Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

She was getting a funny idea. If it worked she would be able to flaunt mystifyingly accurate information about the secret discussions the men were having. They were meeting behind her back, literally, on the other side of the living room wall. Looking hard, she was detecting a long narrow lozenge set into the wall and two spots on it that must be hinges. It was a barely visible rectangle with an irregularity down the right side that was undoubtedly where the door could be pulled open. It was a closet, in short. The opened door would clear the end of the sofa. If she could get into it unobserved, and if it was reasonably empty and there was room for her, she could press her ear against the back of the closet and listen to some of the proceedings. She had perfect hearing. Because he was older, Ned would occasionally stop and wonder if or when they should make long-term-care plans. She hated nursing homes generically and her position was that they would only enroll when one of them became too weak to do the Heimlich maneuver. Getting into the closet would be easy enough if it wasn’t locked.

She thought, Should I do this?

She knew she should wait and read. She was surrounded by reading matter in that room. A wave of resentment passed over her. She thought, I’m a constant reader … I signed a letter to the Chronicle book page as Constant Reader, when they had one … I read more than Ned!.. my family culture was better than his in terms of grammar and I knew when I was still tiny that there was no such month as Febuary and no such word as nother.

Getting into the closet would be easy enough because she could start by just idly peering into it and then if the coast was clear hopping in and closing the door behind her.

God what have I done? she thought. There was no air to speak of. When she got out she was going to smell worse than her cedar-sachet-smelling insane mother. And she was about to cough. No, she was not. Yes she was, she was going to cough. The wire coat hangers she was trying to keep control of were making a racket. There was a pool of them on the floor of the closet that she hadn’t noticed.

She was attempting to remain stock-still. The wall was unconscionably thick and these characters seemed to be arguing in murmurs, if they were arguing at all. This was not a good environment. She had gained nothing by putting herself in this predicament. The crouch she was forcing herself to assume to get her ear against the wall was painful and not working.

Someone had heard something. Someone was fiddling with the closet door.

A maid pulled it open. She thanked God she knew her name, which was Norma. The woman was astonished to see her bent over there in the darkness.

“Norma, hi. I was trying to hear what the men were talking about. You know they are being so secretive, Norma. Please don’t tell on me. It would be humiliating, okay?”

“No problem,” Norma said.

He had to find Nina to let her know about the mutiny. It had been a real mutiny and it had been great. Where was she, his Soft Gem? It was impossible to keep track of her. He filled his lungs with sun-sweetened air, which was a little poetic. It was drier out, today. Maybe Nina would lay off referring to the estate as the water park.

These days he could never locate Nina because she had invented a role for herself. She was a CPA and she was transposing her skills into investigative activities nobody had asked her to undertake. If only he could think of something for her to do other than snooping around. Clearly she thought she was going to uncover the secret gestalt behind the arrangements between Douglas and Iva, and Elliot — who appeared to Nina to have managed the family into bankruptcy, although if that was the case, why didn’t he mind Nina’s browsings in Douglas’s stuff?

Nina saw it as a bad opera. You have a mind like a tweezers, he had said to her once, making her laugh.

He had left her in the living room.

Where was she now? It was warm. She’d said she wanted to look at the physic garden but she wasn’t there, he could tell from where he stood. There were so many places to look for her. Her investigations came from two things. One was sheer Funktionslust. She always had to be busy. And the other was that she wanted to be his best friend. And she had criticisms of his old milieu of friends, and resentments about them. All his life he had wanted a strong and present friend. His only sibling, his older brother, had been abducted into piety, absence, the Salesian House of Studies, priesthood. They had never been friends. Nina understood it all and wanted to undo it, be his total friend, which he understood, because of course she was. And she was somewhere around there, but where?

Elliot should have seen it coming. I led the way, Ned thought. First he had led the refusal to produce short little scripts on assigned subdivisions of Douglas’s life. And he had learned something in the process that was new to him. He looked forward to telling Nina about it. When Elliot had been listing some of Douglas’s contributions, articles, on matters of substance, he had mentioned one, an opinion piece in the Financial Times about the European Monetary Union. Apparently Douglas had been skeptical of its prospects and had sarcastically described it as Jean Tinguely’s Last and Greatest Creation, the joke of course being that Tinguely specialized in art object machines that destroyed themselves when they were plugged in. And surprisingly, Joris had said that he was in effect its author. The two of them had been talking and Douglas had written up Joris’s thoughts, including the Tinguely conceit, and turned them into an op-ed piece supposedly by him which he sent to someone he knew at the Financial Times . They took it. Douglas sent Joris a copy of the issue containing it, along with a thank-you note! Joris had been cool with it, and what he was telling the group wasn’t for the record.

So, it had been conceded that they could write on whatever aspect of Douglas’s life they chose to. So then part two of the mutiny had been that nobody was going to grant script approval to Elliot or Iva or anybody. Elliot was going to have to trust them to solve the problem of overlapping. He’d had no choice.

Ned saw Nina. She was in conversation with someone he couldn’t make out, near one of the media trailers. She waved, but continued talking to her friend. He thought, God damn her, in a way. He knew the name of the guy she was talking to but he couldn’t remember what it was. Nina had talked to him several times, and he was French. Ned wanted to tell her the Joris story.

She was taking her time coming to him. He was standing on a rude bark-chip jogging path that ran close to the perimeter of the manse on three sides but looped out and away on the west side, down toward the gorge where Douglas had died. Ned guessed he would never jog. He was going to stop feeling guilty over it. There was no time in his life. Apparently he was blocking the way of three stately plump black turkeys. They were fearless. Possibly they were pets of some sort. He stepped aside for them. The story was that Douglas had once had a pet peacock. Pets would die when the fire came to Iraq. He thought, Americans love pets more than they love mankind. Maybe some agitation could be built around harm to animals. The turkeys were gross. They were unpleasant to look at and Nina was going to wonder aloud what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of that bell-pull-like excrescence attached to the chest of the males. Survival advantages were a recurring concern of hers, and he would invent notional answers to amuse her. He could tell from Nina’s expression that she had news of her own.

As he explained what had happened at the meeting with Elliot he realized that although she was nodding she was only half listening. She wanted to talk herself.