The Ground Beneath Her Feet (84 page)

Yeah, him I’ve heard of, I say, laughing openly now. He just died weighing three hundred and eighty pounds, which is bad news for that finagling retinue of his, they were going for every dollar they could grab while the poor man, unworldly, unaware, sat singing his devotional songs at the Hollywood Bowl like a spider trapped in his own web. That’s sacred music all right.

What’s funny, she wants to know. People really want this, they want the magic and the security, the idea that there’s something beyond, something greater, something more. Meditation, celebration, supplication, that’s … fuck you, Rai, why is this making you laugh?

No, it’s really okay, I say. I’m sorry, it’s only nostalgia. I knew someone else who talked like this once.

Oh, shit, she says. My people were doing this stuff in the fucking thirteenth century but I should have guessed she’d still have gotten in first.

Here is seventeen-month-old Tara Celano on my roof terrace, wearing a furry pink bomber jacket and lime-green tights, serenading the watching Chrysler Building and World Trade Center towers with a lyric-free approximation of, I’m guessing,
Da Doo Ron Ron
. Mira, meanwhile, lounges on a rug, smoking, apparently ignoring her daughter completely. Left to her own devices, Tara is growing up as a strange mixture of precocious adult and lucky survivor. On the one hand, she can now wait in the wings during her mother’s performances without complaining; she can do the twist, the stomp, the mashed potato too, and the wah-watusi and the hitchhiker and the locomotion, and if you don’t know how to do it, she’ll show you how to walk the dog; and she knows her way around the backstage areas and women’s rooms of dozens of Manhattan clubs and bars, both salubrious and unhealthy. On the other, she picks pebbles off the tops of graveled cactus pots and tries to swallow them. My apartment’s electric wall sockets exert upon her a potent magnetic attraction. I have the feeling I’m saving her life a dozen times a day, but she’s come this far without me, so Mira must have been keeping an eye on
her while pretending to turn her loose. That’s what I choose to think, anyhow, while continuing to make sure Tara doesn’t succeed in mounting the wall at the edge of the roof terrace and swallow-dive to an untimely death in East Fifth Street below.

The spiritual topic, interestingly, never recurs. Mira, always quick on the uptake, has understood two things about it: one, that I do not respond well to such remarks, and two, that it’s a road leading back to Vina, with whose ghost she is beginning to feel, for the first rime in her short life, a tad competitive. Thus it remains unclear whether she’s genuinely religious or if this is some Catholic leftover mixed up with the remains of teenage mysticism. Or, to give her her due, maybe she sees sacred music simply as something to use, there’s no need to become what did she say au courant, it’s just a way of getting people to listen, a storehouse to ransack for her own purposes, as Picasso once ransacked Africa’s visual motherlode, as the empires of the West once ransacked the world.

This is what a generation gap feels like, I realize. In some respects I simply do not understand the workings of so young and fresh a mind.

About the
gunss
, I have formulated a private theory. I think the weapons are linked to the
tattooss
(a butterfly on her ankle and a small dragon below her left shoulder blade), the whorey clothes, the exhibitionism (in spite of my repeated requests, she won’t lower the window shades when she’s walking around demi-nude at home)—in brief, to her whole trash act. It’s all a class rebellion, a way of defining herself against those who rejected her. The guns are pantomime. When I check inside Mira’s bag, I do find a little Giuliani & Koch .09 mm persuader, but it isn’t loaded, nor is she carrying ammunition clips. The city is Mira’s theater and the gun is just her prop.

On the morning of our appointment with Ormus she’s as nervous as a teenager before her first date. Tara, on the other hand, is totally cool, except for a tendency to shout at anyone within range:
Go see old guy!
Johnny Chow has come up for breakfast and she yells the news at him. Big talker, huh, Chow grins, biting into a blueberry muffin. Careful, kid, nothing gets you in trouble like your mouth. Then Mira comes out of the bedroom in her Vina get-up and he chokes. I have to thump
him on the back several times and when he recovers, wiping his eyes, he turns to Tara, gasping for air: See what I mean?

To Mira he wonderingly remarks, Rai told me you were good, but I never imagined, I never fucking dreamed. Damn! And you sing like her, too. Hot damn. I’ve got to tell you this totally weirds me out.

He leaves, shaking his head, still clearing his throat. Gee, you can’t beat a good notice for building confidence, Mira exclaims, with an uncertain smile.

In the cab uptown—Ormus offered to send Will Singh with a car, but I thought it better to arrive independently—Mira goes through her Ormus checklist. Life story, discography, influences, touchy points, e.g. the tinnitus that doomed him to perform in a glass casket. That doesn’t seem to bother him too much in ordinary life, I tell her. I’m remembering how he cleaned up the sound on his spy tape so that I could hear her voice. Even with his internal crackles and tweets he can still hear well enough to work a mixing desk. Oh, Jesus, I suddenly think, he’s not crazy enough to play her the surveillance tapes, is he? If she sees herself on those three hundred screens she’ll walk out of both our lives and never return and I can’t say I’d blame her either.

So now I’m nervous too.

His heterotopian tendencies, his forays into alternative realities, both attract and alarm her. She has grown up with Ormus’s songs and pronouncements about the otherworld, but she doesn’t like the idea that it wasn’t a better place, just a different one, no more than a variation that didn’t quite work, and she doesn’t at all like the idea that it’s gone, that Ormus doesn’t need the eye patch any more. I’ve also briefed her about Gayomart, who after all was Ormus’s original heterotopic discovery. Gayomart and the songs of the future. Gayomart’s escape from Ormus’s head in a car smash long ago. Ormus’s half-belief that it’s Gayo with whom Vina spent her last moments, that maybe it’s Gayo she’s been with in her time below. It’s still difficult for me to come out with this information neutrally, without making judgements, but Mira is fascinated. I love a good twin story, she says. It’s all about the different sides of the brain, I mean we really have no idea of the untapped potential, of our own powers, okay? This guy has really penetrated his dark side. It’s amazing. Rai?

I think the two of you will hit it off just fine, I say. (I’m starting to feel, and therefore sound, not only edgy but more than a little sour.)

Are you jealous? she asks, extremely pleased, I thought he was old and fucked up and had terrible buzzy ears. No contest, right? You are jealous, she says, punching me on the arm, grinning from ear to ear.
Now
she’s relaxed.

Buzzy ear, says Tara from her corner of the cab. Buzzy ear fucked up.

Clea’s waiting in the Rhodopé lobby wearing her thick-lensed glasses, looking more than ever like a tiny old sari-clad Mrs. Mole. When she sees Mira she gasps, Oh, Madam, thank god! Then she shivers slightly, as if making an enormous effort to rein in her feelings, and turns to Tara, greeting her like they’re old buddies, low- and high-fiving her, instantly stealing her young-old heart. In the elevator Tara and Clea do the swim (VTO’s on the sound system) while I look at myself in the mirror. I’m not in bad shape but next to Mira I look like the essence of square. I even use words like square. Ormus, in his current decrepitude, is, I suspect, still cool. I personally would call him more hip replacement than hip but then I’m not a twenty-year-old girl being granted admission to the inner sanctum of one of the sacred monsters of rock.

He’s waiting at the elevator door, looking frail but expectant, dressed in Japanese martial arts whites and leaning on Will Singh. When he lays eyes on her his fingers tighten on Will’s forearm, digging in painfully. Will remains impassive; impassivity is this big man’s forte.

Yes, says Ormus Cama. Just that one word. He and Mira face each other for a silent eternity: fifteen seconds, ten years, something like that. I note with some satisfaction that the look on her face is one of disguised disbelief. She’s acting as if she’s seen a ghost, as if Ormus, this wasted entity that used to be Ormus Cama, is the revenant, the one who’s come back from the dead. Which is of course supposed to be her rôle in today’s little drama.

Please, says Ormus, and leads the way, still leaning on Will, towards the white Yamaha concert grand. After a few paces Mira touches Will Singh on the shoulder. Let me do that, she says, and offers her own young arm to Ormus. He nods, twice, his eyes filled with emotion, and they move forward again. Will hovers at the rear of the group. Tara has taken Clea Singh’s hand. Everyone is silenced by the moment.

When we reach the piano, Ormus sits down and starts to play a slow, haunting gospelly tune. Mira stands by him, a little behind him. The rest of us wait awkwardly, feeling like intruders. For a few minutes she just lets him play, she lets the music take her body, closes her eyes, sways. One of her hands has alighted on Ormus’s shoulder and she leaves it there, she even moves it across a couple of inches and rests her fingertips against the nape of his neck. I feel my face heating up but I do not intervene.

Then Mira sings, and the room fills with her ridiculously strong voice with its great river-deep-mountain-high range. Vina’s voice. Ormus Cama hears it and is forced to stop playing because his fingers have begun to shake, but she keeps going by herself, like a ray of sunlight in a ruined church.

Lead me to your light, she sings, oh sweetheart lead me to your day, I’m down at the bottom in the endless night, won’t you please show me the way. If you don’t lead me baby then I guess I’m down here to stay.

The song is a VTO golden oldie, a lost soul’s appeal to her lover, but Mira’s the one leading Ormus out of the darkness now, the one saving him from the pit. He’s down in that deep dungeon and it’s her voice that’s setting him free.

His hands go back to the piano, the tempo rises and her voice soars in answering joy. Clea and Tara are hand-clapping now. Even Will Singh, mister stoneface himself, is joining in. Me? I’m not clapping. I’m not the musical type.

Later, over dinner back at home, with Tara happily asleep in my bed, I look at Mira across the fettuccine and chianti I’ve set before her and I see a stranger: a tough, disenchanted young woman who is also sharp enough to seize her big opportunity, and under the eyes of her lover to flirt with another man. A woman who still isn’t sure whether or not she has just had the most important encounter of her musical life. Maybe there’s a future opening up for her, or maybe it’s just a mad fantasy that will vanish with the dawn. I can see that she is imagining that future, she can’t help picturing the rebirth of one of the legendary bands, with herself stepping into Vina’s empty shoes.

Don’t run away with it, I say, too roughly. You saw the shape he’s in.
Maybe he’ll break the habit, maybe he won’t. The odds are not great, you know that, you know the addictive grip of what he’s on, it could be stronger even than you. Anyway it’s a long way from today to a stadium show.

Damn, listen to yourself, she says, setting her jaw. I thought this whole thing was your idea anyhow. It was even you who said we shouldn’t tell him about us.
Help Ormus
, yeah, right, but let’s not help Mira, let’s not get carried away.

I can’t think of a thing to say. I just sit and eat.

You don’t trust me, is that it, she asks. You don’t believe what I promised you. You think I’m a whore.

No, I say after much too long a pause, it’s okay, I do trust you, I really do.

In fact I am sort of confident of her love, the unlooked-for surprise of it, I want to trust her blindly, but I’m also aware that I have badly miscalculated the power of what Ormus Cama still has to offer. His music, his legendary status and, yes, also his beauty. Mira is clear about that. You’re so blind, she tells me, he’s the most beautiful man. Those eyes, that soft, soft voice, he’s fucking irresistible. Sure, he’s taken a battering, but you can’t be such a
man
that you actually think that makes him less attractive.

How about his age, I say, trying to sound light-hearted. This is a fellow with childhood memories of the 1940s, of World War II, “White Christmas,” the Partition Riots, the New Look,
Oklahoma
. Is this what today’s youth prefers?

That’s just his shell, it’s just the lantern protecting his flame, okay?, she waves me away. His spirit’s still young, the flame’s still strong, and that’s what counts. Like your spirit, she adds consolingly, coming across to my side of the table, and p.s. I also like your shell.

At night when I’ve moved Tara into the room next door and she and Mira are both asleep, I stare at the ceiling and reflect on fate’s little table-turning ways. With Vina I was always the secret lover, the back-door man. This time it’s Mira and I who are together, an item, in love, whatever, and it’s my turn to fret about her secret life with Ormus. So we’re rivals again, Ormus and I, and in this respect Mira has already filled Vina’s boots. And even though the flow of this new triangle’s
energy has been reversed, some things remain the same: trust is the issue once more; and Ormus Cama still has no idea of my real importance in the story of his life.

The existence of the peekaboo videotapes is the secret Ormus and I are keeping from Mira, and must forever keep. That we have become lovers is the secret Mira and I have agreed to keep from Ormus. This is a secret I would now prefer to tell, but I am denied permission to do so by the woman I love, on pain of terrible retribution. As for Mira and Ormus, music is their secret language, in which they can commune in ways they don’t trouble to explain to me.

Here is the last image in my photo-sequence about Vina. I’m sitting in a chair with a circular mirror on my lap. Reflected in the circular mirror is a rectangular mirror containing an image of Vina Apsara. No, not Vina, but the greatest of the not-Vinas. Mira Celano, my new torment, my love.