Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

He could see that she was relieved.

She said, “His first name was Autocar?”

He said, “No, Ottokar, with an O and a K. Funny. Say that’s your name and you end up working as a mechanic in a garage? You know what that’s called?”

“No.”

“Nominative determinism. We collected examples. There was an insurance agent on Mercer Street named Justin Case. Douglas found them everywhere. The last name of a famous embezzler was Overcash. And there was a sewer commissioner whose last name was Dranoff.”

“My life was uneventful. Shouldn’t we go?”

There was the big house, all lit up in the gloaming. Nina seemed almost lighthearted. He imagined, just before they went in, Nina jumping up on his back and putting her legs around his waist, going in that way. She was so light and compact.

He didn’t want to track water into the house. They both conscientiously ground their boot soles into the doormat.

She hoped she was ready. There were some particular facts in Ned’s thumbnail portraits of his friends she should keep in mind. A cousin of David Gruen had died in the 9/11 horror. What else? Gruen was a Zionist. Elliot had been raised Bahai. She didn’t know what was sacred to them, though. Supposedly Joris believed in nothing, so possibly she shouldn’t insult the memory of Nietzsche or Robert Ingersoll, haha. Recently at lunch in a two-star hotel a colleague of hers had come back from the men’s room to rejoin the group, saying It smells like the Ganges in there. There had been two Hindu gentlemen among the diners who had ceased contributing to the conversation.

She wanted the friends to like her. She wasn’t going to rub some holy foible the wrong way if she could help it. Be mindful, her mother would say. Once, after she and Bob had had a meal at Ma’s, her mother had said Drive mindfully. Bob had been in the midst of a mildly New Age phase in his life and thought she was making fun of him. She had stayed with Bob mainly because leaving him would have revealed how she felt — about his being boring, oh God. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to Bob, judging from how often he mentioned it, had been finding a rubber band in his soup at Denny’s. And then by the grace of God, he had cheated on her, so hosanna. She thought she was ready for the friends.

No one answered the door so Ned let them in. Here we are, she thought. Inside, Ned seemed to know where he was going. She wanted to have a relaxed look at the glamorous living room and its furnishings, but Ned took her quickly through a door and into a small room that felt like the world’s greatest conversation pit. Around the walls ran continuous black leather sofa seating interrupted in only three places where there were doorways. Ned’s hand was steady on her shoulder. This would be a good place for committee meetings. The back angle of the sofa would keep the committee members sitting up straight. And there was nice ivory ambient light, nothing like the bleaching fluorescence in library basements and union halls. The wood paneling suggested good acoustics.

She got it. The catlike way Ned was leading her along and why he had let them in after only a derisory bit of knocking on the door was so that he could surprise his friends with her, which was flattering.

He inched a door open and in effect popped her into the dining room ahead of him, saying, “Here she is.”

And here they all were, standing around. One of them, Gruen, the heavy one, immediately began applauding in a friendly way. They had been contemplating the groaning board and waiting to eat. This was another perfect room. Ned’s three friends came toward her, but moving much more quickly was Iva, who had entered from the kitchen bearing a loaded platter. She slid the platter onto the dining room table and then deftly got ahead of the men, holding her arms out to embrace her fellow woman. Klimt! Nina thought.

The brocade tunic, black and gold, and the black satin headband, Tartar eyes, multiplicity of finger rings, were Klimt, while not-Klimt were her sturdiness and her impressive and unfair bosom. I hate you, she thought.

Nina was saying how sorry she was about Douglas as the others were saying how glad they were to meet her and what an enormous and pleasant surprise it was to see her there. Iva stepped back. As she released Nina, she said, “I want your hair.”

Nina felt a moment of involuntary alarm. For a stupid instant, Nina had believed her hair was being requested as a hostess gift.

“Oh thank you,” Nina said.

Iva’s strong perfume was Klimt, to Nina. No, it was just European. The embraces all around ended. Iva’s workout-calves looked very good. She was wearing snug Capri pants cuffed just below the knee.

Nina thought, Unfortunately some people are more like art objects than others and this woman is in that category and the category of people you find yourself not wanting to look away from because you might miss them in some fleeting and splendid moment. This woman was not a toy. Her face showed the marks of suffering, and something else, some iron drive. She was fully mobilized, was what Nina would say. Iva was grieving. She was grieving. And it was unfair to keep reading her. Nina looked for the faintest sign of age-parching in her grainless complexion. She saw nothing, and then she stopped. Iva was tall, but shorter than Ned, she could tell, who had thank God stopped answering, like a child, Five ten and a half, when he was asked his height.

Iva maneuvered people into the seating pattern she wanted. It was an enormous table. Iva was alone at the head, fanning herself with one hand and undoing the top of her tunic with the other. To her left was Joris and to her right, Elliot. Iva beckoned Nina to a place next to Elliot. Gruen was opposite Nina. Iva had put Ned next to Gruen. Ned got up, brought his chair around the end of the table, put it next to Nina, and went back for his place setting. There seemed to be acres of unemployed table space.

There was an actual wait-staff. Two older women were serving. The younger senior brought in two jumbo Erlenmeyer flasks into which wine had been decanted, red in one, white in the other. She began filling glasses around the table. The wineglasses were the capacious kind — Bordeaux glasses. Nina said no to wine. Gruen encouraged his server and ended up with two full glasses of red. Ned had a glass of white of which he would drink half. The enduring mystery of Hume … endured. She was not going to be the one to ask about that, but it was weird.

She felt the need to concentrate whenever Iva was speaking. Nina hadn’t figured out what Iva was up to, yet — she was up to something. Her voice was on the low side, with a darling texture in the bottom ranges. A smoker’s voice? It was easy to imagine Iva seductively wielding a cigarette during her adventures in intimate combat.

Nina was well aware that it was up to her to say something. She was blanking. Go, she thought. She tumbled into a formulation that began oddly with a statement about how sad she was to be there. She kept on. At one point she was asked to raise her voice. And she got through it, conscious the whole time of how much of the truth of her feelings she was leaving out. Everybody was looking at her, as she finished, with normal expressions. What she had wanted to convey was that she felt apologetic about inviting herself to the wake but that she’d felt that she had to do it in order to be with Ned when he was dealing with the loss of his great friend. That wasn’t the true reason she was here, and this wasn’t a wake, either. She didn’t know exactly what the fuck kind of event it was supposed to be. Somebody was going to tell them soon.

Iva, in the midst of saying something reassuring to Nina, snapped her head around and hissed over her shoulder — startlingly to Nina — as a signal to the servers to bring in the salads. Nina wondered if the hissing was another European thing, because otherwise it was rude as shit. The salads came, bowls of bouffant butter lettuce and other good things.