Mysteries of Motion (13 page)

“What you looking at?” She was behind him.

“For my office building.” He didn’t turn. “Think I’ll sleep there tonight.”

“Which one?”

“The G & W.”

“The—? Oh.” Her nostrils indented. Small, well cut, they moved with each of her expressions. Not all of which he had learned yet. “Can’t see that one from here.”

He saw that she’d changed to a housecoat; this too was often routine. Hers was neatly tailored and initialed. Her legs were too long for it. “But it’s there.”

She shrugged. “Heard it for sure, the other night.”

“When they bombed it? Cuban nationalists. They only got some windows. Pieces of the steps.”

“Cool.”

“Who? Them?” He wouldn’t put it past her.

“You,” she said. “But they weren’t Cubans. They don’t spread the red that style.”

“How would you know?”

She turned aside her head.

Against his will he came closer. “Do Ollie and his friends? Spread the red?”

“Them? Nuh. They’d sell nitro to a nipple-baby. But not for love.”

“Love? You call that—that mass mayhem—love? What they do anywhere? Terrorists?”

“Know any?” She had a scent now, sharp as her voice.

In Venezuela, his first job. Maybe. In Iran once, never turning his head. “I’m not sure. I—prefer not to.”

Her nostrils dilated again. “Practical man.”

“Have you? Ever known any? Or maybe…victims?”

This was a new face on her. She knew that, quickly receding backward with it, skimming quick as an animal into the brown alcoves that a floor-through handily provided. That was why certain people lived in such warrens, often without knowing so. And often at great price. He heard the bathroom door go
plock.

Know any now?—he should have asked. Would all that explain everything? Her brains and her looks, for instance—the way those people now did things. And why she hung on here would be understandable too, in a house that would have so many—outlets. Also her collection of near-nationalities; weren’t nihilists, anarchists, terrorists, as often trying to get into the world of nations as not?

Above all it would explain what infused this room, a sense of some passion hoarded, which he’d first taken to be wholly sexual but was extra to it, free-floating in the room and around her person almost palpably, like the sense of purpose that clung to a lab technician’s shoulder blades. Work—the way it molded, anywhere. Work was what he himself went around the world on, seeing the fanatic patterns it made in other people, as clear in the Ottoman Bow Grindlays Bank in Muscat, as it had been in the shack on the North Concho where his father had taken him, aged eighteen, for his first pair of handmade boots. Such work as he was imagining for her would explain the money and her easy way with it. The magazine would explain nearly everything—except him.

Unless, lured here because of what he was, he was the explanation. He’d long since stopped worrying how his life looked to other people. Bad enough to know so many of the secrets behind the headlines that the most honest of newspapers went limp in your hand. Or to be able to recognize, in the chilly intimacy of those haunts where the future was architected, people who knew much more. He hadn’t been born poor enough to crave being as rich as he had turned out. He
had
been born free enough to see that power, once it continued past the possession of the mere decencies of life, always became incidental to something else its possessor’s temperament wanted—in his case, to see the Earth exhaustively, below its crust and above. Wittingly, his life had become a construction toward that end.

“Your husband keeps forgetting who he
is,”
a vice-president, flown out to the ranch to persuade Mulenberg to attend a promotionally useful royal wedding, had exploded to Mulenberg’s wife. Often true, but not that once. The royal highness in question wasn’t his friend; to have the power not to go was a luxury he did like. He’d just returned from a site, not Oak Ridge but related to it, where he’d seen projections, still controversial, which might change man’s relationship to Earth entirely—and had been standing outside the bedroom door, his arms full of impatiens plants for his wife’s window box, wondering how that humble, tough plant would take to non-gravity (the decencies of life were becoming so curiously mutant). He heard the visitor repeat himself, a characteristic of vice-presidents which came from there being so many of them. “Who he is, Tess. Why won’t he remember it?”

From her bed, his wife said—bless her—“Because he never intended it.”

Outside, the street was quieter now. This was the lull while people were at the movies, gone from the restaurants, not yet into the night clubs. He could go.

She came out of the bathroom turning on lights, turning off shadows, confident. Who was she?

“You okay?” he said.

“Cramps.”

“Mental or physical?”

“Works both ways.” She reached to pull the window drape across, then thought better of it, staring out. The initials on her housecoat were the right ones. “I was in Cuba once. Ten years ago.”

“At seventeen? Doing what?”

“Cutting cane.”

“Cutting—what the hell were you doing that for?”

“A girl like me?”

Nobody laughing, this time.

“Oh, not for Castro,” she said. “Didn’t know I liked beards yet…And sure ’nough not for the hammer and sickle—never heard of them till we got there. Then they gave us each a cane knife, shorter but just as sharp, and explained the connection.”

For a minute he had an extreme sense of what she was. Versatile. “What’d you go for then?”

She hadn’t touched him since he’d left the bed; now she seemed about to. His flesh tensed, not knowing what it would do.

“For love.”

He was silent.

“To get out of it.” She was watching him almost tenderly, not like a colleague of the night. More like one of the club’s exercise pros, monitoring his charges, whose history he knew without having to be told, from the rich fat on them. Watching them jog off the pounds of the night before.

“Hungry?” she said. Like them, without moving an inch.

He was starving. Girls sometimes offered. If the place was theirs. “No thanks. I couldn’t eat a thing.”

“I bet.” She folded her arms. “Well then—I’m waiting.”

So was he. For a sign of how he was to do this. “For what, Veronica?”

“To see how you make it. Out.”

He picked up his jacket then, feeling for the wallet from which he’d removed credit cards, leaving only his Blue Cross card and the couple of hundreds, in tens and twenties, from which he would have settled beforehand, normally. There were girls who flapped a bold palm sideways for it, elbow on hip; there were a few who took it with a tea drinker’s pinkie; most took the money matter-of-factly, slipping it quicker than the eye into some marsupial pouch. Then there were those who looked him over and upped the price; others took something off first, maybe a bra. He didn’t choose all variants, but he knew them. His coat had an extra silk slot, pointed out to him by an unamused Edinburgh tailor, to keep extra bills in, in case he was rolled; he’d never been. The identification card said John Mulenberg, One Gulf & Western Plaza; if he were blown up or otherwise illegally damaged, would Blue Cross pay?

Hustling into the jacket, he side-glanced her bookshelves, tabbed in sections extending to the ceiling: Literature, Philosophy, Physics, no other science, nothing on his own long-gone subject, geology. A lot of poetry. No fashion magazines that he could see, a lot of small ones, mostly pamphlet size. No Marx. “You still go to school?”

“Uh-uh. Just leftovers.” She was amused.

A few shelves down, he saw why. Way up high, two diplomas, hers, high school and college.

“Any books in that office of yours?” she said. “Or only ledgers?”

“A few of each.” He was prowling now for the focus to all this. Sometimes you found such a thing right on the person’s own body, openly displayed in reactions they thought hidden. Or you had to dig for it, the way a man from the De Beers diamond trust had told him their miners were probed from anus to crown. You would get nothing as easily as that from this girl.

Sexually, he now felt happy and lumbering. The girl standing at the window, her housecoat fallen back to show lacy bra and pants of a tan that made her skin slate-blue, lounged there with a slackness she couldn’t conceal. As his father used to say, working beside him in the family greenhouse, he had brought her off. Have to bring a woman off, Johnny; they feel things, too. By rights, all animals. Shouldn’t wonder if the plants.

But this woman wasn’t putting her history on the sexual line exclusively. Or not anymore. Must he give her money now—or not? Under those eyes roving after him he had an idea he’d be clouted for it either way. Depending on why he was here. Or as who.

Ventura. He’d altogether forgotten him. To be taken for that over-sueded man who nervously mowed his lawn by Garden City protocol and at poolside proudly slapped his hairy, veinous self—that was to laugh. Yet Ventura ought to be thanked. In the morning Mulenberg would advance the tanker money and up it a trifle, saying “For the boy,” or some other sentiment. Ventura, by now inured to owing, would put up no argument. What a weakness, though—not to know when other people had payed out enough rope.

This girl would always know. Meeting her glance, he got that. Within the hull of whatever her obligations, mental or real—people always had both—she would manage herself. Somewhere beyond, though, she had her own romance she was keeping up.

A shiver went over him, but he kept on pacing, around the books again, past the old woman’s chair. He could still feel his luck, luxuriant even, as always just afterward. But like any physically based confidence, always on the borderline of change. Sometimes he felt the one overbalance the other; he knew damn well which he felt now. There were places one had to leave with more style than one had entered with; she’d as much as said. Not much admiring him for being practical. He set hands on Vivie’s rocker. Funny how he could see the stepmother, the son, clear as clear. “Can’t decide about you, Veronica. For an amateur, you’re pretty professional. For a professional, you’d be pretty ama—
Hey!
Watch it.”

But she’d only flung out her chest, flung up her hands.

The rocker between them rocked.

She brought her hands down, long and two-colored. Maybe the only consensus to be made on her was that she was beautiful—and that there was no knife in them.

“You’ll have such a very nice long couch over there to sleep on, nuh? And a cozy little office fridge, like ours here; Ollie copied one of those.” The accent came out hard for what it had been all along—British West Indian. “In your little office suite. Maybe large enough for a party of ten studs and their girls—but they always like to call it the
little
one. It occupies that part of their lives.” She squeezed her shoulders forward in that hoarding way she had. “Maybe this is my little apartment, huh? Maybe I play that game with myself.” She shrugged. She tossed her head. “‘Come right to the office marked President,’
they
say. ‘Forty-fifth floor.
I
am not the President, of course. But I have a key.’”

“I have a key,” he said.

“But you don’t aim to take women there,” she said low. “You aim to go with them. I saw.” Suddenly she pursed her double-curved figure into a simper, tiny-footed it up to him in exact imitation of a pross making like a chorine, tickled his lapel—and before he could move slid his wallet out and handed it to him, straight-arm.

Sick—a little—he opened it.

“Professional, nuh?”

“Yes.”

“Put it away.”

Waiting, she clasped her hands behind her neck. He saw how the waterways on her skull ran toward it. “When I was a kid, Ollie used to take me along with him, evenings. To deliver the goods. While Vivie was at work. She didn’t know.” Her speech was suddenly straight New York. “All they did when he and I got up there was sometimes to give me a Coke—just a black kid tagging along. Ollie only books white. But when I got home, I used to mime in the mirror everything I’d seen—like coming out of a movie. Vivie caught me at it, slapped me to the floor. So after that she took me with her.”

“What’d she work at?”

“Cashier, in night clubs.”

He stole a look at the diplomas.

She laughed. “Vivie framed those. I must be the only girl went through Hunter High doing her homework in a ladies’ lounge.”

“But you went back. To the Islands?” University of the West Indies, the college diploma said. A.B. English Literature.

“I got too—” Looking down at herself, she closed the housecoat. “Tall.”

He reached over and pushed the coat open again, exposing a nipple, stroking it until it swelled forward through the silk like a muzzle. “So they sent you back. To be safe. But you still got to—Cuba.”

She pushed down his hand. “Ollie’s not mean. Not really mean. But he’s foolish.”

“He doesn’t come in here, you said.”

“No. But his friends come to this house.”

“Puerto Rican, some of them?”

“You crazy? Bad boys from Brooklyn, they are. Warehouse Brooklyn.” Her lashes were short but thick; they could veil. “Or don’t you know.”

“No Cubans?”

“You mean political? Ollie? When Vivie used to talk about when Stokely was in the islands, Ollie could never keep in mind who he was.”

“Stokely?”

“Carmichael.”

“Who was he?”

“You never heard of him?”

“I only have a B.S.”

She laughed. He still didn’t like the sound of it.

“He was a black radical. Of the sixties. Married to Miriam Makeba, once.” She saw he didn’t know who that was either. “A singer.”

“Oh?”

She stared down at his hand, hers, interlocked at her waist. Only his hair made him the taller one. He felt her breath flow on his cheek. “You’re so white.”

Nobody move, he thought; this is where nobody moves. Not even the belly, retracting in. He had only to nuzzle in, in order to kiss her. Not appropriate. Simply stand here. Hold.

Under his glance, below the two of them, the desk. On it a couple of books—a thin clothbound one and what looked to be a dictionary, and the typewriter, in it a page inkily typed single-space, much crossed out. He was farsighted. Jaggedly irregular lines, with ink interpolations. Stanzas. He craned to read: