Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

Joris said nothing. The exaggerated slowness with which he closed the refrigerator doors was his reply.

Ned said, “What about Hume? Can we do something? Shouldn’t he eat?”

Elliot said, “He’s so upset now it’s hard to talk to him. He has a room here and he, well, he has his own place outside, too, his cabin. And he also stays up in the woods in good weather, in a, well, a yurt. But not in weather like this, usually. Have to be careful with him.”

“Elliot, you look bad,” Ned said.

“She can’t sleep. I’m staying over here. Maybe she’ll sleep tonight.”

Ned said, “You need to come over and talk to us.”

“I know. I want to. Maybe tonight, if I can’t sleep, if it’s okay and you’re all still awake or if it’s okay if I wake you up if I come over late.” Elliot was showing anxiety, which wasn’t like him. He had suddenly decided to load crackers with brie, like a hostess, but when he saw that he had overproduced, he stopped.

Joris was eating standing up. The meal array was top-heavy with meats — Black Forest ham and Virginia ham, both, along with the roast veal and a selection of Italian charcuterie. Joris was addressing a clod of rice salad. There was pickled okra. There were sliced heirloom tomatoes the color of raw liver. There was nothing green. The okra was khaki-colored. There was wine, red and white, in carafes. Joris discovered a stick of butter thawing on a saucer under a napkin.

A timer rang and Elliot leapt to the oven and frantically extracted a large loaf, barehanded, which he deposited in the empty sink. “I got it, it’s okay,” he shouted.

Elliot said, “Really, I have to go.”

Ned said, “If you can, come on over.”

Gruen wanted some of the fresh, hot bread, so there was a brief interval of comedy as he mangled the loaf in tearing away his portion of it, leaving a crushed rump for the others. It came back to Ned that Gruen had always inordinately loved the interior of freshly baked French or Italian bread.

Ned and Joris looked at each other with the same intent, to register forgiveness for their old friend Gruen. They loved the man. They were being reminded of it. He had been the most hapless and the most naked about showing he was honored to be part of the group. And Gruen had always been weak in the presence of good eats. Ned thought, We are what we were, but more so under stress, in extremis, like now. Death was fucking with the bonny boys of 71 Second Avenue. And they were dealing from strength , with death. Everybody had life insurance. A metal device wasn’t dropping screaming out of the sky to destroy them and their families forever. There was a Greek word for the category of promising people who met untimely deaths. One of his professors had used the word when he’d announced the death of a young colleague, weeping. He had called them the aoroi .

They should probably clean up the kitchen before they left for the tower. There was plenty of help associated with the place, but still.

He didn’t feel like it.

It was medievally cold in the tower. They were all wearing their day clothes in bed. A leg had come off the card table they had been using previously. A staff member, an older man, had wrestled a replacement table up the stairs. This table was pine, and its surface featured black rays left by untended cigarettes, ringmarks in the original veneer, all preserved under laminate. The ghosts of careless drinking days clung to the table, had been invited to cling. Ned wondered if Douglas had acquired the table from one of their haunts in the Village, like the Cedar. There was a battery-powered hurricane lamp on the table, also courtesy of the older man. Any one of them could reach it easily without getting up when it was time to put out the lights.

Ned’s spirits were low. Nina was still refusing to answer his calls. Gruen had announced that he was through talking for the night. That was fine.

Joris said, “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to talk about anymore: what I think about all the comedy we kept trying to do. What I think about it is … it was about having fun and the truth is we felt a bit superior, you know.”

Ned said, “Vietnam was over and none of us had had to go to Canada. No we felt like we could play around. So we did dada, I suppose, warmed over. I was a raw youth. I thought dada meant Salvador Dalí. I didn’t know anything. And did you know by the way that Douglas did a paper on dada for Mouvement des Idées? He actually studied it.”

“So enough about that,” Joris said.

“So okay, then I want to talk about Iraq. I want all of us to sign my petition,” Ned said.

Joris sighed. He said, “Okay, let’s get down to preliminaries.”

Before Ned could begin, Joris said, “You can’t stop mass stupidity. We keep having wars. They never make sense. One thing might help. Somebody beats the shit out of us worse than Vietnam did. If the streets were so full of cripples it fucked up traffic possibly the government would notice.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. Listen, when there was conscription there was a chance you could stop them. But they figured that out. Now it’s mercenaries and the unemployed, a lot of them. And women who want to get in on it. War is like the stock market. I know about this. People spend their whole lives showing what the crooks are doing every day in the market and nobody pays attention, and I will tell you this, you can spend your life on it, and you can die, and the next day the market is doing the same thing. Maybe you’ve seen some of my letters to the Financial Times .”

“But Joris. Let me tell you this. It’s different, this protest. It’s going to be in every country, practically. And I know about this. I know what’s coming in Europe. It’s more like the Resistance. Wait until you see the marches. We can stop it this time.”

“Okayokay.”

“Will you sign, then? We all have to sign.”

Joris said nothing.

Ned said, “Just think about it, and don’t forget that every war is men trying to kill each other who have nothing against each other …”

Joris cut in, his voice hot. “Douglas said one true thing. He said War is the continuation of business as usual by any means necessary. So let’s stop there.”

“Okay then, later. I’m not through.”

“Oh Jesus how well do I know.”

They yawned synchronously. Ned had another subject, not as important but still important, he wanted to take up with Joris. He wanted to tell the story of Claire, and what had happened on that front. He had to do it right and not put Claire down. Gruen knew most of the Claire saga. He wanted to tell Joris about Nina, too, but not until Gruen could be part of the audience. And he was reluctant to go into the pregnancy question. It might not work. It was Joris who had said in the old days that babies were the only form in which we can love mankind. Now he had two grown sons.

Ned said, “Briefly about Claire …” Douglas’s stellar fiancée manquée Claire had turned up in Berkeley five years after graduating from NYU after Douglas had dumped her over something still unknown. Ned was managing the Pacific Cooperative Market on Telegraph Avenue when he saw her again, for the first time. She was brought to him in his office for shoplifting a couple of packets of saffron. She was a wraith, then. The breakup with Douglas had been catastrophic. She was at Cal doing graduate work in musicology and then it had happened and they had lived together for the next seven years. They’d had different reasons for not wanting to have children, hers temperamental and his, big surprise, ideological. Post Claire, with Nina, he wanted children, or a child. The idea had been to start an adoption process after they had gone through whatever the fertility clinic proposed. She was willing to adopt.