Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

“Well I think that’s funny, too. Look at me. You can just stand up and say what it was like when you knew him as a friend, forget everything since, just what he meant to you at that time, and that you’re sorry he’s dead, this mixed creature, like all of us, and you honor his good works. And then you sit down. Look at me. And swear to me that you are going to leave out all your murmurings about the connection between personal death and social death and so on into the night. Swear to me.”

He nodded. She inhaled extravagantly. They sat watching cloud shadows on the distant hills.

Nina said, “Since we’ve been here, I get a shiver sometimes when you’re talking, like when I realize the tree I’ve been admiring is really a cell phone mast disguised as a pine tree. Or it’s like your voice is dubbed for a minute. And then you come back. Now you’re back.”

“Nervousness,” he said. Nina was eating raisins from a little box.

The striped tent they were in was enormous. A steady wind was blowing, surging at times. The tent walls bulged in or out at intervals. The crowd filled the tent. Coir matting had been rolled out across the sodden grass. Lights, cameras, and microphones were concentrated toward the front of the space. There was a director. There was a printed program. The friends, except for Elliot, were in the front-row reserved section. Ned had told Nina she shouldn’t be talking to him too much, but she kept bringing things up. He wanted her to stop counting the crowd. It didn’t matter if there were two hundred or two hundred and fifty, did it?

He was looking at Iva, who was seated in a high-backed gothic chair. She was at the center of the row of notables behind the podium where he would be standing soon enough. Iva did look markedly happier, which went along with the latest from Jacques, who had intercepted them as they entered the tent to report that the critical part of the great settlement/deal with the powers that be had gone through very suddenly, overjoying Iva and Elliot. Iva was resplendent in what Nina had described as a Restoration wench mourning gown. It was true that she was showing a certain amount of flesh. A question that was never asked was, Why are you staring at that naked babe? was something Douglas had said. Joris was on Ned’s left. He had his eyes closed. Gruen was on Joris’s left.

Ah, death, Ned thought. Probably he would have to fight Nina to get her to promise no ceremony for him, when his time came. He’d never been to a funeral he liked. He felt cranky. It was Ronald Reagan who said Beware of empty hoopla.

Iva was doing something unattractive, which was to straighten her arm and pluck at the loose flesh on her elbow. Nina had pointed out that Iva did this when she was excited.

He was, he felt, attending reasonably well to the proceedings despite thinking about himself too much. A woman was singing “Für Elise,” accompanied by a CD. It was a song that always drew him into negative thoughts. He took Nina’s hand. He was convinced that she was pregnant. Children hated having old parents, and their child would have one old parent and one not old, and that would be the best he could do for the little creature. The Israeli consul general for Newark had gone on interminably. According to Jacques, there were numbers of what he called plainclothes Israelis around the premises, some of them removing cartons from the tower basement. He was going to break Nina’s heart, but he would strongly prefer not to see Jacques, with his black headband, ever again, not even in his charming caravan in a cowfield in Lyon. The consul general had said too much but the representative of the Ligues des droits de l’homme had said almost nothing. Ned knew who he was. He was a personal hero of Ned’s.

There was a shuffling going on in the audience. The feet of the metal folding chairs were sinking unevenly into the matting as it absorbed water.

He was on next. Then it would be Gruen and Joris reading what had been given them, like zombies, despite having said they wouldn’t. For a funerary event there should be something like a black tent available, not this festive entity they were in.

Ned saw with surprise that Hume had taken a seat at the end of the line of notables. He was wearing a suit and tie. There was nothing to complain about in the matter of his grooming, thanks to Nina. Ned was relieved, greatly.

The director beckoned. Ned made his way to the podium. Nina was insane. She had half risen when he got up. She had almost come with him.

He had tears in his eyes even before he began. He gave his name.

He said, “Douglas Delmarter was my friend years ago when I was a student, when we were students, at NYU. When he was young he had the idea he could force the world to be funny, or funnier than it intended to be. I think he needed it to be funnier for his own reasons, or actually for his own needs. I have no idea what those were. He was a secretive person even then. But anyway, as a fixation … it fascinated me. I am speaking for myself here. I allowed it to cheer me up and I was at a point when I needed cheering up. Later he gave up needling the world in this way and switched to trying to figure out the Why side of things, the Why does the world feel so wrong? side of it. In any case, he went on to honorable and impressive acts, deeds, in fact, about which we have heard much today.

“I’m very sorry that my friend is dead, and dead when he was hardly through with what he might have done.

“You may be wondering what the book is that I’m holding. It’s Douglas’s paperback copy of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson .

“Douglas loved this book. It was probably the best reading recommendation to us, his friends, that he made, and he made many. In fact he loved the damn thing so much he stopped reading it at page 847 in order to save the experience of finishing it for some celebratory high moment he assumed would come, some moment greater and happier than any so far.

“What I am going to do is read aloud a page or so for the benefit of our friend’s spirit. It may be a little strange because one of Douglas’s many positions was that anyone who believed in the afterlife should be barred from seeking political office. So, my old friend, this is for your soul, whose survival is, as you used to say in Wallace Bray’s philosophy class, highly suppository. I hope you can hear this, Douglas.

“This is where Douglas stopped reading. And these are the words he would have read next. This, of course, is Boswell speaking. I’m starting halfway down page 847:

I had learnt from Dr. Johnson during this interview, not to think with a dejected indifference of the works of art, and the pleasures of life, because life is uncertain and short; but to consider such indifference as a failure of reason, a morbidness of mind; for happiness should be cultivated as much as we can, and the objects which are instrumental should be steadily considered as of importance, with a reference not only to ourselves, but to multitudes in successive ages. Though it is proper to value small parts, as ‘Sands make the mountain, moments make the year,’ yet we must contemplate, collectively, to have a just estimation of objects. One moment’s being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, til there is a large portion of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship. We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed …”

Ned pressed the tears from his eyes with a ball of tissue. He hesitated, and returned to his seat.

February 15, 2003

He would never forget this day. He felt clean. The march column was twenty-five across and it was disciplined. The column had a sense of itself. A day of streets like rivers of fists was a survivor from earlier wars, earlier protests, but now it was real, in San Francisco, on Market Street. The sun had been a bright smear in the overcast but it had come out, whole, shining brilliantly on their efforts. Thousands of people had come to the city, thousands. He thought again, It makes you feel clean. Whenever the forward movement of the column halted, the marchers spontaneously linked arms and then maintained that as long as was practicable, which wasn’t long, really, because some people in any rank would move at a slower pace than the majority. There were two wheelchair battalions, he knew, somewhere. He wanted to inhale more deeply than it was physically possible to. The lead cohort of the march was a mile or more ahead of where he was, unbelievably. He had been up with the dignitaries and they were going to mention his name at Union Square, at the rally, but he had decided to fade back deeper into the march. He didn’t want to arrive. He wanted to continue to feel the march.