The Ground Beneath Her Feet (41 page)

And her name is Maria, Ormus asks. He twists round in his seat, trying to see where she’s sitting. The teacher shakes her head. No need for names-shames, she says, leaving. A sick stranger and her friend, you must be happy with that. Why names? You’ll never talk to us again.

But as he watches the teacher scurry down the aisle, Ormus hears Gayomart whispering in his ear: The obsessed young woman’s name is not an irrelevance. She’s not from the past. She’s the future.

Mr. John Mullens Standish XII, the radio pirate, known as Mull, Ormus Cama tells me (years later, in the period we have both come to think of as
A.V.
, that is to say, After Vina), I would call the first man of genuine consequence to take me under his wing, an entrepreneur of real acumen, exceptional leadership qualities, a certain ruthless charm, a deep thinker, the first honourable gent I encountered on my journey West, and what was he? A common buccaneer, a desperado, a man facing possible arrest at Heathrow Airport an hour or two after our meeting. This, however, troubled me not in the slightest. Quite the contrary. Ever since boyhood, I’d had a head full of criminals of the sea. Captain Blood, Captain Morgan, Blackbeard, the Barbary Corsairs, Captain Kidd. The great Brynner, with hair and a moustache, as Jean Lafitte in Quinn and DeMille’s movie about the Battle of New Orleans. The novels of Rafael Sabatini, the feats of the Elizabethan privateers. Nor was I limited to storybook stuff. You, Rai, with your darker perspective, there’s too much of the world’s horror in your eye, so you don’t see. How to relish the seafaring criminals of our own childhood coastline. Yet there they were, all the time, plying their trade right under our noses. Looking out to sea from Cuffe Parade or Apollo Bunder, we—you and I!—we saw the Arab dhows, the dirty little engine-driven fishing
launches. Silhouettes on the horizon, red sails in the sunset. Carrying who knows what booty to who knew where—

Save this guff for the magazines, I interrupt. Narcotics smuggling is not so romantic, that’s the truth. Criminal mafias, ditto.

He ignores me, lost in rhetoric: And if the pirate Drake hadn’t beaten the Armada, and the Spanish had conquered India instead of the British? You’d have liked that, I guess? (Such moments, when Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s Anglophile xenophobia emerges from his son’s mouth, are genuinely spooky.)

British, Spanish, what’s the difference? I cry, to provoke him.

Well
, he rises to the bait, if you’d … then he sees my game, restrains himself and grins ruefully. Anyway, he shrugs, when Standish approached me, it seemed as if Jason himself was inviting me aboard the
Argo
to join the quest for the Golden Fleece. And all I had to do was play music.

They are already in German airspace when the stewardess—Ormus, perhaps excusably in view of the date and his own Bombay English, still thinks of her as an air hostess—summons Mr. Cama into first class. Mull Standish rises to welcome him: tall, Bostonian, not yet fifty but already silvery and patrician, reeking of old money, dressed in Savile Row silk and Lobb leather. Don’t be fooled by appearances, he greets Ormus, handing him a Scotch and soda without troubling to ask, adding: It’s mostly phoney. You’ll find I’m pretty much a rogue.

I caught your Santa act, he mentions further, twinkling. On an earlier visit. That was some exit you made.

Ormus shrugs, is unamused by the happenstance of it: the Cosmic Dancer Hotel again. As if Nataraja, the old Lord of the Dance, were out there somewhere, choreographing the steps of his petty human destiny. I was going through a bad time, he snaps. I’m better now. He doesn’t add that the excitement of England, as it approaches, is flooding through him, as if he were a drain-blocked Bombay street in the monsoon. Standish, a big man, sees it, anyway: Ormus’s aroused condition, his readiness for whatever may come. His so to speak protagony. You’re the vigorous type, he notes. Good. We have that in common, for a start.

Standish’s own vigour is so great that it seems he might burst out of
his suit and shoes at any moment, like Tarzan in the City, like the Hulk. This is a person who has business with the world, who expects events to fall in with his plans. An actor and a maker. His highly manicured nails, his equally well attended hair, speak of a certain
amour propre
. Near the end of this long plane flight he looks daisy-fresh. That takes some doing. That takes an exercise of will.

Is there something I can do for you?

Ormus’s question actually makes Standish applaud. You’re in even more of a hurry than I’d hoped, the older man congratulates the younger. And here I am thinking it’s the East that’s timeless, and us transatlantic rats who can’t stop racing to Hell and back again.

No, Ormus answers. Actually it’s the West that’s exotic, fabulous, unreal. We underworlders … He realizes that Standish isn’t listening. Don’t go chippy on me, Mr. Cama, the American says: distantly, even idly. We may be working together for some time, and we’re going to have to be able to speak our minds, any way we choose. Even a pirate can cleave to his First Amendment rights, as I hope you will allow. (The twinkle is back in his eyes.)

He’s a Cambridge man—Cambridge, England; two years of graduate school. In his day he was a brilliant Chinese scholar, with dreams of setting up an academic institution of his own once he was through studying. Things have not worked out as he hoped. An early marriage to a woman in the rag trade failed, though not before it produced two sons, who stayed in England with his angry, resentful ex-wife when he went back across the Atlantic. For a time he taught Chinese at Amherst College. Then, frustrated at failing to gain the rapid advancement he expected, he made a curious, flamboyant decision. He would drive long-haul trucks across America for a few years, work his ass off, save money, start his dreamed-of Chinese school. From teacher to Teamster: a metamorphosis that represented the first stage of his true coming to be, his American way. He lit out, without illusions or regrets.

He quotes Sal Paradise by heart:
So began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off
For two years, maybe three, time was kind of stretchy then, you never knew how long things were taking, I crisscrossed America, carrying its produce to those who needed it, who were addicted to it as badly as any junkie, or had been
told they needed it so often that they became addicted to the telling. A heavily fatigued speedhead, blissed out on distance and music and harsh, hungry freedom. Of course I never saved any money at all, spent it right away on women and substances, and most of all I spent it at Vegas, where the big wheels kept taking me, the spinning roulette wheels of my monster trucks.

Standish is away with his thoughts. Ormus, sipping Scotch, understands that a full opening of the self is being offered here, an absolute honesty, offered at once and without restraints as the proof of the soliloquist’s bona fides. Listening, Ormus closes his eyes for an instant, and there is his own Vegas, that blaze of light through which his dead brother ducks and dives. So they have Las Vegas in common too.

Like Byron, like Talleyrand … I do not hesitate, Ormus Cama tells me
A.V.
, to compare Mull Standish to such men; for he often made the comparison himself, and these days, a person’s self-description is quickly adopted by all and sundry—Clown Prince, Comeback Kid, Sister of Mercy, Honest John—so why deny Standish his chosen similes? … like Joyce’s Nausicaä, Gertie MacDowell, the American has a club foot. The Lobb shoes have to be specially built to accommodate and support it. In the matter of sexual attraction, it is well known that neither Talleyrand nor Byron was adversely affected by his damaged limb. However, in the younger days about which he has chosen to tell Ormus, Mull Standish was still more of a Gertie: his foot crippled his self-belief. Then, while he was losing his stash in an early round of the World Championship of Poker, he was approached by a young man, who spoke appreciatively of his physical beauty and offered him a substantial sum of money to accompany him to a suite at the Tropicana. Standish, feeling broke, absurd and flattered, agreed, and the encounter changed his life.

This was the beginning of my voyage across a frontier I’d thought forever closed to me. (His voice is languorous now, his body stretches out and grows dreamy with remembered joy.) Through that slash in the iron curtain between heterosex and homosex, I saw a vision of sublimity. After that, I gave up the trucks, and for a passage of years I stayed in Vegas, as a working male.

Prostitution taught him he was beautiful and desired, it allowed him to dream, to construct the Mull Standish who would dare to enter the
Zeitgeist and shake it all about. From Las Vegas to New York’s Forty-second Street was a predictable next step, and it was here that he became the beneficiary of a classic only-in-America moment. A limousine pulled up; its window motored open; out leaned that selfsame young man, the trick from the Tropicana, his transforming angel.
Jesus. I’ve been looking for you for months. Jesus Christ
. It turned out that Mr. Tropicana had come (
a
) into his inheritance, and (
b
) to the conclusion that Mull Standish was his one true love. As a token of this love he gave Mull a brownstone apartment building in St. Mark’s. In a trice the midnight cowboy was transformed into a member of the propertied classes, a respectable member of the Greater Gotham Business Guild of gay businessmen, and a pillar of the community. Thereafter Standish rapidly parlayed his early, lucky break into the beginnings of a jaw-dropping real estate portfolio, thanks to his continuing, long-term relationship with the Tropicana Kid—let’s call him Sam—and, therefore, honorary membership of the inner circle of one of New York’s true First Families, the great construction dynasties, the master builders, the high grammarians of the city’s present tense.

Mayors, bankers, movie stars, basketball stars, representatives, Mull Standish says, and it is the first time Ormus hears a note of boastfulness in his voice, These people have been, let us say, frequently at my disposal.

America is not so unlike India, after all.

Why aren’t you there now? Ormus has perspicacity of his own. There is a hidden dimension here, a side to the tale that has not been disclosed. Mull Standish raises a glass, acknowledging the question’s shrewdness. I have certain issues with the IRS, he confesses. Corners were cut. There was a degree of clumsiness. It suits me to be in England for a time. England, where it’s still illegal to be queer. As for India, I go there for my spiritual needs. I see this is a remark of which you do not approve. What shall I say? You have lived in the wood all your life and so you cannot see the trees. To provide the planet with good air to breathe, we have been given the Amazon rain forest. To provide for the planet’s soul, there is India. One goes there as one goes to the bank, to refill the pocketbook of the psyche. Excuse the vulgar money-oriented metaphor. I have a refined act but I am not at bottom the refined type. Leopardskin briefs under the sober suit. Lycanthropic tendencies
at the time of the full moon. A certain loucherie. In spite of which I have my spiritual hunger, the needs of my soul.

The stewardess tells me you’ve been calling this plane the
Mayflower
, it has pleased you to make that joke. Did you know that Standish is a famous
Mayflower
name? I guess nobody reads Longfellow any more, especially in Bombay. Still, it’s a poem of more than a thousand lines, a long and vile thing. Miles Standish, a professional soldier, suffering from soldierly inarticulacy, wishes to marry a certain Puritan maiden, Priscilla Mullens or Molines, and makes what you might call the Cyrano error, sending his friend John Alden to plead his cause because the cat had gotten his tongue and wouldn’t let go. Young Alden, a cooper, a signatory of the Mayflower Compact, the founder of Plymouth Colony, a man of fortunate looks and pleasing manner, is unfortunately much in love with the same damsel, and yet in friendship’s name agrees to do as he is bid. Well! Mistress Molines or Mullens, she hears him out, then looks him squarely, forwardly in the eye and asks, Why don’t you speak for yourself, John? Tedious hundreds of lines later they are married, and the gruff old soldier, my vanquished—and distant—ancestor, is left to make the best of it. I tell you this because, though I’m no Puritan, Mistress Priscilla’s words are now my motto. I ask nothing on others’ behalf, but am shameless and inexorable in my own interest. As now, this minute, in making my approach to you.

Ormus reddens, and Standish, seeing his embarrassment, laughs. No, not sex, he reassures him. Piracy on the high seas.

England rushes towards them, then stops. Air traffic congestion, even in 1965. Unable to make their approach, they circle in the sky. Down below them, the pirate navy has assembled, an invasion is in progress. Here is a decommissioned old passenger ferry, flying the Jolly Roger, moored in the North Sea. The
Frederica
. Here’s another, the
Georgia
, anchored off the Essex coast, near Frinton. Look down at the Thames Estuary: those three tiny dots, see them?, are also part of this cutthroat fleet. Ormus, tired, exhilarated, is in an airplane state of mind; hollow, unreal, a condition in which it’s hard to keep a grip on things. Mull Standish seems utterly unfazed, and is talking, now, about childhood:

There was a heavy glass ball that used to sit on the windowsill of my bedroom. My father would turn it to catch and refract light. There
were bubbles in it, like galaxies, like dreams. The small things of our earliest days move us, and we don’t know we don’t know why. Now that I’ve started this pirate fleet thing, I keep seeing that ball. Maybe it’s innocence, freedom, I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s about a transparent world: you can see through it to the light. Maybe it’s just a ball of glass, but somehow it’s moving me, it’s making me do this.

It occurs to Ormus as Standish talks on that he’s giving too many reasons for doing what he is doing: over-explaining what is, after all, a nakedly commercial enterprise, news of which has already reached India. At a brilliant moment in British music, British radio is deadly dull. Restrictions on “needle time” mean that when you want the latest hit records—John Lennon singing “Satisfaction,” the Kinks’ “Pretty Woman,” or “My Generation,” by the new super-group High Numbers, who changed their name from The Who and immediately made the big time—all you get is Joe Loss or Victor Sylvester, music for dead people. But because commercial radio isn’t illegal if it’s not land based, the pirate ships have come to give the kids what they want. Needle time and adverts. Hello pop pickers this is Radio Freddie broadcasting on 199 … this is Radio Gaga … this is the Big M. The pirates aim their sounds at Britain and the country surrenders. And Mull Standish is the Lord High Desperadio: the music brigands’ king.