Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “You’re right—I’m rude,” he’d said, settling behind his newspaper, a British one.

  The Eurasian was talking to the man on her other side, with whom she was traveling, but from time to time she and Veronica had covert female communication by glance, the woman eyeing Veronica’s blouse, the girl wide-eyed at the woman’s feet, whose rubied claw-toenails curved over her sandals, long as guitar picks, ending her body in two pronged, erotic paws. She would walk arching each foot, the hip following, Veronica thought—her own body power aroused—and according to the earth-matter beneath her would shuffle, scrape, or click. And saunter best down a staircase. She was no feminist’s riddle; she was any woman’s. For years after, striding a city pavement or lugging a flight bag, Veronica would remember her.

  Furtively she had opened Lievering’s locket. It was empty. As it should be.

  From behind the newspaper, Tom’s card had been dropped in her lap. “Interview successful. Want a job?” He ducked inside the newspaper before she could answer. In the moment that the plane had begun its descent on Honduras she saw by the card that his last name was Gilpin (assumed, she’d somehow thought, until the telephone book showed her many Gilpins), and she saw one brownish pupil mischievously regarding her through an eyehole poked in the air edition of the Manchester Guardian, above a column headlined: Paedophile Society Civil Servant Loses Case. Child-lover, the word must mean; the civil servant being revealed in the column as president of a society which advocated sex with children, for which reason attempts were being made to oust him from his job at the Post Office, though by due process of law. “Den of sin, the P.O.’s—” Tom said, lowering the newspaper. “Always a cover for the sinister. Pals who bury the mater alive on Sunday, sharpshooters who pick off lovers’ trysts.” The picture of the civil servant was nothing like Tom nor the news story either. Still, it would be three years on, and she almost a year out of college, before, picking up the odd, intransigent weekly which was becoming her favorite, she saw the name of its publisher, and got in touch.

  At that time he lived with a woman called by the single name Purvis, a neutered beauty more like a pet swan than a companion, who had silvered hair and wore blackish lipstick, glided now and then into his parties and, like many “art” photographers, lived silently in a welter of recorded music while printing into reasonable life what the rest of the world saw humbly with the disjointed eye.

  Meanwhile Tom, whose paper foretold the death of coherent personality and a coming world of freebooting and free-associating instincts, lived a life organized to the last soap bubble, receiving both at home and office the crisply moral service once accorded nineteenth-century overseers. As for children, she’d never seen him with a young child, but had once heard him call them “the ultimate amateurs,” and there was a column in The Sheet which was run by them. Otherwise—as he often asked the staff sardonically—wasn’t he living the lives they all were? Modernist men and women, eager to swap communication for meaning, shadow for substance; purposefully aberrant and uncohered, preferring to live in the small mental huts provided for by nothingness, on the grounds that these were always enlarging.

  Mightn’t he himself be that powerful mutant he had once described? One of those personalities who could be found waving prophetically from the quicksand of any era?

  In the longish apartment in which he and Purvis lived, a dun progression of rooms budding one from another in the old-fashioned West Side of New York way, there seemed to be no one room devoted solely to either person or any function. If he and she did sleep together, they could have done so in any room of the house. Clothes and other possessions, though always neatly accessible, were kept anywhere, in cupboards scattered throughout like dower chests standing ready to remind these two absent-minded chatelains of the normal duties of dress and ownership. Music was piped. Regular meals were eaten out or brought in and the two secretaries who saw to all this on double shift had an office in a smaller flat on another floor, as did the photographer her darkroom. Tom, so far as could be seen, had no personal office either here or at the newspaper. None of this seemed to have been done from any of the “decorator” impulses which made other people formally display their life stances.

  So it was managed that Tom could commute between office and home in the thinking cell of himself with a minimum of personal friction and in the mulberry medium-weight non-clothes he continued to have made in replica—and that, so sustained, he could go everywhere and did, seeing by turns all the movies, print exhibitions and any other form of human endeavor, making all the city-influential committees and the national ones, knowing all “the” people, plus many who were not, and as she knew, reading well into all the books.

  When traveling, he disappeared fruitfully under an even finer-grained version of this life plan, which saw to it that although he traveled much and unorthodoxly, the publicity never got to him. Publicly, he was known for—and in the usual way, heckled or given kudos for—The Sheet. Years were to go by, with Tom as their tartly frivolous, lazily dependable sponsor of ideas so popularly anti-popular as to be nearly invisible, before she saw how signally his mode of life left all the avenues of influence open to him while he earned no reputation for it.

  Parties he gave sporadically, also in the name of The Sheet. “Parties are non-negotiable,” he’d said. “Benign blockages. In the canals of human friendship.” Yet, from any vantage she knew of he was a fast friend, even to Rhoda, to whom he often let drop those very remarks—because she wouldn’t understand them?—which Veronica early began to save for her own image of him. “Learning to live undersea of politics—” he’d said when Rhoda grabbed him to protest the paper’s lack of interest in the heads of nations, “—is not too far from learning how to conduct oneself without the pull of gravity.” And when Rhoda took him to task for their lack of coverage on Russian bomb capacity: “Talk about the end of the world has such a bad effect on people these days, don’t you think? Makes them so nervy about their bank accounts.”

  Which made Rhoda ask the others whether he meant people wouldn’t buy the paper, or he’d run out of income for it? For as fast as it made up expenses, he doubled them. His maternal grandfather’s money had in fact been based on paper mills. “Paper to paper, in three generations,” he’d say, grinning, and some wag had had it lettered over a door. The younger staff did agree that he wasn’t mystic in any of their modern ways, and only tepidly self-investigative. “Yoga?” he’d said in answer to a devotee. “That’s for self-violinists. Along the muscle path. There’re others.” During her own tenure (now one of the longest, for those hired as promising in one direction usually left him in order to fulfill that promise in another), among the groups he’d sponsored with more encouragement than money had been a Puerto Rican boys’ soccer team and a Yorkville girls’ folk-dance group, each of whose members casually called on him and were chatted to without barrier, but to whose events he never went. “Children are curative,” he’d said of the paper’s column, “for about as much as we can bear.” One office verdict on his sex life was: “Polymorphous? Possibly. But not perverse enough to practice it.” He had a bad word or a comic one for most every human institution, yet never an incendiary one. Where in all this, then, was the “cause”?

  When she’d come for the job, going to his office in between her modeling assignments and finding him listening to the life story of an émigré Czech carpenter who was hanging some shelves, his first words to her were, “That tall. I’d no idea. Your pictures don’t show it.” At Honduras he’d left the plane ahead of her, not from rudeness but to leave her to herself, and had never seen her standing up. Yet obscure as her work as a model still was, he’d followed it.

  “How are you with the camera yourself?” he said, meanwhile watching the carpenter delicately insert a thin sliding shelf. She’d felt as if she already worked there and had merely come in to confer. “My head’s my camera,” she said. The carpenter was now feeling the dowel of a drawer, taking out a file. “You don’t mi
nd the emotions of that?” Tom said, faintly smiling, still eyeing the carpenter, who was working on with the jauntiness of an expert under watch. When she opened her mouth to answer somehow, Tom put a finger to his lips. All this time she’d felt as if she was being calibrated. They’d stayed on until the man, with a final caress to the small finials which ended each shelf, touched his cap and left. “He works slowly and wonderfully,” Tom said. “No contractor will hire him.” Later, both office and Tom’s house had broken out in aisles of the misty woodwork, until a staffer had grumbled, “I’ll be here tomorrow in a powdered wig and black beauty patch,” after which the man disappeared, and they were all guilty for it. “Go on, Tom’s just set him up privately,” Rhoda accused. “A palliative,” Tom said. “It’s one of the burdens of my mental life—that I have the means for them.”

  Standing waiting back there, she’d burst out, “Well? Am I hired?” He’d grinned. Though beard and mustaches were gone, and had never been more than brown, that foxy tinge was still on him, aged a little to auburn. “You’ve been working here all this time. In my head.”

  She’d answered that camera question correctly then. She was often to do that, not knowing why. She’d known from the first that she wasn’t one of his palliatives—though to be certain, she was to work independently hard enough to become The Sheet’s star—and that the job was no prelude to her sleeping with him. Over the years of her employment, as their cool intimacy developed, she felt that whatever he’d been once, he was almost asexual now, and working toward that as ultimate. Perhaps for the same hidden reason that he’d recently absolved himself from the politics which would have been so natural to his temperament, and was now toying with non-gravity—for by pulling some Washington strings, he’d spent time in one of those whirligigs with which they tested astronauts.

  “Like getting a blood test,” he’d shrugged. “Just wanted to know.” And hadn’t told the results.

  At his parties, where she was sure he was learning too, storing up something as simple as one-two-three if she could fathom it, she’d studied his art collection, hunting for the missing work of the woman who lived there. Whose story was revealed easily enough one Christmas when Purvis vanished to the mental hospital he’d taken her from as the penniless daughter of a deceased friend. “She wants to be a man,” he said, with one of his fuzzy blushes for his own generosity, not for the woman. “I’d’ve, hmm, paid for it, but they don’t think she’s—well enough. So by choice she’s gone back. Her own works are all in the darkroom; there’ll be a show of them. Which might help. Very violent stuff—she’ll only show them when she’s inside; isn’t that interesting?” He’d patted the cheek of the youngest researcher, who wore her lover’s diamond around her neck and his baby beneath her belt. “The world wants to change, too, but it’s not yet well enough.”

  Had it struck any of the others at the Christmas party that by now they knew of dozens of tales happening in and around him, of which the keynote was always the same? “I’m nobody’s confidant, just a repository,” he warned. “And not always a silent one.” For interchange was the modern way, he said, and people liked to bank on it. Of her own life he knew as much as necessary—which was the way she thought of it, and which had included Lievering.

  She might tell him about Mulenberg, the man who had just left here, if she so chose, though because of Ollie she might not. Or, to dig deeper, because she was fighting against thinking of that man by name. But Tom knew her sexual sentiments, and would have guessed the style of her sexual life, though she never gave details. “Women too should be able to forage in that style,” she’d said. “You’re one of the ones who can,” he’d replied. “Your professional life gives you the opportunity, the range—just like the men. And your looks. But they have tacit social approval. It’s one sort of male style—recognized.” And then more keenly: “For a woman to be the aggressor, selector of strangers—and without witnesses to confirm her choice of style—that would take a special inner cohesion. Wouldn’t it? Almost another warmth—to replace the warmth?”

  She’d all but confessed about the poem, saved only by an instinct that confession would disperse it, probably forever. As long as she had the poem, she could tell him, or the world, everything else. “You’re my confirming witness,” she’d said.

  The second stanza of the poem was the poorest; maybe the period when she wrote it wasn’t yet digestible, begun as it had been in the exciting limbo of her first jobs in New York. All those jobs had been in the back of something—a dry-cleaning store, a showroom on Seventh Avenue, and finally the Mercantile Library where she was dustily happy handling this merchandise, and was sometimes awarded unbelievably odd but touching throw-outs, dead but smudged with eternal life—histories of the ewer and milch cow, patterns for the bustle, and a prospectus for an early computer: Improved Mechanisms for Performing Multiplication by the Process of Repeated Additions—acc. G. Leibniz—which she brought home to the “superintendent’s room” in the basement of Vivie’s house.

  She was the superintendent, on a promise to Vivie that she would go up to Ollie’s at least for baths. And so keep an eye on him. This she did only when she couldn’t stomach the public bath. The first time she’d gone up, four of his girls, seizing upon her like a hostage—“You got no tub down there, miss?”—had dunked and powdered her; no gang-bang, but not knowing who she was they thought she’d sneaked her passkey on the sly. Then they’d repentantly squirted perfume on her. So she had learned their ethnography, noting how their slippage from better milieus was already or almost a fact, in their too suddenly loosed charity, in the squealing rite they’d made of her and the foolish revenge they took in it, in their delight in any unfounded event intruding on their flesh-dull afternoon.

  She was mostly dirty in those days, and drunk on solitude. Working in the backrooms of whites, living below pavement behind a railed window where a cosmopolis walked by at ankle level, she was saved from hermitdom but freed from talk. At times she broke into poetry the way other people broke into sweat. She didn’t think of herself as a poet. Like a menses, the attack came only at times, sometimes in those days after her real menses, as in later days it would sometimes come after a man. During that long-ago time, poor and solitary as she was, it didn’t seem to her that she was forgetting her dream of converging on the city in all her powers; she thought she was accomplishing this. It had been the vortex, and she had loved being there.

  Then came a second limbo—with Vivie sick again, and she herself returning to the university down there, to do her three more years’ degree stint in two, all the while with the remembered brass fire of the city at her back. Lievering was gone from the island; he’d never come back, nor had the university ever heard from him. Bruce, who’d since been to Cuba, reported no news of him there. He could have left for anywhere, with one of the American groups. It was what he would have done, finding sudden truth in one or another of their allegiances, and on their instance, or through his own fertile passivity, someone to drive him handily across a sea—though possibly, when they got to the boardinghouse where he would live, or the school where he was newly to teach, it would be found to have been burnt to ash. She couldn’t further imagine him, except as a man with a borrowed Aer Lingus bag, hung against the sky of his own traveling.

  Down there she’d picked and picked at the new stanza brought with her, just as when a kid she’d used to suck the chicken carcass until Vivie wrested it from her. But the stanza stayed as it was. Memory couldn’t add more meat.

  Down the hill the pianos still gape in Steinway’s;

  A salesman stands festooned. It’s always noon there,

  The walls are garlands where nothing sells.

  The past works hard on Heimweh street

  In halls that once we scribble at old scores.

  Yonder, behind that window empty as a cracked harp, was a hall

  called the Aeolian;

  In front of the new church store full of blond epigrams

  Is a b
rass hydrant the bums love.

  As the gods arrive, the pianos are leaving.

  At teatime the traffic chatters Kafka

  To a loud sunset. Hung on it is the quiet earring

  Of the battering ram knocking down the old hotel. In after-lecture fever

  Japanese faces pompon midnight, as we walk home

  (You have the landscape you’re leaving

  You have the living you get, all in all)

  Miss Lacey is gone again, from Carnegie Hall.

  Then she’d graduated, Vivie sitting blue-lipped in the auditorium in a nest of her adoring clients, all of whom, invited over Bruce’s protesting whistle, and to Vivie’s answering, “What you care, man? You sit on the platform,” had sent cash presents also, as Vivie had known they would. The little British bounder looked forlorn without his big dogs. The two gentlemen, holding hands, had exclaimed in high voices at the beauty of the Bejan girl graduates. The lord’s American wife, wearing a hat perhaps intended to camouflage her Stateside liberal opinions, came up and spoke in low tones to the diplomaed Veronica of her proud duties to come as “the emissary of your race.” “Yes, ma’am,” she said to the lady—“like you are, down here.” And pressing a little song she’d written for the two men into the hand of one of them, and bending to kiss the green-jumpsuited little Englishman—“For the dogs”—she’d then flown home on the bounty of all of them. To get the job she shouldn’t have doubted Gilpin would have kept for her. Then she’d flown back and brought the dying Vivie home.

  “I’m always dying,” Vivie had bounced at a too commiserating island neighbor, but up here in New York she couldn’t believe she was settling down to it. “Someday, take me with you on that job of yours,” she’d say. “What we races do to each other don’t get melted down to scratch by a good job—but how it helps.” Veronica herself began to realize the gradations of what it had meant to this high-nosed, charged woman to cook or not to cook. One of Vivie’s forebears had been a white Bermuda landholder whose daughter by a native had in turn “housekept” for a white Jamaican hotel owner. “No Spanish in me. Your half-tone person always likes to claim some, your father used to say.” She talked more now of the father.