Mysteries of Motion (55 page)

Wert bursts out hysterically laughing. People smile. The West always cheers.

Manoucher nods back at them with dignity. “Besides”—he whispers in English—“that Uncle of yours. That baby papa? How could you think it? That it was him.”

Wert’s shaking. Not much, nothing heroic.
Just chicken-sick, that chile,
the old home kitchen help say in his head.

“Industry, yes—Much better to be there now, than in government.” Suddenly Manoucher reaches out and collars a young boy just dribbling past them. The boy stands shyly, squirming in his jacket and tie, the skin like dark dew, the eyes pure, the lips full with hope. He’s the hope of the world, Wert thinks—I never noticed it. Manouch cuffs the boy’s cheek. “Get Mr. Ordoobadi.” The kid rushes off, blushing like a page.

Ordoobadi turns out to be the man who knows about banks and Wert’s relative in Baton Rouge. He also knows the name of the lawyer Wert might best procure for them. He speaks a fast-blending patois of Farsi and English. The idiosyncracies of almost any major American city’s country clubs are at his polished fingertips, and like the clubs, suffering from a certain industrial pollution. He’s been everywhere in the service of the Bakhtiary interests, from Beverly Hills, where they don’t scorn to be backers of a boutique which dresses the stars, “A whirlywind success!” to Huntsville, Alabama—“You know NASA?” and Florida—“You know Cape Canaveral?” Is Wert up on what Bakh these last years was into?

“Space, I believe. Outer space.” The obverse of inner space? Wert’s never thought of it that way before, but in this man’s orbit it does obtrude.

“I like best Texas, though. Fine red people. Fine hearts. And in New York, of course, the Kinkerbocker Club. You belong?”

Hungry, light-headed, sick at heart—though that’s curiously fading, or blending with what may be sexual hope; we won’t call it love yet—he’ll believe even Mr. Ordoobadi at the Knickerbocker Club. “No, I’m a Southerner. Georgia.”

“Ahhh. They are more honey-butter there.” Ordoobadi sparkles with what he knows well enough is his “line”—the more telling because he believes it. He’s divided the people of this country by color, which is after all how it began. Florida girls tend to be fish-belly white. “The poor ones.” He’s noticed the poor—and hopes we’re in control there. Thinks we are. “Also in Bridgeport. Very pale.” Washington? “Ah—a girl rainbow. But not only from yours.”

“You’re a poet.” And under the gloss, one of my old cronies, to the life.

Ordoobadi takes the compliment as due; all men of his race are. But at the moment real estate preoccupies him. Children are running everywhere with bowls of nuts and finger food; the intensive predinner nibbling has at last begun; the two old servants are circling. He waves a comprehensive hand, accepting a soft drink from one of them. Pity—but soon they must move from this neighborhood. “Too much brown.” Not blacks, no, and not Puerto Ricans. He doesn’t actually know what they are. He snaps a finger. A tall, good-looking boy appears. “My son. At Deerfield Academy. Mohammed, what are the people in this house? This neighborhood. Tell Mr. Wert.”

“Doctors, nurses, orderlies, hospital staff mostly—from the nearby ones. Dentists.” The boy shrugs. “Airline stewardesses, personnel. They team up.”

“No, you know what I mean. What
are
they?” Ordoobadi turns to Wert. “Twenty years ago, they begin coming here, I am told. From when your people leave their country.”

The boy’s faintly smiling. “He means the Philippines.” He’s not being insolent. He’s merely been born too late to know Bakh’s generation and into circumstances which have made him wiser than his father. But two to one, he’s no longer the hope of the world. “Couple of them were at our school.”

His father dismisses him. “Not like these.”

“No. I’ve been in the Philippines.” Twenty years ago, that slow-moving squatter-crowd behind the Embassy—could some of those here—be some of them? This small, heartening seepage into Queens? “No, those boys would be the sons of the sugar land-holders, I fancy.” In the Manila opera house, their wives wore spun-sugar dresses, Jenny had joked. “Or of diplomats.”

A servant is at Wert’s elbow, decanter in hand. They’ve noted him already. He pours himself one. “Whisky, Ordoobadi?”

“Eh—no thanks.” He bows. “I have though many men in my busyi-ness, who drink it.”

“I’m sure.” Representative Americans. Who, like anyone who joins a clan, will never quite make it to the top—even if not brown.

From the grave, a voice he’s incontinently glad to hear.
Now, Beel.
Never think we’re as stuck in our skins as you are. When among you, we’re not observing our prejudices, but your statuses. Safest for us to be at the top.

So the voice
will
go on. That’s something.

“You ever think of busyness, Mr. Wert?”

“Often.”

The card extended has Ordoobadi’s name, four intercontinental offices and a cable line, but no company name.

“Sell space, eh? Just pure white space.”

“Eh?”

Wert repeats it in Farsi.

“What
good Farsi!”

“Honey-butter style.”

But Ordoobadi is jubilant. “Listen to this, Manoucher! What do you think we sell? We sell—”

Manoucher is gone.

On the women’s side, those two doll-babies, bending over from their four-inch heels with their round bottoms reared, have persuaded his wife from her veil. Her revealed face, rigid as a mask on a neck not its own, is untintable. Clearly even those two don’t dare. All by herself she has a symmetry, of lap and knee, lax hands on them, of black brows dabbed. The blue eyes swim, blinking. There’s a Bellini in the National Gallery looks like that, but it has an infant on its lap.

On impulse he walks over to her. Her eyes lower at once. She must know the effect they have on him. He’s just identified it. When he kisses her hand, Fateh’s girls breathe in as one. Or does the whole room already know what he’s just found out? That he’s been sent the wrong girl? Had she herself known at once? That they should have sent her to him?

Poor blue-eyed, bluestocking Machine, with a neck made to arch more under kisses than under doctrine, she does remind him of Jenny, but only because he recognizes that blend of the steadfast and the mercurial—and knows just how far it will go. Of all the people here, she’d have made it quickest to being an American.

He lets go her hand. In Switzerland, life under Madame’s vengeance will assuage her guilt; it’ll be like being in prison again. But after that, a girl like her must verge toward convicted action. Or toward a man, possibly a family one. Or will she become absorbed in their commerce, one of those muscular, charioteering Dianas in the new high-philosophical, female business style? Before that, he and the other Soraya must send for her. Hope is what she needs.

“Speak English,” he says to her. “Oh, not to me. But generally. Break a vow, why don’t you? Maybe it’ll help.” Cruel. He’s learning. “And I’ll write you, from America. Letters you might even like.”

He sees that the other Soraya has vanished. A sharp-eyed chorus in duo at his elbow supplies the answer before he asks.

“She is waiting outside.”

“We
are ready to eat,
she
does not want to.”

“She will help drive; she has international license.”

“They have pack you a lunch.”

“A very good lunch.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

What practical girls they are, and she is. Prettier than Manoucher’s wife, the other Soraya is also easier, with talents to more moderate scale. Tough and brave, she’ll have his admiring tenderness forever. Plenty steadfast, too, she sees beyond ideals alone. She is the true heroine. Pink socks.

Manoucher’s wife would have been—will be—neurotic enough to fight with him, sardonically knowing what is wrong with him. Living with him, or near, she’d wage war against the West in him—and so assuage his guilt.

Wert wants both of them—
in the house.
He understands that concept perfectly, wanting at once to talk over this marvel, and his devious progress to it, with the person who would understand each—perfectly. Who would agree that in both these solemnly breathtaking girls there are certain flecks of humor—discernible in each like the flakes in a glass of
Goldwasser,
which could flourish best in concert—which must be what harem humor is. Who would concede that for the time to come, or maybe for all time, the girl waiting outside for him is now Soraya, Manoucher’s wife being now—the
other
one.

Extraordinary, what Bakh has done for him, considering the modern world. And Wert is going to accept. Knowing every nuance of the climb by which he’s come to it—every horizontal traverse, crampon and pickax by which two mountaineers can climb from opposite sides to the top—new snow on old ice being specially dangerous.

Which top turns out to be a flat space just big enough for two pairs of boots, one of them worn down at the back.

Does such a space have any credit in the realms of higher conflict?—Probably not. Some human weaknesses are too small for international congresses.

…Oh don’t be too sure about that, Wert. As I’ve hinted before—there’s an underskin sexual thrill to the changeovers of nations, whether these come by codicil or a landing onshore. Take the spinster British—shrouding supple India in her own muslins and pongees. Or the French with their ferocious dictionaries, seducing Algiers from behind a coy fretwork of civil law. That latex-breasted sponginess of you and yours, Wert, we’ll rape it yet. With our barbarian wedge.

But now they want him out of here, the whole crowd. Those men he’s met are surrounding him, fiercely suave. He’s theirs now. Those he hasn’t met are smiling allegiances, crude or austere. But like any in-laws they have family secrets to mull over, feelings still to be kept from him. The wedding is over, of him to them.

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

This dark rug-room, spored with their moisture and light, is already growing them a world here, which can go anywhere. They’ll penetrate the contradictory life over here—our bathrooms like hardened blancmange, our pavements dirtied with garbage gone beyond collection, the fat land gone nitrate-rich with wells our farmers themselves daren’t drink from—yet all of it still gassed only with domestic stainings, for generations not browned with mass blood. Into it they’ll insert themselves, arrowheads steelier than are known here, but bazaar people also, who understand merchandise, software, hardware, all the local words for what with them will end up in the clan machine, and in the gems wound like electric lace around the women. Where we bar them from our inns, they’ll buy them. Their keys will grow here as these always grow, iron affecting the host soil.

It’s nothing new. In London, all the stationers are Pakistani now; in New York, Korean all the fruiterers. Such a movement comes from below the money-mark as well, a lowly surf no United Nations dare legislate aloud, no bourse will bother with. The Bible and Koran are full of it. No diplomacy can hold out against it, it’s the paranoia of what happens. Nations move.

How very tiring it has been, though, not to admit that ever-third world to consciousness.

“Good-bye.”

“Oh, good-bye, Ordoobadi.”

Ordoobadi’s hand makes a feint at being firm, then lies limp in Wert’s. But it’s merely the bisexual handshake of half the polite men of Europe. “Outer space—it’s the new opium, Misser Wert. You think about it.”

Wert tiptoes from the room, closing its door behind him. Crossing the empty second room of chairs and screens, he closes that door as well, with caretaker heed. So, Smiley—my village. See you at the Kinkerbocker Club.

On the landing she’s waiting patiently; a girl without a calendar. Otherwise, that girl has vanished. Or all versions of her yet seen. Brown coat now, brown cap, shoes to match—and stockings, soft plop of brown bag. The going-away clothes, who hasn’t contributed them? Jewels in her ears. Collar up, one can’t see the bandages. She’ll do for him what he’s never been able to do himself. She’ll heal, but not too easily. She’ll keep a sharp lookout.

But she’s not alone.

Fereydoun’s valise is at his feet. His hat is on his valise. “You can’t think it, Mr. Beel. That they would let her go alone.”

“Can’t they. Or only to prison?”

She’s already sneaking her glasses on, as if they’re contraband.

“And your cousin. That charming lady. Would she approve?”

“My cousin has more than charm.”

“I recall.” Fereydoun squats to his hat. Smoothing it, he looks like a butler stirring a campfire. What bruised-blue bits of human offal, human history, he must grill there from time to time, some of it his own. There’s a Tory glow about the old man, a stubbornness like the light seen through the stained-glass of badly reconstructed saints. What is it? “Madame—wishes me gone. It was never my house.”

Why, he’s honest, that’s all. But with such a struggle to show it, under that equivocal voice, plumped countenance. Could one learn to divine it?

“And Manoucher—wishes not to look at me.”

How easily Fereydoun might be arranged for, after all. Wert’s cousin is already half in the room, consoling with all her native good: Oh, but, Mr. Fereydoun, your knees are still so good, for our age.

She, not Wert, could become Ferey’s confidant, more hardened in the hands than Madame but as welcomely imperious. On her antebellum porch in old Athens—with their backs to the gas station—she and he can exchange old civil wars. She learning, for instance, how long before this Sunday in Queens Fereydoun had had to be the silent harborer of bad news. Hearing, too, what Wert only now surmises. Up to now he had visualized the old courtier ever behind a screen work of telephone calls. Now, looking at the old man and the girl, he grasps the collusive innocence which has had to be meted out between them. She had carried the news. Wert looks over at the girl. “In that case—?”

A brown chirrup from her. “Okeh.”

She’s gone foreign on him again. Chill spreads in him like Luminal, half pleasurable. “Well then, Ferey—I expect my cousin’ll be proud to have you. She liked you very much.”

Fereydoun’s already standing, fingertips together. His own story will remain inviolate, except for a tremor of it that Wert can guess at: And I, Fereydoun, will not have to bear the sight of Manoucher.