Mysteries of Motion (41 page)

“Soraya.”

“Soraya.” Like the Shah’s former queen. Whom it hadn’t been polite to mention. “And like all your own father’s brides—is she, too, sixteen?”

“She is twenty-four.” Manoucher looked him straight in the eye.

“Ah, Jenny’s age,” Wert said too quickly. But very late, for them. Or used to be. In fact the respective ages of both were all wrong. Or more like us.

“Will she be joining you over there for your father’s wedding?”

“She stays in your country. To make the house.”

A German-style one, by the stern lift of that face? The Iranians had always admired German expertise.

“We are married only three months.”

“Still time then,” Wert said, knowing these jokes were in order. “To make him a grandchild.” Oh he was trying. This time he knew he was speaking Farsi.

Manoucher put the picture away in an inside breastpocket. He had clouded over again. “She is—
Universität
graduate.”

“Ah…so you met there.” Wert had done this evening all wrong; he was years out of date on modern Iran. He should have asked Manoucher to meet him in the bar; maybe, in spite of the Koran, they knocked back their scotch like anybody—maybe the two of them should go for a nightcap even now.

“No. I never meet her there.”

“Ah. You were engaged to her before.” Before he was sent away. But would even that explain the age of the girl?

“No, I never meet her. She say she think she see me once, somewhere from far away. Before I leave Iran. But until she see me the wedding day, she is not sure.” Manoucher put on his overcoat. Preening? Yes, a little. “It was I.”

“Do you mean—?” Of course it was meant. A young man five years away in the raw city they all wanted to conquer. But where girls were merely met. A boy who was important enough to exile, or whose family was. For nothing bad, he’d said. If you were all that and a learner too at the Western arena where for all their public scorn they carefully sent both their richest money-splashing aristocrats and their finest talk-dragons, no, you wouldn’t take just any wife. Amazing how they could act from conventions thousands of years old and still appear inventive. Confidence did it, roiling in this boy’s veins as bright as blood.

The “boy” was fastening his overcoat, regally. The doorman rushed to adjust its collar, receiving his tip by a sleight-of-hand so fast Wert only knew of it from the man’s face.

Manoucher nodded, standing tall. “I write my father, yes? And he send her to me.”

Just then the
maîtresse
appeared. In the umber light of the old entrance she came toward them on neat feet, all the time seeming to move deferentially backward. Her gold watch swung from her blouse on its rose-velvet bow-knot, pinned to her collar, not to her breast, as a woman not in service might. She would always know her place. Yet the gold chains, which he now saw ended in a bunch of functional keys at her waist, stirred in reverse, faintly sexual. In her hand, held out to Wert, was Manoucher’s button, the one he had popped.

Wert took it and passed it on. Bakhtiary kissed her hand.

“Mrs.—Vrouman.” Wert wasn’t after all surprised he remembered her name. These things had a way of storing themselves up for him. “My—godson.”

Surely no member had ever introduced her before. She took it prettily. Perhaps she’d never before brought any of them a button either. “Vrouman—” Wert repeated. Though the “Mrs.” might well be complimentary, in the same way that the British dubbed their cooks. “I had fancied you yourself were Viennese—” They exchanged looks. He had fancied. She noted it.

“No sir, I’m Dutch.”

She left, thanking them with excess, Wert thought, even for what he now recalled the English would call her—a manageress. Until he glimpsed, in the kissed hand trailing behind her, a clutch of bills. He laughed. “So you noticed her, too.” Manoucher joined in.

Out on the steps, “Gu-gude night, gentlemen,” rolled down them like suet. “Shall you have a cab?”

“There are no cabs anymore and you know it,” Wert blurted. Ashamed of himself at once, he passed the doorman a coin. “Where you staying, Manouch—the Savoy? My car’s down the alley. I’ll drive you there.”

“The Dorchester.” His eyes glinted.

Of course. Islam had bought it.

And miraculously, here was a cab. What’s it doing, creeping up to them from where it had been waiting? Marvelously gleaming cab—the cabbie had a cloth still in his hand. “’Ere you are, guvnor.” Allah had dispatched him—having been applied to beforehand. The cab, on weekly hire for one night, belonged to Manouch.

Wert pressed his hand. “I’ll be in New York shortly. Shall I speak to your wife?”

“I will not yet be home. But call on her,” Manouch said in Farsi.
“Please.”

“Of course,” Wert said, in English.

“My mother is with her.”

“I always wanted to meet that lady.”

“She knows all about you. Also, there is the other wife.” Manoucher’s teeth, suddenly shown, are magnificent. “My father’s, Mr. Beel…But Soraya does not like it.”

“Ah well, two mothers-in-law.” But shouldn’t an Iranian girl—a girl who would still submit to being married as this one had—be used to such leftover polygamous households?

“My mother and the other wife, they tell everyone in Teheran they come to New York to wait for our child. Except my father. They do not tell him.”

“Why not?”

“There isn’t yet a child,” he said, gloomy.

“Manouch. Only three months.”

“And if Soraya—if there should not be, I could not tell him,” he said distractedly. Suddenly he is a wild man, pulling at his tie, raking his hair.

“Manoucher. Why not?” Hadn’t she been a virgin? Wert dared not say it. “Manouch, control yourself.” It was what one crony back there had said to another, after the story of love unrequited, love hopeless, and more usually, love untold. He patted him.

Manoucher straightened his tie and hitched at the overcoat. It was polo-cloth color and cashmere, or maybe even vicuña, and the longest, thickest and no doubt lightest ever seen. No Briton had tailored it, no New York one either. A French expatriate from Algiers maybe, sodden with hashish. “Even it should happen—I do not tell him until his own wedding time is over, yes?” Manoucher said, in the sugary tones with which they said We are speaking the truth, you will understand, but not
the
truth. “That is his time; he should not be—worry-ed.” Only this last word being in the English in which Wert had continued to answer him.

The thought of that ninety-year-old, spry in mind as he was, on his wedding-deathbed, being incantated over, tossed ribbons and chocolate, going through it, however it would be done, only to have the door closed at last on both his exertions and his suffering—it shouldn’t bear thinking of. Why instead should Wert feel that he himself, for all his panoramas, hadn’t yet had a life? “I suppose.”

“We have our reasons, Mr. Wert. Always. Like you do.”

Young Bakhtiary’s voice is cold now, adult, remote. Not a godson’s. What it says is: We know all the nuances. And now—would you like to cut things off?

“I assume you know your father’s reasons then. Why for instance he would want to ask me that most extraordinary…personal—”

Bakhtiary bowed his head, almost all the way to his vicuña breast.

“But you can’t say. You’re not allowed to.”

A headshake, violently
yes.

“Enough.
Enough.”
The boy might break his neck. Even the cabbie was staring.

The doorman, of a higher caste, has turned his back. “Weddings—” Wert said. “I had only one of them.”

The boy raises his head. How he does alternate his ages! “When we marry, we also
give
gifts.”

“Do you.” He was thinking of Jenny’s “mouse,” tangled wet with both their fluids, and so long now in its body’s grave. If there was a grave. When he’d wanted to have his family ring, which Jenny always wore, buried with her, old Bakhtiary had whispered: “No, take it with you,” and when Bill persisted, had removed the ring himself, while the Venetian undertaker emitted a shocked Catholic sigh. “Son”—Bakhtiary had said in English—“grave-snatchers, don’t you see? What do you bet this man has a connection? In fact—” he’d said, switching loudly to Italian, “in Venice you can scarcely bury at all. Perhaps you want to send her and the ring home.” Wert could have done that through the Department, and with flags, too, but instead left her in Venice, ringless. Later, sending the ring via Bakhtiary’s kind offer to take care of such details for him—to the cousin in Georgia, who, awakened one morning by a solemn Iranian on her doorstep, had never got over it. Bakhtiary had had the ring delivered by hand.

“Well, whatever
he
wants of me, he shall have,” Wert said. “Tell him—that it was black. The mouse was black.”

For a moment Manoucher didn’t get it; then his head cocked, smiling sadly. “Thank you. And bless you.” They embraced, kissing cheeks. After a moment, Wert leaned on the cab door. “Shall I bring over your mother her sweater set?” he said in English.

Manoucher grinned. “Already done.”

And probably by hand. “I’m loathe to let you go,” Wert said, the old Farsi formalities liquid in his throat. “You can see, my dear friend, that I don’t want to.” He stood aside for Manouch to get in the cab. “Give your father my eternal love.” In Farsi it was easier. “Tell him I keep his letters always. And the copy he gave me of the
Gulshan-i-Raz.”

“He gave you—that?” When Manouch was caught off guard, the mask made by the mustache faded. One saw the man behind it.

“I shall send it to your first son.”

The boy sat back without speaking. Damn stupid of you, Wert. He stuck his head in the cab. “Manouch. The child will come. And in time, maybe, to have your father see the—what will it be?—the one hundred and seventieth of his line?”

“The seventy-sixth. He exaggerates.” Was the kid smiling? No, but the man was.

“Right. Still, you’re the seventy-fifth. To an American, that’s—what's your New York address by the way?”

A card was slipped to him, bearing more numbers on it than he’d ever seen on one address. “Where’s
that?”

“Queens Boulevard.”

They burst out laughing again. That used to happen—instant double laughter with the father. Who’d once said, Perhaps we two should be in oratorio.

“Thank you,” Manoucher said. “For the mission. You cannot
weiss
how much.”

Wert closed the cab door.

The cabbie gave a last slap to its gleaming fender. “Lovely soi-ght, isn’t it? ’Aven’t the time for a cleanup on the usual.” He swung himself in. “Except I get one of these blokes…The Dorchester, mi-ind you. Soaking in oil these days. Roight? Tally-o!”

Inside the cab, whose window was open, Manoucher, dark and erect, said no word.

Wert drove home roiled with emotion. Landscapes of it were passing one another in his breast, which must have been empty-ready for them. Meshed, Manila, Venice, and Athens, Georgia—as seen through Jenny’s eyes. Teheran—though he’d never seen Bakhtiary there, or ever again since Venice. And Queens Boulevard, which he hadn’t yet seen. In his youth, some such interweaving was what he’d come to the Department for. Yet he could no longer see himself making any new moves for the future among these scenes, even though he had no thought of leaving them. Other people might be kindling to new passions, or like the old man—to further news from life. But these days Wert waited for others to set things going; his own letters to Bakhtiary had said as much. Very liberating it had been, never to get a moral reply, and few direct ones. By the time they got around to answering each other’s thoughts, these had faded gratefully past the contemporary. Any application to living could no longer be made.

He meant to take out the box of letters and begin rereading backward, down to the first, under which reposed the red morocco box Bakhtiary had given him after the funeral—opened then and never since. It contained a small white, plaster death-mask of Jenny. “One can get anything made in Venice,” the old man said. “Better than a gravestone. One day you can break it. But not now.”

Driving home, he began to be irked by the way the Bakhtiarys, father and son, were involving him. Not with their own private lives, which in spite of all the elegant public poetry, they kept hothouse dim. But if you were a serious friend, they would keep looping your own life around your neck, hanging it on you to confront you with it, as with the box, whose purpose had been: “Mourn now.”

Wert parked the car again just off Kensington High, walked into the square where his flat was and entered the pub almost directly opposite, glad that he was in England where, having had so much of the real poetic thing, they’d developed antidotes for it. Neither a limbo nor a place to let go altogether, the Hartsdale was a spot where, though he was known, he might sit and consider his friends without having to acquire more of them. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock; he and Manoucher had dined early. He sat over a shandy, considering much, then went to the telephone, dialed the Garrick, and when it came on asked for Mrs. Vrouman.

A female voice, presumably the kitchen’s, answered: “She’s gone for the evening.” No trick at all to get the voice to give him her home phone; should that tell him something? At the home number, a much superior female voice asked him to hold on, called out, “Helene Vrouman, Mrs. Vrouman,” came back to ask, “You’re not her mother’s nursing home?—ah, good,” and without fuss dealt him another number where he could reach her. He was further convinced of the woman’s prospectively tidy cool; he admired the Dutch. It always pleased him to find women of whatever class who pursued their solitary way with sure, businesslike steps—almost as if, had he been the one to die early, Jenny would have become one of them. Cleaving through life neither remarried nor a mere widow-pensioner, and with a certain quiet personal radicalism—though by now emotional only, not political. The third telephone number had a familiarity he couldn’t place. He dialed it. “Dorchester, good evening,” the phone said.

Crossing the road to his flat, he thought of the quiet dramaturgy of machines. They ought to be members of the Garrick, all breeds of them. Somewhere on the telephone boards a few tumblers had clicked, and here he was with more knowledge than he ought to have—small change as such details were these days. Mrs. Vrouman—a woman who did instead of didn’t, which he’d sensed already—might fade back now into the collage Wert had made of her, only forgetting the roll of bills, folded perhaps around a calling card. But Manoucher—who wouldn’t stay a boy any longer, and whose missions either in Iran or in New York might therefore not be a boy’s—troubled him. He was glad of his own flat coming up—in spite of its black-and-whiteness so comfortably chaired and bedded that he could always sleep off any ambition there. And so acceptably not his.