Subtle Bodies (20 page)

Elliot wanted it to be about friendship. Their friend Douglas was an important figure in European political culture, because of the Dreyfus
carnets
, and the Kundera journal, and a string of other less-well-known interventions, he wasn’t exactly sure what they should be called, Elliot said. A documentary on Douglas for Eurovision that was being made now, here, all around them, was going to be essential to saving the day for Iva and Hume. Two German foundations and two Israeli foundations were
this close
to setting
up a research center on forgery as propaganda, right there, funding it and setting Iva up to superintend and represent it, which he thought they would have to agree she was superbly qualified to do. Douglas had been in discussion with them for over a year. Elliot paused.

Ned had been correct. The pitch was on. Elliot was saying that he had to be frank. And what he meant by that was that Douglas had not always been polite or politic in his dealings with people in his realm of contacts, in his performances at colloquia and so on, in Europe. He had made some enemies. And there were certain names that had been expected to come over for this event who weren’t going to. Douglas had made enemies on the far right in Europe and as they all knew things were shifting and the right was coming back in spots here and there in Europe. So the picture was changing.

Ned willed Elliot to get it over with. He knew what was happening, but he resented having to concentrate to see the inner mechanism exposed. Elliot was blunt about what he wanted. They were supposed to humanize Douglas. Elliot even used the word. Joris said sotto voce, “He means
sell
him,” just before Elliot said, “It’s our job to sell Douglas for Iva and Hume.”

Elliot wanted to go back to the plan as it had originally been. He wanted the friends to divide up Douglas’s life in a particular way. He wanted them to rescind their prior refusal. He gave his ideal division of labor to them quickly, and with a certain amount of shame showing. Joris would do something on Douglas as an outdoorsman, referencing all the camping and long-distance hiking and the Appalachian Trail forays of their student days. Joris looked absolutely
astonished but said nothing. Elliot would supply Joris with some other information relevant to that, environmental groups Douglas had supported, or been affiliated with, and so on.

Ned was sorry for Joris. He wondered what in hell he himself was going to be asked to take up. If they’d devoted time to camping on six weekends over four years that would be a lot, unless Elliot was counting climbing up onto some of the larger rocks in Central Park and sitting there reading in the sun for a while. They’d joined the Outing Club and quit after one semester. The club had included non-student participants from the school’s neighborhood and they had found themselves in a hiking party led by a vigorous old woman who, pointing eastward from the top of Storm King at a line of smoke rising from some valley, had informed them that that was the location of hell.

Elliot had managed this pretty cleverly, and Ned felt disarmed, and Elliot had, after all, signed his petition.

Gruen’s assignment was to give a brief appreciation of Douglas as a friend. And then Elliot said that he wanted a few of Douglas’s pranks mentioned, which he would consult with Gruen on, as to which ones, exactly. Ned couldn’t look at Gruen and was now busy feeling dumbfounded at his own assignment. He was expected to give a short paper on Douglas’s
philosophy
, call it, and Elliot
had a paper already prepared for Ned to read or refer to
. In fact, Elliot had drafts and notes for everyone. They were going to keep things crisp. It would be a panel. Elliot would go into the highlights of Douglas’s career, the great cases.

“All for one,” Ned heard Gruen say.

Elliot took three number-ten envelopes containing their scripts from an inside pocket and handed them out.

It was interesting to Ned that he, Joris, and Gruen understood without exchanging a word that they were all going to participate in this travesty.

The meeting was over. Ned led the way and opened the door, to find Iva standing close, directly in the way, a pained, anxious smile on her face. She was waiting for a sign from Elliot and she must have gotten it because her face relaxed.

37
Nina was telling herself that she was pregnant more or less constantly, but sometimes she slipped and it came out audibly and it was beginning to annoy Ned. She was hungry. There was to be no more fine dining. She’d been told by her friend Nadine Rose that meals were going to be mess hall style now and Nadine had also told her that Iva and Elliot would be eating privately. If, in their frenzy, they were eating at all, Nina thought.

Ned was in a bleak mood. Apparently the group’s decision to mutiny had been overturned and he didn’t want to go into it and now he had to write something about Douglas’s philosophy. And Ned was saying, mostly to himself, things like
What
philosophy?
Antifascism
?

All this brooding around wasn’t good. She said, “You think the self is something like a hardboiled egg. That’s your image of it. But it isn’t, it’s something like a deck of cards.”

He ignored her.

They had made their way to one of the manse’s highest decks and Ned was at work, stretched out on a patio lounger, talking brusquely into his microrecorder. He was getting agitated, she could tell. Because he was occasionally making a fist. He wanted her to be quiet and read something
until he was through. Earlier he had said to her My darling you’re going to have to talk to yourself for a while. He’d removed his shoes and socks and was hanging his feet out into space, his ankles supported by a crossbar of the railing. His feet looked like small wings. And they would look more like wings if he would stop wriggling his toes like a mental patient.

Ned said, “Don’t talk to me.”

“I’d love to.”

Really she wanted to provoke his attention. It wasn’t fair, because he was struggling to write something he didn’t want to. But maybe a break would help him. She would try to get his attention only once. She had plenty of ammunition. She could tell him about Jacques offering her a joint but wouldn’t.

She said, “I wish I could get my karma overwith in a week or ten days instead of my whole life.”

Ned frowned at her.

“Okay then,” she said.

She was starving. Ned had perfect feet, more like drawings of feet. She had a hilarious little toe, as in hideous. Two things were annoying at present. She knew she was going to make a pest of herself at the buffet because Nadine Rose had told her that franks and beans were going to be one of the main dishes and she was going to ask if they were the nitrite kind of franks. She wouldn’t eat those, on behalf of her baby. The other thing that was bothering her was that she had something substantial to offer to Ned that might be useful for his discussion of Douglas’s philosophy, so called,
or not. Jacques had revealed to her the essence of a fairly recent piece of polemic by Douglas, called—and she had written it down on her copy of the
Times
—THE CONSENT OF THE UNGOVERNABLE. pub. Fr? Germ?

Now she had to try to make sense of her scrawled notes:

Inner Secret of Fascism!

She felt like skidding her way into Ned’s sacred ken. She was tired of sitting on her camp stool anyway. A wet black leaf defaced Ned’s right foot. He was ignoring it, concentrating. A bell was ringing downstairs. She walked over to Ned and peeled the dead leaf off his foot.

38
Ned had driven her off. And now he regretted it. He was making the most risible progress possible with his eulogy. And he was hungry because he’d insisted on skipping lunch.

He felt like cursing. He worked better when she was in the vicinity but only if she would read something, be
absorbed on her own in something. But she was born to comment. And he had no idea where she’d gone. He had checked their room and the bathroom they shared with Joris and Gruen. There had been an alien odor in the bathroom. Nina had said something about letting Jacques use their shower to freshen up. So, obviously that had happened. He had no defensible reason for objecting to it.

And if he did say anything, he knew what would come next. It would be the next big fun canard. She was going to say that not only was he Mikhail Bakunin but he was a Francophobe. And he wasn’t. For example, he thought the French had the best
names
in the world like Loik le Floch Prigeant and Fustel de Coulanges and Choderlos de Laclos.

Fuck me, he thought. The day was bright and mild. The madding crowd of service and media people was still growing. When would it stop? He made out Gruen down the slope toward the gorge talking into his cell phone. Gruen is good and I’m a shit, he thought. Because Gruen called his mother all the time. Ned called nobody except associates, which was all he had, really. And unless he wanted to yank his brother away from his duties giving absolutions and praying nonstop or whatever he spent his time doing, he had no family to speak of, nobody to call about personal things. It was melancholy but it was true. His father had died fast, of cancer, at sixty, just after retiring. He remembered his father signalizing his retirement by unstrapping his wristwatch and declaring that he was never going to wear it again. His father had been the office manager of a company in El Cerrito that made bedsprings. Amazingly, as he’d learned very late in their relationship, his father had gone into factory work as an evangelist for the Trotskyist
group he had covertly belonged to for a couple of years in his youth. He’d been elevated from the shop floor to management because he had a knack for it. His main piece of fatherly advice to Ned had been Stick with the Jews, meaning to emulate Jewish rationality and book worship. His mother and father had become more and more alienated from one another as his mother’s embrace of ultra Catholicism had tightened. Not long after his father’s death, when his mother was only fifty-five, she’d been killed in Fruitvale, in a crosswalk, by a drunk driver. His share of the settlement had paid for his tuition at NYU, a place his father had liked the idea of, for him. He didn’t know why but as far back as he could remember his brother had never been friendly to him. Whether it was a question of temperaments or was somehow connected to the fact that their mother had so obsessively been grooming her firstborn for the Church, he didn’t know. His first dried apricot had been given to him by his brother with the information that it was a human ear. His brother had been close only to their mother.

Ned decided to follow Gruen at a distance. Joris had told him that Gruen would go occasionally to stand meditatively by the gorge, alone, every day.

Gruen stopped at a high point upstream from the death site. He stood there. Ned halted. It was solemn. He liked Gruen for this. And then, startlingly, Gruen reared back and spat as hard as he could into the air above the stream. It was a jarring thing. Ned walked halfway to Gruen and shouted at him, “What was
that
?”

Gruen turned and was awkward for a moment. Ned joined him. Gruen said, “I was seeing if I could spit across.”

“Thank God,” Ned said.

Gruen said, “I’ve been wondering about it. The answer is I can’t.” Ned thought, Casually spitting in public used to be a male prerogative, sort of … it could go on Douglas’s list of deprivations that men were experiencing. A campaign against spitting in the street had been conducted in his junior high, and he remembered one of the campaign posters: If You Expectorate Don’t Expect To Rate.

Gruen was looking much healthier. On impulse, Ned embraced him. “Have you seen Nina?” Ned asked him.

“I have,” Gruen said, and patted himself on the back of his neck. Ned was not understanding Gruen’s gesture. “Do you know she trimmed me up?” Gruen asked.

Will she never cease? Ned thought.

What had happened was that Gruen had found her in an amiable conversation with Hume touching on the problem with his ankle, which was improving, and his hairstyle, which she said she loved but that could stand improvement. So they had all gone together to the house and secured barbering tools and she had been good enough to give each of them a trim. Gruen said, “Man, she
razed
those humps off his head and I got scared but he seemed to like the results.”

Ned asked, “Do you know where she is now?”

“I don’t, but she’s having a rendezvous with that French guy someplace, who
by the way
tied up the bathroom for half an hour. She’s very busy. She’s got a bunch of papers she wants to show you. Where she went to find the French guy, I don’t know.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Ned said.

He found her in the physic garden. Her back was to him. He beheld her for a couple of minutes. The sentence
I
stand here lonely as a turnstile
came to him and was unwelcome and he shook it away. It was the pickup line Douglas had used to get Claire’s attention in the Figaro, in the dim past. Nina was standing on the curb of the uninhabited fish pond, slumped, dejected seeming. “Don’t jump,” he said.

When he and Nina had parted earlier, she’d said You’re being fairly abominable. And then she’d said, Oh you’re all so busy playing into one another’s hands. She’d been irritated, but not seriously. She was glad to see him. She was carrying a clutch of papers.

“I gave Hume a haircut,” she said. “Wait till you see him. It’s
much
better.”

There was a park bench available. He stamped down the weedy overgrowth surrounding it and tested the seat for dryness. Nina looked tired. She sat down, relieved. He sat next to her.

“I’m liking him,” she said.

Ned said, “I can see that. Joris has been telling me more about him. Even when he gets into trouble there’s something original about it, it sounds like to me, although original is probably the wrong word. I don’t mean to excuse anything. When Hume was being harassed by an older girl at school he decided to follow her around saying
I moan, Naomi
. And when the principal yelled at him to leave Naomi alone Hume shouted back
Rail, liar!
and defended himself by saying he’d just been practicing creating palindromes. The principal had kind of liked Hume before and had said it was clever when the boy introduced the word tomorning into classroom discourse, Hume’s point being that it was exactly like tonight and today, so it stood to reason it was a real word. Now, what have you got there?”