Subtle Bodies (24 page)

“And this was the way it was going for almost a whole year and Joris was wavering, wavering.

“But then the signals changed in some way he didn’t understand. The only thing he could think of that he’d done wrong was not to promise to sign on the dotted line if she got her divorce.

“But she was turning it off. It ended with a phone call saying she had thought everything over and the affair would have to stop. She said she was very sorry, but she
couldn’t go into it
. Oh, she did express
some
sadness. But that was the end and he was left with a mystery.”

Ned got out of bed without explaining why. He needed to pace. He said, “That’s something like the way it ended with Claire. A sudden announcement. Maybe that’s getting to be standard now. Except Claire did say there was another person, which makes it not the same kind of mystery. I need to pee.”

Mainly, he needed to think about something else, say, like why the French let Rodin freeze to death after they kicked him out of the storeroom he was pathetically squatting in at the Louvre and what about his friends who promised to send coal?

“I didn’t pee,” he said.

“What?”

“I couldn’t. There is someone in the bathroom taking a shower who doesn’t answer.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

Ned looked around the room. There were his petitions. There were plenty of people on the premises he should bring petitions to. But he had no heart for it.

“You could go downstairs. Or if you move the bed a little, you can pee out the window.”

“No, I’ll just wait for Godot to get finished in there.”

“Well sit down. I’m not quite through talking anyway. But first I want to say that I hate it that they’re serving these heirloom tomatoes.”

“Why? They’re delicious.”

“That’s why. Because when you go back to regular tomatoes it’s like eating with plastic silverware.”

“Thank you for trying to help me. You are a dear person. Say what you wanted to say.”

“Okay, Ned. So the situation just sits there for a few months. And then death takes Douglas. Joris feels vile even thinking it, but he wonders if it means anything for him and Iva. He’s probably thinking of sex more than marriage, but he’s still angry, and kind of messed up and thinking about her. So then comes the summons to the group. He shows up, and here we all are, and hark, the shower just turned off. Go and come back.”

He was more grateful to her than he could say. She was trying everything, but he was dropping inward.

Ned said, “I know you want me to get into bed, but I feel like not doing it. I’ll just sit here.”

He could see that she was trying to proceed brightly with him. She was sitting up. She said, “Well you know
you’re welcome to sit on the end of the bed as long as you like, but it’s warmer under the covers.

“So back to my adventures—and try to look interested—I was stirring up the ashes in the downstairs fireplace in the tower and there were a few intact edges of pages that had been burned there, enough so I could tell that the typescript was about fringe science stuff of the kind he was interested in. The magnetic poles are going to reverse in case you’ve forgotten. And I found one whole page on the sun getting dimmer. So then I had the idea to go upstairs. I still can’t get my breath, wait a minute …

“I look at that row of binders on his shelf, all empty, and my guess is that somebody wanted to get rid of the exotic science because it’s embarrassing. After Douglas died I think somebody got rid of this mass of science fiction and Elliot has been saying the plan was to publish all his social science writings of which there were plenty. And it was going to be under the heading Unde Malum, which means where does evil come from. What do you think of me?”

He said, “The same thing I always think.” But he was dead, sitting there.

45
Help him, Nina thought. She had to get him away from himself. But she also needed to
keep calm
. Maybe it was ridiculous but it felt like she was pregnant, in fact
he
was acting like she was pregnant more than she was herself. She had to do something. She was afraid of momentum. And momentum meant an episode of shock and humiliation taking hold and rolling and rolling and rolling and you can only watch.

She had to do something. He was not going to be interested in sex tonight, not in the state he was in.

“Listen,” she said. But then nothing came to her. There had to be something to distract him. The racket coming from under their wing of the house was less, if she wasn’t mistaken. She had gotten to like it, it was soporific, like ValueVision. He was just sitting there in a slumped state she couldn’t bear. Once Ned had talked about maybe losing it and collapsing all the way down and then joking that then he could become a motivational speaker and make a million, which wasn’t that funny.

He had to be all right. She wanted to grow old with him and she didn’t care if growing old meant shuffling around in a house that could be neater and looking for things and shouting over and over
What?
She thought,
I embrace the end
.

Someone was knocking at the door.
Not now
, she thought.

Ned looked wildly at her. He was shaking his head.

She went to the door. It was Jacques. He was being decently circumspect and apologetic. He handed her a damp towel and a sheaf of papers and withdrew, thanking her.

46
He knew she was doing her best. She was bringing light into dark places. It would be fine, later on. He would be fine. Gene Gene made a machine, Joe Joe made it go, Doug Doug pulled the plug, he thought. He was regressing and it was counterproductive and he had to stop.

Nina said, “Have regular facial expressions.” That was
a command from their inventory of facetious devices they used to josh one another out of bad moods. She would put on a chicken suit if it would make him laugh.

Nina got out of bed. She removed her jeans and sweater. She worked her bra off under the tee shirt. She would sleep in that and her panties. She waited for him. She shook the bedcovers in a way she hoped was inviting. Down to his briefs, Ned got in with her.

Nina turned on her side to face him and said, “I’m sorry but I have more to tell you.”

“Why am I here?” he asked no one. He meant several things. One was why he was giving this time to his meaningless personal history when the country was getting ready to burn people to death in large numbers. The mental volume of the thought had been equivalent to a shout. That was odd. He was screaming at himself, it seemed. His personal history would amount to nothing, would amount to a surplus of painful feelings worth nothing, in the balance. And another thing, he had been a fuckwit. His documented stupidity was set in stone for the friends he loved, still loved, to put into the balance when they thought of him. And
another
thing. Why hadn’t somebody kept him up to date? But he knew the answer to that and it was because it was unimaginable for either of them, Joris or Gruen, to tell him man to man. No, it was the accidental availability of Nina. If she hadn’t been there, what he was to Claire would have remained secret, apparently. His thoughts were killing him.

He got out of bed without explanation. He needed to move around while he was suffering.

“What else is there?” he asked.

Nina said, “Well this is from Jacques. Who got it off the Réseau Voltaire, which is on the internet. It’s an aggregator site. How do you like my pronunciation?”

Ned made an aggrieved sound, but motioned to her to continue.

She said, “The story is that Douglas made a critical discovery that I don’t understand. It sounds really technical to me and I don’t know how much he knew about advanced optics, etcetera, but apparently he did, because what he invented or discovered was the answer to a problem that had been unsolved all during the rise of digital reproduction … which as you know very well is the problem of distinguishing between real and fake in digital images and products. Every intelligence service in the world was working on it, according to my source, Jacques. By the way, there’s all sorts of complicated equipment in the tower basement. Jacques says that Douglas was negotiating with the Mossad to give the thing to them and they would use it jointly with the CIA, but he wanted to be taken care of forever, if you get my drift. And it was important that no evidence of the transfer, such as a sale or big payments to him that could be traced, would ever surface. And listen to this. The sheer existence of the invention if that’s what it was had to be kept secret. It was going to be worked out through foundations in Germany and Israel. Money would go for some kind of institute for forensic justice. I told you about the similar thing that had been done for him earlier for some lesser service or discovery where he got paid a staggering fee for the
Tambov
movie script. Someone named Bondarchuk was involved. That payment to Douglas was called a pass-through …”

She was leaning down and feeling along the floor near
the bed. She found her boots. She threw first one and then the other at him, not hard, at his knees. He had almost no reaction.

“Please come back to bed,” she said, raising her voice. He sighed and obeyed. He wanted her to finish her presentation so that the sermonizing on the radio could end forever.

Nina took his hand. “There’s not much more to tell. The deal over his invention was on and then it was off. There was constant negotiation going on. The invention was never patented because that would show the thing existed. The deal looked like it was off, I guess, when Iva was after Joris. But who knows? And then it was on again and then suddenly Douglas was dead, out of it, unable to go out and promote himself and this new institute, so now there’s this public relations spectacular. Which is really all it is, but you’d figured that out. So now tell me what you think.”

“I don’t know if it’s true,” Ned said.

“Neither do I, but it’s what I’ve been told and it’s credible to me.”

Ned covered his face with the blanket briefly. He lowered it and said, “I think I’m not going to have an opinion on this. It’s a pretty good example of a fait accompli. We were talking about that the other day. If Douglas came up with something you can use to defend the better countries against the worse countries, fine. We can never make it up to the Jews, anyway, Americans can’t. It goes back to the beginning, beginnings. Benjamin Franklin wanted to deny Jews citizenship. Roosevelt’s policymaker on Jewish refugees from Germany was a horrible anti-Semite. So you might say, Well, his invention is defensive except when it isn’t. That’s true. I’m making the decision to be okay with it
if it’s half defensive, half something dark. Nobody will leave the Israelis alone. It’s a fight in the Convergence. It’s the Palestinians we’re supposed to be for, first of all, but the Palestinians won’t leave the Israelis alone and remember how everybody at the Labor Center was outraged when the Israelis started putting up their great walls because they were tired of being blown up in their cafés? Everybody said it was an outrage but voilà the bombings stopped. The Palestinians had grievances
in spades
but they fought back like … like monsters. I know it’s not simple, but that’s all I have to say.”

He could tell that there was something else she wanted to say to him.

“Do you remember the first joke you made to me when we were dating, or not even dating, when we were still in the taste-exchanging phase and you asked me what kind of movies I liked and I don’t remember what I said. And then you asked what kind I
didn’t
like and I said, westerns, violence, and suspense, and you said, Does that mean you don’t want to go with me to see
Kill the Horse Slowly
?”

He said, “I’m not sleeping in my underwear no matter what you say.” He got out of bed, went to the chest of drawers, opened it, and took out a pair of pajamas and held them up for her to see.

He said, “These may be Douglas’s pajamas but I don’t care. Tonight I’m wearing them.”

She said, “Ned, you’re funny.”

“I once was.”

47
Ned couldn’t sleep. Nina’s penlight was under her pillow. He extracted it with care, managing not to disturb her. There were the papers Jacques had handed Nina earlier. They were on the floor next to the bed. Thinking about the old days was difficult, tonight. It was like looking at events through a dark mist. I hear as through a wall, poorly, one of them had said once. Certain times had been amusing. Like Douglas’s impromptu heckling of the Venceremos Brigade reunions in Washington Square Park. Douglas thought Castro was a clown and he referred to Cuba as the Brave Little Police State. Ned remembered it all, Douglas shouting
Páredon!
, the cry the Cuban rebels used in their salad days when they were sending their enemies to the firing squad. And of course by the seventies the volunteer sugar-cane-cutter brigadiers had forgotten what the word means and just took Douglas as encouraging them when in fact he was both reminding them of something shameful and insinuating subtly that they themselves could go to the wall, for all he cared. Douglas’s mind had been a dungheap of the left’s past transgressions, which had gone well with his occasional appearances as the conscience of the left, or one of them, anyway.

Jacques was obviously trying to help him. And obviously Nina had let Jacques know about his trouble with the encomium for tomorrow. It wasn’t Jacques’s fault that he got his information from a stream, the internet, that ran alongside a membrane that only let bits of it through into the mainstream
media flow. There was truth on both sides of the membrane.

Jacques had done some work on the internet, for him. Jacques was all right. He had printed out a poem, “Men on Earth,” by Robert Desnos. Nina would know who Robert Desnos was. He read the poem.

Men on Earth