The Ground Beneath Her Feet (80 page)

Long ago—on a plane—I spoke to your friend—I’m talking about Mr. Cama!—Ormus!—When she, Maria, approached him I at first thought maybe he was also one of us.—You can hear me? I thought he came from our side!—But he didn’t—
he did not
—it was just her craziness—I’m saying she lives in a world of make-believe—fantasy! pretence!—poor girl.

Snap. Crackle. Pop
.

Oh Lord!—Oh dear Lord!—It’s tearing, it’s shredding!—So thin, so flimsy!—It isn’t strong enough.—Soon we will all be simply your make-believe world.

(It is becoming difficult to see the woman through the video “snowstorm,” or to hear her through the mounting background noise. She is shouting; fading in and out and shouting as loud as she can. Her voice cuts out, returns, cuts out again, reminding me of poor cell-phone reception.)

Listen!—she fell for him!,—she truly did—she’s not a bad girl, okay?—we are not bad people—our world is as beautiful as yours—but his love—Ormus’s!—
-for that woman, I’m saying!
—this was hard for Maria to handle.—Can you hear me?—This is what Maria wanted to say to you.—This is her last request.—My last also.—Care for him.—We are ending.—Can you hear me?—Do not let him die.

 … HELP ORMUS …

Here the transmission cuts out for the last time. The snowstorm obliterates the image. I imagine that I am watching the end of a world. In the dancing video blobs I seem to see towers crash and oceans rise to swallow the alien land. In the hiss and roar of the white noise it is easy to hear the dying screams of an entire species, the death rattle of another Earth.

There is a change on the tape. The video snowstorm vanishes. In its place is the image of a doll in a chair, holding a circular mirror, in which is reflected a rectangular mirror, which in turn contains the reflection of another doll.

I stay there most of the day, alone with my dolls and their video images, thinking about Maria and her teacher and their story and everything that has melted into air. What comes to mind, absurdly, or not so absurdly, is a scene from a movie: Superman in his private polar ice palace, fitting crystals together and conjuring up his long-dead parents, a serene doomed couple offering wisdom from a vanished world beyond the arch of time. Flighty, deranged Maria with her scribbled messages, and my other lady visitor, nameless, composed, facing oblivion with high dignity: I barely knew them—they were aliens, after all, visitors from a familiar-sounding elsewhere, slipping into our awareness by an unimaginable route—and yet I’m profoundly stirred by their loss. I’m trying to work out why that is. In the end I decide it’s because although I, we, didn’t really know them, they knew us, and whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version
of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

Which notion turns my thoughts back to Vina, to whom all my mental pathways still lead. Her knowledge of me was so deep, her version so compelling, that it held together my miscellany of identities. To be sane, we choose between the diverse warring descriptions of our selves; I chose hers. I took the name she gave me, and the criticism, and the love, and I called that discourse
me
.

Since Vina’s death and the loss of her incisive vision, her Rai, I have at many points felt myself separating more and more into moments, disparate, contradictory: ceasing, as I now see, to cohere. The “miracle of the videotape” has shown me what I should long ago have spotted for myself: that there are two of us mourning the loss of her redeeming judgements; and that it’s time we bridged the rift that has snaked between us over the years, widening by slow degrees. Now that she’s gone, we perhaps hold each other’s salvation in our hands.

Help Ormus. Yes. And maybe he’ll help me.

I’m loading up the Jeep to head back to the city and thinking about the old Bombay days with Ormus, in his dressing room or up on the Apollo Bunder roof. As a matter of fact I’m cheerful enough, feeling the return of old affection, of happier childhood times. But here’s Molly Schnabel in white shirt and khakis, Mack’s embattled ex and world-class all-around poor mouth, strolling hands-in-pockets up the garden path, grinning her lippy, sidelong grin.

Well if it isn’t the inconsolable Indian boyo, moping over the passing of another man’s wife. You great girl, Rai, will you look at you. Like Niobe, all tears.

I keep things neutral. Hey, Molly,
quelle surprise
.

She switches accents from Irish lilt to Hug-me.

O, baba, what to tell? Wehicle broke down just close by. I am thinking, can I use the phone and give mechanic a tinkle? Sorry to incon-wenience.

She has spent time in India—she’s a multinational conglomerate babe, her father was big in Union Carbide until the airborne toxic event, the cloud of methyl isocyanate that ate the eyes and lungs of Bhopal; old man Molony was one of the executives who took the fall for that PR disaster—and she prides herself on her mimicry of Indian idiolect. Once at some Colchis bash she drove Yul Singh to distraction with this type of goodness-gracious, until finally he snapped, For God’s sake, Molly, this is America. Talk American.

If she shows up don’t let her in the house under any circumstances
, Mack had warned. I
don’t care if she’s shot and bleeding. Barricade yourself in and hunker down for a siege if necessary. I mean it. One time when Chow was out there she showed up with a U-Haul panel van and tried to clear the place out
. Now here she comes with her head cocked on one side so that her golden Veronica Lake-y hair falls in waves over one enormous eye, with her trumped-up pretext and her ingratiating Hug-me dialogue. Listen, Molly, I say, you know I can’t let you do that. If you want to make a call, sure, here’s my mobile.

Mobile shobile, this instrument I also have, she says, instantly dropping the cover story with a shrug, her voice rising a couple of notches. You think so you can keep me out of my own residence? What, because it is the desire of that putter of his penis into the fist of his own son?

Stop it, I tell her. Molly, just stop right now.

What, because you have received instruction from that inserter of narcotic toxins into the noses of his own kiddiwinks? That indulger within and without the marital bed in sexual perwersions both bestial and coprophile? That whited sepulchre, in whom only I have seen the worms of corruption writhe?

As well as the version that holds you together, there’s also one that tears you apart. This is it for my pal Mack, this thirty-three-year-old woman shrieking in counterfeit accents on the lawn of her own past, defaming what once she loved, making accusations which carry in many people’s minds an automatic guilty verdict and using the authority of her beauty and of the words “wife” and “mother” to acquire for her falsehoods the support of the law itself. This brilliant adversary who has already stripped Schnabel of his good name but wants everything he’s got. It doesn’t matter what Mack does for the rest of his life.
This version has been branded on his forehead. It’s a letter sewn on to his coat in scarlet thread.

I’ll drive you to your car, I say. Or, if it really is bust, let’s get the mechanic.

You’d make the perfect dogsbody courtier for some murderous third-world despot, Rai, she says, dropping the Indian voice. Or the Chairman’s favorite lickspittle lackey and running dog. Or the little ratso soldier the big dons use to do their dirty work. There’s a woman to abuse, to what’s the argot injurize, to throw off her own land? Send for wiseguy Rai. Call him on his fucking mobile phone.

Get in, Molly, I tell her. And she does; and at once puts her hand in my lap. O, is that all, the old Adam is it, she says, feeling the movement I am unable to control. Is that where you’re keepin’ the keys now, why didn’t you say so, poor darlin’, just wait till I see you right, Molly’s got the combination for your lock.

I move her hand away and start the engine.

Raincheck, okay?, I say too hotly, and drive.

When I reach the Orpheum, Clea Singh is waiting in the lobby, beneath the Latin tag about love, holding an envelope addressed to me in Ormus Cama’s own—pretty unsteady—hand. Again he needs you, sir, Clea says. You must come.

The note inside the envelope is just five words long.

I’ve found her. She’s alive
.

17
M
IRA ON THE
W
ALL

D
oorman Shetty isn’t on lobby duty when we reach the Rhodopé Building. Tiny, purse-lipped Clea tells me he has finally been put out to pasture. Agelessly antique herself, she points out with some scorn and no irony that he, Shetty, was long past his superannuation date.
They only kept him on as a favor to Madam
, she says,
but now it is better he rests
. He’s out in Mineola, N.Y., there’s an excellent retirement home in that neighborhood, convenient for the crematorium, and he has what Clea describes as a
generous allowance, we were under no obligation but he was her Daddy after all
. There was never much love lost between Shetty and the Singhs, and once he lost Vina’s protection his fate was sealed. After a suitable grace period had been allowed to elapse Clea made her endgame move. He had nothing to fight her with. Checkmate in one.

I offer up a silent valediction. Old man, you wanted to die with your boots on, but in old age our power to write our own scenarios wanes, and the shape of our last acts is decided by the rewrite merchants. Goodbye, Doorman. Enjoy the sunsets if you can.

In the matter of Doorman Shetty, Clea has acted with her habitual
toughness and clarity, which makes it all the more remarkable that on our journey uptown in the limo this customarily unflappable lady has been profoundly agitated. I realize that few people outside the closed circle of the Singhs have been where I’m about to go: into the heart of the silence and shadow that now completely envelops Ormus Cama. Ormus has been invisible ever since I was last brought into his presence, in the Guadalajara Hyatt. I have Shetty’s account of his activities—the visits to Goddess-Ma, etc.—but it’s possible that no outsider has visited him in his heavily defended lair in all this time. Certainly Clea’s acute concern is an indication of the exceptional nature of the event. No cameras, she insists before we leave. I hadn’t planned on bringing any, but I am interested by the prohibition. How bad is Ormus looking these days? What is it that he, or his aides, don’t want the world to see?

People in my line of work always think like this, I rebuke myself. There is no law which says that a man must agree to be photographed just because he wants to talk to a photographer. Give the guy a break.

Clea chatters without stopping all the way from the Orpheum to the Rhodopé. Mr. Rai, people have black tongues as you know, and maybe you have heard it said that we have not taken care of Sir. Probably you have read malicious comments on his physical and mental health, also cruel allegations regarding our husbandry of his assets. Mr. Rai, I beg you only to keep an open mind. If you desire I can open for you all the books, all the accounts, you will see that every cent is accounted for and all enterprises are in tip-top shape. If you require it I will present to you his personal physician who will confirm our absolute adherence to his orders. If it is your wish all things can be made plain.

He’s dying, I suddenly realize. These are his last moments and Clea and her people are scared stiff.

I don’t know why you’re telling me all this, I say.

You see, Mr. Rai, Sir is such a lonely man. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he thinks only of dear Madam. To him, that you were Madam’s good old friend makes you like his brother. It saddens him that you have been for so long absent from his side.

I decide not to challenge this remarkable statement.
Help Ormus
.
That is my new resolve, and there’s no time for pettiness, old grievances or ill will.

Clea in the limo has more to confess. Mr. Rai, Sir is in dire straits. He is too much reliant on wrong things to help him bear his loss. I fear for him, Mr. Rai.

Wrong things, I repeat. She looks harassed, and actually wrings her hands. Then in a low voice she speaks the names of the illegal drugs. The chauffeur today is Will Singh. He faces front and drives, stone-faced, obscure.

How much stuff is he getting through, I demand, and when she replies I know that disaster can’t be far off. I ask, How did these substances come into his hands?

Clea looks defiant. I am able to acquire whatever Sir requires, she says simply. It is my duty, as it was for Mr. Yul and Madame in the days before.

I picture tiny Clea in her sari bargaining in the back rooms of Dopeland with the likes of Harry the Horse and Candymaster C, earning their respect by her calmness, her attention to detail, her insistence on the highest standards. You see, Clea, I say, keeping my voice friendly, many people would not understand that when you fed Ormus’s habit and allowed it to grow so big, you were acting as a true friend should. Many people would question your motives.

Clea Singh in the limo draws herself up proudly; straight-backed, almost shocked. But Mr. Rai, I am not his friend, how can you think it. I am his servant. Ever since Madam and Sir rescued us, we are all his sworn subjects. I do not question or dispute his needs, Mr. Rai, I concur. I accede.

And this physician, I say. Does he have qualms about what has been going on?

He is familiar with the music business, Clea Singh replies, and the old iron is back in her voice. Mr. Rai, you are a man of the world, I am sure. Then what is the need for such innocent quizzery? The world is what it is.

Even after these forewarnings, Ormus, waiting for me at the elevator door, is a shock. He’s upright, but only just. I have the feeling that even
this unconvincing display of well-being has been put on purely for my benefit. If I weren’t here he’d be leaning on one of the Singhs. Strong young men dressed in white kung fu outfits wait anxiously in the corners of my eyes, looking concerned.