The Ground Beneath Her Feet (76 page)

Here is a cultural-studies guru, Primo Uomo, repeating for the one millionth time the oft-iterated idea that Vina has become the patron divinity of the age of uncertainty, the goddess with the feet of clay.

Here are two British psychoanalysts. This one, the young lazy-eyed hunky one, author of
Winking, Nibbling and Licking
and
Sex: The Morning After
, speaks in awed tones of a mammoth spontaneous act of group therapy. That one, a grumpy codger of the old school, is haughtily contemptuous, criticizing the way in which the Vina event privileges raw sentimentality over reason, so that now we can no longer think, only feel. This one calls the phenomenon populist-democratic. That one
fears it may be crypto-fascist, the origin of a new kind of intolerant mob.

Here are literary critics and drama critics. The literary critics are divided; the lisping old warhorse Alfred Fiedler Malcolm quotes Marlowe’s Faustus—
Then will I headlong run into the earth: Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbor me!
—and tries to build a complex theory about great celebrity being a Promethean theft of divine fire, whose price is this posthumous hell-on-earth in which the dead woman is actually rendered incapable of dying, and is constantly renewed, like the liver of Prometheus, to be devoured by insatiable vultures calling themselves devotees. This is eternal torment masquerading as eternal love, he says. Let the lady rest in peace. He is rudely ridiculed by the two young turks on the panel, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, who mock his arrant élitism and offer a spirited defense of the place of rock music in society, though they are also fashionably scornful of the low quality of language used by the speakers in the stadiums, their repetitiveness, the use of doggerel rhyming and tabloid cliché, the worrying prevalence of received ideas about the afterlife (Vina living forever, in the stars, in our hearts, in every flower, in every new-born child). These ideas, Gatsby says sharply, are not very cutting-edge; not very rock ’n’ roll.

The drama panel is divided too. There is praise for the spontaneous, improvisatory, street-theater rawness of the phenomenon, but the British participants bemoan the inordinate length of the global mourning, the French regret the absence of a firm directing hand, the Americans are concerned about its lack of leading players or a viable second act. All the theater people unite, however, to complain that their views are receiving insufficient attention, that they are as usual being treated as the poor relations, the beggars at the feast.

Here are tv biopic-film producers, advertising for look-alikes. Here are the open casting calls. Here are the lines of hopefuls, stretching round various blocks.

Here is Rémy Auxerre, calling the size of the phenomenon a product of the
feedback loop
. In the days before globalized mass communication, he argues, an event could occur, pass its peak and fade away before most people on earth were even aware of it. Now, however, the initial purity of what happens is almost instantly replaced by its televisualization. Once it’s been on tv, people are no longer acting, but
performing
.
Not simply grieving, but
performing grief
. Not creating a phenomenon out of their raw unmediated desires, but rushing to be part of a phenomenon they have seen on tv. This loop is now so tight that it’s almost impossible to separate the sound from the echo, the event from the media response to it. From what Rémy insists on calling the
immediatization of history
.

Here are two wild-haired New Quakers, a paranoiac and a mystic, probably both Gary Larson fans, denying her death.… Where’s the body? Just show me the body, okay? She’s not dead, somebody wanted her out of the way is all, we should be storming the Pentagon, the United Nations, you know? … No, she’s free, man, only we are not worthy of her, we have to purify ourselves, and at the hour of our cleanness she will cometh again, dig, maybe from a spaceship?, maybe from a chariot of the gods?, to liberate us. Like Buddha Jesus, man, she liveth.

Television.

Back at the Orpheum in the winter cold, alone and bereft, I hug myself and shiver while my white breath hangs in the air. I’m sitting out on the roof in my hat and coat with my hands over my cold-stung ears, trying to conjure up Vina sunbathing naked in the height of summer, Vina stretching her body and turning to me with a lazy faithless smile. But it’s too cold, and anyway the racket is everywhere, there’s no escape from the war of meanings, the white air is full of words.
Diachronically speaking, this is an event in history, to be understood within time, as a phenomenon with certain linear antecedents, social, cultural, political. Synchronically, however, all versions of it exist simultaneously, collectively forming a contemporary statement about art and life … its importance lies in the random meaninglessness of the death … her radical absence is a void or an abyss into which a tide of meanings can pour … she has become an empty receptacle, an arena of discourse, and we can invent her in our own image, as once we invented god … no possibility of the phenomenon fizzling any time soon because the phase of exploitation has now set in, the shirts bearing the last photograph, the commemorative coins, the mugs, the tackiness, her old schoolmates selling their stories, her army of casual lovers, her entourage, her friends … these are multiplier effects, she’s caught in an echo chamber and the noise bounces round and round, getting boomier, fuzzier, less distinct … it’s just
noise now … and imagine, if she had lived, the dying of her flame, her slow descent towards non-fame, towards nothing … that really would have been an ending, a tumble into the Underworld, and the worst part is she would still have been alive. Maybe it’s better this way. For ever young, right? Well, young-looking, anyway. Pretty fucking fantastic for a woman of her years
.

I find myself rising to my feet, bellowing formlessly, waving my arms at the blind sky, with cold tears freezing on my face. As if my rooftop’s a Tower of Silence and Vina’s living memory lies here, naked, beneath the circling vultures, helpless and unguarded except for me.

After forty days the crowds vacate the stadiums, in response to Ormus Cama’s direct appeal, and slowly the surface regularity of the planet’s daily life resumes. On Ormus’s behalf, the Singhs are frequently in court, seeking to protect the “Vina property” from crass exploitation. The new Vina look-alike Quakette, a doll that sings a stupid song untli its stand first begins to vibrate, then cracks open and gulps her down, is a particular target. It seems that all the cascading emotion of the Vina phenomenon will end in the slave market of capital. One minute she’s a goddess, and the next she’s
property
.

Once again, I’m underestimating her. It is true that commercial interests will do their damnedest to possess and use her, that her face will continue to appear on magazine covers, that there will be video games and CD-ROMs and instant biographies and bootleg tapes and cynical speculation about her possible survival and every kind of Internet chat-room baloney. It is also true that her own “side”—her record label and, in the rôle of her management and business team, Ormus and the Singhs—will capitalize on the Vina Effect too, putting her face on the milk, the bread, the wine, as well as the vegetarian meals and records.

(I once read a story about a woman who loathed her lazy slob of a husband. When he died she had him cremated and put his ashes in an hourglass, which she set on her mantelpiece with the words,
At last, you bastard, you’re going to do some work
. Ormus’s love for Vina is not in doubt, but he, too, is sending her ghost out to do business for the family firm.)

All this is true. But what will become evident during the course of the year is that something like an earthquake is building within people, that in countries all over the globe Vina’s adoring constituency has
acquired a taste for collective action and radical change. Instability, the modern condition, no longer frightens them; it now feels like possibility. This is Vina’s true legacy, not the acres of mawkish commentary or the bad-taste dolls.

And the heaving earth, too, has more changes in store.

This is the way I remember it.

That whole first year after she died, I was badly off balance, not knowing what to do for the best, where to put my own distress, how to continue. I kept recalling a day on Juhu Beach, and a girl in a Stars-and-Stripes swimsuit bad-mouthing everything in sight. That was the day I drew my picture of the world as I wanted it to be, the picture I inhabited from that day on, until the day she died. Now it felt like somebody had snatched the picture out of my hands and ripped it to bits.

When you have no picture of the world, you don’t know how to make choices—material, inconsequential or moral. You don’t know which way is up, or if you’re coming or going, or how many beans make five.

(Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year everybody else’s picture broke, the year we were all plunged into an unframed limbo: the formless future. I’m aware of these facts. But that’s politics and seismology, and I’ll come to it later. I’m talking now about what happened to me.)

I’d wake up thinking she was in the room, and then lie in the dark, shaking. I’d see shadows move in the corners of my eyes and they were her too. Once I rang her private phone line at the Rhodopé and she answered after the first ring.
Hello. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can
. I understood that Ormus had not been able to make himself erase her voice. After that I called the number a dozen or more times a day. Often, when I rang, the line was busy. I wondered how many other lost souls were pushing buttons on their phones, just to hear those two dozen words. Then I thought that perhaps there was just one other caller. Ormus Cama, like me, needed repeatedly to hear his dead wife’s last recording.

I’ll get back to you as soon as I can
, a promise I needed her to keep. But what was the message I should leave? What was the communication that would bring her back from the dead?

Briefly, I felt my heart go out to Ormus Cama, my rival in love. Now my rival for nobody’s hand. In the midst of that ocean of “love,” here were these two shipwrecked lovers, Ormus and Rai, unable to open their hearts to each other, unable to help each other, making stupid telephone calls to the dead from their sinking rafts.

One year after her death, somebody erased the tape—I’m guessing it was Clea Singh, trying to haul Ormus out of his despondent slough—and that day I wept again, as if Vina had just that moment been gobbled up by the hungry earth.

Of all the things said and written about her, the comments that made most sense to me were the ones about death being just death, the arguments against interpretation. Don’t make her a metaphor. Just let her rest in peace. I wanted to fight against the billowing firestorm of meanings, I wanted to put on my fireman’s hat and turn a hose on the flames. Meanings beamed down from the satellite-crowded skies, meanings like amorphous aliens, putting out pseudopods like suction pads and sucking at her corpse. At one point I tried to construct a text of my own, some nonsense about the heroism of rejecting interpretation, the abrasive but desirable embrace of absurdity. But I got bogged down in ethics. How to live a moral life in an absurd universe, and so on. I didn’t want to opt for quietism, to say it was better simply to cultivate one’s garden. Something in me retained a desire for engagement with the world. I tore the piece up and spent my days leafing through my portfolio of Vina pix and, until the tape was wiped, calling her on the phone.

During that first year, noting that I had largely ceased to go out, that when I wanted to eat I would order in, that most of this food was liquid, and that my long-term cleaner had quit because the place was getting to be like a slum, my fellow Orpheum residents took it upon themselves to “save me.” Johnny Chow came to advise, gravely, that I was paying too much attention to death. That was a laugh. Sugar Ray Robinson, Lucille Ball, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Laurence Olivier, R. D. Laing, Irving Berlin, Ferdinand Marcos, Bette Davis, Vladimir Horowitz, “La Pasionaria,” Sakharov, Beckett
and
Vina, in one year, I pointed out thickly: it’s Armageddon out there. Never a great debater, Chow withdrew, shaking his elegant head. Mack Schnabel suggested I
make a selection of my Vina pictures and then hold a show in the building’s gallery space. That was a tough one. Would such an exhibit look like a dignified personal tribute or just another case of an opportunist schmo jumping on the unstoppable Vina bandwagon? I couldn’t make up my mind. Anyway, it was a while before I got round to finalizing the selection. Most days I suffered from blurred, or even double vision. Clarity was not my strongest point in those unhappy months.

Basquiat came up to talk to me about girls, which was sweetly conventional of him, considering his own astonishing preferences. Fantastique weemain are beursteeng out all ovair, he wanted me to know. Aftair so long, it ees no good to be alone ’ere weez your fantômes.

Fantômes is correct, I told him. There’s a beautiful woman who keeps getting into my pictures, I don’t know how. I photograph an empty room, my bathroom, maybe, I’m spending a lot of time in my bathroom, and when I develop the roll she’s looking at me out of a mirror. No, it’s not Vina, it’s someone else completely. A haunting stranger. So you see that now there are two.

This dooble expozhair idée of yours, he said. Eet ees gone too far, I theenk.

Finally they approached me as a group to read me some loving version of the riot act. Say yes to life, clean up your act, take a minute to smell the roses, the usual formulae. I must admit they made quite an effort. They got the place into some sort of shape, cleaned out the drinks cupboard and the bathroom cabinet, dragged me down the street for a shave and a haircut, and threw a party in my apartment, featuring all the most desirable unattached women they knew (and this, given our profession, was a great many). I understood what was being done for me and why. Mostly friendship, yes, and for that I was and remain profoundly grateful. But there was also the other side of the coin. People don’t like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irremediably broken by life, is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we’re bored. I understood that I had good and true friends in these three men, that it was all for one and one for all and these were my musketeers. I also saw that I needed to behave better for their sakes. I had become their nagging toothache, their dose of gut-rot, their ulcer. I needed to get better before they decided to cure themselves of me.