Subtle Bodies

by Norman Rush

  “I’ve eaten, but Nina hasn’t. We’ll sit with you. Let me go detach her from the French,” Ned said. Ned forged his way to Nina’s side.

  Jacques looked particularly unkempt. He had shaved carelessly and what looked like popped white stitching ran along the rim of his lower lip. Earlier Ned had seen Nina draw a circle with her finger around her own lips, which had made Ned nervous, but now it was clear that what she had been doing was innocent, of course. Jacques was wearing a black tee shirt and for some reason a black headband.

  They all sat down with Gruen. Jacques served the coffee. It was pleasant.

  Somebody had to find Joris.

  50 Nina asked Ned where else they should go to look for Joris. They’d asked Iva, who’d had no idea. They’d sensed something odd in Iva’s manner, since the day before—a sea change, a suggestion of jubilance.

  Elliot had nothing to impart about Joris’s whereabouts, and he, also, had seemed distinctly more relaxed. Nina was puzzled. Ned couldn’t think about it that much because he needed to talk to her about his encomium problem, and immediately.

  They were standing behind the manse in a spot Nina liked. It was beside a hillock with a young cedar on top. It was fragrant there.

  He had asked her earlier if he looked okay and she had said that he looked perfect, very funereal, and had reminded him to stand up straight and keep standing up straight. The cuff links he was wearing were courtesy of the excellent Nadine Rose.

  The line His mind more jury than judge came to him from someplace in world literature. He told Nina that he still couldn’t decide what he was going to talk about at the memorial.

  “I realize that, and I wish you’d come up with an outline at least. I’m afraid you have in your head the idea that you’re going to approach this with nothing in your mind but a great cloud of unknowing and that out of that is going to come inspiration and some perfect utterance. Well, maybe … anyway, this doesn’t start until four thirty, so we have plenty of time, if you want my help.”

  “I could start with, say, A toast to Zeus, the protector of friendships.” He waited for her reply. She was going to be kind.

  Nina said, “I think … you can do better. Zeus is kind of embarrassing.”

  Ned wanted to go someplace else, but he didn’t know where. Nina was always trying to help him and he appreciated it. She thought he was too easy on his staff at work, Derek in particular. He remembered what she’d said, mocking him, when she’d been urging him to get on Derek’s case: Um, Derek, if you’re not busy, may I bother you for a minute to ask could you maybe try and be at least a little bit less half-assed now and then in the future?

  He liked being around the hillock with the cedar and he realized it reminded him of the last scene in The Seven Samurai with the burial mounds of the three dead heroes marked with their swords.

  Earlier they had seen a hearse parked in front of the manse, delivering Douglas’s ashes. The sense that they were witnessing the evolution of a gigantic machine came over Ned. A vast party tent had been erected.

  Nina took his hand. She said, “I want you to promise me that if you’re ever depressed you’ll tell me.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Nothing, I just wanted to say that. I don’t want you to … I don’t know.”

  They decided to walk down and inspect the tent.

  Nina said, “And promise me you’ll forget about toasts. What will you do, hold up an imaginary glass? This isn’t a banquet …”

  “I’m not arguing, you notice.”

  Nina said, “Your friend David is very smart and they should have made him talk about Douglas’s philosophy, so called, not you. Do you know what he said about Douglas? He said Douglas’s mind was for bizarro ideas what a belfry is for bats.”

  “That isn’t entirely fair. Anyway …” He trailed off. “I want to say something substantive.”

  He felt like embracing her, so he did. They leaned against one another and it was pleasant in the breeze, in the sun. He was thinking that in the future somebody was going to be designated to do for him something like what he was supposed to do for Douglas. If that happened anytime soon it would be too soon. He had more to do with his life.

  51 Nina was feeling acutely that she had to guide him and leave him alone at the same time. She could well imagine him crafting something that would relate heavily to his own faults as a friend. He was subject to guilt, attacks of it. He could also come up with the most far fucking fetched candidates for empathy, like an old friend who had circulated a hostile, invented, story involving them, to their astonishment. But Ned felt sorry for her because of the guilt he was certain she must feel!—so he wouldn’t mortify her by making an issue of it.

  And now he was wracking his brain for a way to publicly praise his friend, his old friend, the monstrous Douglas.

  Outside the tent were ranks of folding chairs. Ned decided to borrow two of them. He carried the chairs down the slope past the death gorge and set them up in an odd enclosure. Someone had created a rough circle of corkscrew topiary boxwood plants in wooden tubs. They were doubtless destined to be moved to some less inscrutable location, but for now, it amused him to sit down with Nina in this askew setting.

  He began again immediately with his dilemma, talking fast. He said, “Well I had the idea of beginning by shouting a parture to the crowd. Everything has a history … Douglas got a certain satisfaction out of fishing up lacunae in the English language, so there was a game called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary—”

  Nina interrupted him. “When you said start by shouting something, I thought, For Christ’s sake he’s talking about that Great Pan Is Dead idea which is the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard of. And by the way, what is a parture?”

  “No no no, not that. And partures was the antonym Douglas invented for greetings. He said that a single word for the business of taking leave was missing in English, so we had our own, partures. One was Peace to Your Loins! Also Watch the Skies! And …”

  “No!” Nina shouted, deeply agitated. She made as if to get to her feet but he restrained her, overwhelming her distress with insistences that the idea wasn’t a serious one, it was just something he remembered.

  She said, “Well don’t yell things out as though they’re hilarious or something. They aren’t. Not even faintly. They’re very annoying.”

  “And then we did another thing when we went our separate ways, slapping and punching each other and shouting Basta! as though we were Sicilians disgusted with one another.”

  “Are you trying to drive me completely insane?”

  Ned said, “No. Really. Just thinking about things that happened.”

  Nina thought, I have to be more directive, it can’t be helped and time is passing and he’s lost, still. She said, “So now before you say anything else let’s get it clear we are leaving Iraq out of it, okay? People are here for a very specific purpose which is to remember Douglas, a complicated person who was not so nice and who, and correct me if this is wrong, never distinguished himself as antiwar, and so Iraq doesn’t include Douglas, do we agree?”

  “Well, he was for the nuclear freeze.”

  “Who wasn’t? That was twenty years ago!”

  She’d done all she could on that one.

  He said, “When I first saw you, I thought you looked exactly like the pretty girl in profile they had with If You Can Draw This on matchbook covers to recruit art students …”

  “You told me that. It was nice.”

  What could she do? He wasn’t focusing at all, poor lamb. She said, “I have so many things I want to say to you—”

  Ned said, his voice raised and not steady, “I know what I’ll say if you die first, Nina. I know. I don’t know what you’ll say for me. I don’t know. I know you’ll be kind. I’m mixing things up. I’m sorry.”

  She got out of her chair and bent over him and stroked his neck. She said, “Oh, my guy, just put two things in front of you. Whatever he was, this man, yo
ur friend, lost half of his mortal life. People who depended on him are suffering. He had attainments—”

  Ned said, “You’re going to outlive me, by the stats.” He was wrenching it out of himself. She fell to her knees in front of him, embracing him.

  “Are you trying to destroy me?” she said.

  “No. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but we did something I still think is very funny. We got a bumper sticker printed up at a place on Mott Street. It said, HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. DON’T IF YOU DON’T. I’m not going to mention it, I’m just telling you.”

  “Well I think that’s funny, too. Look at me. You can just stand up and say what it was like when you knew him as a friend, forget everything since, just what he meant to you at that time, and that you’re sorry he’s dead, this mixed creature, like all of us, and you honor his good works. And then you sit down. Look at me. And swear to me that you are going to leave out all your murmurings about the connection between personal death and social death and so on into the night. Swear to me.”

  He nodded. She inhaled extravagantly. They sat watching cloud shadows on the distant hills.

  52 Nina said, “Since we’ve been here, I get a shiver sometimes when you’re talking, like when I realize the tree I’ve been admiring is really a cell phone mast disguised as a pine tree. Or it’s like your voice is dubbed for a minute. And then you come back. Now you’re back.”

  “Nervousness,” he said. Nina was eating raisins from a little box.

  The striped tent they were in was enormous. A steady wind was blowing, surging at times. The tent walls bulged in or out at intervals. The crowd filled the tent. Coir matting had been rolled out across the sodden grass. Lights, cameras, and microphones were concentrated toward the front of the space. There was a director. There was a printed program. The friends, except for Elliot, were in the front-row reserved section. Ned had told Nina she shouldn’t be talking to him too much, but she kept bringing things up. He wanted her to stop counting the crowd. It didn’t matter if there were two hundred or two hundred and fifty, did it?

  He was looking at Iva, who was seated in a high-backed gothic chair. She was at the center of the row of notables behind the podium where he would be standing soon enough. Iva did look markedly happier, which went along with the latest from Jacques, who had intercepted them as they entered the tent to report that the critical part of the great settlement/deal with the powers that be had gone through very suddenly, overjoying Iva and Elliot. Iva was resplendent in what Nina had described as a Restoration wench mourning gown. It was true that she was showing a certain amount of flesh. A question that was never asked was, Why are you staring at that naked babe? was something Douglas had said. Joris was on Ned’s left. He had his eyes closed. Gruen was on Joris’s left.

  Ah, death, Ned thought. Probably he would have to fight Nina to get her to promise no ceremony for him, when his time came. He’d never been to a funeral he liked. He felt cranky. It was Ronald Reagan who said Beware of empty hoopla.

  Iva was doing something unattractive, which was to straighten her arm and pluck at the loose flesh on her elbow. Nina had pointed out that Iva did this when she was excited.

  He was, he felt, attending reasonably well to the proceedings despite thinking about himself too much. A woman was singing “Für Elise,” accompanied by a CD. It was a song that always drew him into negative thoughts. He took Nina’s hand. He was convinced that she was pregnant. Children hated having old parents, and their child would have one old parent and one not old, and that would be the best he could do for the little creature. The Israeli consul general for Newark had gone on interminably. According to Jacques, there were numbers of what he called plainclothes Israelis around the premises, some of them removing cartons from the tower basement. He was going to break Nina’s heart, but he would strongly prefer not to see Jacques, with his black headband, ever again, not even in his charming caravan in a cowfield in Lyon. The consul general had said too much but the representative of the Ligues des droits de l’homme had said almost nothing. Ned knew who he was. He was a personal hero of Ned’s.

  There was a shuffling going on in the audience. The feet of the metal folding chairs were sinking unevenly into the matting as it absorbed water.

  He was on next. Then it would be Gruen and Joris reading what had been given them, like zombies, despite having said they wouldn’t. For a funerary event there should be something like a black tent available, not this festive entity they were in.

  Ned saw with surprise that Hume had taken a seat at the end of the line of notables. He was wearing a suit and tie. There was nothing to complain about in the matter of his grooming, thanks to Nina. Ned was relieved, greatly.

  The director beckoned. Ned made his way to the podium. Nina was insane. She had half risen when he got up. She had almost come with him.

  He had tears in his eyes even before he began. He gave his name.

  He said, “Douglas Delmarter was my friend years ago when I was a student, when we were students, at NYU. When he was young he had the idea he could force the world to be funny, or funnier than it intended to be. I think he needed it to be funnier for his own reasons, or actually for his own needs. I have no idea what those were. He was a secretive person even then. But anyway, as a fixation … it fascinated me. I am speaking for myself here. I allowed it to cheer me up and I was at a point when I needed cheering up. Later he gave up needling the world in this way and switched to trying to figure out the Why side of things, the Why does the world feel so wrong? side of it. In any case, he went on to honorable and impressive acts, deeds, in fact, about which we have heard much today.

  “I’m very sorry that my friend is dead, and dead when he was hardly through with what he might have done.

  “You may be wondering what the book is that I’m holding. It’s Douglas’s paperback copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.

  “Douglas loved this book. It was probably the best reading recommendation to us, his friends, that he made, and he made many. In fact he loved the damn thing so much he stopped reading it at page 847 in order to save the experience of finishing it for some celebratory high moment he assumed would come, some moment greater and happier than any so far.

  “What I am going to do is read aloud a page or so for the benefit of our friend’s spirit. It may be a little strange because one of Douglas’s many positions was that anyone who believed in the afterlife should be barred from seeking political office. So, my old friend, this is for your soul, whose survival is, as you used to say in Wallace Bray’s philosophy class, highly suppository. I hope you can hear this, Douglas.

  “This is where Douglas stopped reading. And these are the words he would have read next. This, of course, is Boswell speaking. I’m starting halfway down page 847:

  I had learnt from Dr. Johnson during this interview, not to think with a dejected indifference of the works of art, and the pleasures of life, because life is uncertain and short; but to consider such indifference as a failure of reason, a morbidness of mind; for happiness should be cultivated as much as we can, and the objects which are instrumental should be steadily considered as of importance, with a reference not only to ourselves, but to multitudes in successive ages. Though it is proper to value small parts, as ‘Sands make the mountain, moments make the year,’ yet we must contemplate, collectively, to have a just estimation of objects. One moment’s being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, til there is a large portion of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship. We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed …”

  Ned pressed the tears from his eyes with a ball of tissue. He hesitated, and returned to his seat.

  February 15, 2003

  53 He would never forget this day. He felt clean. The march column was twenty-five across and it was disciplined. The column had a sense of itself. A day of streets like rivers of fists was a survivor from earlier
wars, earlier protests, but now it was real, in San Francisco, on Market Street. The sun had been a bright smear in the overcast but it had come out, whole, shining brilliantly on their efforts. Thousands of people had come to the city, thousands. He thought again, It makes you feel clean. Whenever the forward movement of the column halted, the marchers spontaneously linked arms and then maintained that as long as was practicable, which wasn’t long, really, because some people in any rank would move at a slower pace than the majority. There were two wheelchair battalions, he knew, somewhere. He wanted to inhale more deeply than it was physically possible to. The lead cohort of the march was a mile or more ahead of where he was, unbelievably. He had been up with the dignitaries and they were going to mention his name at Union Square, at the rally, but he had decided to fade back deeper into the march. He didn’t want to arrive. He wanted to continue to feel the march.

  Someone had put an extension ladder up against a first-story overhang above a German restaurant. It looked safe enough. He wanted to be up there where he’d be able to see so much more. There were maybe twenty people on the overhang already, some shaking their signs at a TV truck that was trying to pierce the column at a cross street.

  There was no obstacle to mounting the ladder, so he did. He stepped out onto the overhang. It was a fantasy of goodwill. The feeder streets were jammed with participants waiting to join the main body of the march. He shook hands with the other people on the roof. There were Japanese tourists among them, very shy. A black high school step dance group that was part of the march was drawing enormous cheers from the thick crowds along the sidewalks. We never get enough black people out, so we love the ones who do come, he thought. He cheered as hard as he could, himself.

  I love every moment of my life that has brought me here, he thought. They were going to stop the fuckers. One of the Japanese had a transistor radio. What was happening here was happening across the world. BBC was saying ten to fifteen million in all the capitals, the greatest march numbers in fucking human history ever. Berlin, Paris, London, had already reported and the numbers had been astounding. He thought, Today we are treading on the corpse of this war.