a short time ago
And already we have more than a few memories
Though I want to forget them.”
A stairway full of shadow
A door left ajar
A woman surprised naked.
The fourth man says: “What memories?
This moment we are camped
And my friends we are going to leave one another.”
Night falls on a crossroad
The first light in the fields
The odor of burning grass.
We left each other, all four of us
Which one was I and what did I say?
It was a long time ago.
The glistening rump of a horse
The cry of a bird in the night
The rippling of water under a bridge.
One of the four is dead
This was a poem he wasn’t going to finish. He dropped the pages.
48 Nina woke up and saw that Ned was getting dressed. She watched. It would be more accurate to say that he was getting dressed and re-dressed. She didn’t know if it was a mania, exactly, but he was in some state completely new to her regarding the way he looked. He had collected and laid out different elements to choose from for the outfit he was going to present himself in today. It was very strange. He had assembled a collection of shirts gotten presumably from Joris and Elliot, maybe some of Douglas’s, from Iva—Gruen’s shirts wouldn’t fit Ned—and one shirt that he needn’t have bothered with, a pale floral print. He must have been out scouring the world for shirts since sunrise.
The radio was on, low. She concentrated. It was the local news.
She said, “Me oh my, another pedophile running a summer camp, apparently the woods are full of them.”
She thought, There is no handbook on the subject of how you help people who are acting crazy.
It was only seven and Ned had showered and shaved. Ned was someone who needed to wash his hair every day and he hadn’t been doing that. His curly hair looked vital when it had just been washed, not electrical exactly, but springing up and lively and nice. He had shaved hard, which is what he called shaving scrupulously and not in his usual nominal way. He was turning his head from side to side in front of the mirror over the chest of drawers, so he could check his gleaming cheeks.
The tie he was holding up against the front of an unfamiliar tan shirt was one she had seen Joris wear. It was purple. He would never wear it.
The house was full of nuts, by which she meant that somebody kept refilling the little bowls of cashews and almonds etcetera distributed around the common rooms. Men loved nuts. Ned was munching them all day there. He’s gained a little weight, she thought, in this house. Ma had given her a piece of advice she had paid attention to, but she could only put it into effect when she was in control of the eating environment. It was: restrict the kinds of nuts you keep in your house to the kind in shells so they can’t be consumed by the fistful, because cracking them constitutes an obstacle that keeps consumption down and makes noise so you can always rush in from someplace else in the house when you hear it and distract your husband with a stick of celery.
Ned said, “I like this.”
Nina said, “It shits. You are not going to appear in a purple tie! The black one is perfect. It’s perfect for a funeral. You like the purple one because it’s matte, and you think the black one is too shiny for a proletarian like you, but this is a funeral, Mister Bakunin.”
He said, “Okay, then. This is going to be it.” He had gotten into the black jeans he’d brought with him. Someone on the staff had pressed them to a fare-thee-well. He slipped his borrowed black suit jacket on and for some reason draped the black tie in an X across his chest, signifying that it was provisional. He inhaled and held his breath while she graded him. Men always do that, she thought.
“You look marvelous,” she said, realizing just after the fact that she was resurrecting a tag line from Saturday Night Live and her long durance vile with Bob. She thanked whatever gods may be that she hadn’t said it with the ellipses between the three words that made the phrase comical, or pronounced the “mar” in marvelous as “mah.”
“Okay then,” he said again.
She didn’t really like the way he was sounding. It was tight. Or it was going from tight to less tight through sheer self-control. It was her opinion that life should feel like something other than falling down an endless flight of stairs. Maybe a solid breakfast would help him. He’d only eaten a little rice and eggplant for dinner.
She said, “In my role as warden of your public self, I want to see your nails.”
He came toward her, the backs of his hands held out. His nails were clipped. She liked his hands.
“How am I?” he asked.
“You’re darling.”
“No, you know what I mean.”
“You are completely fine. But you need to relax. In fact, why don’t you do the breathing exercise you’re always, well not always, occasionally, telling me to do, in and out, out and hold, that one.”
She threw the covers back while Ned performed the breathing exercise.
When he spoke to her he sounded worse. He said, “By the way, just so you know, the celebrities are all eating their meals separately, not with us in the mess hall.”
“They are?”
“Yes, and there’s a Nazi hunter in the house. Not Wiesenthal but his deputy or somebody. Gruen will want to talk to him, but won’t be in the same room, malheureusement. Jacques is affecting my life.”
Nina said, “What about that poem. Was the poem any good?”
Ned sighed heavily. “I can’t use it. I’ll thank him, though.”
He said, “I feel like kissing you. I could never kiss Claire in the morning until she’d brushed her teeth.”
“I beg you not to bring her up unnecessarily. I beg you.”
“Right.”
Nina said, “I think that shirt’s fine because it’s good quality, but I have to get cuff links somewhere. Somebody will have some.”
49 Ned’s mind was everywhere. He hadn’t decided on what he was going to do re the memorial. Keep smiling, he thought.
He had eaten more for breakfast than he’d intended to, at Nina’s urging. Gruen appeared next to him at the coffee urn. He was looking for Nina and Ned explained that
she had gone to find a bathroom without a line in front of it and cuff links.
Gruen asked, “Have you seen the program?”
Ned shook his head. Gruen said, “Well, we’re not on it by name. We’re in a segment called, quite simply, Voices!”
“No kidding. But I’m not surprised. Yes I am, actually. And may I say you look nice.”
Gruen was wearing a black cardigan and Ned wanted to tell him he should unbutton it because it was too tight on him, but there was no point in that. It would just make him uncomfortable and the borrowed shirt was probably too tight, too. His black tie wasn’t shiny and he had gotten decent unconspicuous cuff links to close his French cuffs. If Nina didn’t find something he’d borrow a stapler and shut the flapping things with that. He looked around at the crowd disconsolately. He asked Gruen if he’d met any interesting guests lately. “There are thousands to choose from,” Ned said.
Supposedly Nina had gone to scout out someplace at one of the tables but he saw that instead she was engaged in conversation with frère Jacques. Joris was not in evidence, and Gruen had lost track of him. The media component of the crowd had swollen and Ned was seeing faces now and then that were faintly familiar.
“Doesn’t this make you feel minor?” Ned asked Gruen, who shrugged.
“I have to get Nina. Are those your cuff links?” Ned asked.
“No, I got them from Joris. He brought a couple of pairs, but he’s using the others.”
“Where’s the nearest stapler, do you suppose?” Ned said.
Gruen said, “I’m going to make a scrambled egg sandwich on one of those delicious rolls. I’ll scoop the eggs off the top because on the bottom they’re dried out. I’ll make you one if you want. I was about to say we can eat standing up, but there’s room for three or four at that table.”