Mysteries of Motion (42 page)

In the front areaway he passed the sturdy, smutted hedge which never grew. Then came a flight of the spruce stairs he much preferred to a lift. Inside, in the sitting room’s grate, there would be a fire laid pridefully high by the char whose away-all-day gentleman treasure he was; each night he lit it, a happy arsonist. On a lean marble table in the side hall he would find mail and packages brought in by the porter, who was old enough to love a lord and to settle for an American. A bottle of Bulmer’s cider was always ready beside his turned-down bed. No messages in his box. How did irritation enter in? Through what cracks?

What he first thought he saw was a white furred arm reaching out from the grate and up past the mantel; then he saw the flowers on it, crusting thickly. He turned on a lamp. A potted plant the size of a small tree stood in front of the fireplace, one long dazzling branch arching toward the ceiling, then dipping gently to trail its blossom fingers almost in his brazier. Between that and his landlord’s plinth-like marble tables there’d obviously been no place to set the plant down except on the hearth. Was there a card? No, but on the table lay a ticket which said just that—No Card—from a shop just where he thought it would be—in back of Park Lane, near the Dorchester. If he knew anything about Iranians, the pot would be special too. He knelt. It was. Thick putty-colored ware, calligraphed with early indigo, manganese purple and eye-blue, the kind of pot one saw only in museums or mosques. Or should. Sometimes there was a rare flush of pink on them. He touched it, half smiling. A lesson in how to send an unbribable deputy-ambassador—a legal pot.

He drew the curtains and turned on every light in the sitting room, rather as he did when he brought a woman here. To assure her of what was here and what uncozily wasn’t—and for later, to be able to turn the lights out. The plant was as tall as a girl might be; its buds and flowerets were unknown to him. By now he was accustomed only to a certain artificial language of flowers, anyway. He was aware, for instance, of those beaky bird-of-paradise blooms which in Southern California grew outside any dusty insurance office but in New York lorded it over the tables of flash restaurants—and that his mother’s favorite, the true American Beauty rose, seemed no longer to exist. His cousin liked freesias, which were available around her birthday. From an earlier time, there were garden sweetpeas, and those gardenias one had sent girls.

This great spray of brown bark and flushed white must come from a fruit tree, or what once had been one, tamed now to a shrub. Not apple, and not so pink as the cherry blossoms in Washington. He had an idea it wasn’t from any of the places where London got its hothouse supply either—the Scilly Isles, Kent. Algiers, maybe? Gibraltar? Crouching on his heels, he leaned forward. Wound around the plant stem was a coil of what he could identify—those same tiny tree-orchids of spotty tiger and freckle-green which Nosworthy’s wife grew on the place they’d meant to retire to, before the blacks’ unrest. “Who’d have thought it of Jamaica?” Nosy had said, last time Wert went for a visit. “I tell you who should have. Us.” Nothing had rousted Nosy’s gloom, certainly not when Gail had said, “But Nosy dear, how could we have known? We never had a tour
remotely
near.”

He went to get his bottle of Bulmer’s from his bedside and sat down again in front of this plant, or tree, with that strange wreath at its base. It was perfectly possible Bakhtiary had arranged for this flamboyant bouquet, maybe even to be made to some exotic specific from the
Gulshan,
which translated meant Rosebed of Mysteries. He saw Bakhtiary laughing up his sleeve—if his throat, in which the cells themselves must be spreading like fantasy, still allowed that. Hell. Who else could have sent that pot?

An hour later, finished with all the cider in the fridge and starting on brandy, Wert was still sitting there. He seemed to himself to have lived always between two parallel tracks which, as far as he could see into future snows, were still separate. On the one hand, human nature was the same the wide seas over. Yet on the other hand, everywhere on those seas, and clinging to the gravels and fjords as well, there were clumps of people cohesively different. This was why the world didn’t work out, and he had a job.

The big spray of fleshy blooms quivered now and then in a chill current which came from an unshuttable register; the British never really wanted to understand central heating, but like his old hotel in Manila, where the showers had been present but unconnected—they now provided it. Because of this inconveniently precious pot on his hearth, he couldn’t have the fire he preferred. It had taken over his sitting room, a warning. Its givers meant it so; he knew them. Never press a moral; give a gift that seeds the mind. Give no advice but poetry. And never confer a favor without first asking one, so that the one given may be acceptable. What favor were they going to ask—or confer—on him?

Weddings—the evening had been full of them, all airborne on the breath of Bakhtiary’s mortality, under that jaunty boast of his, “I shall smell roses all the way,” which one had only to cut shorter to see the meaning of: I shall smell. As your Jenny had, by nightfall. As one day—you. This branch dipping its gentle tip into his gift brazier—was it a rose? Named for a woman, as roses often were, or for queens? There must be a whole generation of girls named for that deposed queen whose picture used to be in every palace and hut. Like Manoucher’s Soraya, on whom he must call. Those tenacious tree-orchids, he had seen their like long before. That tenth anniversary bouquet sent him by Bakhtiary had been made of them—little Jenny-blooms with their green-pink tattery petals in handkerchief points. All of this was being done with their dreadful literalness. What was he being led through this evening, like a man wearing a blindfold it was time to drop?

Women—the whole evening had been made to murmur suggestively of them.

He was being urged to marry of course. But in all this sickly-sweet barrage there would be some steely hook of the practical. He was as sure of this as that he was now staring at an eighteenth-century pot identical with one long ago admired in Bakhtiary’s quarters at the Danieli. Its replica—in an artbook of their national museum’s treasures, which had been propped up behind it—was as Bakhtiary had said quizzically, “out on loan.” What the hook would be he couldn’t prefigure, any more than he could dispose of this particular pot by sending it home to his cousin. He had the letters, which might help. Last week’s was on his mantel. “One must learn from the physical,” Bakhtiary had written. “Everything in the universe is anticipated there.”

Anticipate he must. Or wait to be embroiled? What saddened him now was that he had a year of grace to find out what he was targeted for—about the same time as Manoucher had, to produce a son. With the help of that wife. Even makers-and-shakers like the old man had to wait for grandsons; who knew but that with the help of the little girl from Ardebil he was hanging on for just that? Or to see Manoucher safely into harbor somewhere. Both, more likely. And in the rhythm of their ways, Wert too would have to wait with them. Because he was to be a legacy: “To my beloved son, Manoucher, for use in the profession he has nobly chosen: One tame diplomat, carefully cultivated.”

Wert laughed. The flowers stirred. If that thing had been a woman instead, its nearest rosy tip could have picked his breastpocket, or put a token there. He felt ashamed, a recent habit. To its giver he was that powerful entity which their like could spend a lifetime treading the waters of feeling with—a friend. In turn, they were friends beyond any shape of friendship Wert was likely to find at home. Certainly not with Nosworthy, whose only real allegiance, after the Department, was to his wife. As Bakhtiary had once commented, this was often the case with the Americans. “We are still very Elizabethan in my country, Bill,” he wrote, “in more ways than one. Have you noticed?” No, he’d have to read up on the Elizabethans, Wert wrote back, privately marveling at how his own slapdash education was being returned to him—from their side. Sometimes he did have the scholarship, and then his own brain was picked exhilaratingly. What had this senior friend, compared to whose lineage even this pot’s was new, ever really asked of William Graham Wert of Athens, Georgia, scion of only four known generations glossed by one part-time brigadier general? Only a correspondence.

Better put the brandy away, or he might weep into his cup—a picnic mug marked St. Ives, left over from a weekend with the she-barrister. When young, he and Jenny had wanted to learn from existence what things were proper to weep for. Only with Bakhtiary had he continued that pursuit.

The mug shot from him, but being of thick ware rolled oafishly on its side, where it did have a look of its round donor when she had her legs in the air. He’d had a pleasant enough time between them. Don’t asperse that shingle she can hang out, either—her name scripted in black-on-cream, high on a fine law-court door. Given the temper of the times at home, he might well soon have need of the kind of advice she could supply from behind a desk, with her legs strictly together. “Everybody’s now sunk in dollar-shame, for which somebody
else
must suffer,” Nosy had reported. What if that bloody intractable, wise, sweet, and wily ninety-year-old should leave money—and pride would call for a whack of it—to him, Wert? He was going to be given something inconvenient. He could feel that for sure.

On matters of state, Bakhtiary always addressed him formally. “You understand us so well, Mr. Wert,” he had written once. “I hope your employers appreciate it.”

Nosy had paused over that letter, too. “Very complimentary. And what did you answer the old guy?”

Wert had written back, taking the trouble to underline, My
country
appreciates it.

Nosy’d slapped him on the back for that one. “Tough isn’t it, to be friends with any other national? There was a Frenchman once. I’m not Catholic, but I was to be godfather to his first child. His wife kicked up a rumpus clear to the Vatican. Where her uncle was a cardinal…And I was just coming
in,
you know. Wouldn’t do.”

“Just after World War Two was it?” Wert had asked. A lot of men like Nosy had come into the Department then, the last romancers of war.

“Right. And before Gail.” Nosworthy had picked up again Bakh’s little disquisition on coitus. “Right you are, Billy me boy. Keep ’em on sex. That keeps everything straight.”

That damn plant hiding his hearth made him angry. He knelt in front of it. The pot, a vase really, had been affixed to a modern base made of their overbrilliant silver. They thought nothing of cramming the centuries together however hideously. Born knee-deep in the beginnings of world art, they could well afford to leave mere taste to the parvenu West.

He put his arms around the great chill vase, and by alternately tugging and creeping backward managed to inch it safely over and off the raised fender. Waxy buds pressed him, warm and resilient; not a one dropped. He was being resisted. Over a shoulder he saw that the plant’s highest arch had gracefully entangled one of his landlord’s rapier lamps. He got up to free it, his arms carefully circling. His hair was raked; a waft of bloom entered his ear. Once, in his teens, he’d marched in a hometown parade wearing a holstered flag which had continually streamed back over its bearer in a tussle the whole laughing town had been watching; this felt the same. He went down on his heels again, pulling. There. Done. The tree, for it was surely that, now half-barred a door, but one could brush past. By its scent, which seemed to come from both their exertions, yes, it must be a rose.

Perhaps he ought to give it a drink. In his bedroom he found the carafe on the night table freshly filled, although his good char, swerved off routine by the arrival had forgot to turn down the bed. Selfishly, he stood in the doorway and drank the water himself, watching the addition to his household. Maybe best to let it die, while he was in New York, with the char off duty. Calling on the daughter-in-law must be gone through, but was obligation enough.

That was the least a conscientious bequest could do. Being one—and he meant to be decent—was chancy enough. While taking all care not to be annexed. At home, friendship died when its generation did, but with them, maybe because they had so many more generations to look back on, its obligation rested ever heavier on the young. In Meshed, one of the consular clerks, an older man with a family, had been nearly bankrupted from supporting a widow with family, no relation, because of an obligation inherited from his own father. What Wert had to guard against might be Manoucher’s supporting him—with favors impossible to accept. With a persuasion as mild and patient as their water buffalos used to be. If ever a man was marked by son-ship, that was Manoucher.

He began laughing again. The tree didn’t seem to mind. That pot must have heard a lot of laughter during eighteen years with old Bakh, and after God knows what palace mayhem it must have survived. Smoking-hot intrigues in which somebody got the knife, rope tricks in which prisoners were hoisted to oblivion. Nowadays of course, the perpetrators were westernized—which to them meant merely: Your nation had better manage its misdeeds more openly; the world is looking at you.

In the Danieli, he used to visit their suite daily, with the sun streaming in gaudily on the fine Tabriz rugs they had laid over the hotel carpet, and the women walking past him barefoot to oil the rugs naturally—though outdoors they affected French shoes which peeped back and forth from each enveloping
chador
as if there was a second and extra-retiring woman within.

Fifty years ago or less, he might have had to have his balls cut off before he was allowed inside the door—or would have had his tongue cut out afterward. Once, there’d even been voluntary eunuchs; their power in public affairs had been so deviously great. In the old days, maybe they’d have sent him one. To brush his clothes, brew him syrup-of-figs when he was bilious, keep his diaries and any loose state papers suspiciously free of lint—and perform certain services for him when he couldn’t sleep. As eunuchs had done for the women, it was said—for when wives accumulated, a wise husband kept them content. All the habits of the world probably persisted somewhere; there were no “ancient” ones. Pity Jenny couldn’t know.