Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  On the nature of what gift might be in store for Wert, Nosy refused to speculate, only shaking his head and saying, “I doubt if you’ll have to retire”—still with that faint smile. Insisting on paying the check, though, as if—Wert himself said—it was some kind of anniversary. Usually they each paid their own deductibles.

  “It is an anniversary,” his friend said. Outside the Monocle, they’d gazed at the wide expanse between it and the building beyond, and the rising breastworks of the rest of Washington. “Since Manila,” Nosy said. Turning, he clapped Wert on the shoulder affectionately. Wert did the same, though he was usually undemonstrative with his own kind. Funny, when the European double kiss or male hug of warmer countries gave him no trouble, abroad.

  “Well, let me know,” Nosworthy said, when the departmental car drew up for him. “Gail and I’ll be on tenterhooks.”

  Wert wouldn’t see them for a year; they were going to Sri Lanka. Wert’s hand was shaken hard in parting, and his face was stared into, keenly. “I always loved Jenny,” Nosy said.

  On the shuttle back to New York, Wert puzzled over that. Nosy had written him from Manila at Jenny’s death. By the time they met again, three years had gone by, leaving Jenny both too near and too far to be easily spoken of, even if Wert’s new arrangements—a woman here, a woman there—hadn’t been plain. Now, after all this time, there was something…valedictory in what Nosy had said, yet he’d done it almost gaily. When did people say a thing like that to you? There was a tone in it which Wert recognized but couldn’t seize.

  In New York, the hotel manager welcomed him sadly. A new management and a renovation was in the works; after this year they could no longer harbor Wert’s hamper. In exchange, Wert would have television in the room when he stayed there, instead of in the clubby old lounge to which the hotel, quiet as a library upstairs, had always relegated it, and though his new room would be half the size of this one, he would have a modern closet with sliding doors, instead of that clumsy old armoire. “Gentlemen are going out,” Mr. Wemyss said. At eighty, and with a matching wife who still regretted their death notices couldn’t be in the defunct Herald Tribune—“the Times is simply not the same!”—he was certainly one of them.

  “Gentlemen are always on the way out,” Wert said irritably. One felt the world was going to rack and ruin when one was of an age to feel it, irrespective of whether or not it was true. But he’d never before been classed as on that side of time’s colonnades.

  Luckily, the woman whom he always called first when here still lived in the brilliantly chintzed Park Avenue apartment a divorce had granted her, along with her three grown daughters. During a round of plays and dinners, Wert made her talk of her girls; he wasn’t sure why. She was delighted to. Always tactful with his bachelor lack of interest, she never had. The three were all willful and all pretty. “Like me, once.” Little by little her anecdotes slipped farther out, across table and into their bed. “Oh, with kids, either you eat them alive or are eaten,” she’d say, staring at her napoleon as if it was a small coffin. Each night now, after love, she resumed her histoire.

  She was a dear, kind woman; her house offered comfort artistically disciplined, and in sex her backbone arched with joyful intensity anyway he asked it to, her breasts pillowing him afterward. He tried to think of her, heroic among her warped nymphs, as all the lovelier for her distress. Blond hair streaming on her satin sheets, she looked it. “Oh, I’m so grateful I can talk to you about it, with most men you have to walk such a chalk line.” Though the girls were all away on a school trip, the three now advanced on him, steady on over their acnes and abortions. He’d intended to ask their mother to stow his hamper in one of her many opulent closets, but after that night decided not to. Inside him, the vote had gone against her. It wasn’t in this way he wanted to become part of the dynasts.

  Besides, on these cold nights which were rocketing up the new year, all New York was a blue mosque. For sure, one would never meet a mullah there. The winds honking him across plazas had no underside from Russia; at their center he would never hear, like a tuning fork, the desert’s stealth. But down on the Lower East Side, where he went alone one night to the theater, a vendor roasted something on a cart from which came that same Middle Eastern smell which had pinched the Tabriz evening with charcoal—here sweet potatoes, a good try, but not the great hairy beets smoking red and orange, under an Elburz sunset which had hung in the west like a fine rug.

  In Tabriz, the men shuffling along under that burnished light in baggy pants, suit jackets and bent fedoras had looked to him like tailors from this neighborhood. Before him in a bakery window, soft powdered cakes oozed the same poisonous yellow in front of which he used to see the Tabrizi schoolboys hungering in pairs, their fifth fingers linked. He would never bump into a donkey here if he hunkered till doomsday at the crossroads of memory. But in a dairy restaurant he sat for an hour watching a couple of old men with a week’s growth of beard, as they drank tea from a glass and played a game with counters, while their feet worked happily in and out of shoes worn down at the back. Borrowing the waiter’s pad and pencil stub, he wrote the note he owed Bakhtiary, thanking him for the tree, admiring his son, congratulating him on marriage, and wishing him well.

  Outside again, he dropped into a stationery store to buy an envelope and stamp. The stage-blue had intensified. The upper bodies of people walking were circled in auras fumed with their breaths. Across the street a gutted building reared, each floor of the façade more open. At its top the stone frame pointed toward him its triangular pulpit—but it wasn’t a mosque. A letter box stood below. This city was its own city now, and the ruins were different. Staring up, he mailed the letter, to which he’d added a post-script. “Dear friend—don’t send me too much.”

  That note must by now have reached Iran. To lie unnoticed maybe for weeks among the congratulations which in spite of all would be coming to Bakhtiary—and to the girl from Ardebil. Strange to think of today as her wedding day also. Would Bakhtiary be sitting apart, on his side of the house, complying with old-fashioned custom for the bride’s sake, since for her sake little enough could be done? While in another part, intoned over by female relatives who saw all their history in her, she sat in separate ceremony, in all her lacy, provincial pomp?

  The only wedding Wert had ever seen there had been a peasant affair not far from that girl’s city, near the Caspian. Pious as the girl’s promises might be, it was more likely she was some wealthy man’s daughter, of the sort he’d glimpsed at their Embassy receptions in Paris—a rich Iranian milkmaid, modernized to the septum of her nose. In which case the male guests would be wearing cutaways, the youngest of the emancipated women might be bared and frizzled in the style the Department wives termed “Call me Babe,” and after the ceremony, couples would jounce up and down together in their peculiar fox-trots, which seemed to be not so much revived from the nineteen-twenties, as saved ever since. Yet none of this meant that the girl’s promises wouldn’t be kept.

  Teheran was eight and a half hours ahead of New York. The ceremony was to be at nine-thirty in the evening. So here he was, driving off to Queens for a one o’clock lunch—and already chilly and touchy, after early breakfast at the United Nations with a member of the American delegation, unknown to Wert, who’d rung him up late and hectically the night before.

  “Woodrow Smiley-Brown—” this tall, bleached man said when they met, “and yes, I was christened for the late, very late President, father’s friend. As father told me daily, ‘They’ll have to know their history, boy, to place you.’…” This over, he appeared less exhausted, keenly examining everyone who passed, and oddly excited by the UN restaurant—if one considered that he must see it every day of the week.

  Pumping Wert, he was annoyed at him for knowing only as much as the next man on “the British temp-er-a-ment.” He was one of those who visualized all national temperament as rather like the wooden plank on which the waiter was offering him smoked salmon—as a thin slab of
some indigenous substance on which a nation’s doings were daily deposited. But the term was useful; when it came up you knew either that the conversation would get nowhere, or that all human talk was in vain.

  “No, I won’t have more salmon, thanks,” Wert said, “I’m going to a wedding in Teheran at one o’clock.”

  The man was duly startled; Wert had meant him to be. Over here he made use of the most shamefully childish tactics, probably because he no longer felt sure of what men were like here, or women either. In his travel-twisted way, he knew too much. He’d grown away from those home standards which, if kept rigidly, whatever they were, made a person certain of himself for life.

  “Your companion going with you?” Wert’s package, brought up from the parking lot, sat on a chair at the table’s third side. “If so, you’re both going to be late.”

  Smiley had been brought up to a certain coyness, Wert decided. As the father had. He explained, lightly sketching Bakhtiary and his entourage.

  “Thought they’d discouraged multiple wives. That they don’t do that anymore.”

  “They do and they don’t.” He wasn’t going to explain Bakhtiary to this man. “Never multiple, though. Islam allows four, I believe.”

  “So you’re going to lunch with three old ladies, to listen to their husband, the old guy—get married again. By international hookup.”

  “Two wives. Third one’s the young daughter-in-law. And neither wife’s really old. Let’s see—” He’d been intending to do this arithmetic, out of a sense that there were already mysteries enough—and that he ought to prepare. “Madame the first wife was married when she was sixteen and he sixtyish; which would make her now about forty-six.” He’s amazed; Bakh always referred to her as “my traveling dowager.” “So was the second wife, Fateh. When he was about seventy-two. Eighteen years ago; that would make her—my word. Only thirty-four. The new bride’s the same age they were.”

  “Got a daughter at Brearley who’s sixteen,” Smiley said gloomily. “You ever feel that these older countries have the right attitude toward—got any daughters, Wert?”

  “No. Though I have friends who do.”

  “Umph…This daughter-in-law—what age is she?”

  “In a way, she’s the oldest. She’s already twenty-four. Of course, she went to the University of Teheran. But only just married—that’s still very late—for their girls. Or used to be.”

  “It’s us,” Smiley said, still gloomy. “You may depend upon it; it’s us.”

  “You know Iran?”

  “No, I was a social scientist. Specializing in Africa. In the days when that was a small field. Or a big empty one. Southern Ghana—four years there. Then northern Nigefia, two more. Village structure—I wrote a book oh it.” He leaned forward. “What’s your ambition, Bill?”

  Wert hadn’t been asked that question so bluntly since high school. In reality it was always being asked. In America, unless you had an ambition that showed, people didn’t know how to ticket you. Even naked ambition, properly bared, made them feel safer. You might even go farther because of it.

  “On my college placement bureau’s form, I put—‘to see the world.’ They switched it. To ‘Foreign Service.’”

  “Heh.” Chin on his big folded hands, Smiley was still swinging his glance keenly left-right.

  “Later, for the Foreign Service application, I switched it, ‘To see the changing of nations,’ I put—I was twenty-three. They thought it quite elegant.” The truth often was, even when misinterpreted. “Best little statement of the departmental cop-out we ever saw,” Nosy had said. “Got you to Manila the moment we saw your resumé. We can use a young officer with your kind of talent for talk-talk.” Leaving the young Wert with the first of the romantic sorenesses which were to replace each yesterday’s heart.

  “Well, you’re seeing it.” Smiley swept out a hand.

  “Mmmm.” Even at breakfast the UN smelled of polyglot sweets and sours, ethnic stipulations and aversions. The smell of any of those trading places where the map changes ran off the tables like water and populations blew before the wind—how this excited him even yet! “They thought I meant—changeover,” Wert said.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

  “You?…Oh yes. What’s your ambition—Woodrow?”

  “To have a village. An African village. Named after me.” Smiley screwed up his eyes. “One of the chiefs had already adopted me.” He said a series of African syllables, grinning. “That’s me. I could still do it. Even these days. If I went back.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “I’m trying. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Why’d you leave Africa in the first place?”

  “Came back home to marry the girl I left behind me. Biggest wedding there since old Woodrow himself. She was the daughter of a dean.” Two women from Sierra Leone passed by in their richly striped and segmented dress. Woodrow stared after them morosely. “Got hooked to stay on, at the college. And never got back to my village. Or had one named for me here.” He grinned again. “The college already being named.”

  “Say”—Wert smiled at himself—already so American again. “Say, your father wasn’t by chance the Brown. The anthro man. My best friend from home studied with him. One great man who was really great—he said.”

  Smiley’s nod plainly had been nodded many times before. “Changed my name. Added on my mother’s. Because of the overtones.”

  Overtones indeed. “I even saw him once.” The old professor, pointed out to Wert by his worshipful friend had had that worldwide look to him even when shuffling unkempt down a university corridor, through colleagues tweeded up and suburbanized. They hadn’t been able to do that either to his looks or to his tongue, which now and then made the papers with near-indecent pronouncements on American life. As a father, the old anthropologist might well have been one of those who should have had only daughters—at least in America.

  “So when the bid came for here, I took it,” Smiley-Brown said. “Got divorced over it. She said if I ever got back to Africa, I’d want to stay, and keep her and the kids with me, even marry them to blacks.” He snorted toughly. “You married?”

  “My wife died.”

  “Ah.” Smiley-Brown gazed past him and out the window. “Sunday. Know why I like to come here on Sundays? Because here there aren’t any. They’ve buried them, under their own Fridays—that’s the Muslim one, isn’t it?—and Sabbaths, and general hut ceremonies. The way they’re going to bury us. Can you imagine any of our women here? In their church hats?”

  “My wife never wore a hat.”

  “Ah. Both my wife and my mother did.” Woodrow drummed his fist on the table. “My—stepmother does, too.” He shuddered, opening his mouth wide.

  “Ah,” Wert said.

  “My father remarried, you see, quite recently. So did my wife.”

  “Oh?” The traumas of the recently divorced or divorcing were always so stale and unvirginal. Must be why bachelors listened to a lot of them.

  “What sort d’ya think those two would marry, Bill?”

  “Mmm…m.” The old guy, Smiley’s father? Probably, by now—some woman who would clean him up. And Smiley’s wife, breathing all this propaganda under that hat? Very possibly—a black.

  Smiley-Brown was staring through him, and out the other side. “They married each other.”

  “Eee,” Wert said.

  “Our daughters are with them. They’ve bought a brownstone here, and are sending the girls to Brearley. After all his talk.”

  “And your sons?”

  “Haven’t any.”

  “Hah.” Having exhausted his monosyllables, Wert looked at his watch.

  Woodrow placed a hand across it. “Scads of time, really. Your boulevard’s just down the road…So you see what I mean, don’t you? About the older countries.”

  Wert stood up. “Sorry. No, I don’t see.” What I see is the frighteningly personal drift of all men, behind their most seigniorial jobs. I see
the old ambassador at Manila, who hadn’t believed in talk-talk, but not from international conclusions—only because the sexual tremors which engaged him from wrist to liver to brain weren’t up to it anymore. Or that gambling French cultural attaché to whom all culture was a coin, including his own. Or even my own British opposite in London, who does act more impersonally than any of us, not as he thinks because his passion-for-no passion is so well ingrained—but because the passions of the belly, when sated five times a day, are more ignorable than the rest.

  Three Senegalese Moslems passed in a waft of white. Wert sat down again. “It’s true, they more often travel together. Arabs. But that’s all I’ll vouch for.”

  “They’re calling themselves the new nations, now.” Brown screwed his eyes to slits. “And why not—they’ve got real life behind their backs, re-al struc-tured life…while we-uns…Arrh, never mind us. Look there. And there. And there.” One brilliant group after another, leopard-sashed or pinwheel-haired or in Arab white, went under his pointing thumb. Europeans and others from the West, or dressed like the West, also thronged the hall, but Smiley-Brown wasn’t seeing them. Harder to, of course, but whether this was because they were more faded in color or more complex in spirit, only time could say. Certainly another quasi-European Westerner couldn’t.

  The room was full of people tangentially closer to Wert and each other than most, each conscious that this ribbon of humanity they were in was an era. The scene had that tremendous, noisy vigor which the centrally busy passing scene always did. He’d never met such publicly displayed human surety as was flaunted here—in a hall no longer in its heart devoted to the curatorship of the living world but crowding in for the ceremonious process of its dying. For the coming pyrotechnical death-talk, each country wanted the best seats in the house. There were no shy people here.