Subtle Bodies (6 page)

Ned opened up four folding chairs and placed them around the card table. Earlier, he had located the thermostat.
He was satisfied that the baseboard heating strip was functioning. His cardigan would be adequate for warmth. He had laid out his petitions and some ancillary paperwork on the table. For light, there was a floor lamp and a ruby-red pillar candle on a dinner plate. Joris would have book matches or a lighter. So would Elliot, but where was he when you needed him?

He settled himself. Company! he thought. He was hearing definite sounds of arrival, followed by sounds of ascent.

Joris looked joyful, seeing Ned. He sprang into the room from the top step and ran over to Ned and stood there with his arms spread wide, gesturing with his hands for Ned to stand up and endure what would be a crushing hug. So Ned did, full of happiness himself. Joris was the least changed. Or maybe they were in a tie. Joris had all his hair, solidly gray, dense as ever, cropped short. He and Ned were the same height, but Joris was powerfully built. He had heavy brows, a hard face generally. He had a low blink rate that Douglas had observed and proved to him. He did project a kind of Teutonic severity, which had led to Douglas referring to him
just once
as the Hun. His background was Latvian.

Joris ducked into the half-bath and closed the door. They had yet to get to the death that brought them all there. Ned waited. Joris was the smartest of them. He had gone from mathematics to maritime law, he had had the darkest worldview available then. Joris came out of the half-bath. Somewhere he had found a bottle of Evian water and two tumblers, which he brought to the table. “It’s warm,” he said, indicating the bottled water.

“That doesn’t matter,” Ned said.

“Should we talk quietly?” Joris asked, pointing his chin at Gruen.

“I’m awake,” Gruen said.

“Then you should get up,” Joris said.

“I’ll get up for dinner.”

Joris said something unfathomable to Ned. It was definitely a word. He had said it in his throat. Joris had been raised speaking Latvian at home and English at school. His mother had gone deaf when he was young. For Joris, speaking English seemed a little effortful. Often he gave the impression he was concentrating what he needed to say into pellets, which he delivered after longish intervals. Wait, no, it wasn’t his mother who had gone deaf, it was his father. He’d gone deaf working in the quarry he owned. He was like the king of a rainy country: own a veritable gold mine of a quarry, work it, work in it, get prosperous, go deaf.

Ned and Joris gripped hands across the table, elbows on the tabletop, as though they were going to arm-wrestle. “I concede,” Ned said. It was the way many discussions between them had ended.

“So, you bastard, you came. Hello,” Joris said.

They talked sadly about the freakishness and unfairness of Douglas’s fate. All of them were going to be saying the same things over and over to one another. Douglas had been a man attentive to what he ate, hyperattentive. He had taken care of himself.

Closing the topic for the moment, Ned said, “The group is finished.”

“No,” Joris said, in a voice loud enough to cause Gruen to thrust his head back into the room. “It was finished
long ago
.”

“What?” Gruen asked.

Ned said, “He doesn’t mean dead from the beginning.” He looked at Joris, who hesitated but finally said what Ned wanted to hear, “No, nono.”

“What were we, nineteen seventy-four to nineteen seventy-eight, the five of us?” Ned asked generally.

Joris closed his eyes. He was considering.

Ned had his own private image of that time. He saw himself looking back, down a very long road, at night, and seeing dimly lighted establishments spaced along the road—but at one point, far back, a gathering of bright lights something like an arcade or a carnival, red and gold lights and shreds of music coming from that location only. It was cheap.

“Look at me, I’m emotional,” Joris said. He was going to say more. Ned knew it was a sign that Joris was ready to give his finished opinion when he took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and laid them down in front of him, as he was doing.

Joris said, “What we were … well, I could quote from when we discussed this on the phone a few years ago: I said we were a cult, but not exactly a cult, a cult of friendship. We got the whole idea of it from Douglas. Without it, we would have made ordinary connections like everybody else does passing through college and not noticed anything particular about that. And some of us might not have made any connections at all. I am not naming names …”

Ned knew enough about Joris’s life to provide a base of real sympathy. They had been in contact through letters, and then email, and very rarely by phone, through the years. Joris’s marriage had produced twin boys, now grown, both in pre-med, one at the University of Hawaii, one at a
dubious school in the Caribbean. Joris was divorced. He had divorced and had never remarried for what had always seemed to Ned a singular reason. He had described himself as a married-woman fetishist, that is, a fetishist for married women except the one he was married to. And he realized it was going to ruin any marriage he undertook the same way it had wrecked the first one. Helen was the name of his first wife. Joris had said that maritime law was a perfect field for him because absolute cynicism was the best Weltanschauung to have if you were in it, because the field was strewn with pirates and crooks.

Gruen was up. He was in the broom closet aka bathroom, running water, and repeatedly blowing his nose.

Joris said, “Man you know there’s a toilet on every floor, don’t you? And a shower in the first-floor one. Not very big, though.”

Gruen rejoined them. God he was really plump.

“I would like to add something,” Gruen said, acting stately. “We were
friends
 …”

“I am coming to that,” Joris said, his voice raised.

Gruen got out of his bathrobe and gathered up his clothes. Then, standing facing out one of the great windows, dressed himself. Blasts of rain struck the glass. It was turning black, out.

For sex, Joris went to prostitutes. There were prostitutes of every caliber in Manhattan, and Joris had the money. This had gone on for years, was still going on, no doubt. Joris claimed he had never gotten an STD. And going to whores had given him a
Decameron
of stories. A drawback was that going to prostitutes meant having to use condoms all the time. Joris rarely saw his sons.

Joris said, “We tried as hard to be friends as anyone. And we
were
good friends. And what else. We were big moviegoers, cineastes, even, always at the Thalia or the Eighth Street. For a while we were a hiking club. We climbed Storm King. We hiked and then we stopped hiking. The girlfriends took over but we kept on the best we could. We carried books up to the tops of mountains and sat there and read them for forty-five minutes. In the dorm and also on Second Avenue we would sit and listen to good music, records, nobody allowed to speak. You could put it this way, we were a very strict book club run by Douglas. We made jokes. You could say that most of the time we carried out Douglas’s jokes. And here is the thing, my men. Nothing was funny that we did. Nothing. Almost. Stop objecting until you sit down with us, you there.” He meant Gruen.

Over his shoulder, Gruen said, “I’d like to point out that we were also dean’s list, all of us. And that we were getting grades fucking nicely. Everybody moved on, everybody did well.”

Joris groaned theatrically. “I’m almost through. And you’re right about that. There was something else we were getting at being …”

Ned said, “Molecular socialism.”

The other two knew what he meant. It was embarrassing to recall how seriously he had taken the whole thing, the world remade, friendship at the core of everything.

Gruen faced them in his dinnerwear, a heavy Irish white cable knit sweater, wide-leg khaki pants, loafers.

“Where are your socks?” Ned asked him.

“Every pair is wet since I got here.”

Ned went to his rucksack to dig out a pair to lend to Gruen.

Gruen looked flushed. He said, “Also don’t forget it wasn’t boring, the whole time, mostly. In the subway or waiting around for anything, we had games, like the Hollywood stars gave a picnic and Bogart brought the yogurt, you remember.”

Yes, Ned thought, plenty of word games: a bouncer was an excort and graffiti artists were ulterior decorators and Pinot Noir meant don’t urinate at night.

Joris was in the half-bath in the room they were sharing so Ned went upstairs to find the facility in Douglas’s studio. What looked like a narrow bookcase was the door to the micro-bath. It was at the end of the circle of desks by the stairs. It was nice inside. He sat down on the toilet. Taped to the door in front of him at eye level was an eight-by-ten reproduction of a Paul Klee painting, which amounted to a grid of dots of different colors, at the bottom left paling to dimness and then to nothing. It had been torn out of a bound volume by somebody. The painting’s title was DAS GANZE IST DÄMMERNED / THE WHOLE IS DIMMING.

Lo, potpourri in a tray on the toilet tank, a mass of rose petals and other petals. This was Douglas’s workplace bathroom. It was pretty feminine. Ned washed his hands and fingered the hand towels, delicate things. Women who love us, he thought, do things for us in ways they think we’ll love.

They were waiting.

We were so cineastic, Ned thought, but he rarely went to the movies now. Douglas had been serious about Film, writing tart notes to the
Village Voice
correcting the views
of their house movie critic Andrew Sarris. And each of the friends had been assigned a physical double from the world of movies: Douglas’s had been Leslie Howard, Joris’s had been John Garfield, Elliot’s had been an all purpose B-movie villain named John Ireland, and Gruen’s double had been the athlete whose name he couldn’t think of who played Flash Gordon in Saturday serials. And he himself had been informed that he was the double of the wavy-haired leading man Marx Brother Zeppo, until he’d exploded at Douglas over the stupidity of it. He remained without a double. Flash Gordon had been Buster Crabbe.

Ned asked Joris if he went to the movies much.

“No. Not much. I don’t know. I don’t enjoy the experience.”

An intercom said to come to dinner. The effect was institutional.

Everybody got up. Gruen asked them how he looked. The truth was that he looked like a model for Big Man clothing, a handsome fat man. Joris answered by nodding vigorously and Ned did the same.

They descended to leave.

Rain blew in as they opened the tower door. Douglas inserting the word
egad
into every answer he gave in Cohen’s Medicis class had been funny to him.

They went single file into the night, Joris leading.

9
Even in the dark the disconcerting bulk and reach of the main house came through. The place was lit to the gills—the whole interior flushed with light, walkway fixtures blazing, shrubbery spotlit. And Ned had been told that
there was more to the edifice than at first met the eye, e.g., three lower levels were built onto the back of the house, down the far side of the hill. Joris was plying the front-door knocker, a masterpiece of the smithy’s art.

Ned tapped Gruen’s shoulder. He said, “Hey remember the plan to buy an old manse in some rundown neighborhood near a good university and all of us retiring there together? Get a handyman special and work on it?” The idea had been to die together one by one as friends.

No one was answering the door.

Gruen said, “How I got along so well with Douglas was this. I said everything he said was great. I never said anything worse than Food for Thought.”

Ned said, “Probably a good idea, about the insights he kept sending.”

Gruen said, “Some of it was interesting. He had his cosmological scenarios. But I lied to him about following the syllabus. That was too much. I got hold of some of the titles, though, physically, thinking … someday, okay. He knew I wouldn’t read everything.
Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery
I didn’t finish. And it was short, an essay.”

“Ah, Barrington Moore,” Ned said.

“Barrington Moore. Who wrote a lot. Douglas loved him.”

The door opened and they all went in.

They seemed to be progressing from one waiting area to another. They had taken their coats off. They were in an annex off the front hall and they were still waiting.

There was ambient music. It was Dvořák. Ned said, “Douglas hated background music.”

Elliot appeared but only long enough to say he’d be right back. They were left to study the woodwork. It was like being inside a large armoire with soft lighting.

Since it was a sin to waste time, Ned decided to use the moment to agitate for the Convergence. He took a folded petition and a Bic pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.

Joris unfolded the petition, glanced at the heading, refolded it almost immediately and handed it back to Ned. His expression was apologetic.

Ned was startled. He assumed Joris had misunderstood what he’d given him.

Ned said, “It’s for Senate Foreign Relations. Next week the resolution authorizing force goes up. I’ll get a few more signatures around here and overnight it with the others I have on Monday.”

Joris shook his head. He made a negative sound. Ned stared at Joris. Gruen, not current in the stage their discourse had reached, said, “Another thing I never read was the sort-of-manifesto he wrote. It was against war.
Strike When the Gorgon Blinks!
It was a little long. I feel bad about it.”

“I never saw it,” Ned said, “so how long ago was this?”

“I don’t know. Wait, I think Grenada was in it.”

Ned turned to Joris. “They’re going to do it. Unless we—”

Joris cut him off. “I don’t care. Let them.”

Ned felt a pain inside as much like acute indigestion as anything else. It wasn’t indigestion and he was feeling cold.

“I don’t believe you,” Ned said.

“Believe me,” Joris answered, as Elliot rejoined them, beckoning.