Subtle Bodies (7 page)

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The interior of the manse was a poem to money and woodcraft. What had it been like for Douglas to conduct his life in perfect hand-carved settings. They were being led to the kitchen. He would like to have a name for the style of the rooms when he gave Nina his account of the trip. Rustic modern might do it. I hate money, he thought, which is adolescent of me. Sometime after college, Douglas had fallen into a huge bequest. Had he known it was on the horizon when they were egalitarians together at NYU? Nothing had been said.

They entered the kitchen, a wonder of its own, like a layout for some glossy culinary-supply catalog. On the subject of money again, if he was correct it was Douglas who’d observed that you never had the full attention of someone with a large stock portfolio while the market was open.

There was Iva, and Iva was a splendid-looking woman. She was standing at the far end of the kitchen island, weeping but not sobbing, keeping on with some cooking project. They drew around her. Iva was slicing the poles off many small onions. She seemed incapable of saying more than Thank you, in a murmur, saying it over and over. Bread was baking. There was a pan of fresh biscuits on a side counter. The woman was evidently in a cooking mania. There were platters of sliced meat set out, warm meat, he gathered, because the plastic film covering the platters was fogged.

She embraced each of them. To Ned, she felt overheated. He thought, You blend an undertone of perspiration with a good perfume and it’s erotic. The kitchen was very hot.

Now she was chopping cilantro. Hell she was theatrically beautiful. She had a Tartar face, almost, a face from the image-world of vintage Russian movies or operettas
like
The Merry Widow
. Her skin was tended-looking. Her shaped eyebrows were art. She had suave hair the color of brass. It was pulled straight back and a single heavy braid fell over her shoulder. She was wearing a too-big long-sleeved white shirt with a mandarin collar. About her sturdy bosom the less said the better. She was wearing black elf pants. He didn’t know any other name for them. She was forty-three. Nina was six years younger. Iva was barefoot. She was solid. Nina would say she could stand to lose three or four pounds.
Naughty Marietta
was another light opera.

That was it for the cilantro. She had expertise. She had moved on to opening jars of pimentos and artichoke hearts. She said, with difficulty, “I know you are all hungry.” Everybody nodded vigorously to vindicate her berserk industry. It was funny to Ned that she still sounded so German after living in America as long as she had. Of course, she was Czech, but Czechoslovakia had been part of the greater German culture-zone, so possibly she sounded Czech, in fact. How would
he
know?

The grouping in the room was odd. Elliot was standing apart, superintending. The others had all been able to make some kind of personal condolences to Iva, and Ned hadn’t. Now Elliot seemed to be nudging the group prematurely toward the dining room.

Ned touched Iva’s arm. He said, “I loved Douglas. He was my friend and I loved him.”

He’d had no intention of soliciting a second embrace. But possibly he had moved too abruptly, judging by her reaction, a vehement gesture that utterly baffled him. She seemed to be pointing at her armpits.

Elliot interpreted the moment for him in low, tight words, to the effect that she felt she hadn’t had time to
clean up properly. It was odd. She had embraced everybody freely a minute earlier. “She’s fragile,” Elliot said.

Iva said, “Tomorrow we can sit.”

“Sure,” Ned said.

“She was in Kingston seeing the body today. She’s exhausted,” Elliot said.

She undid two or three shirt buttons, pulled the front of her shirt forward and shook it. More tears came, and tears and perspiration seemed to be uniting in a yoke around her throat.

Ned wanted to say something about Hume, or rather
to
Hume. The boy’s father was dead. Ned wanted to tell Hume he had loved his father. Then he would have said it to both of the survivors and he would be easier waiting for the next developments. “Is Hume here?” he asked, keeping any urgency out of his voice.

Iva seemed to be trying to formulate something to say. The effort failed. Elliot was beside her, consulting, and then almost immediately leading her away. He pushed his palms toward the friends, briefly, to enjoin patience. It was confusing. Elliot said something about eating in the kitchen as he left. There were stools that could be pulled up to the island.

“Hume is here,” Joris said, pointing to a doorway.

Iva was gone. Raised voices were coming from somewhere else in the house.

“My boy Hume! Come over!” Joris said. He was being cordial but his voice was too loud.

Standing half in shadow in a doorway in the back wall of the kitchen was the person Ned had glimpsed earlier, the running person.

The boy was strongly built and seemed tall for his age
of fourteen or fifteen. He was ruddy. He wore his hair in a double Mohawk, something new to Ned. He was dressed in leather, black pants or chaps and a vest. There was a symbol hanging around his neck, metal, not a cross, large. He stepped out of sight. Joris dashed after him. He returned quickly, defeated. Elliot came into the room. He looked pink. Ned thought, Dislocation everywhere. Gruen had placed stools around the island and was already furling back the plastic wrap on one of the meat platters.

Let’s get in a circle and wring each other’s hands, Ned thought.

“I have to return phone calls,” Elliot said, but sat down and began pushing platters around.

Gruen surveyed the collation and said, “There are scones here someplace.”

Where had Hume gone? Joris was off looking for him again somewhere in the bowels of the woodbutcher’s palace, as Douglas had referred to his house. Again Joris was back. Gruen had decanted pan drippings into a teacup. Now he was rolling slices of veal into tubes and carefully making them au jus before each bite.

Elliot said to all of them, “I know we haven’t had much time to talk, and I apologize. Tomorrow we will. Right now I have the phones turned off, but I have to put the system back on. I have a bunch of saved calls I have to answer. It’s been crazy here. Press is coming, a man named Fusco, Dominique Fusco, might show up tonight. We might see some police around. It has nothing to do with any of you, of course. Loose ends is all. And I’m trying to get a doctor to come in for Iva. But you should eat.”

Joris was at the massive refrigerator. Opening both doors wide, he said, “Looking for the butter.”

Elliot rose and said sharply, “Don’t touch anything in there. She doesn’t like it … because, ah, because everything’s arranged. Everything you need is on the counter.”

Joris said nothing. The exaggerated slowness with which he closed the refrigerator doors was his reply.

Ned said, “What about Hume? Can we do something? Shouldn’t he eat?”

Elliot said, “He’s so upset now it’s hard to talk to him. He has a room here and he, well, he has his own place outside, too, his cabin. And he also stays up in the woods in good weather, in a, well, a yurt. But not in weather like this, usually. Have to be careful with him.”

“Elliot, you look bad,” Ned said.

“She can’t sleep. I’m staying over here. Maybe she’ll sleep tonight.”

Ned said, “You need to come over and talk to us.”

“I know. I want to. Maybe tonight, if I can’t sleep, if it’s okay and you’re all still awake or if it’s okay if I wake you up if I come over late.” Elliot was showing anxiety, which wasn’t like him. He had suddenly decided to load crackers with brie, like a hostess, but when he saw that he had overproduced, he stopped.

Joris was eating standing up. The meal array was top-heavy with meats—Black Forest ham and Virginia ham, both, along with the roast veal and a selection of Italian charcuterie. Joris was addressing a clod of rice salad. There was pickled okra. There were sliced heirloom tomatoes the color of raw liver. There was nothing green. The okra was khaki-colored. There was wine, red and white, in carafes. Joris discovered a stick of butter thawing on a saucer under a napkin.

A timer rang and Elliot leapt to the oven and frantically
extracted a large loaf, barehanded, which he deposited in the empty sink. “I got it, it’s okay,” he shouted.

Elliot said, “Really, I have to go.”

Ned said, “If you can, come on over.”

Gruen wanted some of the fresh, hot bread, so there was a brief interval of comedy as he mangled the loaf in tearing away his portion of it, leaving a crushed rump for the others. It came back to Ned that Gruen had always inordinately loved the interior of freshly baked French or Italian bread.

Ned and Joris looked at each other with the same intent, to register forgiveness for their old friend Gruen. They loved the man. They were being reminded of it. He had been the most hapless and the most naked about showing he was honored to be part of the group. And Gruen had always been weak in the presence of good eats. Ned thought, We are what we were, but
more so
under stress, in extremis, like now. Death was fucking with the bonny boys of 71 Second Avenue. And they were dealing from
strength
, with death. Everybody had life insurance. A metal device wasn’t dropping screaming out of the sky to destroy them and their families forever. There was a Greek word for the category of promising people who met untimely deaths. One of his professors had used the word when he’d announced the death of a young colleague, weeping. He had called them the
aoroi
.

They should probably clean up the kitchen before they left for the tower. There was plenty of help associated with the place, but still.

He didn’t feel like it.

10
It was medievally cold in the tower. They were all wearing their day clothes in bed. A leg had come off the card table they had been using previously. A staff member, an older man, had wrestled a replacement table up the stairs. This table was pine, and its surface featured black rays left by untended cigarettes, ringmarks in the original veneer, all preserved under laminate. The ghosts of careless drinking days clung to the table, had been invited to cling. Ned wondered if Douglas had acquired the table from one of their haunts in the Village, like the Cedar. There was a battery-powered hurricane lamp on the table, also courtesy of the older man. Any one of them could reach it easily without getting up when it was time to put out the lights.

Ned’s spirits were low. Nina was still refusing to answer his calls. Gruen had announced that he was through talking for the night. That was fine.

Joris said, “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to talk about anymore: what I think about all the comedy we kept trying to do. What I think about it is … it was about having fun and the truth is we felt a bit superior, you know.”

Ned said, “Vietnam was over and none of us had had to go to Canada. No we felt like we could play around. So we did dada, I suppose, warmed over. I was a raw youth. I thought dada meant Salvador Dalí. I didn’t know anything. And did you know by the way that Douglas did a paper on dada for Mouvement des Idées? He actually studied it.”

“So enough about that,” Joris said.

“So okay, then I want to talk about Iraq. I want all of us to sign my petition,” Ned said.

Joris sighed. He said, “Okay, let’s get down to preliminaries.”

Before Ned could begin, Joris said, “You can’t stop mass stupidity. We keep having wars. They never make sense. One thing might help. Somebody beats the shit out of us worse than Vietnam did. If the streets were so full of cripples it fucked up traffic possibly the government would notice.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. Listen, when there was conscription there was a chance you could stop them. But they figured that out. Now it’s mercenaries and the unemployed, a lot of them. And women who want to get in on it. War is like the stock market. I know about this. People spend their whole lives showing what the crooks are doing every day in the market and nobody pays attention, and I will tell you this, you can spend your life on it, and you can die, and the next day the market is doing the same thing. Maybe you’ve seen some of my letters to the
Financial Times
.”

“But Joris. Let me tell you this. It’s different, this protest. It’s going to be in every country, practically. And
I
know about this. I know what’s coming in Europe. It’s more like the Resistance. Wait until you see the marches. We can stop it this time.”

“Okayokay.”

“Will you sign, then? We all have to sign.”

Joris said nothing.

Ned said, “Just think about it, and don’t forget that every war is men trying to kill each other who have nothing against each other …”

Joris cut in, his voice hot. “Douglas said one true thing.
He said War is the continuation of business as usual by any means necessary. So let’s stop there.”

“Okay then, later. I’m not through.”

“Oh Jesus how well do I know.”

They yawned synchronously. Ned had another subject, not as important but still important, he wanted to take up with Joris. He wanted to tell the story of Claire, and what had happened on that front. He had to do it right and not put Claire down. Gruen knew most of the Claire saga. He wanted to tell Joris about Nina, too, but not until Gruen could be part of the audience. And he was reluctant to go into the pregnancy question. It might not work. It was Joris who had said in the old days that babies were the only form in which we can love mankind. Now he had two grown sons.

Ned said, “Briefly about Claire …” Douglas’s stellar fiancée manquée Claire had turned up in Berkeley five years after graduating from NYU after Douglas had dumped her over something still unknown. Ned was managing the Pacific Cooperative Market on Telegraph Avenue when he saw her again, for the first time. She was brought to him in his office for shoplifting a couple of packets of saffron. She was a wraith, then. The breakup with Douglas had been catastrophic. She was at Cal doing graduate work in musicology and then it had happened and they had lived together for the next seven years. They’d had different reasons for not wanting to have children, hers temperamental and his, big surprise, ideological. Post Claire, with Nina, he wanted children, or a child. The idea had been to start an adoption process after they had gone through whatever the fertility clinic proposed. She was willing to adopt.