Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

“No, well, I knew.”

“You’re so crazed on the subject of how I’m going to come across I can’t stand it.”

He wanted to defend himself but for the moment couldn’t think of what to say.

Nina said, “There’s something not on the surface between Joris and Iva. He can hardly look at her. And something happened in the hall last night that has something to do with it but I don’t know what.”

Ned said, “You’re imagining things.”

“I’m not, but nevermind. But anyway, don’t worry about me. Damn it! The only reason your ectoplasmic girlfriend never embarrassed you is because she never opened her mouth, as I understand it.”

“But why ectoplasmic ?”

“Because in case you never noticed it, she looked exactly like one of those young woman forms or ghosts or whatever they were in Victorian photographs coming out of the medium’s ear, flat and white. That’s why. Or nostril.”

“Okay,” he said.

She slid out from under her breakfast and stood up and asked, “So how would you anarchists …”

They had a conceit, or rather Nina had a conceit he went along with because he didn’t care. The conceit was that he was an anarchist pur sang, an absolutist like Bakunin, but crypto. It was all a canard based on an episode that meant nothing during the time he was running the Pacific Co-op and he had allowed a local of the Industrial Workers of the World, which still existed at that time in little nooks and crannies of the Bay Area political landscape, to distribute a recruiting appeal on the co-op premises. That was all. The treasurer of the local had vanished with the petty cash box. Nina knew the story because he’d told it to her, and he never knew when she was going to come up with some weird accusation based on it.

He said, “I know you like to keep on about my supposed anarchism, but for a change you go ahead and come up with a better system of your own.”

“Well under anarchism would the trains run on time?”

After a pause, he said, “Trains? What trains?”

All this had only been a diversion meant to distract him so she could get into the bathroom ahead of him. She laughed as she won the race.

Ned was en route to the meeting-before-the-meeting, meaning a caucus of old-friends-only prior to sitting down with Iva, who was going to give them their orders on what to do or say or write for the eulogy spectacle. Elliot was descending a flight of stairs that led to the second floor, his cockpit office, and Iva’s quarters. Elliot was carrying a red-rope portfolio. Ned felt some kind of strength come into him, unexpectedly, and he thought that Elliot saw it. Elliot froze on the last step above the floor.

Ned looked up at him and decided not to say I don’t like your altitude and decided not to be appeasing.

Elliot looked over-groomed to Ned, as though he were on his way to a court appearance. He had a lustrous navy-blue tie on. It couldn’t be, but Ned thought he saw color in Elliot’s cheeks that looked like it might be some brilliant application of rouge. Ninjas with video cameras were everywhere, as usual. A TV makeup person might have done that to him.

Ned uncapped his pen. He held out the petition clipboard with the pen balanced on the petitions and in danger of falling. He tilted the clipboard. Instinctively, Elliot reached for the pen.

Ned said, “Aha, you see you have to sign this.” Elliot was unhappy.

“No, I don’t. I told you no, it’s not necessary.”

“Would you sign if I convinced you the invasion was in fact going to happen?”

“It’s not .”

“Make this deal with me. Give me a minute before we go in. Hear me out.”

Elliot nodded. But proceeded toward the meeting room at a rapid and unfriendly pace. Ned stopped him.

Ned said, “No, not while we walk.” It didn’t seem unreasonable from his standpoint.

Ned said, “I know you’d sign if you thought the invasion were going to happen. And you’re wrong about it, it’s the plan. And forgive me, but I think your taking the position it’s not going to happen isn’t just laziness — I don’t think that. If you don’t want to appear in the list of signers that’s going to take up ten pages in the New York Times , say so and I’ll drop it. Maybe you have business reasons. But what I think is that you can’t stand to think about it, and a way of nullifying a gruesome possibility is to make yourself believe it’s not going to happen. I guess there’s enough uncertainty about everything that that’s an option. I do it myself. But this is real. The petitions go to Congress on Monday and you should sign for the same reason Pascal said you should be a Christian, because the Christians might be right about God and hell and everything so there was nothing to lose. If you stop the invasion, children who are alive and well today will keep breathing. Lots of them. The four of us have to be on the petition and you’re the only one who isn’t.” Elliot said as he signed, “I’m not reading it.”

It was just one more thing she had to conquer disappointment over. She was walking an oval circuit in the annoying living room. She was partial to earth tones herself , but enough . The boys were sequestered, getting their marching orders for the eulogy part of the memorial service. She had been excluded in a nice way she couldn’t complain about. Somebody had dropped hints that it could get a little emotional in there, giving her the impression that she might be a hindrance to that, which had been enough. Let them, she thought. By all means let them have soft deep feelings together for a change, with no one watching, go .

Truly all she wanted was observer status. Because she liked to see Ned in action in disputes or presentations. She had missed a big argument with Joris already. She would have liked to be a spectator for that. There was a definiteness in Ned that came out beautifully sometimes, depending. It was different than the knee-jerk obduracy that everybody mistook for toughmindedness. She couldn’t wait to see him stand and deliver at the memorial. She had faith. Suddenly, she had the answer to the question of why men with curly hair were treated in a certain way. It was because their hair analogically called up lambswool and lambs were lambs, not lions. She was not going to tell him.

She would wait calmly until they were through. She seated herself at the far end of the sofa next to the basket of quarterlies. She thrust her hand into the heap and pulled out one of the periodicals at random, the Journal of the History of Childhood , still in its wrapper. No thanks, she thought. Disturb nothing , she commanded herself as though the living room was a crime scene, or were one. Either way. She tried to fit the Journal back into the stack at roughly the place it had come from.

Outdoors it wasn’t enticing. The sky was gray. She felt like doodling. Secretly she was proud of her doodles, because they weren’t doodles. They were complete odd little pictures. She had the impulse to draw a figure in outline of a naked male giant with a flight of stairs running up to his anus and another flight of stairs running up to his mouth, but better not, because someone might chance by and casually ask her what she was drawing. Her doodles could be framed if anybody made frames small enough.

She was getting used to the media swarm. A ninja flashed past. One of the ninjas, a young Frenchman with long hair, a child, really, had tried to be friendly to her.

In the morning she’d said to Ned It’s going to take all day to figure out what I can’t wear. But it had worked out all right. There were conflicts. There were the funerary considerations. There was the need to try to blot out the image of the world’s most beautiful woman not counting Iva, the tremulous Claire.