Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

She wouldn’t mind getting into an argument on Christianity. Because she had a new standpoint on the subject since she had happened to marry a sort of Jesus, a secular Jesus, of course, not that Ned would tolerate that description. So far as she knew, he had never done a bad thing, except for like a complete asshole going to the funeral of fucking Douglas, the world’s greatest friend — going and just leaving her a few messages. Douglas, never Doug, the rule for addressing the world’s greatest friend.

Nina had her own reading matter but she was too hyper to read. Two poems in Poetry magazine had irritated her. In one poem, the gist was that the reader goes to the seaside, and it’s the sea shouting Help! the sea saying Help! to humans, something like that. And then in another one, the poet seemed to say It’s closing time in the old fort and you have to go and you can’t find your sons, so what to do, you just go back to the cannons and you’ll find them hanging around there. Everything was upsetting. And there was nothing interesting about the interior of a plane. Her seatmate swallowed a cough. Planes were unsanitary. She was breathing recirculated air, and it was Ned, his impulsiveness, Ned, who was to blame. Her fury was rising again.

She knew why it was. Things she wanted, things she thought she had, being jerked away from her without warning and at the last minute, always upset her, based on patterns in her absurd childhood, patterns she had studied and parsed and studied until she was sick unto death of the subject. But her therapist had been a Freudian, and being sick and tired of it wasn’t a reason for letting go of something. The reverse! And after years of staring at the facts, she had no idea, still, how she should feel about her pixie parents — up, down, sad, send them to the firing squad? How should she feel about the elf shoes, with their pointy toes curving back toward her little shins, that her mother had gotten on sale, making her wear them to school, insisting they were perfectly normal? She remembered the giant celebration her parents had given when her father finally got into the Screen Extras Guild, in his fifties, was that sane? She had no idea. They did this, they did that. For any ailment, they medicated her with bark tea. Her mother had become an astrologer because it was such a portable occupation. But then they had stayed stuck in Los Angeles forever. Linda, her mother’s best friend and worst influence, had branched out into astrology for pets, dogs mainly, and tried to get Ma to take it up, which she hadn’t.

But then finally, late in the day, turning thirty-four, she had found Ned, and gradually gotten him to want a child, and to really try, with her. And then this. She thought, I take the pills, I get the shot, he vanishes! It was outrageous.

It all had to do with le grand Douglas. Douglas had been the head of Ned’s clique in the seventies, the spokesmodel, when they were undergraduates, which would make it Douglas’s clique, actually. They had been a group of wits, in their opinion, of superior sensibilities of some kind, was the idea. Everything she knew about Douglas was irritating. He even had his own term for the effect they were going for: perplexion. So elegant. And there was his legendary pensiveness, the way he would sometimes hold up his hand in a certain way to signal the group to stop talking so he could finish a thought he wasn’t sharing. Then he might jot something down on a scrap of paper or he might not. The point, to her, seemed to be to show that whatever was going on around him was subordinate to the great private productive secret-not-necessarily-related-to-anything-his-groundling-friends-were-talking-about trains of thought that Douglas was having.

And one thing she could not get out of her mind was that when Douglas had been the ringmaster of the group at NYU he had demonstrated that he was the world’s champion of walking out of the Thalia, walking out on foreign films he personally found highly overrated and taking his pack of stupid fool friends along with him. She had been incredulous, hearing about that, and about Ned obeying Douglas, essentially. And Ned had told her about the group going to see Last Tango in Paris . And Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando were having precoital fooling around and in the course of it she has to pee and she goes into the toilet in the vacant apartment they’re carousing in and the camera follows her and she pees but gets up without wiping or using a bidet or anything and then they had gone on to have sex. So quelle horreur and that was enough for Douglas, who found the hygienic omission a good enough excuse to lead his minions out immediately. His position had been that the omission fatally attacked the plausibility of the scene. They had been very severe about cinema, Ned’s group. It was amazing to her. They had walked out on Brando at his professional and physical peak. So why had they kept going to the Thalia led by someone who was so sensitive that half the time their money would be spent for nothing?

And what she did know with certainty was that Ned had been abandoned, abandoned gradually, and then finally, by this man he was racing ahead of her and her ova to praise and bury, and it had been painful , muted but painful, to Ned, over the years. And she knew that the abandonment had gotten more painful for Ned as Douglas got half-famous in the world, debunking forgeries, significant forgeries. And Douglas had remained closer, Ned had known for a fact, to the other three friends. She had no idea what had led Douglas into the “questioned documents” business, but something had, and he’d made it pay. He’d proved that some sensational papers revealing that Alfred Dreyfus was in fact guilty of espionage were right-wing forgeries. And then someone had forged Milan Kundera’s so-called Love Diaries , and Douglas had shot that down. And then he had married the leading gossip columnist in Czechoslovakia, the radiant Iva, a consensus great beauty. And he had gotten her over to the U.S. and put her in a tower in the woods, in the Catskills, near Woodstock. And they had lived in it, and there had been an inheritance, and when the internet came, there would be little fragments from Douglas to Ned, avant-garde tips on nutrition or postings from the Committee for Ethical Tourism which proved there was nowhere in the world you could go for a vacation except possibly Canada. She had always wanly hoped to get revenge on Douglas. Because there had truly been a superior soul in their little grouplet, and that had been Ned, her lad, her Ned. And there was another thing that had driven her crazy about Douglas. At first through the mail, and then by fax, and then by email, had come a stream, a very intermittent stream, of short papers and notes from Douglas, who had become eccentric and was proposing various universal solutions to the problem of the persistence of evil in the world, in human relations. And some of them had been items like monotheism, and then it had been declining terrestrial magnetism, and there had been others. Like his theory that gradual anoxia was driving mankind crazy, based on the shrinking percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere compared to the much higher oxygen content in air samples taken from bubbles in ancient Egyptian glassware. And then it had been estrogens and antidepressants infiltrating the water supply. Of course it would be very nice if someone could prove that unkindness was caused by pollution.

And Ned had always been dutiful and sent some sort of reply trying to argue, shorter and shorter replies, because Douglas almost never, and then never, had had anything to say to Ned in return, no expansion on the particular subject.

Douglas’s group had thought very highly of itself. They were going to be social renovators of some unclear kind, had been the idea, by somehow generalizing their friendship. Ned could still get solemn, talking about those times. She didn’t get it. And part of the original group idea had been that they would always be a unity, helping each other, maybe creating a compound in the wildwood for summer vacations or maybe crafting some excellent retirement collective. Right , she thought.