Subtle Bodies (2 page)

She knew why it was. Things she wanted, things she thought she had, being jerked away from her without warning and at the last minute, always upset her, based on patterns in her absurd childhood, patterns she had studied and parsed and studied until she was sick unto death of the subject. But her therapist had been a Freudian, and being sick and tired of it wasn’t a reason for letting go of something. The reverse! And after years of staring at the facts, she had no idea, still, how she should feel about her pixie parents—up, down, sad, send them to the firing squad? How should she feel about the elf shoes, with their pointy toes curving back toward her little shins, that her mother had gotten on sale, making her wear them to school, insisting they were perfectly normal? She remembered the giant celebration her parents had given when her father finally got into the Screen Extras Guild, in his fifties, was that sane? She had no idea. They did this, they did that. For any ailment, they medicated her with bark tea. Her mother had become an astrologer because it was such a
portable
occupation. But then they had stayed stuck in Los Angeles forever. Linda, her mother’s best friend and worst influence,
had branched out into astrology for pets, dogs mainly, and tried to get Ma to take it up, which she hadn’t.

But then finally, late in the day, turning thirty-four, she had found Ned, and gradually gotten him to want a child, and to really try, with her. And then this. She thought,
I
take the pills,
I
get the shot,
he
vanishes! It was outrageous.

It all had to do with le grand Douglas. Douglas had been the head of Ned’s clique in the seventies, the spokesmodel, when they were undergraduates, which would make it Douglas’s clique, actually. They had been a group of wits, in their opinion, of superior sensibilities of some kind, was the idea. Everything she knew about Douglas was irritating. He even had his own term for the effect they were going for: perplexion. So elegant. And there was his legendary pensiveness, the way he would sometimes hold up his hand in a certain way to signal the group to stop talking so he could finish a thought he wasn’t sharing. Then he might jot something down on a scrap of paper or he might not. The point, to her, seemed to be to show that whatever was going on around him was subordinate to the great private productive secret-not-necessarily-related-to-anything-his-groundling-friends-were-talking-about trains of thought that Douglas was having.

And one thing she could not get out of her mind was that when Douglas had been the ringmaster of the group at NYU he had demonstrated that he was the world’s champion of walking out of the Thalia, walking out on foreign films he personally found highly overrated and taking his pack of stupid fool friends along with him. She had been incredulous, hearing about that, and about Ned
obeying
Douglas, essentially. And Ned had told her about the group
going to see
Last Tango in Paris
. And Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando were having precoital fooling around and in the course of it she has to pee and she goes into the toilet in the vacant apartment they’re carousing in and the camera follows her and she pees but gets up without wiping or using a bidet or anything and then they had gone on to have sex. So quelle horreur and that was enough for Douglas, who found the hygienic omission a good enough excuse to lead his minions out immediately. His position had been that the omission fatally attacked the plausibility of the scene. They had been very severe about cinema, Ned’s group. It was amazing to her. They had walked out on Brando at his professional and physical peak. So why had they kept going to the Thalia led by someone who was so sensitive that half the time their money would be spent for nothing?

And what she did know with certainty was that Ned had been abandoned, abandoned gradually, and then finally, by this man he was racing ahead of her and her ova to praise and bury, and it had been
painful
, muted but painful, to Ned, over the years. And she knew that the abandonment had gotten more painful for Ned as Douglas got half-famous in the world, debunking forgeries,
significant
forgeries. And Douglas had remained closer, Ned had known for a fact, to the other three friends. She had no idea what had led Douglas into the “questioned documents” business, but something had, and he’d made it pay. He’d proved that some sensational papers revealing that Alfred Dreyfus was in fact guilty of espionage were right-wing forgeries. And then someone had forged Milan Kundera’s so-called
Love Diaries
, and Douglas had shot that down. And then he had married the leading gossip columnist in Czechoslovakia, the radiant Iva, a consensus great beauty. And he had gotten her
over to the U.S. and put her in a tower in the woods, in the Catskills, near Woodstock. And they had lived in it, and there had been an inheritance, and when the internet came, there would be little fragments from Douglas to Ned, avant-garde tips on nutrition or postings from the Committee for Ethical Tourism which proved there was nowhere in the world you could go for a vacation except possibly Canada. She had always wanly hoped to get revenge on Douglas. Because there
had
truly been a superior soul in their little grouplet, and that had been Ned, her lad, her Ned. And there was another thing that had driven her crazy about Douglas. At first through the mail, and then by fax, and then by email, had come a stream, a very intermittent stream, of short papers and notes from Douglas, who had become eccentric and was proposing various universal solutions to the problem of the persistence of evil in the world, in human relations. And some of them had been items like monotheism, and then it had been declining terrestrial magnetism, and there had been others. Like his theory that gradual anoxia was driving mankind crazy, based on the shrinking percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere compared to the much higher oxygen content in air samples taken from bubbles in ancient Egyptian glassware. And then it had been estrogens and antidepressants infiltrating the water supply. Of course it would be very nice if someone could prove that unkindness was caused by pollution.

And Ned had always been dutiful and sent some sort of reply trying to argue, shorter and shorter replies, because Douglas almost never, and then never, had had anything to say to Ned in return, no expansion on the particular subject.

Douglas’s group had thought very highly of itself. They were going to be social renovators of some unclear kind,
had been the idea, by somehow generalizing their friendship. Ned could still get solemn, talking about those times. She didn’t get it. And part of the original group idea had been that they would always be a unity, helping each other, maybe creating a compound in the wildwood for summer vacations or maybe crafting some excellent retirement collective.
Right
, she thought.

One thing she knew and Ned did not, was that there is no permanent friendship between men, among men. Something goes wrong, somebody marries the wrong person, somebody advances too fast, somebody converts, somebody refuses good advice or bad advice, it didn’t matter. It went up in a flash, it went up in a flash like magnesium paper set on fire in a magic show. She thought, It’s not always great with women, either, but it can be. Women
can
have friends, it’s more personal, she thought. Although in the great design of things, women were getting to be more like men. There were more tough cookies around, and liars.

Well, Ned was her friend, her deep friend. He didn’t realize it, exactly. He thought everything was love with them, but it wasn’t. She would have been his friend whenever. It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering. It was a pure friendship fantasy. Not sexual.

And that was why she was enraged at the man, enraged. She had to get this rage out of her, so she could kill him when she caught up with him. He was an idiot. He was reckless. He was hopeless. He had shit for brains. He couldn’t
be counted on. He was a fool. These people had hurt him in the past, Douglas had. She only knew some of it.

She was moving around too much in her seat. The woman next to her was unhappy.

She offered the woman her uneaten dessert, an industrial brownie still in its packaging. Nina had watched the woman devour her own brownie in two bites, earlier.

“No,” said the woman, quite forcefully.

She thinks I’m affiliated with Satan, Nina thought.

3
His great friend was dead.

Ned wanted to embrace his dead friend. An imaginary burning feeling ran across Ned’s chest and down his arms. He wanted to embrace his friend. Where Douglas’s body was, even, Ned didn’t know. No clue whether it had been removed from the estate, no clue what shape it might be in wherever it was. Nobody could have gotten there from the West Coast any faster than he had. And still he was late. Except that when the call had finally come from Elliot, it had already been too late, whatever he meant by that. He meant something. Your thinking is choppy, he thought.

Douglas had died when his riding mower had pitched him down into a ravine, the mower on top of him, when the ground at the edge had given way. So he had been buried once already.

These were the Catskills, all around. The upward road he was walking on ran through terrain jammed with trees still dripping from a monster rainstorm he had just missed. It was trees, trees, and glimpses of hills farther off, also burdened
with trees, as Douglas might have put it. The ruts in the unpaved road were running like brooks. It was all uphill. There were regular trees in their last leaf, intermixed with unwelcoming, bristling evergreens. It was four in the afternoon.

It was muggy. This was not where he would choose to die, in a ditch in this vicinity. What had Douglas seen, dying, his neck broken and mud sliding over him? No friend near, no one around, black mud engulfing him.

Ned shrugged off his rucksack and, holding it against his chest to give his shoulders a break, continued on. He had brought too much reading matter and had so far only managed to get cursorily through three recent issues of
The Economist
. That had been during the San Francisco–to–Houston leg of the trip, before guilt had shut him down. He was agitated about the war that was coming and guilty that he’d been forced to drop the little he was doing in the effort to stop it. There was going to be a march—the Convergence was what they were calling it—to protest the rush toward war in Iraq. It was looking immense. Feeder marches from all over Northern California would culminate in San Francisco. Contingents were coming from as far north as Yreka, for Christ’s sake. There was a coalition for the Convergence,
his
coalition. It was funny, the anarchists were the easiest to deal with and the Quakers were the most difficult. Oh and of course he felt like shit about leaving Nina with so little notice, and leaving exactly when the timing on their personal project was so critical. He couldn’t think about that.

4
He had come to a rude plank bridge across a gully occupied by a roaring brown torrent. Spray was coming up through gaps in the planking. The bridge meant that he was better than three-quarters of the way up the road to Douglas’s estate. He supposed it had to be called an estate. It did, after all, have a whole variety of buildings on the property, including a stone tower. And this had to be the bridge that some of the taxi services in the area would go no farther than when delivering visitors to Douglas’s. He had been given this piece of information by the Trailways driver when he dropped Ned on the highway between his scheduled stops. The driver had also mentioned the tower, and, overall, that the locals didn’t like Douglas, or hadn’t liked him.

Ned started across the bridge and then stopped. It came to him strongly that he needed a better idea of how he looked before he arrived, and there was no sign of a mirror in the roadway. His eyes itched.
Visine
, he needed. There was none in his toiletries. In fact, his toiletries amounted to a toothbrush and deodorant picked up in an airport shop.

Maybe he looked all right. He was wearing a new tan corduroy hacking jacket, a good blue dress shirt straight from the cleaners. Nina had found the jacket in a Junior League thrift shop she surveilled like a spy. He had all his hair, curly, graying, but still. Somebody in their group, he couldn’t remember who, had said it was a fact of life that people tended not to take people with curly hair seriously. But curly or not, he had his hair. He remembered that it was Douglas who had made the crack about curly hair. My
weight is okay, one seventy-two is good, he thought. The Timberland boots he was wearing gave his five ten and a half a little help. Elliot was the tallest in their group, six four and an ectomorph. The boots had been purchased by Nina and never worn. She had a mission to get everything together they would need when they went camping at Stinson Beach. They were going to be serious about camping. They had gone once. Stinson Beach was a good choice for starters because it wasn’t that far from Berkeley. So camping there could fit neatly into weekends and not protrude into their insane work life. They wouldn’t burn up hours getting to where they were going to rusticate.

He kept calling Nina. At some point she was going to talk to him. And she would forgive him. Because she was forgiving. She would be getting deluged with calls for him, emails, faxes.

He should have brought a novel, plucked something from Nina’s shelves of uppermiddleclassics. She called them that. Something by Louis Auchincloss or Barbara Pym or Frederick Buechner or Thornton Wilder, people he was not uninterested in reading. He felt guilty over not reading a piece of worthwhile fiction when the constraints of travel made it a completely justifiable waste of time, which was not what he meant. He should have brought along something with a story to it. Well, he hadn’t. And he hadn’t really tried to pay attention to the Ulster County countryside, either. Why Douglas had chosen to settle in this particular part of the forest was a question. The bus trip had been a montage interrupted by naps and daydreaming: sharp hills, thick forests crowding down close to the road, motels and restaurants and trailer parks, an inner-tubing center, a splat-ball drome, gun shops, a pottery studio with a huge stucco
golem in front holding a sign saying Feats of Clay. A lot of the businesses seemed to be shuttered. It was the end of September. Maybe everything was seasonal. And on the subject of not paying attention, he remembered a couple of years ago when they had been flying over the Rockies on a brilliant clear day and he had chided Nina for not paying attention to the grandeur below and she had said I find scenery beautiful but repetitive.