Mysteries of Motion (60 page)

“One up for St. Paul,” Gilpin murmurs, not moving.

Mulenberg has a blinding image of his two girls, united again, each flown from her coast to stand somewhere in the middle of his and their United States, maybe O’Hare Airport, looking up at him. Daddy will explain.

In the same minute he pulls Gilpin to the floor with him. Feeling along the wall of locked folders, he finds the warning plate above, and decides against warning
them.
Below, in a column of control boxes and stats, all talking to their computers, is one marked H. Ex. The inner gauge had three positions. He stretches to flick to the middle one: Norm., and slides to the floor again. What kind of floor is it has no smell, neither plastic nor dust? Breathe in, slowly.
Fac me cruce, custodieri
—his voice box sings silently.
Morte Christi, prae-mu-ni
—

“That isn’t us laughing,” Gilpin mumbles, his face close to Mulenberg’s. “Is it the ship marvelous?”

Listen to its laughter, brewing between multifold wirings from which only satire can twang. In this ark carrying to the new world enough electronic chips of info to alert a small galaxy or regulate that gross watch of Mulenberg’s, is a personality igniting—and are they hearing its first cry? In Italy once, he’d been present in a house where a baby was being born. He was in that
sala
now as the message-cry came from that odorous bedroom, twining the air with honeysuckle birth. A soul is ignited, the priest said.

The woman in Seat Six, Veronica told him yesterday, is making one.

High in the heavens its
sala
waits.

And this complex we’re in, trusting it to bear us on and on into the non-weather, along comprehensions known to no one telegrapher, is laughing. That is my
alluzinacione, illusione.

“And that is
my
dee-lu-zhee-on,” Gilpin says aloud, sleepily. But the Free Room doesn’t smell of Tuscany. He opens his eyes. Mulenberg’s already are. Gilpin’s had no reclining face that near his for years, male or female. He sees the attraction of it, animal and kin. Pillow talk, while life-as-usual hangs by a thread. The collapsed closeness of those who’ve already extorted each others’ private images. All that part of sex which isn’t sexual per se but which people bring there, because—where else? Two men lying on the floor in forced eye-contact, breathing the oxygen which in a hospital would be called intensive care.

Mulenberg’s remembering Ventura, those deathwatch eyes. Long-vanished eyeballs which had seen Veronica. Ventura’s son has been given a trust fund to which Mulenberg adds annually, though he’s never seen the boy; the shipment of Saudi crude never became possible. On account of that night he’s here—and she is—and the man opposite.

“I’ll eat with you—” she’d said, in the corridor. Hope seeped into him, simply because she remembered that last detail of their night. Though the nether side of obsession is that black hole down which all belief falls. In the corridor they of course couldn’t eat, but while they perambulated—a word her mouth spat out in scorn—she fed him tidbit histories of herself and the other two men, in sketches so sharp they scratched on the air the outline of any person talked about. “Lievering?” she’d said, to his suggestion that the man might be aboard because of his connection with her. No, Lievering’s pure chance. That’s his way. We’d better be afraid of him.

He’d asked her about Gilpin point-blank. Not a brother to me, she’d said. No, I had a brother. I don’t hear from him. I once thought my problem was to lose him. But we lose no one. Especially those. She’d seemed to Mulenberg to want to throw away every reticence, and to have him see why. He saw. Because she’s so open with him, there’s no hope for him. He doesn’t loom with her as a lover must.

No, not my brother, she’d repeated. There were tonal changes to her repeats. He noted that like a husband. But Tom’s more than a friend, even a heavy friend, she’d said. Put what I am with what he is—and together we might make a third sex. I’ve often thought of it. At the end of one of their turns on the parallelogram their path was tracing, she lifted a boxed foot. Out there—as sex gives me up—she shook the square boot—I’m fancying he’ll come to it. Mulenberg planted his boot next to hers.

“He looms with you, doesn’t he? I know why you’re telling me all this. Because I don’t.” Pshaw, you’re smart, she said. He’d stamped his own great boot, thinking of his first Indian-slender ones, in which he’d dreamed for hours before putting them in muck. “Not as I’d want to loom. But maybe—as an extra man?” He meant her to know any share would be acceptable. “Ah, I often thought of it,” she said. “How with you, I could almost repeat a man.” Her outline came clearer to him, a woman more often among her own thoughts. “What I did with women,” he said, “you have done with me.” “You’re smart,” she said, softer. “Know what, Mulenberg—” The office way she said his name smote him. “I’ve never met a man again—to talk with. That I slept with before.”

When it came time to enter the vehicle he’d managed to be behind her. “You’re in Cabin Six too?” she’d said. “Yes—I arranged it.” If she’d slapped him, he’d have still hoped. She smiled. “Down below, Mulenberg. Maybe as extra man. But not—out there. It’s not what I’m going for. What I’m going for—” The line in front of them was held up, as if waiting for her to declare. Her features were small for the strains and powers within. To one side of the hangar door where they waited there was a basket of roses. She touched one, shuddered back—and touched it again. “I’m going for the—the glass planet. Yes, that must be it. What I’m going for.” She stared straight through him, seeing it.

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?”