Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

They stood back from one another. Both said, “Ah, man …” with feeling.

Elliot was wearing a black leather trench coat worth a fortune. He had the collar up for drama, or possibly protection against wind. There was no wind. A dead calm prevailed. The sound of water draining from the tower’s downspouts stood out in the stillness.

Elliot smelled of cigarette smoke. It had been understood among the friends that smokers were the ultimate fools. But the fact was that Elliot had smoked modestly and privately back then. And considerately. It was up to him. Ned doubted that smoking was popular in Douglas’s household. In truth, Douglas had been generally intolerable about it. At one point, he had picked up some anti-smoking flyers featuring medical photographs of specimens of leukoplakia, the condition just prior to oral cancer, and had dropped them around in lecture halls and the Commons room. But he hadn’t harassed Elliot, or not very much.

They embraced again. Each told the other he was looking great.

Ned was finding it hard to talk normally. He said, “I came right away after you called, this is so fucked. God. Fuck. It’s terrible. What happened? What happened that I don’t know about?”

Elliot put his arm around Ned’s shoulders. He started to say something but then stopped, clearly considering his words, which made Ned a little uneasy. Elliot was a stockbroker and a juris doctor. He had given financial advice to Douglas, and legal advice, too. Ned was prepared for Elliot letting it be felt that he was in a different, or even official, relationship with Douglas’s family. This was going to be something more than the usual benign reserve Elliot projected and that intrigued people and made them want to reassure themselves that it wasn’t caused by anything they might have done. Ned supposed he had to live with it.

Ned said, “I want to see Douglas.”

Elliot shook his head, saying, “No, you can’t. They took the body to Kingston.” The special relationship had made its appearance.

“Okay, but I want to see him anyway, the physical Douglas.”

Elliot nodded rapidly, but signifying understanding and not assent. Ned didn’t like it. Ned said, “Have you seen his body?”

“I did, before they took him.”

“Well. What’s going on? Is there going to be a wake? A funeral service, what?”

“Right now I don’t know. I don’t know what Iva can take. Douglas is going to be cremated. She’s fragile. We’re trying to figure this out.”

Ned said, “And what about Hume? I just saw him running around back there, around the tower, if that was him, without a shirt on.”

Elliot grimaced. He said, “He’s upset and he’s out of control. To some degree. He has an exceptional arrangement with his parents. He … lives outdoors a good deal, and he has just about agreed to home schooling, after a debacle, two of them, with private schools. Douglas built a cabin for him last year. For his independence. He rejected it. He let them do it and then rejected it.”

Ned said, “How could this happen?”

Elliot said, “It was a complete accident. He drove the mower too close to the edge of the ravine. That’s what happened … the autopsy was today.”

Ned felt himself shaking, and to quell it, clutched his hands together behind his back and clenched his arms.

“Take that thing off and give it to me,” Elliot said, pointing at Ned’s rucksack. “Christ, is that the same one you had when we climbed Storm King?”

“It is,” Ned answered. “Storm King and the Shawangunks and all of them. It’s the only one I’ve ever had.”

“You’re loyal to your possessions,” Elliot said.

Ned felt a moment of trivial puzzlement. Was Elliot being critical? All it could be was a reference to the fact that he didn’t, had never, thrown things away wantonly, while they still had some use in them.

“You’re a masochist. Give it to me,” Elliot said, guiding Ned toward an ornate door in the base of the tower. Ned held on to his pack. Elliot scrutinized him. “Ned, you need to rest. Come in and rest. We’re all here.”

Elliot had the door open. Ned was moving reluctantly. It was a concession to go in instead of mobilizing somehow to get to Kingston. He was tired. He murmured something about Kingston but without force. He knew it was in the nature of a reproach to Elliot.

Elliot said, “It makes no sense to go to Kingston. All this is being worked out, Ned.”

Elliot patted Ned’s shoulder, then pressed him forward, being less patient. Ned said, “All of us are here?”

Ned stopped abruptly, putting Elliot off his stride. Elliot stumbled slightly and began coughing. The coughing went on. Ned was alarmed.

“Why are you coughing?” is what he came out with, surprisingly to himself. Maybe it was anxiety that something was wrong with this friend, too, now, someone trying to do his best under stress. He knew what Nina would say. Ned, she would say, you’re displacing. Displacement behavior meant getting aggrieved about something that was standing in for something else.

The ground-floor room was sizeable, with a high wood-beam ceiling. The walls were lined with blond wooden filing cabinets, to a height of five feet or so, and above the cabinets ponderous shelving held oversized books and binders. Everything was fitted to the curve of the walls, and all the woodwork was polished to gleaming. The books here seemed to be in the reference category — serials, in bound volumes, quartos, sets. Ned wanted to look more closely at them and also at the items laid out on an oceanic work table pushed against one of the three broad windows. He could see a lightbox on the table, and an array of optical instruments. How long would it take, Ned wondered, to get used to the postcard-quality vistas of placid nature the windows provided? The temptation would be to drift into witless contemplation and then wonder where the time went. And who dusted and cleaned and polished all this? Someone.

A steep and narrow stone stairway ran up to the next story. There were red-orange oriental carpets on the floors. Whether they were top of the line, someone like Claire would know. Immediately he wanted to move past the thought of his ex love and, with a little effort, he did.

Elliot was beckoning impatiently from the stairs.

There was a definite burned smell in the air and a fireplace jammed with ashes, white paper-ash.

Ned said, “Everybody’s upstairs, right?”

“Joris is out walking and Gruen is taking a nap. You’re all on the third floor. We were up drinking last night.”

Ned winced inwardly at that. It was another part of all this that he had missed.

Elliot came down a step or two, reaching toward Ned. He said, “Take your pack off, for Christ’s sake, it’s a monster. Give it to me.”

Ned ignored Elliot’s move.

Elliot said, “You’re all on the third floor, keep coming. I’ll show you your bed. It’s dormitory style.”

“Where are you sleeping?” Ned asked.

“I’m over in the main house … there’s a reason.”

Ned said, “I need to see Iva, of course, before I do anything, don’t I?”

“Not yet,” Elliot said. “Not yet.”

Elliot kept a forefinger pressed to his lips the whole way up, screwing his head around at intervals like an idiot, to show that he wasn’t kidding about silence.

There was a shock for Ned on the third floor. A form completely shrouded in a white blanket encumbered an army cot near the stairhead. Of course it could only be Gruen sleeping in his signature mode, the covers pulled over his head, but for an instant, Ned had thought he was seeing death. Elliot was telling him in a shouted whisper that it was Gruen, and to leave him alone.

Ned went to the cot and bent close to the sleeper, whose rumbling breathing was familiar enough from the deep past. And the wine-tinctured breath sifting up through the blanket was also vintage Gruen, so to speak. Gruen had been the leading drinker in their group.