The Ground Beneath Her Feet (65 page)

In the front lobby, carved into a stone wall, was a Latin motto.
Venus significat humanitatem
. It is love that is the sign of our humanity. This was a sentiment with which we were all prepared to live.

It was perfect. So this is what they feel like, I thought: roots. Not the ones we’re born with, can’t help having, but the ones we put down in our own chosen soil, the you could say radical selections we make for ourselves. Not bad. Not bad at all. I began to think about staying home more, but on the other hand I had a motive for travel which the three rebels didn’t. I traveled, in part, to get away from Vina’s absences. To get away from the brass bed she wasn’t in, the empty bed which tormented me with memories of the times when she did turn up, usually unannounced, to remind me why I’d never married, and make our wretched liaison feel (almost) worth the pain.

Vina had moved uptown, into Ormus’s Rhodopé Building super-apartment, now expanded with their limitless unblocked funds into a complex of four apartments, “to give ourselves space.” Missing her old Canal Street haunts, she compensated by plunging into the property market. She started buying up historic houses all over the East Coast, sometimes sight unseen. I’d just look at the map and it would feel right? Also, she told me, I consulted numerologists sometimes. This is how she was right to the end, a strange mixture of high intelligence and the superstitious nonsense of her times. She loved the Orpheum, loved walking naked beneath the winking spire of the Chrysler Building and, in the opposite direction, the giant gray henge of the
World Trade Center. Nearer to home, a dark water tower stood watch over her on Martian legs. Like a rocket, she’d fantasize. Look across town. A whole fleet of rockets standing on the rooftops. They’re preparing to leave, to grab our water, blast the city to smithereens and take off, leaving us to die of thirst in our ruined urban desert. Vina was interested in Armageddon. Velikovsky’s crank best-seller
Worlds in Collision
and its sequel
Ages in Chaos
, with their theory of “cosmic catas-trophism,” the new eschatological fiction by John Wilson, the ponderous old Cold War movie
Fail-Safe
, were all favorites. You could see why she liked
The Lord of the Rings
. This offered the end of a world too, but, unusually, it was a sort of happy ending.

Across the street from the Orpheum was a little coffee-and-vegetarianism store run by New York Buddhists. The coffee was good, the vegetarianism praiseworthy, but ever since her return from Dharmsala the omnipresent downtown tinkle of Buddhism had started to get Vina’s goat. She was all in favor of noble truths but she was not comfortable with the way the Buddha, a wealthy and powerful prince who renounced power and wealth to gain enlightenment as a mendicant sage, now attracted followers among the wealthiest and most powerful class in the wealthiest and most powerful city in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. The kids in the store were sweet and by no means were they zillionaires but they weren’t carrying begging bowls or sleeping rough either, and their fellow Buddhists among the ranks of America’s arts élite seemed to have an original definition of the simple life, of the Path. Vina was not sure how much renunciation was going on, but if the Dalai Lama wanted it, she said, and if the Constitution allowed?, with those backers he’d have a shot at President, or at least Mayor of New York. She had his campaign music all prepared.
Hello Dalai. Lama-Lama-Ding-Dong
. If you lost your sense of humor and pushed her into a corner she’d admit she was on the High Lama’s side in his struggle against the Chinese, who wouldn’t be, but she’d be annoyed at being forced into the admission. Most of the time she preferred to be sardonically out of line, out of step. To sound harsher than she was. Which fooled nobody, strangely enough. People saw through her tough-guy routine, even liked her for it, and the cruder her formulations, the harder she tried to be this radical alienated individual, the more profoundly she was loved.

India still called to her, and she couldn’t understand my decision not to return. You and Ormus, she shook her head, just my luck to pick the two men in the world who turned their back on the old place. What?, I should go alone? Just me and a bunch of security guards?

Listen, I told her (her frankness lending added force to my own confessional promptings), the day doesn’t pass when I don’t think of India, when I don’t remember childhood scenes: Dara Singh wrestling in an open-air stadium, Tony Brent singing, Sherpa Tenzing waving from the back of an open car outside Kamala Nehru Park. The movie
Mughal-e-Azam
bursting into color for the big dance number. The legendary dancer Anarkali strutting her stuff. The non-stop sensory assault of that country without a middle register, that continuum entirely composed of extremes. Sure I remember it. It’s the past, my past.

But the tie is broken. There are conversations going on every day in India, conversations we’d be dragged into, that we no longer wish to have, that we can’t stomach the thought of repeating even one more time, tired arguments about authenticity, religion, sensitivities, cultural purity and the corrupting effects of foreign travel.

We
, she marveled. I suppose you think you’re speaking for Ormus too.

Yes, I said. What do you think “Tongue Twistin’ ” was about, anyway?

(“Tongue Twistin’ ” is, on the surface, one of Ormus’s lighter efforts, cast as a simple song of teenage disappointment, a verse of yearning followed by a verse of disillusion. I like the way she walk and I even like the way she smell. Yeah and I like the way she talk and I really want to ring her bell. Now I know she’s kinda crazy and a little too much, but I’m hopin’ for the strokin’ of her lovin’ touch, and I’m really not insistin’, but if we were tongue twistin’, what a twistin’ good time it’d be. The love story doesn’t work out, alas: She don’t like where I’m livin’ so she don’t care ’bout the way I feel. You know I had a lot of givin’ but she told me that I was unreal. I tried to paint her picture but I had no luck, I tried to write her story but she said it sucked. Now I’m tired of her resistin’, gonna go tongue twistin’, with someone who wants to twist with me.)

In our weariness, Vina, I think we were always as one; as we are in our love for you, which is to say our love of the joy of life itself, which you embody.
Vina significat humanitatem
. That’s the truth. It’s you.

Well, that speech deserves a reward, she murmured, curling a hand around my head and drawing me down to where she lay, nude and splendid, beneath the blind skyscrapers and the all-seeing sky. Hug me, she ordered, and I did.

A kind of India happens everywhere, that’s the truth too; everywhere is terrible and wonder-filled and overwhelming if you open your senses to the actual’s pulsating beat. There are beggars now on London streets. If Bombay is full of amputees, then what, here in New York, of the many mutilations of the soul to be seen on every street corner, in the subway, in City Hall? There are war-wounded here too, but I speak now of the losers in the war of the city itself, the metropolis’s casualties, with bomb craters in their eyes. So lead us not into exotica and deliver us from nostalgia. For Dara Singh read Hulk Hogan, say Tony Bennett instead of Tony Brent, and
The Wizard of Oz
makes a more powerful transition into color than anything in the Bollywood canon. Goodbye to India’s hoofers, Vijayantimala, Madhuri Dickshit, so long. I’ll take Kelly. I’ll take Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul and Rogers and Astaire.

But if I’m honest I still smell, each night, the sweet jasmine-scented ozone of the Arabian Sea, I still recall my parents’ love of their
art dekho
city and of each other. They held hands when they thought I wasn’t looking. But of course I was always looking. I still am.

The party girl and the recluse, the loudmouth and the silent one, the promiscuous and the marrying kind: I never really believed they’d tie the knot, but they did, and right on schedule too. Vina’s friend Amos Voight used to tell people that the celebrated ten-year engagement was just those kids’ crazy game, a flirtation that acknowledged their mutual attraction but also resigned itself to the failure between them of trust, which left them no foundation on which to build any sort of marriage. Also, he’d say, it’s just
so
good for business. The publicity, darlings, you couldn’t buy it. Voight’s philosophy of life was that you didn’t read your clippings, you weighed them, and as long as your publicity was putting on weight, why then everything was just dandy. And it was true that as a publicity stunt the suspended love affair took some beating. Even during the band’s long recording silence the unusual bond between Ormus and Vina kept them in or near the forefront of people’s minds.

The contemporary public has had a long training in Voightian cynicism; it no longer believes what it’s told. It’s convinced there’s a sub-text beneath every text, a hidden agenda behind the overt one, an otherworld running parallel to the world. Because Vina shoved her promiscuity under people’s noses, celebrated and satirized it, there were many who didn’t believe it was “real.” These citizens also openly queried Ormus’s faithful restraint. The less scrupulous newspapers and magazines assigned their finest muckrakers to the case, and even put professional gumshoes on Ormus’s tail to see who he was secretly sneaking around with, but they all came up empty. The desire to debunk the extraordinary, the urge to chop off its feet until it fits within the confines of the acceptable, is sired by envy on inadequacy. Most of us, on arriving at the notorious inn of Polypemon Procrustes in Corydallus, Attica, would find that the bed we were offered was far larger than ourselves. In the middle of the night he would seize us and stretch us screaming on the rack until we fit. Many of us who are racked by the knowledge of our smallness begrudge the few true heroes their great size.

Ormus, Vina and I: three of us came West and passed through the transforming membrane in the sky. Ormus, the youthful proselytizer of the here and now, the sensualist, the great lover, the material man, the poet of the actual, saw visions of the otherworld and was transformed into an oracle, a ten-year monk and an Art Deco-rated recluse. As for me, I must say at last that I passed through a membrane too. I became a foreigner. For all my advantages and privileges of birth, for all my professional aptitude, I was turned by the fact of leaving my place of origin into an honorary member of the ranks of the earth’s dispossessed. Indochina helped, of course, unforgettable Indochina with its forgotten yellow dead, click, and the firestorm of bombing in neighboring Angkor that gave birth to a life-devouring beast, the Khmer, click, which walked like an evil phoenix out of the flames to declare war on spectacles, tooth fillings, words, numbers and time. (And on cameras too. That was my narrowest escape, needing much luck as well my old trick of invisibility. Khmer-sympathizing insects saw through my cloaking devices and assaulted me, and for weeks afterwards I was laid up with malaria as well as soul-sickness on Cheung Chau island in
Hong Kong harbor, but I was mightily relieved to settle for that, and for a slow convalescence eating waterfront fish and noodles.)

Over the years I saw the hand of Mighty America fall hard on the back yards of the world, click, not the helping hand-across-the-sea extended to America’s friends but the fist which he-that-is-Mighty hammers on the green table of your country to tell you what he wants and when he wants it, i.e. right now, buster, assume the position, this means you. I came back from click the Angkoran slaughterhouse Tuol Sleng, after which I didn’t find amusing any more the name of Amos Voight’s studio; from click sickening Timor only to learn that officially, according to the word from Might Central at Foggy Bottom, there was no such place on the face of the earth; from Iran ’79 where click the Puppet King forced his people into the arms of a revolution click that ate them alive; click from blasted Beirut; click from the revolution-speckled bananarama of Central America. I came home like Godard’s soldiers bearing photographs of the dark wonders of the world, all my clicked body heaps and skull mountains and land-mined school buses and score-settling murderers and famines and full-blooded genocides, and when I opened my cheap suitcase to prove I’d kept my promise my sweetheart wasn’t around, but there were photo editors who asked me, Mr. Merchant, do you love America? Ray—is that some kind of alias, Ray?—Ray, to what extent are you a communist stooge?

Our lives tear us in half. Ormus Cama the reluctant mystic, the surviving twin, lost the double in his head and discovered instead a doubling in the whole of existence. His two eyes, seeing different whatnesses, made his head and heart ache. Something of the same sort was my fate regarding this thing, America. Because the America in which I led my well-off, green-carded life, Orpheum-America in which love is the sign of our humanity, America below Fourteenth Street, loosey-goosey and free as air, gave me more of a sense of belonging than I’d ever felt back home. Also, with the dream America everyone carries round in his head, America the Beautiful, Langston Hughes’s country that never existed but needed to exist—with that, like everyone else, I was thoroughly in love. But ask the rest of the world what America meant and with one voice the rest of the world answered back, Might, it means Might. A power so great that it shapes
our daily lives even though it barely knows we exist, it couldn’t point to us on a map. America is no finger-snapping bopster. It’s a fist.

This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began.

In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth.