Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

Suddenly he knew clearly where to take this. The problem with going into detail about Claire was that it made him look like a fool and a dupe. He didn’t want to revisit any of it, and Joris’s contribution had made the picture even worse. So he was going to talk about Nina. They knew nothing about Nina.

“Now Nina, you could say Nina contains multitudes. I’ll just tell you about this because it sheds light on certain aspects of my girl. You don’t know anything about her yet, of course. You will. But here’s something she wouldn’t tell you. She’s a terrible sleeper. She starts getting night thoughts the minute she lies down. For example, we’re trying to get pregnant. So she worries about that. She can’t read herself to sleep because she gets too interested. Did I mention that she has too many interests? So she needs some kind of custom distraction to help her get to sleep. She has to get up at six thirty for work. Movies are out because even a completely crap narrative holds her attention. We tried some judge shows but she kept kibitzing the cases and soliciting my views. So then we discovered thank God ValueVision. The jewelry shows especially. It’s endless pitching by dressed-up women. Prodigies who can talk for thirty minutes about a fucking ring! About twenty minutes of focusing on the words bores her to sleep. The timer turns it off automatically. The funny thing is, it puts me to sleep, too. I recommend it. I’ve even learned things I never knew existed from it — drusy, bale, bezel, station necklace, and so on. Did you know that zircon is a real stone, I mean gem stone, and not a diamond simulant? Ever hear of a diamond simulant? And do you know what the second most cavernous state in America is? Missouri. They have over seven thousand registered caverns. Did you even know they registered caverns? Anyway, she, we, developed a comedy regimen around this sideshow. We renamed the models and the presenters and the experts. The names have to be apt. One woman who has an unidentifiable accent is Foreigna. A kind of slutty model is Traila. One woman is Wigga. Sometimes I come up with completely good names she won’t let me use because they’re unkind. She has veto power. I wanted to name a plus-sized model Ponderosa, but she said no. Also no to Refrigerata …”

“I get it,” Joris said. Gruen laughed.

A bout of knocking shook the door. Gruen got back under the covers. Ned went to the door and opened it, and Nina, furious about something, stood there. She strode into the room.

There was no preamble. “ Forgive me , but God damn it, you guys, these two rooms are sharing the same bathroom and I am not going to step in your spillage in my bare feet. I don’t know you that well.”

Ned said, “We’re sorry, Nina. We—”

“I doubt it’s you,” she said to Ned.

“He’s toilet trained,” Gruen said, not taking it seriously enough for Nina, who turned on him.

She pointed at Gruen as she continued. “This is what you do, and please do it for eternity. It goes like this. You unzip, raise the seat, and address the toilet from above , as follows. You take your unit out and you straddle the toilet, which yes you can do without pushing your pants down. You lean slightly forward toward the wall behind the tank. You aim straight down like your stream is an Olympic diver going down straight . You shake any drops on your unit off over the bowl . Don’t hurry before you step back. And this is the most important thing your mother never told you — and it’s rehouse your thing while it’s still over the bowl . And then check around and if you’ve spilled anything, you clean it up yourself and then you leave. It’s easy .”

The men were rattled.

Nina backed out of the room, closing the door softly.

Again Gruen had his head under the covers.

He emerged, asking if she was gone yet.

“Good for her,” Joris said.

Ned was proud.

Ned stood in the corridor. He wanted to look at his notebook before he joined Nina in the bedroom. She was always curious about his jottings but sometimes he didn’t want to be asked about them. He could be as asinine as the next man, in his reminders and creations.

The top page in his little notebook read:

For Eulogy — METAPHOR

— Life a gigantic auditorium in which a play that never ends is in progress.

— Everything is dark, the seats, everything except the stage. People arrive in the theater. — One stream of personae goes straight to the seating. The other lines up in front of a Takacheck machine which is distributing parts to play.

— Ultimately the Takacheck people end up on stage.

— The theater is haunted by an immortal invisible sniper who strikes whenever he feels like it. Nothing can be done about him. He kills actors, concentrating on the older ones, but not exclusively.

— The dead are taken out one by one. New actors join the cast. The sniper kills members of the audience as well.

— This metaphor is useless.

He tore the page out and rolled it into a pellet he had no idea what to do with. He flicked it down the hall. Then he retrieved it and dropped it into his pocket for flushing later.

They were getting ready for bed, at last. She needed more sleep than she was likely to get in the next few days, but the problem was that around there it was like a novel. There were white spaces on the map of the relationships she was poring over.

Ned was undressing. She expected him to say something about her underpants. He didn’t like the cut and he didn’t like the material and he called them grandma pants. When he comes back from flossing watch him say something, she thought.

“May I say something about your unmentionables?” Ned asked.

She was beginning to hate friendship. He was mixing up friendship with acts and atmospheres from the deluded matrix the boys had lived in for a heartbeat in the seventies. She thought, I am your friend, you idiot, and I let you into my perfect body, for Christ’s sake. “Why do you hate plaid so much, do you know?” Nina asked.

“I just don’t like it.”

“And why do you hate the word ‘valid,’ would you say?”

“Because people use valid when they’re too chicken to say whether something being asserted is true or false.”

“Oh bullshit! People may misuse it but you can just as well apply it to a piece of evidence or reasoning offered in a debate. And why would you bother to have an attitude about people who say ‘feisty’ or ‘meld’ or ‘vibrant’? Only because Douglas did, am I right? And now you can tell me if Douglas happened to have a special opinion about plaid.”

Ned thought about it. “Okay he did.”

“Based on what ?”

“I can’t remember.”

She threw herself into the bed. She wanted to lie still for a while. A thing she liked about the permanent delicate subliminal trembling of the room caused by the pounding torrents below was that it kept her from dowsing for occult signals from her uterus.

Ned joined her under the blankets, saying, “I have come here directly from the tent pole factory.”

Nina woke Ned with an incomprehensible message in his ear. The room was black. Gently he pushed her head away from his and said, “Say it again.” He pressed the crown of his wristwatch, which illuminated the dial. They had been asleep for just two hours.

“Something is waking me up,” Nina said.

“Me too.”

“Two things are. Listen. There’s something going on. In the hall. Knocking and whispering. Why don’t you go out there and look around?”

“Because I don’t feel like it and I don’t want to know what’s going on, I don’t care.”