Mysteries of Motion (9 page)

The view from the window? He’s looked at it once and is done with it. It would never think of haunting him. That man Gilpin’s moral flushes—what’s known of them from his publications and appearances before congressional committees—seem to Mulenberg the man’s personal style, a freedom not to be infringed upon. Along with most of the country, he thinks of the man’s dramatics as astringently good for the nation to consider, if not to accept totally. To this he has a private addenda: Gilpin’s face, narrow but benevolently engraved, is to him an eighteenth-century American joy. Rarer still, Gilpin’s manners are the same as his character, yet another anachronism of which Lafayette and de Tocqueville, Mulenberg’s early heroes, would have approved. Mulenberg’s own trade, which a daughter had once put on a college application (under Father’s Business) as “tycoon,” has circled him among pretty many of the world’s greats without ever making him feel himself infectiously one of them. But he has a shrewd sense of when someone obviously moves in a broader than normal scale. Gilpin is what Mulenberg thinks of as a world person, probably the only one on the ship. Having so judged him, as with the view he is done with him.

For Mulenberg this trip is transportation like any other, toward a goal. Born with an indifferent sense of direction even on a horse, he early made the pragmatic jump toward pure passenger. In the process of that he cares little where he sits or is; he expects to be delivered. He regards all science as in the business of General Delivery. He does commit the folly of still passively trusting it, which that same daughter has pointed out. As a passenger, he makes that choice. He regards this trip as a particularly long one in an advanced kind of plane, the rocket principle being merely an elaboration and the pretrip training a necessary sport, or stiffer-than-usual massage, of the kind often recommended for businessmen. The training has been hard on his outsize bone structure but has flattened his belly. Once on habitat, even temporarily, which is all he plans, he will follow the rules, however peculiar, as he would in any factory. It’s all a means toward the goal.

If he were in an airport now he would go straight to one of those machines that write insurance policies and take out one for the largest sum permissible—always in favor of some far-fetched or far-flung recipient who may well have forgotten Mulenberg exists. It’s a form of gambling and of faith—one of those private rites by which one tries to link oneself lyrically with other people, always safely absent. “One of your Swedish actions” his long-dead wife had called it, meaning those fits of mythic gloom which sometimes moved people of their ancestry.

Many of his unaware beneficiaries have been women. For the last three years always the same one. That cuckoo little act, repeated at every airport, has become his guarantee, keeping death away from him, and other men and other destiny away from her, while in life he has hunted her. The stupid miracle was that even given the trips to Saudi, away from Western planes and the magazines that went with them, he hadn’t found her sooner. He could never for so long have kept himself from finding her—a fact now admitted—if all along she hadn’t been so near.

On the night table is his evening dose of that yeasty yellow brew which will keep him hale until his first flight meal, meanwhile lessening the amount of excretory waste. As with all NASA-related inventions, from a personal feeding tube to that shuttle component which might yet revolutionize ordinary jet flight cost analysis, the company that worked it up has waived rights to the invention only, not to such product applications of it as might be marketable. Should the company disclose the invention itself, it forfeits that competitive position. On the surface, all very tidy-fair. Except, as Mulenberg knows, the real competition, such as it is, comes at the beginning, when investigational research is assigned—the same few favored companies like his being most often tapped. It’s natural. You give the contract to the company with the most experience at getting the particular thing well and quickly done, which experience comes from—the habit of getting contracts. As the yellow stuff rolls past his closed palate, a fish glue trying to smell like almond, it amuses him that in outer space—he can’t learn to say Outer—the discretionary facts of business, no matter how mixed with meteors, smell as usual.

Somewhere, on another floor perhaps, she must be downing the same potion. An exquisite stealth creeps over him. She’s here, gathered into as safe a cage as ever a footloose woman has wandered into, wooed there by the delicate octopus arms of secret government. Although she’d been a first-class prospect, he hadn’t dared wait to see whether she would qualify on her own before he committed himself to leaving. They wanted him; they must be sure to have her. Though of course he hadn’t said so. His direct request had been for Gilpin, who it was thought had already pressured for her, or whose presence on the list was likely to affect hers…All in all, Mulenberg has influenced the choice of five candidates: himself, William Wert and wife, Tom Gilpin—and Veronica Oliphant. He himself had plumped for training at a far station and arrived at the motel only yesterday, so has yet glimpsed none of them.

He can wait now. Bliss enough to know she’s here and even to be in the same cabin, on terms chaste enough to appease any sultan.

Setting the emptied medicine glass on the night table, which is a beveled-off block of crystal-white quartz the designer must have deemed in tune with what was going on here, his hand shakes. The quartz is cold, and jagged to the hand. They’ve all been warned away from harboring too many lonely images of space, of what the layman thinks goes on there in monster ice geometry. Keep it joky close, the way the Apollo astronauts did, yesterday’s indoctrinator had cautioned, that holy look on her face at every mention of the imperial three. Keep it human. He’s doing that. He’s seen the glassed-in museum display, with
YE OLDE LUNAR SCRATCH PAD
—mottoed in Old English type—taking top billing over even the biomedical harness, or the gloves with the wee lights in their fingertips for non-atmosphere’s frauds, or the personal radiation dosimeter and the oxygen-supply energy masks. He’s already peering ahead to the little packet that jogs along, chilly or hot, alongside every human adventure. There it goes, on earth as it shall be in heaven. The discretionary facts.

He slips down. That stuff was sedative. She too must be sliding down into the warmish pillows of the last-night-on-earth’s womb-bed.

Surely their two dossiers must be tangling and melding there. Where even the feathers have weight.

T
HE SIX-FOOT GIRL
loped toward the men standing under the New York Athletic Club’s summer canopy, going east fast on long, bare grape-black legs. Passing them, she slowed, her arched sandals hitting first with the insinuating ball of the foot, then with a sharp click of the stilt heels. In the draining light, Mulenberg noted that the polished head and stalk neck rode their own caravan motion at the angle of a giraffe’s. But it was Ventura who spoke, his pale, unhealthy-looking cigarillo drawing to a glow.

“Model?”

The girl’s crushy white dress, thick but floating, shagged on behind her. “Never.”

“Classy dress.”

Mulenberg drew deep on breath; he didn’t need to smoke. Across from them, directly west of the south end of Central Park and backed by a sky of cracked cloud, the Gulf & Western Building, where his office floors were, rode like a chandelier lit and paid for by shahs, some of whom he’d met personally. Coming in there twice a month on the easterly route, returning west again on a string of South American cities, and so home to the ranch and small wells which had begun it all, he’d made the world his triangle. And this city, this corner, its apex. Twice a month. Only fools demanded that a city be pasture—or even have pure air.

“Classiest street for it in the world,” he said, elated she had looked at him.

“You should know.” Ventura was sincere. In the steamroom, where men sat as if at pot, and talked like it, Ventura’s sallow, forty-two-year-old body, canalled with black hair, gave him a sinewy edge on Mulenberg’s giant, Scandinavian-pink forty-eight. Until Ventura opened his mouth. He was now from Garden City, Long Island, where he’d built his Spanish villa before his troubles, his tennis court in spite of them, and lived with his family. Such as it was.

Ventura had married too young, Mulenberg had first thought, rubbing elbows with him at the Oak Room bar—and now that he had the export-import business, with a thirty million gross that was always needing capital but took him high flying, he must be saddled with some pasta-fat mamma-tits at home. But no. A snapshot of a shapely enough woman, with tragedienne eyes. “She is mostly confined,” Ventura said. “Oh no. Not to a string of kids.” There was a picture of the one kid, a weakly little boy standing knock-kneed between the mother-in-law and the housekeeper, two wizened plug-uglies with outlaw mustaches. “To a sanatorium,” Ventura’d said. “Psychological. I spend the average of a new Buick, every month. Working my way up to Cadillac.” His pride in that had almost outrun his appropriate sadness—in which case Mulenberg would have crossed him off—but not quite. So they’d discovered that they belonged to the same club in more than one sense—and not only to the old A.C. behind them, now boozing and steaming itself, or jockeying for the night to come.

For they also have the same excusable habits, if not tastes.

Twice a month, they join up briefly before exerting these. Always they meet over a game of something, toss-ball or ping-pong, and have a drink or two afterward—never dinner. Neither of them likes to eat beforehand. Ventura likes to eat afterward, with the girl and her pimp. Mulenberg has never in his life dealt with anyone but the girl herself, and devoutly means never to, though Ventura has “a very quiet list”—more shadowy than shady, ranging from art-gallery swamis who could also supply the human frame, to stock runners who knew a ring of not-too-middle-aged receptionists, to Bronx warehousemen who had a pliant ring of “cousins.” All of them small merchants in fact, with a fly eye for the fringe product, but still the kind of manners you could eat shrimp with. Ventura has a knack for finding such men through his business channels. Such anecdotes as he has come from those dinners, little accounts as pale as those cheroots of his, and full of that nameless middle-class yearning of, say, twenty years back, which Mulenberg recognizes; he had come from it.

Neither of them ever described an evening’s sex afterward. “The exploit,” Ventura called it. He sometimes went so far as to qualify it. “The exploit—was fine.” Mulenberg never replied in kind, or mentioned what he had done afterward. He wouldn’t mind eating with some girl who might spark him to enough concentric tenderness to ask her, but for a long time now, though the exploits often went beyond fine, he had dined alone.

Neither he nor Ventura ever set foot in a house. But unlike Ventura, he had to see the girl first. To tell the truth, he even hated beginning on the phone.

“Yes, I should know,” he said ritually. “Ten years, my wife’s cancer took.” Rabbit-punching her first in the guts, then in the lungs and breasts, and finally—in the brain. He never showed pictures. He and she had had relations almost to the end. Anything he’d done while away from her had been for forgetfulness. Or, just once in a while to touch health. “And I tell you—not Paris.” Where, out of provincial convention, he’d started his rounds away from her. And where it was all foozle and flame on top and scrawn below, and gardenia stink instead of washing. “Maybe Berlin was the best once. But before our time.” Blue angels everywhere now, greasy-chopped little waitresses and countesses both. It was there he’d lost his taste for eating with them afterward. “Barcelona?” He pursed his lips out of consideration for Ventura’s mixed Latin heritages. A gentle town. Where the girls wore handsome underlinen, but where the church horned in, even in the lowest quarters. Especially there. And upper-class connections had been beyond him. “Got more of a high out of that church. The crazy one you didn’t like.”

“The Sagrada Familia?” Ventura and his wife had traveled doggedly for her health. She’d never been irrational, he claimed, and wasn’t now. Only depressed. “Crazy barbaric,” he said now, meaningfully. They were both still watching the girl, paused for traffic at the far corner but easily sightable by her height and that dark back veeing deep into her foamy white. “You and your street Scheherazades.” He was always warning Mulenberg against street pickups. “Someday, you’ll overstep.”

Someday Ventura would. Then this pally on-the-sidewalk twice-a-month confab of theirs, which was beginning to itch Mulenberg already, would be quits. “Bet you she turns the corner, down Sixth,” he said.

“You’re on.” Ventura checked his watch. “Bet you breakfast, tomorrow morning.”

If she did, it was at least fifty-fifty she was taking the high-class route she clearly rated, though even Sixth was a little too far west. But if she turned down it, walked a couple of blocks south and turned west again, she’d be almost across from Carnegie Hall—in whose aged flank a nightspot called Miss Lacey’s, now replaced by a coffee shop, had for many months drawn a slow cortege of limos containing the escorting buckoes in their platform shoes, frilled shirts and ten-gallon hats—and girls like her. That place had been raided but its clientele still lingered, as he sometimes did, eyeing the satiny new doorway across the street, of what looked like only a disco so far. Where the tall, sooty couples going in—men outfitted in fawn suede from tip to toe, girls with the same dazzlingly snub ebon eyes and paper-doll hips—might just possibly be merely social couples from that new world of black designers, black theatricals, to be seen in the glossies the air stewardesses were always handing him. He kept up with all his neighborhoods, making it a point to apply the same impersonal research to evening prospecting as to shale engineering. It never hurt to. That way, it never hurt.

“There.” Mulenberg leaned forward, craning. “Turn
south,
little lamb.
There.”
He straightened up. “She’s done it. What did I say.”