Subtle Bodies Page 8

  Ned moved his attention to the urgent question of accommodations, meaning a decent bed, not a cot, and privacy. It had to be solved.

  18 It had taken only a second’s observation to dismiss the tower accommodations as impossible. She was a pest when it came to beds. She knew it. She was a mattress hog and was used to articulating her body for sleep employing an army of pillows which was why their mattress at home took up three-quarters of the bedroom. If she had to, she would lie down on an ironing board to conceive, but she strongly preferred not to.

  Ned was a genius at logistics when he wanted to be. She needed him to be a genius now. He needed to start machinating immediately. She looked at his crotch. She had gone overboard with the teasing, obviously, given that he now had to go forth and interact.

  “Recede,” she said, addressing his lower self.

  19 He was a genius and this was a coup.

  He was slightly hyperventilating as he locked the cabin door behind them, triumphant. He had proved his ingenuity his desire his what-have-you, in spades … and his, well, erectitude because here he was, getting hard again. Nina wanted more kissing. It had taken a certain power, what he had done.

  What he had done was, he had executed a continuous single flourish ending where they were, safe and private together. He had gotten Nina up the hill, had her wait out of sight in the tower, sought out the head housekeeper, a new persona, Mrs. Murphy, and laid out to her that his wife was here and that they urgently needed their own place, and getting a key from her for the unused pristine cabin expressly built for the boy, Hume. He had been delicate but frank with Mrs. Murphy, a thin, older, darker, sighing woman he guessed to be a Filipina. Elliot had approved the arrangement, frantic as he had been with phones ringing in the hive of industry that was the cockpit of everything going on. Since anything that might delay conjugation felt unbearable, he’d avoided Joris and Gruen.

  This Wendy house was one of the many custom living setups Douglas had tried to sell to his impossible son over the years. There had been boarding schools of various kinds including a brief spell in something in Saugerties called a Hof, which had been a facility run for the youth wing of an Odinist pagan organization. Then there was the boy’s yurt. And a room somewhere in the manse, too. So they had created this House of His Own, and he’d rejected it.

  “That’s right, manhandle me,” Ned said as Nina clung to him while he edged them into the bedroom. There were two rooms, a small main room and a bedroom, and what would have to be called a kitchenette, and a bathroom. The smell of fresh paint hung in the air. Some of the window panes still bore manufacturers’ stickers. The walls were pale gray, window frames white, the floors gleaming amber pine. The main room housed an old steel desk, a chair, and a bookcase with one paperback in it, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, by H. P. Lovecraft. The kitchen had seemed to be equipped with the basics, although there was no food in the countertop refrigerator. There was a stack of new window screens awaiting installation. In the bathroom it had been similar: towels, facecloths, soap still in its wrapper, an electric fan and an electric heater, both still boxed. The windows were uncurtained. The ceiling lights functioned and there was a gooseneck lamp on a stool near the head of the bed. So they could read when their revels were over that night. Good. The bed linen was fresh. In fact, it was new.

  You could begin a new life in a place like this, which had probably been the idea, Ned thought. He imagined himself arriving with a toothbrush and a pad and pencil and sitting down to stare out at the verdure, nothing on his agenda, which reminded him that he had to find a way to cover the bedroom windows with towels, somehow. Nina was continuing with undressing him. To put up the towels he needed pushpins or a hammer and nails, and right away. Nina was being herself. She ceased long enough for him to collect a few towels and she joined him in clamping the top edge of the towels between the sashes and the casing on each of the windows looking into their bedroom. It wasn’t a neat job, but it would do.

  Nina resumed her attentions, undressing him without his assistance, slowly, like the devil incarnate she was.

  Nina wanted him naked but she liked herself to be half-dressed for the proceedings. She dropped her buckskin jacket to the floor. She liked to be taken in dishevelment, with her underwear askew or undone, outer garments barely obscuring her naughty bits.

  She finished undressing him, kissing his genitals when she felt like it.

  20 When had buck naked turned into butt naked? Nina wondered. And when had it become common for women to refer to their own breasts as boobs, and as casually as they might refer to their elbows or ears?

  She had resisted sleep. It was midafternoon. Ned was dozing. Their limbs were still entangled. Something she liked was waking up with Ned and finding that they were in new combinations and alignments, compositions devised by their unconscious minds while they slept. Once she’d awakened to find that the soles of her feet were pressed firmly against his. She wanted everything to go on forever if possible.

  Meticulously and with strategic halts she disengaged from Ned. He could sleep some more. She was feeling almost perfect. Ned had come twice. She had a good feeling about the first shot especially. She was using the word womb a lot in her ruminations lately. Ned had been all heat and conviction. And she should be doing one of her dumb visualizations, shouldn’t she, à la her womb becoming a flowerpot suddenly exploding with geraniums? She didn’t feel like it. As a young girl she’d visualized her heart as a dark red artichoke and the leaves as things her future boyfriends would strip away and it would be dramatic.

  She was supposed to have her legs above her head by this time. Okay she was pinching her introitus shut. Now to get on with it.

  She studied her sleeping man. There was something she understood, which was why Ned had felt so urgently the need to fly east. It had to do with power. It had to do with the old days, with the dismal Roman Catholic miasma of his household, the Catholic spell over his mother and his brother, the deathly house he was raised in, the early death of his father, his escape to NYU and meeting Douglas and being included in the power group of friends. That had been his great escape, as he saw it. Right now it was like a fable where some grail or amulet has been mislaid and needed to be gotten back by a hero going into a labyrinth or dark gorge the hero had already passed through once. Oops he forgot his amulet in the gorge and has to go back. She had a better idea of what he was doing than he did. He wasn’t depressed but he wasn’t happy enough. The fucking truth was that Ned was in fact an instrument for good, both in Fair Trade and before, in the co-operative movement … what was left of it. But he could be more of a force! He was a skeptic on the subject of himself. It held him back. It was painful to her. She shook the thought away.

  She had inched herself to a sitting position on her edge of the bed. Her next feat was going to be achieving a three-quarter shoulder stand without waking her husband up. She swiveled around and raising her pelvis she levered her feet up the wall at the head of the bed. When she felt the angle was steep enough she let go of her vulva. She held the position. She was dogged. Should she throw in some visualization? It was too boring. She would distract herself otherwise. “You guys are adorable,” she murmured to her breasts. Ned was a fiend for her breasts. It was almost a dream state he went into. She was reminded that there was an amount of hair on Ned’s back she might suggest doing something about, if he were somebody else.

  Getting fucked was so interesting, seen from the peculiar detached mental moment that could descend on her during the act. She felt a flash of fellowship with all women getting fucked, the ones getting fucked carelessly or badly or cruelly, the ones fucked decently or brilliantly. She thought of the shadow of night sliding around the globe endlessly, and with the fall of night the clashing of a million cymbals sounding and representing the coming together of males and females in the Continue Humanity project, this colossal enterprise. But that was enough. There was too much blood in her head.

  She let herself relax off the wall.
She lay with her knees up for a while, and then turned on her side, sensing suddenly that something was wrong. One of the towels was moving. Where it had been clenched between the sash and casing, something was dragging it minutely to one side leaving naked glass along the edge of the window and then there was an eye and part of a face in that space and then that was gone. It was gone before she could gasp. She was freezing. Violently she caught the sheets up against her and in the process woke Ned.

  21 He hadn’t run this fast since his last field day at Frick Junior High. He was running in an attempt to lay hands on the only child of an old friend who was dead. Life was unusual.

  Peeping at naked people without their permission was a crime. He could understand an adolescent doing it, but still. When he’d realized what it was Nina was trying to tell him he’d jammed himself into his clothes. His loafers were meant to be worn with socks, not bare feet.

  He stopped to finish buttoning his shirt and to get his breath. He could see Hume. This was a lower part of the hill where the lawn had given way to brush, down past the place Douglas’s life on earth had ended. His quarry, which is what Hume was, appeared intermittently. He was on the opposite side of the stream that was roaring its way toward the flatlands. Hume was scrambling nimbly up and away through the vegetation. Douglas would have been proud.

  He was tired. He’d scared Hume, which was all he could do for now. He didn’t know if there was something generically wrong with the next generation or not. You can’t lift a cheesecake with an iron hook, somebody had said. Hume was tearing his way out of sight. He was gone. Ned turned back. Nina was coming to join him.

  Sex with Nina was so … great. And there was no work to it. Claire had thought of her own body as a votive object.

  “I wish you wouldn’t run,” she said when she reached him.

  “Why not?”

  “You could fall. People fall and die around here.” She swept her hand in the direction of the raging brook. There were slick boulders spaced across the brook that only an idiot would use to cross over. She pointed at them. “Look, you might have tried to jump on those youyouyou, my man of action, my man of action guy. Good thing I came … What’s wrong with that boy?” She was wearing a man’s engulfing white terrycloth robe and flip-flops.

  “I don’t know. What Joris said is that they were going to try homeschooling again. Hume told his mother he’s a follower of Odin. They’re a pagan group and their religion is based on Norse mythology. The whole deal is right wing.”

  Nina was a proud person. He had to remember about not over-explaining things to her. She was self-conscious about her two-year community college education but she knew more than anybody, really, and certainly more than Claire, and Claire had a PhD. It would be good not to spend too much time thinking about fucked-up children. Only children, like Hume, seemed to be the biggest risk and their child was likely to be a one and only.

  She said, “You must be cold.”

  Here it came. She had a fixation about being dressed warmly at all times, not only herself but the world. There was nothing annoying about it, or there shouldn’t be, because it came from nothing worse than out-of-control empathy. It was part of her character. She was also crazed about bedclothes, blankets. She tended to want more coverage than he did and she would frequently insist or at least imply that she knew better how comfortable he was going to be with his choice of blanket layers than he did. She laughed when he accused her of making too many blanket statements.

  They came to a decision. They would go back to the cabin, where he would scotch-tape paper towels onto the windowpanes, two layers if he went outside and could see anything. They would make tea.

  She led the way back. She was doing something. She was torquing around in the cavernous robe she had on. She was making good time.

  Her underpants dropped to the ground and she kicked them to the side, striding straight ahead. He picked them up, noted the teardrop-shaped wetness in the crotchpiece, balled them up, and put them in a pocket.

  They strove upward in silence. A couple of moments later, it was her bra. It was black, a new one. He retrieved it.

  “I’m smiling,” he said.

  • • •

  She was in the bathroom.

  After a moment, she said, “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m marveling at the feebleness of this shower and how much I don’t care anyway.”

  He went to see. The water spraying out of the showerheads smelled old or stale. It wasn’t foul. Later he could unscrew the fixture and make the flow normal. He assumed the odor would go away, with use.

  He considered her there, in the shower stall.

  “My breasts are looking at you,” she said.

  She was trying to keep him cheered up. After a baby the areolas of her perfect small breasts would take up more of the divine surface. At least that was what he expected to happen. Because she would nurse. That was already decided on. She’d once asked why men thought undressed women were not considered really naked if their nipples were obscured. He didn’t know.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Well. Quoting somebody, A pleasant despair in the region of the loins.”

  “Why despair?”

  “It’s just a quote. Post coitum triste, maybe, but I don’t really feel that. In fact I think maybe we struck pay dirt.” He thought, You’ve struck gold … fool’s gold: that’s from something. He said, “But it’s the female who gets the intuition, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not telling,” she said.

  She positioned herself so that the spray was playing directly on her face. Her hair was so long that he could grab it tight at the nape of her neck, twist up the fall, and mock-lash her with it, now and then.

  “Look how much I’m not complaining,” she said.

  “Look how much you’re repeating yourself. And get the fuck dressed. You have to meet people.”

  “I’ll look nice. I’m putting on makeup.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No I mean the right amount, about as much as for work.”

  “That much?” He said it gently.

  He was sorry for women. Nina had a rather gnarled little toe she didn’t like him to look at and she was standing awkwardly with her good foot on top of the toes of what she called her awful foot.

  She pointed at his crotch. “Do you think you’ll have time to give me my just deserts again, one more time?”

  “That remains to be seen,” he said, leaving the bathroom.

  “Wait, my breasts are still filthy,” she called. But he ignored her.

  Nina was malingering. Some day someone would explain to her why everything had to be so difficult. She was supposed to be actively calm. And what if he returned with that juvenile delinquent to deal with.

  Ned was competent. The windows were satisfactorily covered. And he was interesting. He’d asked her if she thought it meant anything that his favorite toy as a child had been a little tin periscope. She’d said she didn’t think so. And then he’d gone on about how long he’d been willing to secrete himself behind a sofa and wait for something to happen in the living room. And she’d said Well it shows once again your long attention span, but frankly, re a child, it was about as interesting as saying he was fascinated by secret passages and buried treasure. He wanted to tell her things. And then there was this: there had been a girl in the third grade named Lynn who wore a locket he was curious about. She was flirtatious, as in making an undue number of references to her behind, but with everybody. And she flaunted, if that’s the word, her locket, during these suggestive behaviors. And nobody knew what was in the locket. And then this and that had happened and he had gotten closer to her than the other boys had, and she’d said she was going to show him something secret—the contents of her locket. And what had been in the locket was, she’d explained, a collection of her desiccated scabs, from wounds that had healed, and he’d said that there had been something intimate about it an
d that in fact he’d felt like running around the play yard in some kind of triumph. Ned was increasingly into telling her the truth about everything. It was no wonder, because he’d been living for years with a piece of statuary. His mind was jammed with unshared reflections, memories …

  The cabin was weird but maybe it was just right. He’d done a neat job with the paper towels and typing paper, on the windows. When she looked around she thought of shoji screens and kabuki.

  22 She was always doing something, Nina. Somewhere in the cabin she had found a tiny rabbit-eared black-and-white TV set. Earlier, she had tried to get a news program on it, without success. Now she was sitting naked, crosslegged, on the bed, holding the thing out at arm’s length, squinting at it.

  She said, “It only works on this one channel and only in certain places in here, certain elevations, so to speak.”

  The reception was on the dappled side, but he was able to make out that she was watching an ice skating exhibition. A girl was doing a prolonged spin, head flung back.

  Nina said, “I can do that for twenty minutes.”

  “You don’t do it that often, I notice.”

  “Do you want to know why I don’t?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Because it makes me dizzy.”

  “Right.”

  He reminded her that she needed to get ready. He went outside again.

  Hume was somewhere. So be it, Ned thought.

  A little way down from the cottage a mossy granite hump about the size of a compact car stuck up out of the lawn. Ned was leaning against it. He had completed the last of the top nine calls required by Convergence business. The marches were going to be immense.

  Moss had a distinct odor. I did not know that, he thought. The odor was like the smell of urine. He pushed himself away from the rock and bent to examine the lower surfaces of the monolith more closely. Someone may have peed on it, he thought, or an animal like a stag marking its territory.