Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The way twenty or so heads around him shrank back, then closed in—he recognized a movement herders knew.

  The two men cased him, exchanging glances; had this fellow said something obscene? “Ste-p up.”

  He tried to.

  “Let him through, d’ya hear.”

  He’d walked through such hostile aisles before—more tailored ones, but the eyes quite as ready to make him pay for it.

  They uncovered the face. A blue-chinned man turning to putty under the cheekbones, thick, naked yellow at the nose, but not long dead. Not long enough. They must have left him alone to it.

  Mulenberg knelt. Ventura’s long-lashed eyes glared askance, the eyes of a horse about to spook. Like all the dead, he knew something. He was the victim of it. Of what all would know. Those left behind rushed to close the eyes for that reason. More than for respect.

  Except for the police. “Know him?”

  The victim, as the police reports would say. Maybe this had been the origin of his own contempt. The other guy in the deal. He shook himself, as he often did after a big one.

  “I know him,” Mulenberg said, leaning over Ventura with the heavy bated heartbeat of the better businessman.

  So he got to the station house after all, going with the willingness of the respectable. When he gave his deposition there was a moment, when asked his name, when he trembled. But not because he had no identification. This was easily explained—and could be corroborated. He’d merely been for a walk.

  A solicitous young rookie was sent back to the club with him anyway. Invited upstairs, he accepted, cannily scanning the signed portraits of shahs, sultans and sheiks which Mulenberg set out in every hotel room, on the certainty that now and then an original would turn up. Once the officer had properly refused a scotch on grounds of duty, other virtue spread from him. Mulenberg could have refused to come along, he instructed. Strictly speaking, it was no crime to know a corpse. “First thing they taught us at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. No honest citizen ever knows his civic rights.” He then accepted a cup of powdered coffee. But they’d had to gamble on it, you see. “You could have been some kook who was connected.”

  Mulenberg sank into a chair, the scotch, a hotel staple he rarely drank, warming through him. He jerked his head awake, clicking up his jaw. “I knew my rights.”

  “You did, eh?”

  “But honest methods are often slow.”

  “How about that. How about that. You’re damn right.”

  They almost shook hands on it.

  “Sorry about your friend.”

  They’d told him nothing, he realized. “Who found him?”

  “The doorman. He noticed the cab.”

  “There long?”

  A shrug.

  “Did he die there?”

  “They’ll tell us. Chances are the cab was stolen. We don’t know he was robbed. He carry much?”

  Mulenberg looked up. They’d already asked him that. “I just don’t know.”

  “He wasn’t rolled. Now—a pross’ll do that. Or two of them. Maybe no time for it.”

  “A—? Oh.” Mulenberg cocked his head innocently, shook it doubtfully. The scotch seemed to run to the tip of his ear, reddening it.

  “Too bad,” the officer said. A wedding ring shone on his stout finger. “That could leave it random. Junkies. Punks.”

  Mulenberg stood up. “Will you people notify his family? Or shall—?”

  “Being done.”

  “Because I leave for Bahrein tomorrow evening.”

  A good citizen always babbles openly to the police.

  “Have to do our jobs.” On his way out, the officer stopped again in front of the photographs. “Know all these guys, huh? What’re they like?”

  Mulenberg laughed. It felt good to. “Not like us.”

  The officer gazed at the picture of Mulenberg’s wife and daughters. “Your friend. Would you say his habits were more or less like yours, sir?”

  “Guys, you mean?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “He liked it normal,” Mulenberg said.

  Those were the hardest, he was informed again. Citizens just out for a walk.

  On leaving, the young man had clearly already forgotten Mulenberg’s name. “Well then, we’ll do what we can, Mister, er—”

  Mulenberg was having that same image—of wafting the other man over the doorstep by his lapels—which he often had ending a successful conference. “It’s an odd one.” What he always said, but suddenly he was shaking again. By an exertion that left him limp he didn’t voice what some demon was pressing on his tongue: Ventura. “Mulenberg.”

  When he shut the door, he looked at his sheiks. Though they were of diverse nations, the West rightfully thought of them as one. Collectively they often reminded him of those pottery horsemen of some Chinese dynasty long before Ming, who sat welded to horse and lance, and through these to ground and sky. Though he’d never seen any of these live men on horseback, when dealing with them he sensed brotherhood in their buttocks, even through their business suits. They still traveled together. Though their women now carried Vuitton bandboxes and they themselves put slim attaché cases of black ostrich on his desk, or stood in the airports centered in mahogany hills of Italian leather, they were only changed on the surface from the days when they’d villaged forth behind perimeters of waxy or dirty linen pouches containing honey and dates. They all had the same luggage, carrying their oasis with them everywhere. They left the lowly spiritual labor of building the world up from scratch every morning, the tramp stews of going it alone, to nations built up of separatists like Ventura and himself. They had their feet on more diurnal rhythms. To them, an individualist was simply a man who had to travel without kin.

  He felt hungry now—not ravenous, but ready. It was never any good to think of the world too much in terms of nations. Between any two poles there existed that modest vale-in-between where people could talk. Though he’d never been a Christian by more than birth, when singing his Latin he could still feel a vague churching. Even though Ventura’s failure—for to be murdered was to fail—wasn’t his, surely his own success could be partly Ventura’s and without charity; he still had a tanker that belonged to the man.

  Trouble could come—and demons too—from finding the vale of such human connections too modest. For he knew why he traveled. People said they traveled for adventure, or learning, and often thought so. More often they were like him—if they had enough money for it. As long as they skipped on, they kept themselves from the event chains that made up ordinary life. This time, too, would he run?

  Downstairs, he met several club members he knew. Too bad; they’d remember him. When involved with crime, or with happiness, keep yourself unmemorable.

  Outside, New York’s most faithful star, that low one—was it Venus?—shivered like an asterisk which wasn’t sure what it was replacing.

  I will not have revelation, he said to his wife—and stopped short. He’d loved his wife best for being able to talk to her, even after the sexual furor had waned. Ventura had at least talked to his Concettas; maybe the live wife in the madhouse, lately refusing to see him on his Sunday visits, had kept that connection warm. For ten years he, Mulenberg, had triangulated the world to keep from himself what many men did—that the people they liked best in the world to talk to were women. His wife’s long dying had been his excuse for doing to himself what he had tried to do to the girl, Veronica. He’d kept himself from personality—his own—by separating it into parts. He and Ventura belonged to a nation whose men talked best and closest to their women, but hid it from themselves. He, Mulenberg, was still talking to the dead.

  “Father!”—his kinder, hippie daughter had groaned, hauling him backward at his wife’s funeral. Since that day the other daughter had never written. The burial dress had torn to the breastbone. In her coffin, his wife, a five-month skeleton, had been plumped by the undertakers into a kind of sharp-nosed girl he couldn’t get to. Clasped by paws of
music, she had escaped.

  Since then, her zombie, floating through the cities, had been made to keep appointment with him, in perfect, synthetic ritual. She never looked like herself. He never spoke.

  The big wooden totem at the Trader Vic’s entrance loomed again in front of him. This time he went in.

  One of the dimmest restaurants in New York, and usually empty when he arrived—he’d never been too late for it; maybe it never closed. Since it was always the same, he could have the impression that its braziers burnt only for him; that was its specialty. He was welcomed and seated. The lotus-shaped chairs, printing verandas on the pink dim, were meant to inspire him with fake Polynesian feelings, but the place would accept real ones, if held quietly. The same elegant male amah served him. A tall Chinese with a long, grandee head and gold patina profile, he could have sat for an ambassador. Or stood, for waiters did not sit. When he bent to his male customers, speaking with curled, lacquer lips, in the dimness their white faces, raised to that head, were bowls of milk, curdled with beard. Mulenberg knew his lofty impatience with the need for pussyfooting race relationships sometimes didn’t jibe with the facts. His somber assumption of equality or worse unnerved his junior executives. Nor could its recipients always believe in it.

  The waiter, at least, brought him his usual drink with a smile, and a table telephone. He always phoned a daughter from here, once a month—not the hippie one, who had no phone in her hutch in the California foothills, but now and then sent him a glittery three-dimensional postcard addressed in roundish script, but the one who didn’t speak to him. He phoned person-to-person—so that she could know it was he, and so that he could hear her voice. To the operator, at least, she always sounded in health.

  “Bring me a phone book.”

  He was sitting as usual opposite one of the high-backed chairs. By every color curve, the woman he’d met tonight belonged in it, a queen to the bone. It wasn’t her skin that would complicate things between them, or his cheese-curd face. But she’d done her homework in the women’s lounge at Miss Lacey’s. Her mission, whatever it was, would have come from it.

  He wasn’t surprised that her name was in the book; that would be her style—a woman who had picked him up, had walked that route for him. My kind of style, he thought. His daughters had no style as yet except reactively, and maybe never would. His wife had been a lovely amulet stored in his armpit—always under a man’s wing. In life no doubt better than his bereft memory of her, in death she could only be the fringe product of his shoddier sense of romance. His mother on horseback, rating him for his trail losses with the Indian red high in her cheek, had had maybe a touch of this girl. But he wanted neither of them now for more than the reminiscent love he bore them. He could say this and be understood—by that girl.

  What else could he say of such a girl—other than that she’d picked him up? And that she knew what her own mission was. For which she would walk any route.

  That he wanted her to walk his, from now on?—how could he say it to her? Anything thought of brought that laugh of hers whipping into his ear. Come to the office of the president. I have the key.

  Yet they shared something more than the flesh. That brutal something which had bedded them. He could see her going around the world with him because of it, he trying all the while to find out what it was. Or to avoid knowing.

  The phone rang and rang; she might be debating whether to answer it at all. Or had already gone out again herself, to wherever such a girl would go? Not to a lover, lockets or not, not now. Nor could he feel around her any sense of other kin. When he could figure out where, then he would have her. He would not tolerate her being lost. Or rather, that he could be left behind. Where could she go that a man like him couldn’t follow?

  Find her quick, then, and tell her. Pay her, or beat her, to remember it. That the dead all say the same thing: You better watch out.

  But when she came on with the same sharp “Yes?” that he himself answered a phone with, relief choked him, so that he answered from the nerve of himself.

  “Will you—eat with me?” Mulenberg said.

  She sat over the poem she might never finish, only enlarge or refine, maybe letting it hulk on her desk, on all the desks, until in the end it went down with her life. Meantime, it served in secret as her real calendar, neglected for weeks for the ordinary one. To tick it over always brought her back to herself. Its three stanzas belonged to three periods of her life. When she was in her teens in New York or Barbados, and first had feelings she could phrase. When she returned here from the West Indies with a university-educated psyche which by then she could no longer sever from the dreams or facts of cunt. And the ever-budding third stanza which contained her life now.

  Under all three she could hear that missing stanza of her time in Cuba and its aftermath, which her pen could not write.

  The poem, typed single-space, with all its hand-written annotations forming like coral, occupied one long page, and was untitled. Lievering always told his classes that the title of the piece was the most unimportant thing about it. “Ladies and gentlemen—” his brilliantly echoing, brittle Anglo-German voice said, “—can one title a life?”

  His white, seraph’s face hung over all his pronouncements like a pained medal struck in memory of the era he carried with him without ever speaking of it, as a child thrice removed—Berlin to England to the West Indies—of the Holocaust. Details were unknown, but there was a sense of villages destroyed behind him. Even though he was unbranded and had gone to an English grammar school, his parents’ history, if not his own, elf-locked his face. Everyone wished to cherish his remarks, but outside his presence could no longer remember them. That presence, facially beautiful—as well as spiritual, ruined and intense—couldn’t be borne for long. That was his history.

  She had been the one who’d borne it long enough to remember those remarks. At seventeen. Thirty-five, he’d been then. Now, wherever he was, he was about the age of the man who had just left. The men she chose kept pace with him.

  Otherwise, he was now a man in a locket never opened, and in a stanza as yet unwritten. Once she had tried to incorporate that year, from an autumn to an autumn, during which she had been first Lievering’s student, then his protégée, finally his lover, and through all of it his companion victim. Instead, Lievering’s voice, too nasally distinguished by its own pain, had incorporated itself into her life. For in a way, some would say, wasn’t she still answering him back? Except that no one had more than an inkling of her true life scheme, either of her poem or of her actions outside of her rather public job. And no one, certainly not Lievering himself, had known precisely what his voice had been asking for.

  “Is this—yours?” he’d said in his soft, compelling out-of-class manner, not looking up at the student who, only in her second week at the university, knew she was already being called the “New York transfer,” for having asked to be exempt from a freshman English course she apparently thought beneath her.

  “Yes, it’s mine, whatever it is,” she’d replied, recognizing the folder of work submitted to substantiate her request, from which he was holding up a page. Her last defiance. For then he’d raised his head. Lievering had no idea of the effect his face had on people. Or his manner either. If they were at first stunned, then thralled and at last too irritated or wrenched by their pity for him to further bear his company, he always ascribed their jitteriness to their reactions to his “thought.” But he could never merely beguile just enough for people to tolerate him, much less want him about in the ordinary way. It was like meeting an archangel momentarily, one just fresh in from tortures lucid behind him.

  Ten minutes later you could scarcely bear to have tea with him. Or with his intensity, which he was so unconscious of or familiar with that the effect was of some ravening bird always at his elbow, visible to all but him.

  His face, uniquely his if ever a man’s was, had at that moment raised its suppliant eyes at her. Her flesh felt the shock.

&
nbsp; Outside his office, two boys and a girl passed and grinned in at her knowingly. She’d expected yokels down here, and there were some, but many of her classmates, long-legged exquisites dressed by the island’s crop of clever designers, or by their mothers’ expertise, had been members of the new native middle class, children of merchants or, like herself, of the new black diplomats. Movie-tutored, sent to Montreal or Toronto for singing lessons and expecting to explore other resources of the Empire later, they were a knowing lot, with a softer, tropical version of British manners. Lievering’s classes, where his strange spirituality could enliven, and where the disease of hesitation from which he suffered was lessened by his knowledge of his subject, were always packed.

  They had been a confident lot also. While the inhabitants of the greatest cities were often barred by private owners from direct access to their own city’s beaches and waters, by law no Bajan native could be kept by the richest estate from strolling the morning or evening shoreline. So, when she and Lievering had apparently become a pair, gossip, though strong, had been surprisingly free of racial sentiment alone. Or they knew Lievering. So they went on past without rescuing her, which they might have done, watched her and Lievering’s association grow, in class and out—and left her to discover him.

  “Read this out,” he’d said, at the torturous pace she’d mistaken for a stately one. As if he thought a poem was important—anyone’s. But she was to learn that so might he pause before any of the details of life. A crumb on the floor, a bit of sauce on a spoon, a telephone call, a pencil raised, would all halt him equally. The trivia one must pass through in order to exist burred and gouged at him as if he had to react to each with an outsize sensitivity. Whatever had happened to him—or to his parents—had made it impossible for Lievering to summon the slightest indifference.

  Already dazzled, bemused, she’d looked down at the stanza she had written. Hunter had been a smart, hip school, poetically oriented the way her whole generation had been, via the sluices of rock music, the jazz prose of popular journalists, and the sing-alongs of radical politics. Except for the page Lievering now handed back to her, the folder on his desk contained essays and stories only; she hadn’t really chosen poetry yet. “Miss Lacey’s” had already chosen her. Those years as Vivie’s inherited stepchild and Ollie’s evening sister, and as a quiet high school girl among whores, had focused her. As Lievering would later even congratulate her for, Miss Lacey’s had been the “concentration camp” experience of her life.