Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

They were standing behind the manse in a spot Nina liked. It was beside a hillock with a young cedar on top. It was fragrant there.

He had asked her earlier if he looked okay and she had said that he looked perfect, very funereal, and had reminded him to stand up straight and keep standing up straight. The cuff links he was wearing were courtesy of the excellent Nadine Rose.

The line His mind more jury than judge came to him from someplace in world literature. He told Nina that he still couldn’t decide what he was going to talk about at the memorial.

“I realize that, and I wish you’d come up with an outline at least. I’m afraid you have in your head the idea that you’re going to approach this with nothing in your mind but a great cloud of unknowing and that out of that is going to come inspiration and some perfect utterance. Well, maybe … anyway, this doesn’t start until four thirty, so we have plenty of time, if you want my help.”

“I could start with, say, A toast to Zeus, the protector of friendships.” He waited for her reply. She was going to be kind.

Nina said, “I think … you can do better. Zeus is kind of embarrassing.”

Ned wanted to go someplace else, but he didn’t know where. Nina was always trying to help him and he appreciated it. She thought he was too easy on his staff at work, Derek in particular. He remembered what she’d said, mocking him, when she’d been urging him to get on Derek’s case: Um, Derek, if you’re not busy, may I bother you for a minute to ask could you maybe try and be at least a little bit less half-assed now and then in the future?

He liked being around the hillock with the cedar and he realized it reminded him of the last scene in The Seven Samurai with the burial mounds of the three dead heroes marked with their swords.

Earlier they had seen a hearse parked in front of the manse, delivering Douglas’s ashes. The sense that they were witnessing the evolution of a gigantic machine came over Ned. A vast party tent had been erected.

Nina took his hand. She said, “I want you to promise me that if you’re ever depressed you’ll tell me.”

“What’s this about?”

“Nothing, I just wanted to say that. I don’t want you to … I don’t know.”

They decided to walk down and inspect the tent.

Nina said, “And promise me you’ll forget about toasts. What will you do, hold up an imaginary glass? This isn’t a banquet …”

“I’m not arguing, you notice.”

Nina said, “Your friend David is very smart and they should have made him talk about Douglas’s philosophy, so called, not you. Do you know what he said about Douglas? He said Douglas’s mind was for bizarro ideas what a belfry is for bats.”

“That isn’t entirely fair. Anyway …” He trailed off. “I want to say something substantive.”

He felt like embracing her, so he did. They leaned against one another and it was pleasant in the breeze, in the sun. He was thinking that in the future somebody was going to be designated to do for him something like what he was supposed to do for Douglas. If that happened anytime soon it would be too soon. He had more to do with his life.

Nina was feeling acutely that she had to guide him and leave him alone at the same time. She could well imagine him crafting something that would relate heavily to his own faults as a friend. He was subject to guilt, attacks of it. He could also come up with the most far fucking fetched candidates for empathy, like an old friend who had circulated a hostile, invented, story involving them, to their astonishment. But Ned felt sorry for her because of the guilt he was certain she must feel! — so he wouldn’t mortify her by making an issue of it.

And now he was wracking his brain for a way to publicly praise his friend, his old friend, the monstrous Douglas.

Outside the tent were ranks of folding chairs. Ned decided to borrow two of them. He carried the chairs down the slope past the death gorge and set them up in an odd enclosure. Someone had created a rough circle of corkscrew topiary boxwood plants in wooden tubs. They were doubtless destined to be moved to some less inscrutable location, but for now, it amused him to sit down with Nina in this askew setting.

He began again immediately with his dilemma, talking fast. He said, “Well I had the idea of beginning by shouting a parture to the crowd. Everything has a history … Douglas got a certain satisfaction out of fishing up lacunae in the English language, so there was a game called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary—”

Nina interrupted him. “When you said start by shouting something, I thought, For Christ’s sake he’s talking about that Great Pan Is Dead idea which is the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard of. And by the way, what is a parture?”

“No no no, not that. And partures was the antonym Douglas invented for greetings. He said that a single word for the business of taking leave was missing in English, so we had our own, partures. One was Peace to Your Loins! Also Watch the Skies! And …”

“No!” Nina shouted, deeply agitated. She made as if to get to her feet but he restrained her, overwhelming her distress with insistences that the idea wasn’t a serious one, it was just something he remembered.

She said, “Well don’t yell things out as though they’re hilarious or something. They aren’t . Not even faintly . They’re very annoying.”

“And then we did another thing when we went our separate ways, slapping and punching each other and shouting Basta! as though we were Sicilians disgusted with one another.”

“Are you trying to drive me completely insane?”

Ned said, “No. Really. Just thinking about things that happened.”

Nina thought, I have to be more directive, it can’t be helped and time is passing and he’s lost, still. She said, “So now before you say anything else let’s get it clear we are leaving Iraq out of it, okay? People are here for a very specific purpose which is to remember Douglas, a complicated person who was not so nice and who, and correct me if this is wrong, never distinguished himself as antiwar, and so Iraq doesn’t include Douglas, do we agree?”

“Well, he was for the nuclear freeze.”

“ Who wasn’t? That was twenty years ago!”

She’d done all she could on that one.

He said, “When I first saw you, I thought you looked exactly like the pretty girl in profile they had with If You Can Draw This on matchbook covers to recruit art students …”

“You told me that. It was nice.”

What could she do? He wasn’t focusing at all, poor lamb. She said, “I have so many things I want to say to you—”

Ned said, his voice raised and not steady, “I know what I’ll say if you die first, Nina. I know. I don’t know what you’ll say for me. I don’t know. I know you’ll be kind. I’m mixing things up. I’m sorry.”

She got out of her chair and bent over him and stroked his neck. She said, “Oh, my guy, just put two things in front of you. Whatever he was, this man, your friend, lost half of his mortal life. People who depended on him are suffering. He had attainments—”

Ned said, “You’re going to outlive me, by the stats.” He was wrenching it out of himself. She fell to her knees in front of him, embracing him.

“Are you trying to destroy me?” she said.

“No. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but we did something I still think is very funny. We got a bumper sticker printed up at a place on Mott Street. It said, HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. DON’T IF YOU DON’T. I’m not going to mention it, I’m just telling you.”