Subtle Bodies Read online

  “Now Nina, you could say Nina contains multitudes. I’ll just tell you about this because it sheds light on certain aspects of my girl. You don’t know anything about her yet, of course. You will. But here’s something she wouldn’t tell you. She’s a terrible sleeper. She starts getting night thoughts the minute she lies down. For example, we’re trying to get pregnant. So she worries about that. She can’t read herself to sleep because she gets too interested. Did I mention that she has too many interests? So she needs some kind of custom distraction to help her get to sleep. She has to get up at six thirty for work. Movies are out because even a completely crap narrative holds her attention. We tried some judge shows but she kept kibitzing the cases and soliciting my views. So then we discovered thank God ValueVision. The jewelry shows especially. It’s endless pitching by dressed-up women. Prodigies who can talk for thirty minutes about a fucking ring! About twenty minutes of focusing on the words bores her to sleep. The timer turns it off automatically. The funny thing is, it puts me to sleep, too. I recommend it. I’ve even learned things I never knew existed from it—drusy, bale, bezel, station necklace, and so on. Did you know that zircon is a real stone, I mean gemstone, and not a diamond simulant? Ever hear of a diamond simulant? And do you know what the second most cavernous state in America is? Missouri. They have over seven thousand registered caverns. Did you even know they registered caverns? Anyway, she, we, developed a comedy regimen around this sideshow. We renamed the models and the presenters and the experts. The names have to be apt. One woman who has an unidentifiable accent is Foreigna. A kind of slutty model is Traila. One woman is Wigga. Sometimes I come up with completely good names she won’t let me use because they’re unkind. She has veto power. I wanted to name a plus-sized model Ponderosa, but she said no. Also no to Refrigerata …”

  “I get it,” Joris said. Gruen laughed.

  A bout of knocking shook the door. Gruen got back under the covers. Ned went to the door and opened it, and Nina, furious about something, stood there. She strode into the room.

  There was no preamble. “Forgive me, but God damn it, you guys, these two rooms are sharing the same bathroom and I am not going to step in your spillage in my bare feet. I don’t know you that well.”

  Ned said, “We’re sorry, Nina. We—”

  “I doubt it’s you,” she said to Ned.

  “He’s toilet trained,” Gruen said, not taking it seriously enough for Nina, who turned on him.

  She pointed at Gruen as she continued. “This is what you do, and please do it for eternity. It goes like this. You unzip, raise the seat, and address the toilet from above, as follows. You take your unit out and you straddle the toilet, which yes you can do without pushing your pants down. You lean slightly forward toward the wall behind the tank. You aim straight down like your stream is an Olympic diver going down straight. You shake any drops on your unit off over the bowl. Don’t hurry before you step back. And this is the most important thing your mother never told you—and it’s rehouse your thing while it’s still over the bowl. And then check around and if you’ve spilled anything, you clean it up yourself and then you leave. It’s easy.”

  The men were rattled.

  Nina backed out of the room, closing the door softly.

  Again Gruen had his head under the covers.

  He emerged, asking if she was gone yet.

  “Good for her,” Joris said.

  Ned was proud.

  28 Ned stood in the corridor. He wanted to look at his notebook before he joined Nina in the bedroom. She was always curious about his jottings but sometimes he didn’t want to be asked about them. He could be as asinine as the next man, in his reminders and creations.

  The top page in his little notebook read:

  For Eulogy—METAPHOR

  — Life a gigantic auditorium in which a play that never ends is in progress.

  — Everything is dark, the seats, everything except the stage. People arrive in the theater.—One stream of personae goes straight to the seating. The other lines up in front of a Takacheck machine which is distributing parts to play.

  — Ultimately the Takacheck people end up on stage.

  — The theater is haunted by an immortal invisible sniper who strikes whenever he feels like it. Nothing can be done about him. He kills actors, concentrating on the older ones, but not exclusively.

  — The dead are taken out one by one. New actors join the cast. The sniper kills members of the audience as well.

  — This metaphor is useless.

  He tore the page out and rolled it into a pellet he had no idea what to do with. He flicked it down the hall. Then he retrieved it and dropped it into his pocket for flushing later.

  29 They were getting ready for bed, at last. She needed more sleep than she was likely to get in the next few days, but the problem was that around there it was like a novel. There were white spaces on the map of the relationships she was poring over.

  Ned was undressing. She expected him to say something about her underpants. He didn’t like the cut and he didn’t like the material and he called them grandma pants. When he comes back from flossing watch him say something, she thought.

  “May I say something about your unmentionables?” Ned asked.

  She was beginning to hate friendship. He was mixing up friendship with acts and atmospheres from the deluded matrix the boys had lived in for a heartbeat in the seventies. She thought, I am your friend, you idiot, and I let you into my perfect body, for Christ’s sake. “Why do you hate plaid so much, do you know?” Nina asked.

  “I just don’t like it.”

  “And why do you hate the word ‘valid,’ would you say?”

  “Because people use valid when they’re too chicken to say whether something being asserted is true or false.”

  “Oh bullshit! People may misuse it but you can just as well apply it to a piece of evidence or reasoning offered in a debate. And why would you bother to have an attitude about people who say ‘feisty’ or ‘meld’ or ‘vibrant’? Only because Douglas did, am I right? And now you can tell me if Douglas happened to have a special opinion about plaid.”

  Ned thought about it. “Okay he did.”

  “Based on what?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  She threw herself into the bed. She wanted to lie still for a while. A thing she liked about the permanent delicate subliminal trembling of the room caused by the pounding torrents below was that it kept her from dowsing for occult signals from her uterus.

  Ned joined her under the blankets, saying, “I have come here directly from the tent pole factory.”

  Nina woke Ned with an incomprehensible message in his ear. The room was black. Gently he pushed her head away from his and said, “Say it again.” He pressed the crown of his wristwatch, which illuminated the dial. They had been asleep for just two hours.

  “Something is waking me up,” Nina said.

  “Me too.”

  “Two things are. Listen. There’s something going on. In the hall. Knocking and whispering. Why don’t you go out there and look around?”

  “Because I don’t feel like it and I don’t want to know what’s going on, I don’t care.”

  “Don’t get grumbly,” she said.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” he said. “I don’t want to know what’s going on and I don’t need another task. I could be on the phone all day tomorrow trying to find out what’s going on with the Convergence, you think I need another task? You’re making me get the names of all the help in the place so you can greet them the way you want to, for God’s sake, and the staff is multiplying as we speak instead of sleeping.”

  “Multiplying like coat hangers. That’s what Ma used to say.”

  “Well Ma hit the nail on the head with that one. Nina, please be quiet.”

  She observed a pause, then said, “There are no curtains in here you know. And that peeping Tom son of your best friend is still on the loose.”

  He exploded at her. “God
damn it! He would have to be a lizard to get his head outside our window, not to mention that Niagara Falls is down there.”

  She was silent for a while, again. The hallway was still. But she was annoyed. She was wishing she’d put on her plaid underpants and gone out in the hall that way. No doubt they all hated plaid.

  Now she was remembering something she’d forgotten she did. She’d made a note to herself after the last call to her mother. She tapped Ned on the shoulder.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I think we’re being unfair to my mother too much. Do you know what the Akashic Record is?”

  “No, but you’re going to tell me. Help.”

  “I’ll be brief. It was one of her beliefs, okay? It was the theosophical idea that every thought you have gets recorded out in the ether in this thing called the Akashic Record. So I said to her, That’s the most fascist thing I ever heard of. How can anyone live with that? I must have been about twelve or thirteen and all I had to say was fascist and she dropped it immediately. I’d said the magic word. I give her credit.”

  “Wonderful,” he said. He pushed the covers down preparatory to getting up for a trip to the bathroom. They slept naked, which was unlike the nighttime protocols under Claire.

  Nina turned her penlight on his penis. “Handsome penis,” Nina said, and then said, “These are pretty, too,” brushing her naked breasts with the beam of the penlight.

  “Don’t be relentless,” he said.

  He was right. They needed their sleep.

  30 Nina was sleeping in. Yet somehow she had tasked him with the mission of finding yogurt for her somewhere. He’d forgotten to ask if he was supposed to wake her up when he found it, if he did find it. The fact that she’d had a sudden sharp food preference could be good news.

  So far he had asked two obviously wrong people if there was any yogurt they knew of. The ground floor was overrun with media. They were around every corner. The kitchen was a chaos. Calling the media people ninjas had started with Joris. It was appropriate because they were all similarly dressed in dark clothing and were always disconcertingly darting about. They came and went, came and went, communing with one another in European languages, German mainly. Elliot had instructed the friends not to interact with the media.

  Ned had his petitions with him, arranged with the top blank petition just askew enough to show that it rested on a thick block of filled-up petition forms. That was show business. There were blank petition forms at the bottom of the block. Nina had gotten on his case about the petitions. She was accusing him of mixing up the question of self-worth with getting all the friends to sign. He had denied it, knowing it was true, and she had said, I’m thinking of writing your biography and I have a good title for it, but unfortunately it’s been used, and he’d said, Okay, what? and she’d said, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, you poor thing. He understood everything. She’d said she wanted him to keep his spirits up so he could keep her spirits up for the sake of their, as she was already calling it, their homunculus.

  Ned went out the front door to look at the scene developing all over the place. Elliot was trotting up the drive, followed by a ninja.

  Ned ran up to Elliot, who declined to stop, so Ned fell in beside him, all the way into the living room where Ned was inspired to hold his clipboard out in a way that blocked Elliot’s viewfield. Elliot stopped and so did the ninja.

  “My petition, Elliot. It’s against …”

  “I know what it’s against. I don’t need to sign that.”

  “What do you mean?” And this is my friend Elliot, Ned thought.

  Elliot said, “I have no time to explain this now. Look around. But Ned there isn’t going to be a war.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What we’re doing is called compellence. Compellence. It’s a bluff.”

  “So you think he’ll just leave, Hussein?”

  “He will. He’ll join Idi Amin someplace nice. Riyadh. I have to get to the office.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ned said.

  “You don’t,” Elliot said. What he was insinuating was that he, Elliot, was operating at a loftier level of contacts and information and should be left alone by Ned.

  Ned thought, At least he looks uncomfortable doing that. He said, straining for a neutral tone, “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Good! At the seminar.”

  “What seminar? Do you mean the planning session for the memorial?”

  “That’s it.”

  31 Ned found Gruen in the physic garden. Gruen was just putting his cell phone away, in his jacket pocket. He looked yellow. He said, “Never again, sambuca.”

  “I thought we learned never to get drunk on liqueur,” Ned said.

  “You should have reminded me. By the way, right here is good for phoning. Better than down by that rock, and closer.” Gruen shook himself. He said, “I missed breakfast, but a woman named Nadine Rose, I can describe her, dug up a container of yogurt for me. Now, Nadine Rose, her job is, as it was explained to me, is to fix you up with any kind of food you need between meals. She’s Jamaican. She’s the extremely pretty one, maybe thirty. For some reason she told me she was single. I didn’t ask. Nadine Rose.”

  Ned held out his petitions to Gruen. Gruen sighed and said no.

  And then it was exactly what Ned had anticipated. Gruen was sure Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons because he had done it before. And the Israelis had blown up the Osirak reactor and his recollection was that Ned had been fine with that years ago despite the fact that it was plainly illegal under international law, the same way the invasion of Iraq in the next couple of months was going to be, unfortunately.

  Ned said, “But the scale of this is going to be completely different. This is not going to be about killing seven French technicians.” Ned faltered. There were too many factors that had to be left below the surface when it came to Israel. The main one was the rightness or wrongness of asserting a right to have a state dedicated to one religion only. It was hard to be fair, very hard. And another problem was the general demographic apocalypse that Jews worldwide were facing through assimilation and low birth rates, which made it all the more urgent to get rid of the criminals who were going out of their way to speed up that process through terror, by terrorizing Israel. Ned had his own dubious solution for the Arab-Israeli problem. It was to let America be the homeland for all Jews, any Jews, from anywhere, right of return, and let the UN take over all the holy sites for Jews and Islamics alike over there. Then the world would see what the Arabs did with the place. It had no oil and the Dead Sea was evaporating.

  Ned said, “Gruen, do you really believe he has nuclear weapons?”

  Gruen had something green in his mouth. He had plucked mint leaves from a bush growing in the ruined garden.

  Ned was encouraged by Gruen’s delay in replying, and said, “War isn’t the only way. If we can convince Bush that there is going to be so much unhappiness in this country, you’ll be surprised at how fast he comes up with, oh, boycotts, seizures of assets, blowing up the ports maybe, which I could go for, I suppose, but if there’s an invasion? How much blood is going to be spilled are you thinking? And for how long? And one other thing. You want to sign this because I can tell you we are going to have millions of people in the streets, not thousands millions. Douglas would sign this petition but he’s dead.”

  Gruen’s smile was a truly beautiful thing, it had to be said.

  He signed.

  Ned said, “Now for Joris. But first Nadine Rose.”

  He had to get Joris out of the way. A Nadine Rose did exist, but her whereabouts were a mystery. No one in the kitchen at present had ever heard of yogurt, to judge by their mystified expressions when he used the word. Most of them had to be emergency hires who understandably felt no urgency to assist him in his quest. He wondered if he was signaling to them that he could safely be ignored. Ah well, he thought.

  A glowing sun room lay ahead of him, down a dim cor
ridor. He had walked through the sun room a couple of times. Ned was certain, for no good reason, that he would find Joris there.

  Blinking, he entered the brightness. The air was tepid and humid. The room was solid glass on three sides. Thriving ferns stood in copper planters along the window walls, some growing so tall they would block the vista in places for anyone sitting down. He found Joris in an oversized rattan armchair, hunched over an enviable leatherbound notebook. The chairback fanned up and out so flamboyantly that from the rear Joris had been invisible. Ned sat down next to him in a matching chair. Joris closed the notebook. His feet were resting on a grisly thing Ned hoped was one of those ingenious resin replicas the Chinese produced in every branch of home décor. It was an elephant-foot ottoman with a metal cap on top. Joris looked at Ned with his eyebrows raised in question, but his attitude was friendly enough. He waved away Ned’s apology for interrupting. Ned gripped his clipboard. The elephant foot was real, he could tell. A musty smell in the immediate vicinity that he was surely imagining seemed to be emanating from the thing.

  Joris put his hand on the block of petition forms. He said, “I know what you want and I wish I could make you happy and sign that. Also, your wife. She is nice as they come and I wish I could add to her happiness. I don’t know if you know that she asked me just lightly had you gotten hold of me yet with this petition to sign. Not asking me directly but putting a nice kind of pressure. I didn’t mind.”

  An odd thing was that Ned felt himself looking forward to the contest that was coming. And if he could have sciencefictionally gotten Nina out of bed, into and out of the shower, dressed her and fed her, all in sixty seconds so that she could come and watch them fight, he would have done it.

  Joris said, “But here’s what: they are going to do it, whatever you do. The government decides what it wants. The State sings the Song of the State. Brecht, I believe. The Congress is out of it. And war makes money for the happy few. War is like the prime interest rate, it is something the government takes care of. Or like the Geodetic Survey, it is something the government takes care of. The people don’t care. There’s no draft.