Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

At forty-five, Elliot had undergone a prostatectomy. This was new. Apparently it was new to all of them. There was a group murmur of sympathy. Ned felt something in his genitals, not his physical genitals but in the idea of his genitals.

There was a bevy of details on the protracted healing process. One detail that was tough to hear was Elliot’s account of discovering, through an embarrassing incident, that he had become insensitive to a faint odor of urine it seemed he was carrying around with him although he was faithful about changing his pads. Changing them timeously, Douglas would have said, during the phase when he was pointlessly trying to lard Briticisms into everyday discourse at NYU. Arvacado. They all wanted to hear the grim minutiae of Elliot’s path back to continence. Or rather, they didn’t and they did. It could all go under the heading of cautionary information because every man in the room was entering the prostate trouble zone. And of course crouching there was the other thing.

The other thing was impotence. Of course impotence would probably be the universal masculine fate if you lived long enough. But everything is timing, Ned thought. On the plane he’d read in something that the human body stops aging at ninety. So … something to look forward to. Elliot had the traditional open prostatectomy. Now there was the robotic option. Ned had read about it. Elliot had suffered postoperatively. He was not giving them the Reader’s Digest version of his tribulations, either.

Elliot said, “What you realize is that it takes away something you were used to and depended on.” It was difficult for him, where he was going with this. Ned was full of sympathy. Elliot was grimacing. The friends waited.

Elliot was saying, “You lose the stupid imaginary availability of the women you run into. I was a widower when this struck, and I had been for a while, so I was single, you could say. Also the example of getting my continence back in less than a year turned out to be misleading. But this thing about women, until it’s gone, you never realize how calming, automatically calming, it is, to have these fantasy images running in your head, this imagery. And then the material basis of the imagery is gone and of course you have the history of getting lucky in the past in the fairly recent past that supported the imagery.”

They were all uncomfortable. Ned wanted urgently to think about something else, something amusing if possible, and felt cowardly. Nina would find Elliot’s existential discoveries, or discovery, interesting. But he knew if he told her she would say, So how well does that describe your inner life, by the way?

His mind wasn’t wandering, it was resisting. He didn’t want to think about death or impotence, either one. Since Nina, he had been living in almost a burlesque show with sex and comedy going on nonstop after the years when it had been so otherwise. Take blubalub, for example, he thought. Blubalub was a conceit of Nina’s. One summer they had stayed for a month in a cottage near Stinson Beach. And the cottage’s Dutch door had opened directly on the driveway. So once when he was coming back from the mailbox she had opened the top section of the Dutch door and stood there topless and invited him to put his face between her breasts and nuzzle side to side, which she’d referred to as blubalub. Trees kept anyone in the vicinity from seeing. So then she’d said blubalub was something for the UPS driver, something she had worked out with him one day when Ned was off swimming, and that when Ned had come to the door just then and she was topless, it had been a mistake because she’d been expecting the UPS guy, with whom the deal was that he would come to the Dutch door and she would let him have blubalub and he would give her the parcel meant for them and then she would get to go out to the truck and take her pick of any other parcel she wanted. Ned wanted it all to go on forever. On his very tall tombstone he wanted inscribed at the top Fun Had, and all the rest would be a list of things dating from Nina coming into his life. He knew he had to keep it to himself.

He got back to Elliot, who apparently was doing pretty well with erections. He was saying that getting used to orgasms that produced only a puff of air had taken some doing. Ned was a little unprepared for the degree of intimacy Elliot was providing. Their life together on Second Avenue must have been more decorous than he remembered.

Now this is interesting, Ned thought. Elliot was implying or imparting something that seemed cryptic. It was about a woman who had been his lover. He was being flowery. He was being obscure and intricate in his references to whoever she was. Nobody knew what to say.

Ned got up, feeling he had to. He said, “What a thing for you, man.” He wondered if others would want to say something, too, but Elliot was moving rapidly on. The pitch was coming. Ned sat down again.

Elliot was retracing the part of the story that had to do with Douglas’s economic situation. It was a crisis. There was nothing else to call it. A lot of his investments for the family had been under-hedged, as he put it, and Douglas had plowed much more into the physical estate than he should have. He was profligate. And Douglas had done that on his own, not letting anyone grasp the dimensions of it. Even Iva had been left out of Douglas’s finances. This place they were in was surrounded by collapsing walls of debt, was the way Elliot expressed it. And here was the Elliot who had been a star in the Drama Club at NYU, always in character parts because of his unusual height. Emoting, was what he was doing.

Elliot wanted it to be about friendship. Their friend Douglas was an important figure in European political culture, because of the Dreyfus carnets , and the Kundera journal, and a string of other less-well-known interventions, he wasn’t exactly sure what they should be called, Elliot said. A documentary on Douglas for Eurovision that was being made now, here, all around them, was going to be essential to saving the day for Iva and Hume. Two German foundations and two Israeli foundations were this close to setting up a research center on forgery as propaganda, right there, funding it and setting Iva up to superintend and represent it, which he thought they would have to agree she was superbly qualified to do. Douglas had been in discussion with them for over a year. Elliot paused.

Ned had been correct. The pitch was on. Elliot was saying that he had to be frank. And what he meant by that was that Douglas had not always been polite or politic in his dealings with people in his realm of contacts, in his performances at colloquia and so on, in Europe. He had made some enemies. And there were certain names that had been expected to come over for this event who weren’t going to. Douglas had made enemies on the far right in Europe and as they all knew things were shifting and the right was coming back in spots here and there in Europe. So the picture was changing.

Ned willed Elliot to get it over with. He knew what was happening, but he resented having to concentrate to see the inner mechanism exposed. Elliot was blunt about what he wanted. They were supposed to humanize Douglas. Elliot even used the word. Joris said sotto voce, “He means sell him,” just before Elliot said, “It’s our job to sell Douglas for Iva and Hume.”

Elliot wanted to go back to the plan as it had originally been. He wanted the friends to divide up Douglas’s life in a particular way. He wanted them to rescind their prior refusal. He gave his ideal division of labor to them quickly, and with a certain amount of shame showing. Joris would do something on Douglas as an outdoorsman, referencing all the camping and long-distance hiking and the Appalachian Trail forays of their student days. Joris looked absolutely astonished but said nothing. Elliot would supply Joris with some other information relevant to that, environmental groups Douglas had supported, or been affiliated with, and so on.