Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “Do as I say.” The dead voice he must beat his girls with. He never damaged the goods. “Veronica.” Of a sudden he quirked at her winningly. “Please?”

  Fascinated, she nodded. The alternative love and cruelty that members of his profession had to supply must make them supple as wands.

  He heaved a sigh. “Five o’clock then, better make it. Five-thirty at the latest. And—” he hesitated. “And—don’t go upstairs.”

  On his way out, he went right past the rocker. Not that he wouldn’t miss it. Just that he had many sentiments.

  From the door he leaned back in. “You’re always going off on your own anyway, aren’t you?” he said lightly.

  “Fix that gun in your pocket,” she said. “Liable to shoot yourself in the heart.”

  She didn’t watch him from the window as Vivie would have done. He always got away, into rabbit holes near or far. His problem was staying away—from the crooked ruts he loved, for which he would violate any parole, even self-imposed. As those boys were sure to know. Never a sincere criminal, never able to convince them of it, he was most in danger from the bad company he admired, over whose superstitions he yet had a certain sway.

  I’m getting tired of this window, she thought. I’d have had to leave it soon anyway. I’m tired of what it puts on me. Not that she ever expected to escape from what life had put on her, any more than Ollie could. But she was tired of this version of it. If she forgot her race more than most—or more than she should, some said—it was because in her work she saw how people were divided socially by primitive inner gaps as deep or even deeper than any the world put on them in the form of money or bloodlines, or skin.

  There was the gap between the sick and the well. There was the gulf between those who had their dead already behind them, and those who didn’t yet. The gap she was thinking of, and it was a social one, lay between those who had or hadn’t clung to their own people. The final rabble, avoided even by one another, were those whose close family members, once strayed, were not merely lost but no longer counted upon. For there were tragedies of loss and shame the world over, but in the right sort of tribe even such lost persons were held consciously in the fold, ticked off by story or memory—accounted for. The worst blot was not to know where a family member was.

  Ollie had made Vivie and her feel that way. Even though he was always coming back, they could seldom say where he was, even if they knew. One day, by some underworld twist they might never hear of, he was doomed not to pop up again. That was the real reason Vivie had held off from those Bejan island clans always proudly mapping their tributaries present and absent. It might be why, in her own travels, Europe centerstream didn’t please her, and why she had fled the wedged villages of France. And hadn’t been made comfortable by skin alone, in some parts of Africa.

  Take up your bag now, baby. Kept always at the ready, packed with those cosmetic and medical needs which increased each year like one’s weight, plus those charmingly interchangeable clothes which chemists now pressed upon one like an ideology—she half despised it. She glanced swiftly about her, her heart missing a beat, and ran to the desk. Always at the last minute before leaving here, she almost forgot. As if she wanted to leave it here, the one lover to be permanent. Stuff it in the bag now, the original manuscript. A copy, kept updated, was in the bank. The key to the bank went into her purse, its duplicate being with Tom, who’d said when she gave it, “Mentally, I’m your nearest relative.” She took the original with her everywhere.

  Not that she fully believed her stepbrother—but Ollie was never trustworthy enough to be disbelieved on all points. She’d go to her office, where she often spent the hours from midnight on, until time to take a morning plane. There was a whole such afterlife in high office buildings all over the world—as if those huge unwalled fortresses could no longer be left to the ministrations of night cleaners, as if the world no longer could be.

  Often she saw hired limousines arriving or drawing away with clients for whom the dawn hour might be either late or early. Tom had urged her to use a chauffeured car at such hours, but she never had; at times she had to be poorer than some, humbler than some, in order to be her old self, still embarking. Last two times up to Montreal, she’d taken the train along the Hudson, watching for the small, yellowed island—was it before Poughkeepsie or after?—on which lay Bannerman’s durably ruined castle, whose roofless crenellations and broken spaces were what her overannotated poem might come to be. This time there were plane tickets in her purse. Then would come those children chirruping in the square, and in other city parts she would search out. Work was the best travel.

  Good-bye, desk. As she turned away, the rocker’s viciously short prong caught her ankle; it had been kicking them all for years. “No—you can’t come back!” Vivie yelled from it into the phone, to Ollie in New Orleans, down there on his third lam in a year, fifteen years ago, the time he’d secretly invited his young sister to go along. “No, I’ve rented it to somebody,” Vivie’d said, duller. “The whole house.” This time, she’s really trying to get rid of him, the younger Veronica had thought, from behind. “Vivie. Listen. He only asked me along for company. I could’ve always come back.” Vivie had reached out—and slapped. Later, the tenant complained that their “son from South America” had had the nerve to let himself in and out of the place, with his key. Ollie, taxed with this on one of his hideaway calls, had yelled back, “You think I want to—that ratty old house? You think I like to go in there?” Why had he then, his sister had asked when they all three were together again. “What did you do here? When you sneaked in.” He’d wrinkled his nose. No turban as yet. A broad leather hat, butternut soft, that she’d envied. “I dunno. Those velours drapes, ever sniff them?” he’d said, pointing. “I came and sniffed.”

  Half across the room she could smell them now, heavy with the niches and coral glints of childhood. In the reaches which had lapped around Vivie, around their three. She walked over to them now, to draw them closed. Saw her own hand gripped on the tassel, where it always lingered. “What a fool I am,” she said aloud, and ran to get her own passkey. “What a—fool.” And ran out the door and up the stairs.

  Loud colors get so shabby, when executed in paint. White floors get so dirty. Moorish arches hang by their matchstick portals, made in a Brooklyn woodyard. Rattan tables get picky here, soggy there. The looped bedcover droops from the sofa bed like a fallen breast. The girls have cleared out, leaving a pink cloy of face powder and champagne. Not the cleaning woman’s day. Ollie, who could always rise to an occasion once a plan had altogether failed, had thought of everything.

  She found what she was looking for in the kitchenette, wired to the oven clock. She’d never seen a time bomb before. Nor likely had Ollie. The thing hung from the oven door like a sick black bat. It looked like all of Ollie’s contraptions, as if it just might work. If she turned back the clock, though? She crept forward, not daring to. She gave the clock a bitter smile. It was set for seven o’clock. There was also a smell of gasoline.

  Was he trying to pull a fast one on those louts—to make them think some ally had already taken care of him? She’d never seen any of this new crowd more than in a brush on the stairs, but knew from Ollie’s boasts what they were like—like all his crowds, routinely too smart for him. Or was he doing it for the insurance—odd of him to know how much? For which, as total owner, she’d be such a plausible front. To be applied to, later.

  She bowed her head, in Vivie’s old attitude. Repetitive grief was gulled grief. Her head whipped back. Call the bomb squad—why not? Up near the curved ceiling there was now a weight lift and a leg exerciser hanging from hooks on which the shelves for her father’s books used to be. So long dead, he and her own mother, so honorably. Did such deaths still fund hope? Was it possible that Ollie had been funded by Vivie’s? For she did half-feel that admiring tug of the heart-brain when a life reverses itself in front of your eyes, as possibly a better one than thought.

  She drew aw
ay, carefully stepping backward, shutting the outer door infinitesimally slow behind her, as if it led to a house of cards. Not because of the bomb only. Ollie’s good instincts were not like other people’s. Even his reforms could have a ramshackle guile. Yet it was possible, the way even a swami’s dreams of self-magic can be. Possible that he too, her brother Ollie-Ali, was at last tired of this house’s version of his life.

  Leave his gamble to simmer there, then. At the worst she would be an accessory after the fact—for both of them.

  Minutes later she was ready to go, dressed in a floating but serviceable gray, whipping a gray scarf around her head and neck, even enjoying the self-drama of rising from these dead steppingstones out into the cloudy walkabout, with her spirit handy to her flesh and vice versa—when the phone rang.

  A preliminary? One of Ollie’s crowd, checking it out? Taking care of it ourselves, boys. Won’t answer it.

  Or her brother. Reneging again. Vivie was never able either. Not to answer.

  “Yes?”

  A choking. Or a groan. From a wounded throat.

  It’s the one they thought they killed, flashed through her. Ventura. Calling from somewhere, for Ollie. Or Ollie, himself? They got to him. The phone cord twined from her, blood-clotted.

  “Will you—eat with me?” the man said.

  The phone slid from her. She bent to pick it up, the house sliding neatly after and from under her, without ever a bomb. The drop came when you looked up and saw where other people still normally were. Up there, up. In that dialogue where I was only two hours ago. What can I answer him?

  Her name was coming to her like a pulse, breathed in her hand. She brought it to her ear.

  “Veronica. You all right?”

  I’m all right, in my own way. But if I open up to you, I’ll whimper.

  “Please, I know you’re there.”

  She swallowed. “Tell me your name? Again?”

  That was a strange sound he made.

  “Mulenberg. John Mulenberg.”

  She saw him clearly, everything he was. If he were standing here in his full strength the floor would humanely provide itself under her again. And she would delude herself that she could get to him for more than a night.

  “Say something,” he said. “Anything.”

  After a minute, he said, “I’ll wait.”

  How smart he is. Don’t cry over it. Her eyes stung.

  Ask him then. The question that welled up in her wherever she was in the world, from a distance she was only beginning to define.

  “How do I get to you? How we ever—going to get to you?”

  People like me. To people like you.

  Would he think it the basic cry between man and woman, or black and fair? Or rich or poor? If she herself knew who was asking, who was replying—would that be the answer?

  She could have sworn she heard him smiling, before he said from confident lip, “We—get to you.”

  That was the answer. That she knows only the question. That he has only his reply.

  “Yes—I have your card,” she said. “Your calling card.” The phone was an extension on its own wall switch. Gently, she pulled out its plug.

  Now she was ready. Her overnight bag could still be swung over a shoulder, though in addition to her month’s supply of interchangeables, it now held the boots and woollies she’d need if she went north. She’d always wanted to visit Calgary and the Rockies above it, ever since riding up in a Montreal elevator with a young woman carrying a thick hide suitcase out of another era, with a sticker from there—a rawboned white girl tall as herself, with ankles like hocks, long feet shod in new white kid, red hands and a face brilliant with quiet—a young moose who’d parted the foothill forest in order to check in at the Ritz.

  She herself kept certain places like that stored always in the back of her mind. To go to, as now. In emergency.

  Montreal itself might just now be as hot as New York. The manuscript was in the central pocket of the bag over her left shoulder, the typewriter case in her right hand, carried under her mottled cape of all purpose. She knew she looked internationally handsome, seductively capable, a spender though probably not rich. Trained by Vivie to love clothes both for vanity’s sake and for their artistry, in her long mirror she saw a woman who had learned on her own to value them for their guises, which could both influence her thought and externalize it, all the while hiding her good mind. Men used clothing in much more muted and less conscious ways, which at times she envied. A man’s dress, much closer to uniform, gave him the same solidity of intent and maneuverability which his lack of protracted reproductive process did. Their vanities, like their energies, could be applied straight to the main chance. When she wanted a man, it was in part for this. She didn’t see herself as ever wanting a particular man’s child. The poem was her child, born to her in the washroom at Miss Lacey’s, at the time when it became plain to her that her body interposed between her and all revolution, because men noted it.

  And now, ready to wheel and go, she suddenly let go of everything, typewriter banging to the floor, the cape puddling after it. The shoulder bag unyoked itself and slid. Kneeling at the open refrigerator door, she might have been searching its contents like a scholar, or adoring them. She saw nothing, blindly. Squatting on her haunches, she wolfed abstractedly at random, paté, mushrooms, bread, the door hanging wide. Now and again she rested her head on her long thighs, inching her head to the knees. Her shoulders heaved, but only in digestion. When she’d finished the solid food, she closed the door in reflex, her face still a blank. Opened it again. Only mustard left, soda, champagne. Shutting it again noiselessly she stood up. Head bent, eyes inward, she reassembled herself, leaving without a backward look.

  Outside, she walked rapidly in flat rubber-soled sandals. On the road, she never wore high heels. The city at this hour, with its stars waning, its buildings coming forward out of night into the stone of themselves, its milk-and-porridge needs beginning mildly to clink, was her precinct. In her cub reporter days she’d often left town at weird times or worked an excited, self-imposed midnight-to-dawn shift because she loved the office then, a catacombs for one person, neatened by cleaning women and lunar light. On a view.

  Inside the office and her own cubicle, flinging her gear on the tweed couch, she sat down at her desk to watch it. How kind big buildings could be when deserted, how permissive. This architectural kindness was rarely spoken of. Structures of many sorts had it, as if from an instinct beyond their builders. Seated here she felt nurtured by an amah’s arm from behind, urging on her the orange-blue over a bridge, the wet fishgleam on a junkyard’s immortals. She had mappings here, all pointing outward. When she sat here in the early hours, she was always about to set out.

  She’d walked the few blocks here piloting steady on that. Each time, crossing the broad convergence of streets in front of the Gulf & Western, mounting the small apron of steps and past the guard’s trusty joke—“Only two of us holding up the world this morning!”—she was walking toward this.

  Wherever “John Mulenberg, One Gulf & Western Plaza” had his office here, his view wouldn’t be quite hers. Perhaps his was at the very top—not counting the restaurant. This seemed likely. They might still pass each other unaware for years—or meet soon, one dusk or morning. She ruled no one out of her life, not even Lievering. But that was the range of possibility she liked best.

  Over Jersey two helicopters were homing for the city port like mechanical bees. She had a license to fly dating from a period just after graduation when she’d been acquiring every physically useful talent she could, from snorkeling to marine navigation, since these too were ways of conquering the world. Or in order to demonstrate—to the gods, perhaps—her lost faith in language alone? Never. Or not yet. If that ever happened, didn’t she know what she’d have to do? Hunt him up—Lievering. To apologize—“Now there are two of us.”

  What did she mean by language? Faith, hope and principle? Or only that the act of enunciating
was the mediatrix to all grace? All she knew for sure was that once she’d found it, the act of announcing had been her way out of the wilderness of early being. So that when in days before she’d have sobbed or raged, now instead a rod rose in her, ramming those valves shut. Cry on the page, the rod said.

  Years went by before she knew that this, too, was worship—and, like all worship, could be dangerous. In any act of words there’s praise, she thought. And I don’t yet fully know what I praise.

  That man Mulenberg had thought her a terrorist. She smiled to herself, meanwhile overlooking the angled warps of the same view he at best might have eight or so more stories of. A singer, he’d sensed the timbre her life sounded, when like a bell it was struck: that she was organized around something. True to the times, he’d assigned this to the political—and hadn’t been altogether wrong. There were people who were linked to the political world merely by what they themselves were circumstantially. Many an émigré thought himself a revolutionary for that reason alone. And it appeared that all revolutionaries thought of themselves as émigrés emotionally, when really both might be merely among those who were displaced in life by having had a world view thrust upon them. Like greatness, she thought. So that though they talked of themselves as part of the “new world,” they didn’t yet know what that world was.

  Over beyond Columbus Circle, in that welter of lower rooftops whose tarred surfaces were catching the first sun gleams, her own house lay, a molecule helping inch life along. Or actually far smaller, in the atomic scale. From a period spent at an institute in La Jolla, writing up a pair of physicists who felt themselves to be turning into biologists (quite as naïvely, it turned out, as pilots might dream of being trapeze artists), she’d learned certain rudiments from the one who’d fallen in love with her—and although she tended to mistrust secondhand knowledge picked up sexually, she did know that in the realms of matter, a molecule was now very large. Would her house, however infinitesimal, soon be made to puff up higher than its neighbors, sending up a heap of tumbling clothes and small criminalities? She couldn’t stay to see. But I’m glad I ate that stuff in the fridge. Got the jump on whoever. Maybe even Ollie’s crowd, ignorant of Ollie’s effort and, like many of the gangs, now reportedly masking their ordinary crimes and vendettas by aping the style of the political ones, would indeed come for the house.