Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  He didn’t know what that meant, didn’t need to. He was back in Bahrein, Oman, Yemen, Baghdad, Teheran—countries which were like overheated mosques of such gestures. Honor. Virtue. Despair. Fate. Fortune. Peril. Redoubt. Eighteenth-century gestures, lingering on in the Western mind like swords brought home by travelers. I’m falling through the air waiting for Allah to catch me—the bazaar guide boy at the Hilton in Saudi said—and two days later was seen clinging to the rack of one of the Rolls-Royces which haunted government there, a Luger at his waist and his shrewd bargainer’s eyes exalted past recognizing his own mother. In the hotel coffee shop in Oman, the Arab bank manager who every morning sat next to Mulenberg said: “You don’t despond loudly enough in New York. I have been there. It is more like discomfort, yes? And vi-o-lence is for television.” The fine shoes which hooked over the footrail were the same brand as Mulenberg’s. He’d had one of their prouder faces, the nose jutting from the snowy headdress over the mustache which thickened the upper lip, the lower one curling outward over a jaw which declined straight into the throat without making the face chinless, as it would have an Anglo’s. He wore a collar on that throat, and a Liberty tie. Yet not too long after he’d hung a rope around it—for the sake of one or the other of those words. Retribution. Shame.

  About to board the Courier, Mulenberg had stretched to see the last of the sky. It flashed over him that if disaster came upon the Courier, it wouldn’t become legend. His own company would merely repudiate the vehicle, its whole concept if need be—and try for another. His country would do the same. He put both clumsy canvas mitts around the woman beside him; the mitts were double ones, he’d forgotten why. Women weren’t pushed toward the unknowns that were common enough to men. So that when one of those great unknowns came over them, they mightn’t even know it. “You’re going for glory—” he’d said.

  Two gentlemen lying exhausted on the floor, as if after love. When that wasn’t the case, or even the impulse, why should memory of love awaken in Gilpin after so long? The air had a lemony tang over a snuff underbase, like adolescent sweat. Even in his maturity he’d secretly felt that all sexuality belonged more rightfully to the young. His last involvement, with the woman photographer Purvis, had already had too much pity in it for health—though he’d never believed that her desire for a sex change was more than a forlorn grasp at a fashionable deliverance of the day, from one whose weakness of orientation hadn’t been to sex but to the world. Those days, if one had to risk being publicly mad, to do so sexually was by far the easiest. Since to be publicly sexual in some sense was so much the norm.

  As for him, not impotent, nor homosexual, though he’d had his experiences—he hadn’t escaped the freakiness. Sexuality as it aged didn’t lapse, only dispersed, gently polymorphous—though he wasn’t that old. But he’d been drained, publicly too, by the open life. The Lord Newsworthy giveth and taketh away, a little of the psyche being smeared like printer’s ink on the public thumb every morning—to the disadvantage of both parties. Men and women directly under the yellow news glare became publicly bedworthy. I went the other way—toward a public chastity—without even feeling it. Philanthropy can shrivel one. Mass love dissipates; the saints have that unfocused stare. One has to love singly—even daughters. I forgot to live privately.

  Lying on his back, he sees that the Free Room’s ceiling is stenciled with stars, as if there aren’t enough of them around already. Centered in them is a photostat of the living-station. The private life—what a place to undertake it.

  Gilpin bubbles laughter, and breathes free.

  Mulenberg, stumbling to his feet, looks down at Gilpin in embarrassment. “It worked. Air’s normalizing.” He offers Gilpin a hand.

  “Or what passes for it.” Gilpin takes the hand and is raised to his feet. “Someone’s always rescuing me. Thanks.”

  Mulenberg’s reading his own palm. “First time I ever. Moved the machine. On my own. Well—always parlay.”

  “What?”

  “Success.”

  That’s a word Gilpin and his kind never use, on the grounds that only spiritual fools or knaves see such finish lines. But this man has an air of a maybe just as able half of the world which sees like that. He’s already made Gilpin admit it exists, and made him yearn for Mulenberg’s confidence. “Mulenberg, why don’t you stay on out there with us?” To be that other half—of Wert. And maybe—of me? “Any real chance of it?”

  Mulenberg is at the wall of dossiers, guardedly lifting a few to see if they unlock. They do.

  “Looking for someone’s? For Veronica’s?”

  “No, Tom. I’ve already found hers.” Mulenberg’s leaning toward him. Is it only from the gravity angle? “Tom—”

  I hate this first-naming, Gilpin thinks, but it’s the business way. His estimate of Mulenberg drops. “Yes, Jack?”

  “She’ll marry you in the end.”

  The hatch from the airlock opens. William Wert enters, helping in ahead of him the wife the rest of them call Seat Six. She bows, all she’s done so far, even at mealtime. Never in here without Wert, and even with him unwillingly, preferring to stay in the Hygiene Unit, where she’s under dispensation to take more than the limit of baths, according to Veronica lounging afterward in a non-NASA-issue smock, tacky yet female—the way they can be where she comes from, even when they’re princesses.

  “Gentlemen. My wife, Soraya.”

  This metal-plated room, giving off mini-illuminations which never come to much, isn’t tooled for that style of address. Let it adjust then, Gilpin thinks. Wert would have said Gentlemen if he’d found the two of us men on the floor locked in mortal embrace. Isn’t that the right temperament for the administrator of so many diverse souls? Whether Wert would have found the gauge as Mulenberg had, or known of it, is still to be demonstrated. The wife has her eyes lowered. Soraya, yes—but which of them, both so clear to him from Wert’s memoir? Blue eyes—or brown? Gilpin has no time for it. “Mulenberg—”

  Mulenberg’s turned his back on the new occupants, taking folders from the shelf one after the other, opening each, slamming it closed and shoving it back in. When Gilpin nears he pays no attention. Behind them Wert reverentially seats his wife in an Easy Chair.

  “Jack—” Gilpin says low, “you get that from Veronica herself?” Can he know what is known only to Gilpin’s lawyer, and Rhoda of the old staff? “I can’t imagine that she—”

  Mulenberg’s now strewing a bastion of the dossiers on the floor around him, his hand shaking. “She doesn’t know it yet.” He squats to the ring of folders. “Lots of roads to—glory. Why else would she come? If she isn’t—following you?” He opens a dossier, peers in and smacks it shut. “Because she’s free to? Because she’s a citizen of the world?” Another folder smacks down—open and shut quickly; what can he have found there? Or not found. “No one’s a citizen of the world. Not me. Maybe not even you.”

  “Maybe she already is. Married.” He can’t give the word Mulenberg’s emphasis.

  “Lievering? Puh. She told me that one. They never were. Nothing legal.”

  “No.” So she hasn’t told him. How Gilpin and she are married, if only legally. Six years ago, for the sake not of taxes, but of testimony. When they were about to clap him in jail. So he could transfer certain obligations. For the good of the paper. Rhoda Esher had suggested it.

  But would businessman Mulenberg, even dreamer Mulenberg, have understood the three of us in that bar near City Hall afterward—the aura of the kind of people we are? Or were.

  “It’s Rhoda who’s marrying,” Gilpin had whispered, though Rhoda was right there at the table between the two of them. “She acts like she’s the bride of the Lamb.” And looked it, in a black hat whose wings hid the red pot-holder hair and came down to her wattles. “But which one of us is the Lamb?”

  Veronica asks for Bejan rum and gets it. “Me. Now that I own The Sheet.”

  Rhoda, staring at the two bartenders behind the long bar, two Humpty-Dumpty look-alikes
, says: “And because she always answers my telephone calls, no matter how stewed I am. No matter how late.” She leaned toward the bar. “There are two of you, aren’t there?” The nearer of the two barkeeps laughed and said yes, they were twins, fraternal not identical. “That’s the way to be,” Gilpin said. Veronica lifted her glass. “To my brother, wherever he is.” The barkeep, joining them in a drink, leaned over the bar. “Tell you a story.” Once, when he and his brother worked a gay bar in Greenwich Village, his twin, trying to quell a noisy sailor who kept protesting he’d never seen twin barmen before, had snapped: “Well, there’s nepotism everywhere!” The sailor had slammed his fist down, looking around him defiantly. “Well, and why not? This is the Village, ain’t it?”

  It had seemed just the right wedding anecdote, in their case. “We three just got married,” Rhoda said. The barkeep stood them a round. “Three’s a crowd—” he said, “though if you ever need four—?” Gilpin smiled at Veronica. “A crowd, yes. That’s why we did it.”

  She’d nodded back, twirling her glass; it was the last of the Bejan. She’d worn white, but then she often did. “Now I know what to do,” she said. “Now I can lead a proper life.” The aura at their table came of knowing one’s own reasons and each other’s. Rhoda had squinted at the barman for all of them. “But it’s not the Village.” Then they had each gone home, alone.

  Here they’re four, the room’s tolerance, but by a convention fallen into the first week, privacy is always ceded the new occupants. Wert, if he wants this, would never say. Even in a fatigue suit he looks too fine-boned for authority, one who would exert it a mite too politely and maybe a little slowly—but in long sieges of any kind, still a man you’d like to have in the room. At the moment watching his wife, who’s bent to the opposite wall, scanning it. “She checks every computer setup she can here. Of course, it’s her field.”

  So she’s that Soraya. Where’s the one who went to Switzerland, by now? Surely not back in Iran. The minute Gilpin mentions countries to himself he experiences a strange dislocation. Since he’s been aboard, no one’s mentioned any. Once he’d spent nine weeks in Southern California without ever hearing the word Europe. But this is his first plane without travel talk. How could there be? “We had a little trouble with the air mix. Not enough to call for help.” Had it been? “Seems all right now.”

  Soraya turns from the wall to focus on him. Yes, the eyes are brown. How she focuses. Now on Wert. What she murmurs must be Farsi. Are they very much married, or not?

  “We’ll be off now,” Gilpin says, loud enough for Mulenberg to take the hint. “Time for the bicycle. I must have pumped halfway to Betelgeuse.” All three men glance at the window. Such glances come like tics here. Then for hours they forget to. Whatever stars they see are nameless, any time they look. And that’s distance for you.

  Wert’s been gazing out there the longest. “My wife wants me to tell you something. But first, I’ve news of my own. I’m not to be your civil administrator out there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Protests from home.”

  “Home?” Gilpin horse-laughs, jerking a thumb at the window.

  “We’re still wired to it. With bands of steel, I’d say.” Wert’s tired smile, so attractive, is really a facial mold, years in the forming. It won’t release him even in stress. “I’m not surprised. What surprised me was being appointed.”

  “Wrong politics?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind that. Spent my life at it. And when I had to leave the Department a university gave me a chair for it. Seems it’s my private life as well. I live with two women. Openly. Or did.” Wert’s smile does relax—when he regards his wife. Whose eyes are concealed again. “That’s all right. You can’t take them to state parties—but that’s all right. Just don’t have it occur that some scruffy, well-intended avant-gardists make a cause of you—which finally reaches Washington.”

  “Wash-ing-ton,” Gilpin says, as if in some Hopi dialect. He’s still eyeing the window.

  “It’s still there. As I’ve been informed.” Wert’s hand, held by his wife, twiddles itself from her grasp, opens and shuts, slaps his thigh. “My worry-beads. Had to leave them behind of course. But it’s like cigarettes, breaking yourself. Even the voyaging is not enough.” He says something under his breath.

  “Eh?”

  “I said, ‘As I should know.’”

  “Oh, there’re things we should.” It seems to Gilpin that everyone present aboard is linking these, pooling them, socializing each other down from the first peaks of the journey, when any remark had been as significant as a mountaineer’s move. “We’re going to bring down all the marvels to take tea with us. It’s what the human animal does so well.”

  Seat Six is touching Wert’s arm. “William.” The rest is in a tongue soft and twirling as an awl.

  “My wife thinks we should know the computer was programmed. For your air change. A rise in oxygen. Twenty minutes of it. Can you read computers?”

  “No.”

  “Can Mulenberg?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Mulenberg, still in his corner with his back to them, is coming out of his barrier of dossiers, slowly returning them one by one, like a man working himself out of an aberration.

  And Wert and I? Why’ve we lowered our voices?

  “She could be wrong. Not on the reading—she’s tops. On the interpretation. She’s been so upset all day.”

  How has this dignified man, who looks fifty but must be nearing sixty, got in the habit of speaking for his wife? What happened in that throwback household which must have come out of the events Gilpin’s read of? What age would she be now—pushing forty? She still looks young, but not the way American women do. Nor like Veronica—delayed. He can’t put his finger on it. “That the reason you won’t speak English?” Gilpin says to her directly.

  A half grave smile from her. A soft American “—No.” But a shrug for the triviality of it.

  “She reverted to Farsi the second we heard she was pregnant. I tell her she must be programming a son.”

  One sees how Wert’s reverted, too. Handsome and straight-backed enough to impregnate a younger wife, maybe two, with mutual pleasure, he’s newly, fussily rheumy at the eyes—a more than middle-aged first-time father, who’ll become elderly the minute the child’s born.

  “What’s upset her?”

  “I can’t—I scarcely know how to say—she’s got this singular idea.” Wert draws himself up. “I must tell you she’s the least paranoid person I know. All her dangers have been real.”

  “I know of her background.”

  Mulenberg has glided up behind the three of them. “I don’t know it.” He turns to her. “Something about this—ve-hickle? Some naggy long-eared delusion buttin’ you in the back? Like one of your burros in the back streets of Tabriz or Rezaiyeh, eh? I said ‘Beg pardon’ to one of those once.” His drawl’s suddenly Western American—and his bow to her. “Jack Mulenberg, Cabin Six. Your cabin. Like to tell us what’s botherin’ you?” Tell Daddy. He doesn’t say that, but the womanizer magic is there. What a scare that may have been—for daughters.

  “She—”

  She hushes Wert. Speaking with her hand still in his of course, “Soraya here. Okeh, listen. I am often in the Hygiene Unit. I have to bathe for the back. Old troubles there.” Her voice is low enough to please Shakespeare but matter-of-fact. “Yet for the baby I must not soak too much. So I must balance, I must think ahead. I am there often in the Jacuzzi, doing that.” Her teeth are exceptionally white. What will the baby do to them, on the diet they all have here—does she supplement? Her polite smile doesn’t compromise her, nor inform. Gilpin, having once held her very life story in his hand, is moved to see her.

  The brown eyes aren’t on him but on Mulenberg. “You know our Hygiene Unit—how it has the four doors? Three to our section—and also the door which would lead to the next cabin’s Hygiene Unit?”

  Each cabin has access to its unit from its gall
ey, from the cabin proper and from the general corridor—and so on down the line, making each cabin an autonomous section, linked to the one ahead or behind only by their adjoining Hygiene Units. Bathrooms, for God’s sake. Locked. As linking bathrooms often are in a house. Bordering all is the general corridor for access forward or aft and so to the general vehicle, enterable only on schedule, for it, too, has a set capacity.

  “That’s right.” Gilpin enjoys going over it. Helps. “So we’re the only cabin with a Hygiene Unit only on one side—the forward one. Since we’re the last cabin in the tail. Excuse me—aft.”

  “So that door—” Soraya’s saying. “That fourth door. To the next cabin’s unit. Not used. Locked. Why? What a design. Multiple capability, but they don’t allow.” She flashes a competent look at her computer wall. Her very English gains ripple from it. “So I sit in my bath, or not in my bath, and I think of how we are not to see the other passengers until the last week. And how now and then the red light in the unit comes on over a door. Only never that door.”

  While the unit’s video screen will warn you of someone’s approach, though in vague outline. Whereupon, though the room’s set up for two, you exit as soon as possible through one or another access doors. Doing this not for privacy really but because that was what one had once habitually done. And perhaps because there aren’t that many such habits one may still exert?

  Always remembering meanwhile—if you’re returning cabinward, you’ll change first from fatigue suit to the non-gravity one with its cumbersome life supports, taking yours from the hooked line of them. Or vice versa. Maybe cursing Congress for insisting on the heaviest model suit—which some say is like requiring every seat in a jet not only to have its personal oxygen mask but to wear it.