Subtle Bodies (15 page)

Gruen was not through with Joris. Ned could tell
because Gruen was running his tongue over his upper teeth. That meant he was about to say something important. It went with alcohol.

Ned wasn’t satisfied with what he himself had said, so far. There seemed to be no place to go with Joris’s declaration, his confession. Joris had trusted them.

Gruen said, “I’m sorry. I can be wrong. In fact I am. So I’m sorry.”

Ned thought, It’s too late.

Joris said to Gruen, “Thank you, David.”

Ned thought, I wish Joris could just be
for
something. Or against it … how pointless of me, but it could be the Anglo-Saxon Invasion, if he would let it.

Ned said, “We all have our dark moments.” In some dark moments—visited by sins of omission,
mistakes
 … Ned would say aloud,
Mutual Aid
. It was a trick. Ostensibly he was reminding himself of a classic he had pledged to read years ago, and hadn’t. It was a trick that in a disguised way acknowledged the stab of regret and in the same breath knocked it away.
What Is to Be Done?
was another title he used. Nina had figured it all out, of course.

What the friends needed was to be back at the round clawfoot table in their Second Avenue place, everybody sitting up alert, a decanter of red wine on the table, somebody saying
This is the issue before us
, bringing his fist down like a gavel, Elliot usually, or Douglas, or he himself, often enough.

They were in a conversational eddy. Gruen had gotten out of bed, dispensed with the sweater he’d been wearing, and begun to stalk aimlessly around the room in his boxers. Ned
thought, Man I love you but you need a regimen. Between sips of sambuca Gruen seemed to be free-associating about his wife, Helen, more to himself than for the benefit of the group. He was proceeding as though it was his turn to talk about his intimate life. If they think I’m going next after Gruen in this area, they can forget it, Ned thought.

Gruen’s disclosures were on the pastel side, after Joris’s. Helen always wanted certain music on during sex and Gruen had to have just gotten out of the shower and he had to be sure to remember to see that his nails were groomed. His wife always wore a negligee for the occasion. He couldn’t complain. She had to sort of elevate the thing in order to let go, for some reason. It didn’t matter. She put her heart into it. She was taking a plunge, each time. For her it was like going off a dive tower.

“You have to give her credit,” Gruen said, wanly.

“We do,” Joris said, which was a peculiar thing to say. But then what
Gruen
had said was peculiar, seeming as it did to take the position that his wife deserved credit for having sex. Ned thought, You can ask about certain facts of life but not others. And evidently that was all Gruen had to say for the moment.

And Joris was dormant. In fact, both of them were looking expectantly in Ned’s direction. I love group dynamics, Ned thought. The body language directed at him was saying he should now give them the minutiae about Claire. He didn’t want to. He would tell what he had to.

Joris startled him by saying, “I loved Claire. And then I hated Claire. Watch me speak freely on this. When in the future history of the world I am ever going to find a group of people interested in my opinions on this subject is never. So here’s the truth. She was a shit. With all respect, because
I know you got together with her on the coast and then you were together for those years, she was no good. And she was so pale I always wanted to buy her a steak. Douglas was her tool. She made little things disappear. When she came into the room everybody had to try to ignore her beauty so anything separate from her could get done, which she knew. And she wasn’t a nice person. She was passive. She was so passive that anything anybody proposed that didn’t work out was somebody else’s fault. She was the one who got us banned from the Alliance Française. I forget what she did …”

For Ned, there was shock to digest. It was a subject that could trap him into ugliness in what he said. But he had to say something. He thought he knew where to go. He said, “I’m not going to say anything about Claire, really. Although it’s interesting to hear that she had itchy fingers even back then. You know we connected over a shoplifting incident when I was at Pacific Co-op for a while and then lo and behold. This was three or four years after NYU. Gruen knows about it already. A clerk caught her shoplifting. I took care of it and that’s how it started up with us. A Nation of Shoplifters, somebody said back then …”

Suddenly he knew clearly where to take this. The problem with going into detail about Claire was that it made him look like a fool and a dupe. He didn’t want to revisit any of it, and Joris’s contribution had made the picture even worse. So he was going to talk about Nina. They knew nothing about Nina.

“Now Nina, you could say Nina contains multitudes. I’ll just tell you about this because it sheds light on certain aspects of my girl. You don’t know anything about her yet, of course. You will. But here’s something she wouldn’t
tell you. She’s a terrible sleeper. She starts getting night thoughts the minute she lies down. For example, we’re trying to get pregnant. So she worries about that. She can’t read herself to sleep because she gets too interested. Did I mention that she has too many interests? So she needs some kind of custom distraction to help her get to sleep. She has to get up at six thirty for work. Movies are out because even a completely crap narrative holds her attention. We tried some judge shows but she kept kibitzing the cases and soliciting my views. So then we discovered thank God ValueVision. The jewelry shows especially. It’s endless pitching by dressed-up women. Prodigies who can talk for thirty minutes about a fucking ring! About twenty minutes of focusing on the words bores her to sleep. The timer turns it off automatically. The funny thing is, it puts me to sleep, too. I recommend it. I’ve even learned things I never knew existed from it—drusy, bale, bezel, station necklace, and so on. Did you know that zircon is a real stone, I mean
gem
stone, and not a diamond simulant? Ever hear of a diamond simulant? And do you know what the second most cavernous state in America is? Missouri. They have over seven thousand registered caverns. Did you even know they
registered
caverns? Anyway, she, we, developed a comedy regimen around this sideshow. We renamed the models and the presenters and the experts. The names have to be apt. One woman who has an unidentifiable accent is Foreigna. A kind of slutty model is Traila. One woman is Wigga. Sometimes I come up with completely good names she won’t let me use because they’re unkind. She has veto power. I wanted to name a plus-sized model Ponderosa, but she said no. Also no to Refrigerata …”

“I
get
it,” Joris said. Gruen laughed.

A bout of knocking shook the door. Gruen got back under the covers. Ned went to the door and opened it, and Nina, furious about something, stood there. She strode into the room.

There was no preamble. “
Forgive me
, but God damn it, you guys, these two rooms are sharing the same bathroom and I am not going to step in your spillage in my bare feet. I don’t know you that well.”

Ned said, “We’re sorry, Nina. We—”

“I doubt it’s you,” she said to Ned.

“He’s toilet trained,” Gruen said, not taking it seriously enough for Nina, who turned on him.

She pointed at Gruen as she continued. “This is what you do, and please do it for eternity. It goes like this. You unzip, raise the seat, and address the toilet from
above
, as follows. You take your unit out and you
straddle
the toilet, which yes you
can
do without pushing your pants down. You lean slightly forward toward the wall behind the tank. You aim straight down like your stream is an
Olympic diver
going down
straight
. You shake any drops on your unit off
over the bowl
. Don’t
hurry
before you step back. And this is the most important thing your mother never told you—and it’s
rehouse your thing while it’s still over the bowl
. And then check around and if you’ve spilled anything, you clean it up yourself and then you leave. It’s
easy
.”

The men were rattled.

Nina backed out of the room, closing the door softly.

Again Gruen had his head under the covers.

He emerged, asking if she was gone yet.

“Good for her,” Joris said.

Ned was proud.

28
Ned stood in the corridor. He wanted to look at his notebook before he joined Nina in the bedroom. She was always curious about his jottings but sometimes he didn’t want to be asked about them. He could be as asinine as the next man, in his reminders and creations.

The top page in his little notebook read:

For Eulogy—METAPHOR

He tore the page out and rolled it into a pellet he had no idea what to do with. He flicked it down the hall. Then he retrieved it and dropped it into his pocket for flushing later.

29
They were getting ready for bed, at last. She needed more sleep than she was likely to get in the next few days, but the problem was that around there it was like a novel. There were white spaces on the map of the relationships she was poring over.

Ned was undressing. She expected him to say something about her underpants. He didn’t like the cut and he didn’t like the material and he called them grandma pants. When he comes back from flossing watch him say something, she thought.

“May I say something about your unmentionables?” Ned asked.

She was beginning to hate friendship. He was mixing up friendship with acts and atmospheres from the deluded matrix the boys had lived in for a heartbeat in the seventies. She thought,
I
am your friend, you idiot, and I let you into my perfect body, for Christ’s sake. “Why do you hate plaid so much, do you know?” Nina asked.

“I just don’t like it.”

“And why do you hate the word
‘valid,’
would you say?”

“Because people use valid when they’re too chicken to say whether something being asserted is true or false.”

“Oh bullshit! People may misuse it but you can just as well apply it to a piece of evidence or reasoning offered in a debate. And why would you bother to have an attitude about people who say ‘feisty’ or ‘meld’ or ‘vibrant’? Only because Douglas did, am I right? And now you can tell me if Douglas happened to have a special opinion about plaid.”

Ned thought about it. “Okay he did.”

“Based on
what
?”

“I can’t remember.”

She threw herself into the bed. She wanted to lie still for a while. A thing she liked about the permanent delicate subliminal trembling of the room caused by the pounding torrents below was that it kept her from dowsing for occult signals from her uterus.

Ned joined her under the blankets, saying, “I have come here directly from the tent pole factory.”

Nina woke Ned with an incomprehensible message in his ear. The room was black. Gently he pushed her head away from his and said, “Say it again.” He pressed the crown of his wristwatch, which illuminated the dial. They had been asleep for just two hours.

“Something is waking me up,” Nina said.

“Me too.”

“Two things are. Listen. There’s something going on. In the hall. Knocking and whispering. Why don’t you go out there and look around?”

“Because I don’t feel like it and I don’t want to know what’s going on, I don’t care.”

“Don’t get grumbly,” she said.

“Oh for God’s sake,” he said. “I don’t want to know what’s going on and I don’t need another task. I could be on the phone all day tomorrow trying to find out what’s going on with the
Convergence
, you think I need another task? You’re making
me
get the names of all the help in the place so
you
can greet them the way you want to, for God’s sake, and the staff is multiplying as we speak instead of sleeping.”

“Multiplying like coat hangers. That’s what Ma used to say.”

“Well Ma hit the nail on the head with that one. Nina, please be quiet.”

She observed a pause, then said, “There are no curtains in here you know. And that peeping Tom son of your best friend is still on the loose.”

He exploded at her. “God damn it! He would have to be a lizard to get his head outside our window, not to mention that Niagara Falls is down there.”

She was silent for a while, again. The hallway was still. But she was annoyed. She was wishing she’d put on her plaid underpants and gone out in the hall that way. No doubt they all hated plaid.

Now she was remembering something she’d forgotten she did. She’d made a note to herself after the last call to her mother. She tapped Ned on the shoulder.

“What?”
he asked.

“I think we’re being unfair to my mother too much. Do you know what the Akashic Record is?”

“No, but you’re going to tell me. Help.”

“I’ll be brief. It was one of her beliefs, okay? It was the theosophical idea that every thought you have gets recorded out in the ether in this thing called the Akashic Record. So I said to her, That’s the most fascist thing I ever heard of. How can anyone live with that? I must have been about twelve or thirteen and all I had to say was
fascist
and she dropped it immediately. I’d said the magic word. I give her credit.”