The Ground Beneath Her Feet (52 page)

Our son has come back to us and all the world’s in bloom.

To this place, Darius, the country’s grandees would come to let their hair down, believing themselves beyond inspection and above criticism. Lord Methwold was an unbuttoned host and here, in his prime, he offered recherché pleasures to the great. But the old roué Lord Methwold grew lonely and tired and took a widowed Parsi bride. After that the grandees found the house unsuitable for their preferred sports
and the carnival moved on. None of those funny goings-on under my roof, Darius, I can promise you that.

But tell me: is a third marriage proof of lax morals? Especially if for example with a younger man? Even if the gentleman concerned has no interest in um?

By taking Darius around with her, by pleasing his shade and seeking his approval, she assuages a certain guilt. She now possesses what he yearned for above all things: a place in England, perhaps even in Englishness. I resisted it all your life, Darius, so you never had it, and now I’ve got it instead. If I walk these fields with you, if I tell you the stories of the house and make them yours as well as mine, will you forgive me, my true husband, my love. You see what a poor woman I have been. Everyone must forgive me. You and my sons.

Praise God. Our son Ormus has come back.

Darius, he’s awake, but we’ll lose him soon. He didn’t come back for us. My little Ormie. My little shrimpy boy.

Will you look at this shit, Vina scoffs from the parterre, looking down on Spenta and the shining Thames. Ormus is walking again, slowly, resting an arm on her shoulder. He who moved so beautifully now staggers like a drunk puppet. It’s a museum, Vina says. Ye old world. For a boy like you, a place like this is living death. No wonder you got stuck in that coma?, but you’re out of it now?, and at your age it’s time you finally high-tailed it out of the British Empire.

There are butterflies, songbirds, wildflowers. There are onion-domed gazebos in the woods. Vina, voluble, impatient, makes this well-kept, carefully manicured or tidily unkempt country estate sound like the jungle, like some grass-hut Africa. I mean let’s go, Ormus. I’m like out of here. Sail away with me.

That’s a song about being tricked into slavery, he objects. It’s about deceptions and lies. It’s ironic.

England’s the trick, she says. You’re an American, she says. You always were.

He begins to sing about the ways in which America is unlike Africa. America, which is mercifully free of lions, tigers, murderous black mambas. It’s the first time since the coma that he’s raised his voice in song.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee covered it, she says, turning away from him so he can’t see the tears standing in her eyes. You’ve got to hear them. Newman may have written it but those guys made it hurt.

She gets rid of the throat lump and returns feverishly to the attack: Ormus you got stuck here, but it was an accident, and man, you’re not stuck any more. You can either stay and I don’t know immigrunt the rest of your life away, and let’s not forget immigratitude, that’s expected too, along with immigrovelling?, or you can cross the mighty ocean and leap into that old hot pot. You get to be an American just by wanting, and by becoming an American you add to the kinds of American it’s possible to be, that’s in general I’m talking about?, okay?, and New York City in particular. However you get through your day in New York City, well then that’s a New York kind of day, and if you’re a Bombay singer singing the Bombay bop or a voodoo cab driver with zombies on the brain or a bomber from Montana or an Islamist beardo from Queens, then whatever’s going through your head?, well that’s a New York state of mind.

Of course there are Americans you’ll never be, she goes on, Boston Brahmins, slave owners’ sons from Yoknapatawpha, or those sad sacks on the daytime confession shows, fat men in check shirts sitting with fat women showing too much thigh, wearing their naked subtitles and baring their clumsy souls. Just because they do not remember their history?, it doesn’t mean Americans don’t have it or they’re not doomed to repeat it. You’ll never have that stuff, that’s for sure. But you don’t need it. You’ll say things all wrong but they’ll at once become American ways of saying things. You won’t know shit but it’ll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that’s an old American tradition, see?, that’s the American way. You’ll never be a child in a haunted Virginia hollow, Ormus, or see your mama swinging in a barn, but that’s cool, you’ve got horror stories of your own. And you don’t have to do it?, but if you want to you can pretend, you can start arguing in bars about the Yankees’ pitching rotation or stressing over the Mets, you can play remember-when, that’s as in remember-when the Brooklyn Dodgers or Runyon’s Broadway or the Village in the fifties or the birth of the blues. It’s like you have a leg sawn off and you still feel it twitch?, only it’s the opposite?, you can start feeling the twitching of legs you never had, and guess what,
if you pretend long enough, then baby it becomes a good old American pretend, you can walk on those pretend legs without even crutches and they’ll carry you wherever you’re going, because what do you know, half the country’s faking it just like you, and the other half isn’t, but there’s no way to tell who’s which. So you get your strength back, Ormus, hear what I’m saying, and then you take up thy bed and you don’t just walk, you fuckin’ fly out of here. With me. America starts today.

Whoo-ee, she thinks, exhausted and astonished by the vehemence of her propaganda.
Whoo
. Well bang that drum, wrap me in the flag and call me Martha. But if I don’t get him out of here pronto, I’m the one, because who can breathe this air, that’ll suffocate to death.

Vina has been at war with Spenta since the moment she arrived. Mother and lover circle Ormus in his bed, as if they were prizefighters and he the referee.

All this technology, Vina smacks at the array of medical equipment. It may be good for fixing your teeth but it understands nothing, it explains nothing, and that’s why it achieved nothing.

The finest money could buy. It kept him alive, Spenta plaintively replies, not knowing why she’s sounding so apologetic, unable to get off the defensive.

Imbalances in the doshas, Vina diagnoses. They disrupted the flow of his prana life-energy force?, and impeded the body’s fire. Impeded agni leads to the production of ama. Toxins. We must concentrate on panchakarma: on purging him. Focus on his feces, urine, sweat. The three malas are the key.

What are you saying, Spenta says. These words.

It’s your culture, Vina gibes. The world’s greatest and oldest holistic system. You don’t know this? The five basic elements, earth, water, air, fire, ether?

Oh, ayurveda, Spenta sounds relieved. Yes, daughter, I know many of you youngsters are interested in these old ideas again, but this was never our Zoroastrian way. I personally like Ormus’s deceased father put my trust in the finest Western care. Developed, like you, darling, over here only, in the West.

I’ll plan it all out, Vina says, ignoring her. He’ll need masseurs, herbal
remedies. I’ll teach him yoga as he gets stronger. Breathing exercises too. And a strict vegetarian diet, okay.

Meat is good for muscle, protests Spenta. And fish for brain. Surely it would be best to leave such matters under professional doctors’ care. It must be so, that experts’ régime affords best hope of recovery.

Did the doctors wake him up, okay? Vina spits at her. Did the experts have that expertise? Okay. Time somebody started paying attention to what works.

Maybe, daughter—I don’t know—maybe you’re right—

Rasayana, Vina firmly prescribes. It’ll make a younger man of him.

Means what, child?

Sunbathing, Vina says. And herbs yoga meditation. And chanting.

Chanting, Spenta repeats, helplessly. Why not. He always loved to sing.

This is not a battle over medical treatment, but an inter-generational war of possession, and Spenta, who believes that she has already lost, has no weapons with which to fight. Unexpectedly, however, heavy artillery is offered. Big, shambling, baggy Patangbaz Kalamanja in a loose dark suit comes to call with bad news. Dolly is dead: of a thrombosis that worked its way to her generous and unsuspecting heart.

That earthquake shook something loose in her, opines Pat, his usual good-natured smile stretched by grief into a kind of snarl. Her own blood turned against her and became her killer, isn’t it.

He gave the impression he was describing a murder in the family, and that was plainly how he felt. He blamed himself, of course. All these years I have foregrounded business interests and neglected the little lady, he mourned, looking like a lovelorn panda. She had Persis, but her damnfool husband sat on in Wembley, preferring to be a boss. Now she has gone! What good is Dollytone to me without my Dolly’s own dear tones?

The Wembley place has been put on the market. Typically, Pat has nothing but good words for the country he is leaving. Britain is best, he says firmly. But Persis, now, she is my only home.

They are on the stone terrace overlooking the formal parterre, and Vina comes out to join them. Pat Kalamanja is rattled by the arrival of the woman whose charms defeated those of his own beloved daughter. He stiffens when introduced. Vina offers routine condolences, then,
unable to check her impulses, asks whether the late Dolly lived and ate according to the principles of vegetarianism and traditional medicine; and adds, foot in mouth, that had she done so with due rigour and attention she might not have succumbed to the blood clot that stopped her heart.

The sight of a choleric Patangbaz Kalamanja, beet red of face, arms flailing, is rare indeed; yet this is the surprising Pat who rounds on Vina and lets fly. Who are you to speak of old learning? he cries. Some cheap singer, isn’t it? Yet this same ayurveda you praise is expressly opposed—diametrically and inalienably opposed—to your brand of debauched activities. Music, drugs, television, sexual aggression, exciting movies, pornography, personal stereos, booze, cigarettes, the physical arousal of bodily rubbing in nightclubs and discothèques. This degraded material fills your personal environment, isn’t it? Yet what are such stimuli but just the things which our learning names unnecessary and harmful? You have the cheek to speak of vegetables when your whole life is an abomination?

Just as rare as angry Pat is the spectacle of a flushed, nearly speechless Vina. I am an entertainer, yes, she says, shaking her head as if she’s been punched. But surely?, as a manufacturer of radios et cetera?, you wouldn’t …

Your self craves excitement to fill an emptiness born of insecurity, Pat Kalamanja rages. It is an addictive personality that goes for such low-life materials. Probably you have unfulfilled desires from a past life.

Pat, be calm now. (Spenta feels obliged to intervene on her rival’s side.)

It is the bad times, roars the Dollytone tycoon. Kalyug, the age of destruction! Now we see the downward mutation of the species and also of knowledge itself. The universe proceeds by mirror images, and each set of imitations and replicas is less than that which it copies. Even in my beloved Persis I see only my Dolly’s echo. Charles Darwin! Evolution! Just a sham, isn’t it? A sham and a shame.

What a thing to say about your daughter, Vina objects, rallying.

You shut off! Pat Kalamanja roars. Leave India’s sacred knowledge within India’s national boundaries! What is knowledge? It is the Mind of Vishwaroop, the Cosmic Entity. It is the software of universal consciousness. Keep out of it, you, you,
virus
.

Come away, coaxes Spenta, taking her friend’s elbow. Vina is not the right target for your wrath. Fate has dealt you a cruel blow and you must strive to understand it. It is not a time to indulge.

Patangbaz subsides, panting. He is no longer the god of anger but once more a stooped widower, coming apart at the seams. You should return home also, he advises Spenta as they move away from the stunned Vina. What is here for you now?

Darius is here, she answers. I am living in his Garden of Eden and he is happily by my side. We walk and talk. It’s like this.

Everywhere there are women sitting alone because of men who will not return, says Pat Kalamanja, thinking of Persis. And men also, he adds, longing for women who have gone. Life is a broken radio and there are no good songs.

Go to Persis, says Spenta, kissing him on the cheek. Cling to love while you can. At least he has his daughter, she thinks. As for herself, a vegetarian immoralist, whose determination to succeed will now be twice as great, is planning to make off with her son.

It’s been ten years, more than ten. Red Nichols is dead and the Five Pennies aren’t worth a nickel. When Ormus and Vina speak of love, they may be chasing phantoms. But though the body metamorphoses, it also remembers. They remember each other’s moves, each other’s need and smell and touch, each other’s extremeness.

There’s forgetting, too. Her return, his awakening: they feel like they’ve journeyed to a city they’ve both visited in dreams. Everything’s familiar, there is much that tugs at the heart, but they don’t know their way around. And there are whole neighbourhoods they’ve never seen.

They set out to learn each other again.

I’ve been alone, she says. Even when there was a man in my bed; maybe particularly then. You don’t know, she says. You truly have no notion. A woman alone in this assassin’s business, this thief’s murderer’s rapist’s business. Sometimes you don’t get paid. And after they steal your money they bootleg your work, they dirty your reputation, they call you whore.

You don’t want to know what I have done. I have danced in a G-string in dirty Midwest dives. Bums in Atlantic City bars have put their hands on me, but I always knew I was a queen in exile, I had that
in me?, the waiting?, the knowing my kingdom would come. One day, I knew, the poor would beg me for money and I would say, no dice, jack, I did my hustling, go do yours. People. Always hitting you up, always hitching a ride.

He says, weakly, you sound like you’ve lived a hundred years.

Two hundred, she says. My heart broke open and history fell in. That, and the future too. I go back a century to ugly Ma Rainey preaching Trust No Man, and forward a century to some space kitty floating weightless round the moon and singing to a stadium in the sky. I sat at the feet of Memphis Minnie, who’s only just alive?, a fat balloon in a wheelchair now, she stopped crying just long enough to boast how she out-guitared Broonzy and to teach me the Minnie-Jitis. And what Holiday said about herself you know to be true of me. I was a woman when I was sixteen. Now I’m old as money, old as gold. Now I’m old as love.