Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

Nina said, “Your friend had a compulsion.”

“You don’t see me arguing with you. There were the gallstones. A retired surgeon was a friend of the family and they were visiting him in Kingston. Douglas notices a jar of gallstones in the living room. The old surgeon had been accumulating them for years. The short of it is that Douglas begs the guy to give them to Hume as scientific curios. What Douglas actually had in mind was for Hume to use them in the battlements of the forts he built for his toy soldier armies, which he did.”

“Grotesque,” Nina said.

Ned said, “And Douglas would never give it a rest. The four of us would go out walking in the Village on the way to a show or opening and fucking Douglas would jump inside a restaurant we were passing and shout in a giant voice Save room for pie .”

“Gruen has pranks. Remind him about that.”

“Good idea. And go ahead and show me anything else you think I can take. I can take anything.”

• • •

Nina considered her papers. She said, “I have something from fourth grade. He was in the Steiner school then. I want to read it to you. You’re going to like him better.”

“I don’t dislike him. I just said I felt sorry for him. And I blame Douglas, anyway. It’s a rant. He was a second grader dealing with rage, letting it out, and it’s not so terrible anyway. And who knows, maybe that’s better than trying to digest a doorknob for twenty years. Read me something, go.”

The Thanksgiving Meaning

Twas one of the first Thanksgivings;

But none of the best, we know ,

For this Thanksgiving, I’m sorry to say

was full of sleet and snow .

But this doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving’s bad;

Or that it has no meaning .

Thanksgiving’s a wonderful thing;

For it is a time of feasting and dancing;

What a wonderful time to sing!

The Pilgrims came from faraway England

In a little ship called the Mayflower;

They came to America freedom to find ,

And could worship every hour!

Not only could they worship for long ,

But worship as they pleased ,

But good and great as Thanksgiving is ,

The Pilgrims were not quite eased;

For by the end of the very first winter ,

Half of them were deceased .

They sat in silence. “There’s just one more,” she said. “It’s not by Hume.”

“What is it?” Ned asked.

“It’s a poem by Douglas, I mean the beginning of one, and it’s pretty recent. You’ll be sad.” She handed it to him.

The poem fragment was in Douglas’s familiar spineless loose cursive hand.

My son Hume had two

friends when he was very young

Belgerman and Johnsont

Invisible but always on his

side

Now he’s lost

Please go and find him ,

She liked Ned in jeans. The two of them were a symphony in denim but it didn’t matter. It was appropriate for what they were doing. They were bushwhacking. She stopped to study the beautifully sketched little map Hume had given her. She had also seen some other artwork by Hume that was lying around in Douglas’s studio, or office, but she wasn’t going to share it with Ned, necessarily. One had been a large cartoon head of a woman who looked something like Iva, wearing earrings that were little globular cages with tiny men trapped in them.

“Ned, stop brooding.”

“Let’s get this hike over with,” he said.

Hume had provided her with a route map to a place he wanted her to see, on, as he’d put it, his side of the mountain. That apparently included the entire reach of forest on the other side of the death stream, all the way up to the next ridge. The ascent to Hume’s Inspiration Point wasn’t exactly a gratuitous thing. It was more an act of solidarity with the boy. The spot meant something to Hume. She wondered if Hume might come to visit them in the future. It was just an idea.

Ned was scowling into his notebook.

Nina said, “We can stop for a while if you want. Or do you have something you want to say to me?”

“Yes, I want to say something, but what? I’m feeling bad. I called Don at Christmas, but I should do it more. I have a brother who has to get permission to come to the phone. But I’m going to do it more often anyway.”

She wondered why he was bringing up Don. Ned was estranged from his brother and he didn’t like to talk about it. And her past efforts to get him to be friendlier toward Don had been met with a confused resistance. It was complicated. Her impression from meeting him had been that Don was gay. She’d made the mistake of asking Ned if he assumed he was. The timing was bad, because this had been during one of the surges in the Church’s pedophile scandals when Ned was stomping around referring to the Roman Catholic Church as a criminal enterprise. Ned had been impatient with her. He didn’t care. What he cared about was that he didn’t have a brother.

“It was good you called Don, but that was months and months ago. And these men … I don’t think you should be complaining about friendship. These are decent, intelligent men, and they’re interesting. And say something substantive to Gruen! Ask him what he’s reading! Half the time he has a folded-up copy of the New York Review of Books in his pocket …”

Ned said, “I agree with everything you say.” They resumed their climb.

Their destination had been this overlook, a small clearing open at one end on a fine northwest view of rows of medium hills. A semicircle of hemlocks closed the venue at the back and on the sides. Getting there had taken them through raw brush, tangled deadfall, and, here and there, around stinking sumps. The rough little meadow felt untouched. If you got too close to the view, you could step off into a sheer drop. It was a lover’s leap. They stood for a while watching the grassy field around them creasing in the warm wind.

Ned said, “Somebody appreciated this spot in the past. There’s an overturned sundial back in the brush, and I’ll bet it was set up here originally.” He was looking melancholy.

He found a tree to lean against. He brought out his notebook and began to write in it. And when Nina drifted toward him with the intent of being granted a look at what he was writing, he bridled. She was used to it. He had said, “My notebook is my unconscious.” And now he was going to say that he often wrote down things that he couldn’t understand later. We don’t hear ourselves, she thought. Ned said, “Sometimes I can’t even read what I’ve written.” She couldn’t help being curious about what he was writing, but based on his asides on the trip up through the woods her guess was that he had turned his attention to thinking of subject matter for Gruen. She knew him. His own assignment, he hated.

“Why did Hume want us to come up here?” Ned asked.

“He didn’t say but I know he thought we’d like it.”

“I wonder if Douglas ever came up here.”

She was sick of everything linking back to Douglas. She was starting to feel like Douglas was Rebecca, ready to come to life and jump down out of a picture frame over the fireplace.

Ned was still writing. She would leave him alone. She walked around moodily enjoying the ambiance as well as she could.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. Oh, well. Do you think you were homophobic in the old days?” She genuinely had no idea why she was asking that question.

Ned was startled. He closed his notebook. He said, “You’re kind of uncanny, asking me that right now. Because what I’ve been doing is recalling and rejecting stuff, prank-related stuff Gruen might use. We made up gay comic strips. I remember Prince Variant … and Vaseline Alley, and Gene Autre. There was no animus behind it, I don’t think. I don’t remember, if there was.”