Subtle Bodies (11 page)

She said, “You must be cold.”

Here it came. She had a fixation about being dressed warmly at all times, not only herself but the world. There was nothing annoying about it, or there shouldn’t be, because it came from nothing worse than out-of-control empathy. It was part of her character. She was also crazed about bedclothes, blankets. She tended to want more coverage than he did and she would frequently insist or at least imply that she knew better how comfortable he was going to be with his choice of blanket layers than he did. She laughed when he accused her of making too many blanket statements.

They came to a decision. They would go back to the cabin, where he would scotch-tape paper towels onto the windowpanes, two layers if he went outside and could see anything. They would make tea.

She led the way back. She was doing something. She was torquing around in the cavernous robe she had on. She was making good time.

Her underpants dropped to the ground and she kicked them to the side, striding straight ahead. He picked them up, noted the teardrop-shaped wetness in the crotchpiece, balled them up, and put them in a pocket.

They strove upward in silence. A couple of moments later, it was her bra. It was black, a new one. He retrieved it.

“I’m smiling,” he said.

•   •   •

She was in the bathroom.

After a moment, she said, “Shit.”

“What is it?”

“I’m marveling at the feebleness of this shower and how much I don’t care anyway.”

He went to see. The water spraying out of the showerheads smelled old or stale. It wasn’t foul. Later he could unscrew the fixture and make the flow normal. He assumed the odor would go away, with use.

He considered her there, in the shower stall.

“My breasts are looking at you,” she said.

She was trying to keep him cheered up. After a baby the areolas of her perfect small breasts would take up more of the divine surface. At least that was what he expected to happen. Because she would nurse. That was already decided on. She’d once asked why men thought undressed women were not considered really naked if their nipples were obscured. He didn’t know.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Well. Quoting somebody, A pleasant despair in the region of the loins.”

“Why
despair
?”

“It’s just a quote. Post coitum triste, maybe, but I don’t really feel that. In fact I think maybe we struck pay dirt.” He thought, You’ve struck
gold … fool’s gold
: that’s from something. He said, “But it’s the female who gets the intuition, isn’t it?”

“I’m not telling,” she said.

She positioned herself so that the spray was playing directly on her face. Her hair was so long that he could
grab it tight at the nape of her neck, twist up the fall, and mock-lash her with it, now and then.

“Look how much I’m not complaining,” she said.

“Look how much you’re repeating yourself. And get the fuck dressed. You have to meet people.”

“I’ll look nice. I’m putting on makeup.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No I mean the right amount, about as much as for work.”

“
That
much?” He said it gently.

He was sorry for women. Nina had a rather gnarled little toe she didn’t like him to look at and she was standing awkwardly with her good foot on top of the toes of what she called her awful foot.

She pointed at his crotch. “Do you think you’ll have time to give me my just deserts again, one more time?”

“That remains to be seen,” he said, leaving the bathroom.

“Wait, my breasts are still filthy,” she called. But he ignored her.

Nina was malingering. Some day someone would explain to her why everything had to be so difficult. She was supposed to be actively calm. And what if he returned with that juvenile delinquent to deal with.

Ned was competent. The windows were satisfactorily covered. And he was interesting. He’d asked her if she thought it meant anything that his favorite toy as a child had been a little tin periscope. She’d said she didn’t think so. And then he’d gone on about how long he’d been willing to secrete himself behind a sofa and wait for something to happen in the living room. And she’d said Well it shows once
again your long attention span, but frankly, re a child, it was about as interesting as saying he was fascinated by secret passages and buried treasure. He wanted to tell her things. And then there was this: there had been a girl in the third grade named Lynn who wore a locket he was curious about. She was flirtatious, as in making an undue number of references to her behind, but with everybody. And she flaunted, if that’s the word, her locket, during these suggestive behaviors. And nobody knew what was in the locket. And then this and that had happened and he had gotten closer to her than the other boys had, and she’d said she was going to show him something secret—the contents of her locket. And what had been in the locket was, she’d explained, a collection of her desiccated scabs, from wounds that had healed, and he’d said that there had been something intimate about it and that in fact he’d felt like running around the play yard in some kind of triumph. Ned was increasingly into telling her the truth about everything. It was no wonder, because he’d been living for years with a piece of statuary. His mind was jammed with unshared reflections, memories …

The cabin was weird but maybe it was just right. He’d done a neat job with the paper towels and typing paper, on the windows. When she looked around she thought of shoji screens and kabuki.

22
She was always doing something, Nina. Somewhere in the cabin she had found a tiny rabbit-eared black-and-white TV set. Earlier, she had tried to get a news program on it, without success. Now she was sitting
naked, crosslegged, on the bed, holding the thing out at arm’s length, squinting at it.

She said, “It only works on this one channel and only in certain places in here, certain elevations, so to speak.”

The reception was on the dappled side, but he was able to make out that she was watching an ice skating exhibition. A girl was doing a prolonged spin, head flung back.

Nina said, “I can do that for twenty minutes.”

“You don’t do it that often, I notice.”

“Do you want to know why I don’t?”

“Naturally.”

“Because it makes me dizzy.”

“Right.”

He reminded her that she needed to get ready. He went outside again.

Hume was somewhere. So be it, Ned thought.

A little way down from the cottage a mossy granite hump about the size of a compact car stuck up out of the lawn. Ned was leaning against it. He had completed the last of the top nine calls required by Convergence business.
The marches were going to be immense
.

Moss had a distinct odor. I did not know that, he thought. The odor was like the smell of urine. He pushed himself away from the rock and bent to examine the lower surfaces of the monolith more closely. Someone may have peed on it, he thought, or an animal like a stag marking its territory.

He was keeping an eye on the cottage. Nina must be almost dressed. She knew where he was waiting and that the paper-covered windows would let her put on a shadow
play for him. She was doing it. They could doubtless get some actual curtains from the manse, if it mattered.

He stretched. It was still misty. He wanted Joris to sign the petition, and the others, too, but especially Joris. He shouldn’t be assuming he knew where his friends stood politically, based on the past. If only his personal dark sense of what it was going to be like this time could be instilled in other minds by some kind of contagion, that would help. But he didn’t have that gift. Douglas had once had it. He himself could help once the ball got rolling. He could help with the arrangements and he was always willing to be on the cleanup committee. He felt his pilot light was back on. The standard munitions the U.S. Army used were made from recycled radioactive metal. He hadn’t mentioned
that
to Joris, the new the hideous
permanent
consequences of just blowing things up. The only bad news he’d gotten during his calls was that some absolute idiot had approached ISKCON about joining the East Bay march and ISKCON had seemed interested. He was not going to have the Hare Krishnas involved if he could help it.

He walked up to the bedroom window, tapped on it, and then stepped back. Nina posed, making a cruciform shadow, which meant, he guessed, that she was ready for her debut.

He wanted to delay everything. He wanted to get up on a big rock and hold his arms out like Nina, like the Gandhi of the Catskills or the Jesus overlooking Rio de Janeiro.

Three of the nine people he’d talked to on the phone had asked him if he was all right. He’d explained about Douglas’s death to everyone, but still what they wanted was some more evident elation out of him when he got the
repeated majestic estimates for participation in the Convergence. He was elated, but apparently not enough. Rise, he said to himself.
A day of streets like rivers of fists
was from a poem.

After Nina’s ablutions, Ned had gotten the shower to work better by unscrewing the head and clearing it of a clot of matted leaf shreds. He should have done it before she’d used the thing. It had been a simple task. Nina was always nice about showing gratitude for small tasks, and it wasn’t flattery. Ned knew he was benefitting by comparison with her all-talk ex-boyfriend Bob.

They were both cleaned up and ready, or thereabouts. In fact she was still busy on her hands and knees behind the bed.

“You know what I hate?” she said.

“I already do.”

“Okay what?”

“Puncture wounds.”

“
No
. What I hate is when you lose your shoes and have to look all over the place and when you find them it’s just your shoes.”

The deodorant she had brought smelled like pine. She apologized for its not being their customary scentless type. Ned said, “That’s okay. In fact I like to use this kind once in a while. It makes me feel regular.”

“Like the masses?”

“Right.”

“Where are the masses when you need them?” she said.

“You’ll see. Just wait.”

They were both wearing jeans and black sweaters, which made no difference at all to her. Claire would have complained that they looked like twins. Hume was on his mind, still. Douglas’s original plan had been to name his son Godwin, after William Godwin the cosmocreator of anarchism, ignoring the static the abbreviation of Godwin would have brought down on the child. Now Gruen was saying that in fact Douglas had been claiming in the last couple of years that his son hadn’t been named for David Hume, as they all knew he had, but in honor of Hume Cronyn, the actor. What was the point of that? It was annoying.

It was time to go. There was something he wanted to tell Nina first, an item he was carrying around from his adolescence. Sometimes certain memories just emerged from his consciousness and if she was around, he could vent and be done. She had gotten used to it.

There was a secret he was going to keep from her, though. Before he had gotten into the shower they had tried again and to get hard he had resorted to an image of Iva, naked except for her apron, bending over and presenting a rear view to him.

Nina was finalizing the placement of barrettes in her hair. It was pulled straight back. She was looking at herself in the mirror. She said, “I need beauty treatments of some sort.”

He approved everything about her appearance. He said, “Something I want to tell you. It doesn’t exactly relate to Hume.” Bringing this up from nowhere might soften the light on Hume, it occurred to him.

She sat down on the bed.

“Okay, I would shoplift paperback books from display racks in drugstores, mostly. Mostly science fiction. The
racks were usually near the door and you could slip out quickly. Once I was getting set to take
Slan
, I think, but I got flustered and stole the wrong book, which turned out to be a thick little compendium of the plots and librettos of the great operas, something I had zero interest in. So but when I got home I was seized with the feeling I had to read the damned thing to justify taking it. I took science fiction for the pleasure of reading, so since I had this opera book in my possession some Catholic notion said I had to read it.”

Nina said, “Aaah, so that’s where you get all the minutiae about operas that you use when the subject comes up. You impressed me, you know!”

“Well then my crime was providential. Composer biographies were in there, too. A lot stuck. Is there anything you want to know about Donizetti?”

“Not right now. Are you saying this in defense of Hume, by the way?”

“I don’t know.” She would want to know more about his criminal past later. She identified him with a sort of unfailing law-abidingness.

“Was that the last one? Did you stop then?”

“No, I stole one more. From Holmes Bookstore in downtown Oakland. A big hardcover book, a history of stage magic by Ottokar Fischer, with big gorgeous plates. It was the maximum size I could fit down my pants. I wanted it and I put it down the front of my pants and pulled my stomach in and zipped my jacket over it and walked out of the place almost fainting. And that
was
the last, forever. I stopped before I was ever caught.”

He could see that she was relieved.

She said, “His first name was Autocar?”

He said, “No, Ottokar, with an O and a K. Funny. Say
that’s your name and you end up working as a mechanic in a garage? You know what that’s called?”

“No.”

“Nominative determinism. We collected examples. There was an insurance agent on Mercer Street named Justin Case. Douglas found them everywhere. The last name of a famous embezzler was Overcash. And there was a sewer commissioner whose last name was Dranoff.”

“My life was uneventful. Shouldn’t we go?”

23
There was the big house, all lit up in the gloaming. Nina seemed almost lighthearted. He imagined, just before they went in, Nina jumping up on his back and putting her legs around his waist, going in that way. She was so light and compact.