The Ground Beneath Her Feet (60 page)

Ormus, Yul Singh says quietly, these are what can I tell you sensitive times, people are touchy, skinless, you may be giving them too much truth. I’m just saying which it’s a matter for you, okay, but you should keep under control your crazier sentiments and if I may say so also her many unscripted remarks.

That’ll be the day, Vina snaps, flinging down her hat and shades and striding off fast through the dappled sunlight, a giantess at war. She turns heads, but the thunderclouds around her look too dangerous; people leave her alone.

There’s no follow-up. Somebody’s decided to let this one go. The attack on Ormus comes fifteen months later, after the earthquake songs.

The culture needs a vacuum to rush into, it is an amorphousness in search of shapes. Ormus and Vina’s suspended love, that divine absence which we can fill with our fantasies, becomes the center of our lives. The city seems to organize itself around them, as if they are the principle, the pure Platonic essence, that makes sense of the rest.

I flatter myself that here I use the word “we” to describe a collectivity of which I am not a part.

They live separately. She’s in a third-floor loft downtown, all the way west on Canal, a large space rescued from post-industrial decay in a
building with brutalist common parts that satisfy some instinct of hers for roughness, though the loft itself is eminently creature-comfortable. She fills it with fish tanks for dumb company and whole walls of hi-fi equipment to shut out the noise of the West Side Highway and the no doubt even louder roar of Ormus’s absence, which sounds constantly in her ear like the ocean in a shell. He’s in a vast empty apartment uptown in the old Rhodopé Building, a classic-period Art Deco landmark; cocooned in space, looking east across the reservoir. Whole rooms contain nothing except a piano, a guitar, a few cushions. A fortune invested in soundproofing and air-purification systems. Ormus still wears his eye patch when he’s out and about, and always when he’s performing, as an aid to concentration, but here in this luxury padded cell he gives free rein to his craziness, his double vision: he rides it hard, busts it like a bronc. He shuts out the world and hears the music of the spheres. Though he is sworn to celibacy, he lets Maria come.

Their audiences, their arenas expand. The music gets louder. He goes on stage wearing earplugs but there’s already damage to his hearing. Vina has her ocean-roar; in his case it’s a ringing noise like a faraway alarm. This is the last sound he hears at night, the first that penetrates his consciousness each morning. Sometimes he mistakes it for air knocking in underfloor pipes or the wind whistling through a cracked pane of glass.
The ringing noise is my life
, he writes in his journal.
It’s just another thing I can’t escape
.

After a tense initial period during which they sometimes see each other in the evenings, with painfully awkward results, they agree to meet only to rehearse with the other band members, to discuss their finances and to perform. They are never alone together any more, they never eat a meal or take in a movie in each other’s company, never phone each other, never go dancing, never feed animals in the zoo, never touch. Like divorced couples, they avoid each other’s gaze. Yet mysteriously they continue to say they are both deeply, irreversibly, for-ever-and-a-day in love.

What can this mean?

It means that they are with each other constantly even while they are apart. When she stands in the shower she imagines him on the other side of the glass door, watching the water run down her body, pressing his lips to the steamy glass. She puts her own lips to the inside
of the door, closes her eyes, imagines him waiting for her. The water becomes his hands, and her own hands run down her body, searching for and often becoming his touch. And when he lies in his bed he convinces himself there’s a warm hollow in the mattress beside him, as if she has just left the room; he closes his eyes and she returns, she comes close. Their curled bodies are a pair of question marks at the end of the puzzling sentence of the day.

When he writes a line he always wonders what she’ll think of it, he hears her goddess’s voice take his music and hurl it into the sky, to hang there like a shining star. And when she eats, alone or with others, she never fails to think of his carnivorous habits, his high daily intake of red meat cooked medium rare, and a look of exasperated affection crosses her face, a look which (if she is not alone) she uncharacteristically declines to explain.

Her decision to live her private life in public embarrasses and even humiliates a man as private as Ormus has become; yet he wonders every day at the raw courage of her engagement with the world, of her willingness to walk naked in its streets in the service of what she thinks of as the truth. In response to her blabbering mouth, his own reserve grows around him like a wall. She beats her fists against it, as she does against his famous oath; but she also thinks of his choices, as she thinks of him, with a respect that she accords to no one else.

Entering the same room, they crackle with the electricity of their solitary loving. They quarrel, of course. What he thinks of as his commitment to monogamy, she calls his growing absolutism. She accuses him of tyranny, which he calls fidelity. It is her nature that separates them, he replies. Her determined infidelity, her refusal to value what is of value, namely the love of a good man, himself. What he calls infidelity, she calls freedom. What looks to him like promiscuity, she provocatively renames democracy. These arguments go nowhere; like, perhaps, all lovers’ quarrels, though they cannot be ended, defused, as other lovers’ quarrels are: by oblivion’s kiss.

Everything is remembered.

And they can kiss only while they sleep; only in their dreams.

Vina continues to reveal everything to everyone all the time. The more intimate the detail the surer it is to see the light of day. When they go
on stage Ormus stands with his back to the audience, facing his fellow musicians like a conductor, Karajan with a Stratocaster, while she yells out a number to the audience, which everyone knows by now is the number of days that have passed since she and Ormus last had sex. She announces the names of her latest stopgap lovers, her Reichian belief in the healing powers of orgone energy and multiple orgasms, and the precise nature of her sexual preferences.

(Domination, bondage, aggression alternating with submissiveness, punishment, surrender: long before her eighties imitators she was bringing out into the open the flimsy repetitive secrets of our forbidden hearts, flaunting beneath the intense weight of stage lighting what had previously skulked around in the dark; demolishing—by inhabiting—taboos. For this she was predictably called the pornographer of the phonograph, the stereotypist of the stereo, by those who did not care to notice what was staring everyone in the face, namely her colossal and growing need for him, that need which she shouted to the whole planet in order to belittle and thus survive it, which hit her with redoubled intensity every morning of her life—her heart’s seismic scale, like the Richter, proceeded by doublings—and forced her into ever greater extremes of compensatory behavior, loudmouthings, promiscuity, drugs. Namely that there was only one person in all the world whom she was trying to offend: no matter how large the audience, how outrageously suggestive her performance, her true purpose was profoundly intimate, and her true audience numbered one.

Or perhaps, if I may be permitted a flash of vanity, two.

I say this because she, the queen of over-exposure, never exposed me.)

The arch-enemy of the hidden, she keeps me secret until the end. About our long afternoons on my outsize brass bed, Ormus will never learn as long as she lives. Why? Because I’m not nothing to her is why. We have
duration
, a present and a future, is why. Because a cat may look at a queen and maybe, just maybe, sometimes the queen looks right back at that hungry young tom.

Her casual amours, which she makes public, are rendered insignificant by being named. None of them lasts long, anyway: a few weeks, a couple of months at best. My love affair with her—or call it half a love affair, because half of the two of us was in love—will last for almost eighteen years.

Gayomart Cama skipped out of Ormus’s head and disappeared. The great man lost a twin brother, but (without knowing it) gained me. I’m his true Other, his living shadow self. I have shared his girl. She doesn’t tell him because this would matter to him. This would tear him apart. The people with whom you share a history: these are the people who can leave you shipwrecked and drowning.

This is how Vina will one day leave both of us.

If the Other cannot be named, the shadow self must also, by definition, be selfless. She gives me no rights over her, comes and goes as she pleases, summons and banishes me at her pharaonic whim. It’s not for me to mind about her cavalcade of playmates; certainly not to be jealous of Ormus himself. Yet each new sexual revelation comes as what I’m learning to call a
zetz
in the
kishkes
. And the fact of Ormus, of the love that can neither be nor cease to be, is a knife slowly twisted in the heart. She makes public sport of his celibacy; I’m counting differently. Every day that passes is one day closer to his goal, the day when he’ll ask her to keep her promise.

There’s only one man for me, and I can’t have him, she shouts to the crowds. Listen and I’ll sing you his beautiful songs instead.

He keeps his back to the audience. He can’t show them his pain.

The breakdown of boundaries, what Erwin Panofsky called decompartmentalization, gave rise during the Renaissance to the modern idea of the genius. The fifteenth-century manifestos and treatises of Alberti, Leonardo and Cennini leave us in no doubt that this decompartmentalization is intimately connected to the urbanization of artistic sensibility, or, rather, to the artist’s conquest of the city. The Renaissance artist is no longer a worker bee, a mere craftsman dancing to a patron’s tune, but polymathic, a master of anatomy, philosophy, mythography, the laws of seeing and perception; an adept of the arcana of deep sight, able to penetrate the very essences of things. The achievements of modern artists, Alberti proclaimed, prove that the modern world is not exhausted. By crossing boundaries, uniting many kinds of knowledge, technical and intellectual, high and low, the modern artist legitimizes the whole project of society.

Such is genius! Leonardo, Michelangelo: they claim kinship, even
equality, with the gods. The opposed destinies of immortality and destruction are theirs.

As for Ormus, at first, upon his helicoptered arrival in Manhattan, he enters a condition of worship, marveling at this new Rome, open-mouthed and slack-jawed, as did Alberti in Florence in the 1430s. Every chord he plays will be a paean to the sky-high city, he promises himself. If it can conquer the heights, so too will he.

He should have been my mother’s son. I should have been his dad’s.

One might suggest simply that Ormus Cama’s worship of the city has quickly been reciprocated; it has become the city’s worship of him. And where this city leads, this Rome, all the world’s cities quickly follow.

Alas, this is an over-simplification. If Ormus lands in Manhattan as a provincial with stars in his eyes, circumstances quickly sour his joy. The rusting decadence of the city at ground level, its shoulder-barging vulgarity, its third-world feel (the poverty, the traffic, the slo-mo dereliction of the winos and the cracked-glass dereliction of too many of the buildings, the unplanned vistas of urban blight, the ugly street furniture), and the bizarreries to which Vina initially insists on exposing him, at such boho meccas as Sam’s Pleasure Island and the Slaughterhouse, these things fuel his celebrated moral disgust. Groovy Manhattan is plainly no better than Swinging London. He retreats into high-rise heaven and watches the city float in space. This celestial Manhattan is what he loves. Against this backcloth of noble silence he will set his pet sounds.

He, too, is screaming inside. His agony will emerge as music.

Give me a copper and I’ll tell you a golden story
. Thus, according to Pliny, did the oral storytellers of old preface their fantastic tales of men transformed into beasts and back again, of visions and magic: tales told not in plain language but adorned with every kind of extravagant embellishment and curlicue, flamboyant, filled with the love of pyrotechnics and display. When writers adopted the mannerisms of these storytellers it was, says Robert Graves, because they “found that the popular tale gave them a wider field for their descriptions of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical asides, than any more respectable literary form.”

What hope can I, a mere journeyman shutterbug, a harvester of quotidian images from the abundance of what is, have of literary respectability? Like Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, a Moroccan colonial of Greek ancestry aspiring to the ranks of the Latin colossi of Rome, I should (belatedly) excuse my (post) colonial clumsinesses and hope that you are not put off by the oddness of my tale. Just as Apuleius did not fully “Romanize” his language and style, thinking it better to find an idiolect that permitted him to express himself in the fashion of his Greek ancestors, so also I … but look here, there is an important difference between myself and the author of
The Transformations of Lucius
, better known as
The Golden Ass
. Yes, you will say, there is the small matter of talent, and you’ll hear no argument from me on that score; but I’m driving at something else: viz., that while Apuleius happily admits to the fictionality of his fiction, I continue to insist that what I tell you is true. In his work he makes an easy separation between the realms of fancy and of fact; in my own poor effort, I am trying to set down the true-life account of the life of a man who saw, long before the rest of us, the artificiality of such a separation; who witnessed the demolition of that iron curtain with his own eyes and courageously went forth to dance on its remains.

Thus: