Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

Ned was sorry for Joris. He wondered what in hell he himself was going to be asked to take up. If they’d devoted time to camping on six weekends over four years that would be a lot, unless Elliot was counting climbing up onto some of the larger rocks in Central Park and sitting there reading in the sun for a while. They’d joined the Outing Club and quit after one semester. The club had included non-student participants from the school’s neighborhood and they had found themselves in a hiking party led by a vigorous old woman who, pointing eastward from the top of Storm King at a line of smoke rising from some valley, had informed them that that was the location of hell.

Elliot had managed this pretty cleverly, and Ned felt disarmed, and Elliot had, after all, signed his petition.

Gruen’s assignment was to give a brief appreciation of Douglas as a friend. And then Elliot said that he wanted a few of Douglas’s pranks mentioned, which he would consult with Gruen on, as to which ones, exactly. Ned couldn’t look at Gruen and was now busy feeling dumbfounded at his own assignment. He was expected to give a short paper on Douglas’s philosophy , call it, and Elliot had a paper already prepared for Ned to read or refer to . In fact, Elliot had drafts and notes for everyone. They were going to keep things crisp. It would be a panel. Elliot would go into the highlights of Douglas’s career, the great cases.

“All for one,” Ned heard Gruen say.

Elliot took three number-ten envelopes containing their scripts from an inside pocket and handed them out.

It was interesting to Ned that he, Joris, and Gruen understood without exchanging a word that they were all going to participate in this travesty.

The meeting was over. Ned led the way and opened the door, to find Iva standing close, directly in the way, a pained, anxious smile on her face. She was waiting for a sign from Elliot and she must have gotten it because her face relaxed.

Nina was telling herself that she was pregnant more or less constantly, but sometimes she slipped and it came out audibly and it was beginning to annoy Ned. She was hungry. There was to be no more fine dining. She’d been told by her friend Nadine Rose that meals were going to be mess hall style now and Nadine had also told her that Iva and Elliot would be eating privately. If, in their frenzy, they were eating at all, Nina thought.

Ned was in a bleak mood. Apparently the group’s decision to mutiny had been overturned and he didn’t want to go into it and now he had to write something about Douglas’s philosophy. And Ned was saying, mostly to himself, things like What philosophy? Antifascism ?

All this brooding around wasn’t good. She said, “You think the self is something like a hardboiled egg. That’s your image of it. But it isn’t, it’s something like a deck of cards.”

He ignored her.

They had made their way to one of the manse’s highest decks and Ned was at work, stretched out on a patio lounger, talking brusquely into his microrecorder. He was getting agitated, she could tell. Because he was occasionally making a fist. He wanted her to be quiet and read something until he was through. Earlier he had said to her My darling you’re going to have to talk to yourself for a while. He’d removed his shoes and socks and was hanging his feet out into space, his ankles supported by a crossbar of the railing. His feet looked like small wings. And they would look more like wings if he would stop wriggling his toes like a mental patient.

Ned said, “Don’t talk to me.”

“I’d love to.”

Really she wanted to provoke his attention. It wasn’t fair, because he was struggling to write something he didn’t want to. But maybe a break would help him. She would try to get his attention only once. She had plenty of ammunition. She could tell him about Jacques offering her a joint but wouldn’t.

She said, “I wish I could get my karma overwith in a week or ten days instead of my whole life.”

Ned frowned at her.

“Okay then,” she said.

She was starving. Ned had perfect feet, more like drawings of feet. She had a hilarious little toe, as in hideous. Two things were annoying at present. She knew she was going to make a pest of herself at the buffet because Nadine Rose had told her that franks and beans were going to be one of the main dishes and she was going to ask if they were the nitrite kind of franks. She wouldn’t eat those, on behalf of her baby. The other thing that was bothering her was that she had something substantial to offer to Ned that might be useful for his discussion of Douglas’s philosophy, so called, or not. Jacques had revealed to her the essence of a fairly recent piece of polemic by Douglas, called — and she had written it down on her copy of the Times —THE CONSENT OF THE UNGOVERNABLE. pub. Fr? Germ?

Now she had to try to make sense of her scrawled notes:

Inner Secret of Fascism!

D. deconstructs fascism as the

incarnation of the heresy that

men shld exercise sex selectn

choice not females. This goes

w/ men losing long term! Divorce

easier. Illegit babies ok. Fear of

losing guns. Can’t smoke in bars.

+ + + etc etc etc

She felt like skidding her way into Ned’s sacred ken. She was tired of sitting on her camp stool anyway. A wet black leaf defaced Ned’s right foot. He was ignoring it, concentrating. A bell was ringing downstairs. She walked over to Ned and peeled the dead leaf off his foot.

Ned had driven her off. And now he regretted it. He was making the most risible progress possible with his eulogy. And he was hungry because he’d insisted on skipping lunch.

He felt like cursing. He worked better when she was in the vicinity but only if she would read something, be absorbed on her own in something. But she was born to comment. And he had no idea where she’d gone. He had checked their room and the bathroom they shared with Joris and Gruen. There had been an alien odor in the bathroom. Nina had said something about letting Jacques use their shower to freshen up. So, obviously that had happened. He had no defensible reason for objecting to it.

And if he did say anything, he knew what would come next. It would be the next big fun canard. She was going to say that not only was he Mikhail Bakunin but he was a Francophobe. And he wasn’t. For example, he thought the French had the best names in the world like Loik le Floch Prigeant and Fustel de Coulanges and Choderlos de Laclos.

Fuck me, he thought. The day was bright and mild. The madding crowd of service and media people was still growing. When would it stop? He made out Gruen down the slope toward the gorge talking into his cell phone. Gruen is good and I’m a shit, he thought. Because Gruen called his mother all the time. Ned called nobody except associates, which was all he had, really. And unless he wanted to yank his brother away from his duties giving absolutions and praying nonstop or whatever he spent his time doing, he had no family to speak of, nobody to call about personal things. It was melancholy but it was true. His father had died fast, of cancer, at sixty, just after retiring. He remembered his father signalizing his retirement by unstrapping his wristwatch and declaring that he was never going to wear it again. His father had been the office manager of a company in El Cerrito that made bedsprings. Amazingly, as he’d learned very late in their relationship, his father had gone into factory work as an evangelist for the Trotskyist group he had covertly belonged to for a couple of years in his youth. He’d been elevated from the shop floor to management because he had a knack for it. His main piece of fatherly advice to Ned had been Stick with the Jews, meaning to emulate Jewish rationality and book worship. His mother and father had become more and more alienated from one another as his mother’s embrace of ultra Catholicism had tightened. Not long after his father’s death, when his mother was only fifty-five, she’d been killed in Fruitvale, in a crosswalk, by a drunk driver. His share of the settlement had paid for his tuition at NYU, a place his father had liked the idea of, for him. He didn’t know why but as far back as he could remember his brother had never been friendly to him. Whether it was a question of temperaments or was somehow connected to the fact that their mother had so obsessively been grooming her firstborn for the Church, he didn’t know. His first dried apricot had been given to him by his brother with the information that it was a human ear. His brother had been close only to their mother.