The Ground Beneath Her Feet (57 page)

The door swings open. The widow Egiptus is holding on to the handle and, with her spare hand, catching at her chest. She sounds like: a mule. Like: death.

Vina waits.

I didn’t do right by you, the woman gasps. That’s what you think. To you I’m dirt. I took a young life already damaged and treated it like shit. Well looky here how things worked out. You end up in the big time and I end up in the fucking long grass. You don’t reckon maybe you owe me for that. You don’t reckon maybe I gave you the kick in the butt that put you on your road, and the survival equipment that took care of you on that journey. Look at you, you look like some tough bitch. Meaning, thanks to me. So don’t you come here and fucking stand there like judgement day and hand down your verdict. You took my strength and left me to fucking die. Can’t you see I’m dying in front of your face. What do you care. You’ll go and I’ll go on dying behind your fucking back. Maybe they won’t find my body for weeks, not until it’s blowed up like a airship and stinking up the county like a bad conscience. It ain’t your verdict I got to worry about it’s another whole fucking court entirely. Another whole sentence. Jesus.

Mrs. Egiptus shuts the Winnebago door once again and Vina listens
to the noises of emphysema in its advanced stage. She turns to Limo Singh. I’ve had all I can handle for now, she says. Give her the address. Invite her to dinner at eight and tell her it’ll be informal, she doesn’t need to put on her glass slippers and satin gown. I’ll wait in the goddamn car.

Thus Cinderella invites her wicked stepmother to the ball.

Pre-dinner drinks and drugs—champagne, cocaine—on the lawn at Tempe Harbor. Which by the way all I ask is you indulge in the conventional manner, through the nose, Yul Singh stipulates in a series of firm telephone calls to his guests. We got a vogue now for rear-end insertion, excuse my frankness, there’s a fellow calls himself Rock Bottom, one of Voight’s celebrated superstars, maybe you’re acquainted with him but in my frank opinion he’s the one to blame. Which it’s a free country he can do as he pleases but I’m a little old-fashioned, I don’t care for my guests feeding their assholes in front of the hired help.

Mrs. Pharaoh—Marion, the widow Egiptus—comes in like gang-busters, concealing her considerable unease behind a barrage of obscenity; getting her retaliation in first. Her spotless floral-printed dress hangs loose on her emaciated birdy frame. Otto Wing, campily entranced, raises his nose from a small mirror and peers at this ancient apparition.

Wow, Vina invited a bag lady, he announces loudly.

So you’re rich now, Marion Egiptus says to Vina right there in the entrance vestibule. You’re up here with your rich buddies having yourself a high old time. Sure, I know what that means. A shift in the fucking balance of power. I’m done for and you made good. This is America, money gives you rights. You get the right to haul me out here and shame me, and your friend Mr. Asswipe gets to insult me right into my fucking face. That’s okay. I know the score. How’s this for a deal. Gimme twenty bucks and I’ll apologize right now for how I treated you way back when and for twenty more I’ll forget what a twisted little whore you always were. For fifty bucks I’ll kneel down and kiss your rich foot and I’ll suck your black pussy why not for an even hundred. Your four-eyed friend here, I’ll cut him in too. Bag lady, huh. I could show him some fancy action. Put a bag over my head, professor,
cut a hole for my mouth, and for two hundred bucks I’ll give you what not even Mary Magdalene let alone no naked fucking under-age foreign whore could dream up. But sit down to dinner with you stinking scum? You don’t got the money could make me do a thing like that.

I like this woman, enthuses bespectacled Otto Wing. So lacking in circumlocution, and her offer also is intriguing. To have intimate relations with a person who stands at the very gates of eternity. This has possibilities.

But the blasphemy, Otto, Ifredis objects, We must loudly to such language exception take. Her evening dress leaves little to the imagination, and she pushes it even further off the shoulders to attract and hold his attention; which works. Holy flagrant youth triumphs over bad-mouthed blasphemous age.

And the pit of eternal fire will surely open beneath her foots before so long, Ifredis victoriously predicts. Also by the way lady I am not under-age and if you care to know it one hell of a performer in the bag.

Sack, Otto corrects her lovingly, running a hand down her exposed back. One hell of a performer in the sack.

Whatever, darling. I am confuse in my words because just now there is overmuch speech of bags.

Vina takes wheezing Marion Egiptus by the arm and more or less drags the unwilling old woman down to the lakeside, to the same spot where the dead stag fell. Okay, Marion, she says, you’re right and you’re wrong. You’re right I drove out to your trailer to put you down, I wanted some kind of closure?, after all these years of refusing even to speak your name I wanted you to know I made it anyway, I wanted your goddamn envy. But about my inviting your ass up here to jerk you around you’re wrong. You’re so goddamn fucked up, when I saw that it made me want to help you, so I’ll do what I can, doctors, medical bills, whatever.

You’re offering money?

Yeah. Yeah, I’m offering cash. And you don’t even get to vacuum my cunt.

Okay, I’ll take it, the old woman says quickly. How much?

Not as much as you think, Vina shrugs, coming clean. All this isn’t mine. I’m just the singer and this, it’s the label’s.

Marion Egiptus cackles, bringing on a coughing fit. Water streams from her eyes. When she recovers, leaning against Vina, she says, Shit, honey, I knew
that
. When you’re real rich, not pretend rich which is about your level, you don’t care to make war or peace with the past. Baby, you leave it behind. You’re
gone
.

For an instant, the widow Egiptus goes on leaning against Vina’s side.

I’m glad I didn’t leave you behind, Vina says. Their hands touch.

Marion pulls away. Yeah, she snarls. But once you’ve handed over the money you won’t have to carry me on your fucking back no more. Don’t think you’re doing nothing for me. You’re buying your personal freedom is all.

Well, okay, Vina concedes, maybe so. Nobody wants to be a slave.

Maria’s at Tempe Harbor too. No locked door can keep her out. She sets off no alarms. She arrives whenever Vina briefly leaves Ormus to his own devices, and she’s all done talking, she is physically insistent once again, even urgent, a phantom soul sister of the erotomaniac Ifredis Wing. Her body feels real enough, and she is strong. She grips his wrists and forces him back on to his bed. Still, Ormus resists. He thinks of Vina, and Maria’s power ebbs. Her grip fails. A force drains out of her.

You can’t help it, she says disconsolately, stepping away. You’re stuck in this stupid place, this dirty fork in the true path. This uncertain earth, its troubled water, its belching fires, its poisoned air et cetera. Its wrongness. No wonder it creates these pernicious side effects. You’re polluted, poor darling, you’re sick of some psychotropical disease and so forth, and you think what you feel is love.

Strangely, Maria’s coming and going is no longer entirely unrestricted. It’s as though, by coming into his presence through his pale, blinded, other-sighted eye, she has been deprived of her old means of arrival and departure. It seems that now that she has become a part of his vision, of his seeing, he can control her appearances. She can no longer materialize and then vanish simply by turning sideways, as if there were a slot in the middle of nothing. She can’t mail herself in and out of this world like a letter; not any more.

So Clea’s eye patch makes possible what no security system can manage. Ormus resolves to keep his left eye patched and in darkness.

Vina is all he sees and all he wants to see.

Even with the eye patch in place Ormus Cama has been finding that America defies credibility. In the hall outside his and Vina’s suite there is a drinks machine that eats paper money. This astonishes him. Paper is incapable of the simple mechanical feats which are the limits of his scientific imagination. Electronics—scanners, printed circuits, yes/no pathways—these mysteries are beyond his ken, as secret as the mysteries of the ancient Greeks. The paper-triggered automaton is the gatekeeper of a new world of miracles and confusions, a world where the door knobs turn the wrong way and the power switches are upside down.

It is evident from the daily newspapers that the world beyond the frontiers of the United States (except for Indochina) has practically ceased to exist. The rest of the planet is perceived here as essentially fictional, and what is most distressing about the war in Indochina is that this basically imaginary country is depriving American youngsters of their very real lives, to which they have constitutionally guaranteed rights. This is a disturbance in the natural order, and protests are intensifying. On tv, helmeted, shielded figures bearing arms are seen marching across college campuses, reclaiming the God-given right of Americans to kill or maim their own youngsters before the Indochinese get a chance to do so.

Tv is new to Ormus Cama and it has further wonders to reveal.

There are many advertisements for anti-personnel devices ingeniously and variously disguised as edible foodstuffs and designed to turn the stomachs and digestive tracts of the American people into savage, heaving battlegrounds. These alternate with promo films for a wide range of chemical remedies, each claiming to be the only reliable way of restoring intestinal peace. In between the commercials he gets word of the death of Louis Armstrong whom once he loved in the film of
The Five Pennies
and in other films too. He glimpses many families—including a family of talentless musicians—being laughed at in their own homes by invisible strangers who seem easily amused. There is word of foo fighters—flying saucers—landing in the wide open spaces
of the Midwest. An old man, an actor whose chief gift is his inability to remember anything he is told for more than fifteen minutes, is running for governor in California and is routinely referred to as an exemplary American.

The music, however, makes him feel at home. In the soundproofed music room he listens with excitement and pleasure to the
200 Motels
album by Uncle Meat, a live tape of the already legendary tour performances by Zoo Harrisons Caledonia Soul Orchestra, Eddie Kendricks singing “Just My Imagination,” the Plastic Ono Band’s “Imagine.” However, when he hears some kid moaning about the end of rock ’n’ roll, Ormus gets angry. Died? The music is just getting born. Vina is its mother and he’s the father, and anyone who thinks otherwise should get out of their high-speed road.

In his heart of hearts he knows why he’s really angry. He’s fifteen years late for the party. These should have been his years, and instead they belong to others. Time’s running out. Every day there’s one day less to seize.

He’s up at the house now, watching Vina down below, by the lake, talking to Mrs. Pharaoh and stuffing dollar bills into the dying woman’s shabby purse. He shakes off the miasmic state induced by Maria’s visits, and is overcome by a rush of great love for the woman who has renewed his life. How extraordinary she is, how much she has had to combat, to overcome. He must marry her at once. She must stop making her joking refusals and agree to marry him without delay, perhaps even here, at Tempe Harbor. Yes, that would be perfect! By confronting the woman who was not good to her in her younger days, she has laid a ghost to rest. Yul Singh exorcised the ghost of old Manny Raabe by the use of heat. Vina has chased her phantoms away by looking them in the face, and giving up her revenge. Her business with the past is done. To be married at this moment would turn a page.

His desire for Vina swells and overflows. Hers is the only love that can—that
will
—unite his broken vision, make him whole. As his are the only arms that can hold her together after all her struggles, all her pain.

There is a field of cosmos wildflowers by the lake. It’s the perfect spot.

He glows with love. Soon it will be his wedding day.

•  •  •

If she hadn’t made that final settlement of accounts with Mrs. Marion Egiptus of Chickaboom, N.Y.—if her childhood suffering had not been assuaged by an adult cash transaction—then Vina Apsara might just have been raw and vulnerable enough to entertain Ormus’s renewed proposals. If Otto and Ifredis Wing had not raced up to her on the lawn, passing the departing Mrs. Egiptus, and proposed a little ménage à trois, or, if she insisted on including her solemn and preoccupied gentleman friend, à quatre, then Vina might not have been so thoroughly consumed by disgust, might not have transferred her contempt for the Wings’ post-marital antics to the institution of matrimony itself.

But these things have been done and cannot be undone. And so it is that Ormus, approaching her at the water’s edge in the last light of day, with a bunch of wildflowers in his hand and a heart full of love, finds her in viperish mood.

We’ve got to get out of this place, I mean right now, Vina seethes at her fatuously smiling beau, who’s come a-romancing only to find his beloved transformed into a hissing harpy. Her former foster mother’s soured anger has ignited her own formidable rage. Ormus, Jesus
Christ
. What are we doing?, we must be crazy?, we should be setting fire to this nightmare palazzo instead of acting like Cool Yul’s private harem. His eunuchs and what’s the word concubines. We should be burning it to the fucking ground. For this we left England? If this is the twentieth century, baby, we should be making urgent plans to exit permanently into some other epoch. Run, comrade, the old world is behind you, the students said in Paris, ’68. Down with a world where the guarantee that we won’t die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom! Victory will be for those who know how to create disorder without loving it! Come
on
, Ormus. What’s the project, right? Are we going to tear down the asylum or just move in here to some fucking padded cell and I don’t know begin to
babble?