“Oh do I know it. I’m going to France, mon ami. But you have to stop this, you’re acting like we’re talking in front of a horse. But I will say this, apparently they have tons of petite women stars over there. French movie stars I look like that I never heard of. He’s so
acute
.”
“I em a
cute
?” Jacques said.
Seize power, Ned said to himself. “Jacques, listen to me. Okay, first, comment ça va tu?” He couldn’t help but notice Nina groaning loudly enough for Jacques to hear. He was going to proceed anyway and she could fuck herself.
“Bien. Bien.” Jacques had had to repeat himself because he had spoken crookedly, having had the need to stick his tongue out and pick a few wayward flecks of tobacco off it. His tongue furrow was black.
Ned said, “Secondaire, il y a deux visions entre nous au contraire. A la regard de les deux … towers—les neuf onze
tours
…”
Nina whispered, subtly, she obviously thought, “Jumeau. Twin is jumeau.”
“Would you please shut up,” Ned replied.
Jacques said, “I understand well.”
Ned, with effort, resumed. “C’est un fait accompli. Les auteurs originals, avec l’argent, peut-être, sont inconnus. Les Saudis peut-être. C’est n’importe. Et maintenant puisque les explosions de les jumeaux, nous avons un invasion, la guerre!” Ned stopped. It was too hard, although he could easily understand what Jacques was saying in French which at the moment appeared to be an invitation to them to come and visit him on the Rhône. And here Jacques swung into English. Apparently from his porch one could see “La Rhône right affront of you.”
Ned thought, To be fair, it’s hard to know what’s a fait accompli and what isn’t. He had to keep that in mind. What he wanted to say wasn’t that complex. It was that there could be a conspiracy at the root of a great evil, and there could be appendages to the conspiracy, and the problem was that the outcome was the same whether there had been a conspiracy,
or not. Douglas’s term for the right attitude to take toward politics had been selective fatalism. The term had come up in discussions of the Kennedy assassination, which was a perfect example of a fait accompli. There was only so much social energy available for addressing evil, which never stands still. You had to forget conspiracies tout court, if that was right, and get on with the outcomes.
And then like a bird from God, Nina put it all into perfect concise French and did it too fast for him to follow. And Jacques nodded sharply and she nodded sharply and Ned felt stupid and blessed.
Ned accepted the Meyssan book. Jacques had someplace to go.
Nina said, “I don’t know where it came from. It just all came back to me in a sort of flash.”
Ned said, “I seem to know very little of what is going on these days. And why did he say, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Maternité’ when he left?”
“Because I told him I was pregnant and couldn’t have sex with him.”
“He asked you that?”
“Of course. He’s an anarchist, like you. He asks everybody.”
“I’m glad you said no.”
“Good,” Nina said. Then added, “I better be pregnant.”
Don’t ever leave me, Ned thought.
36
They were all convened, again, in the conversation-pit room. It wasn’t clear why. The mutiny had taken place and it had been successful and it was supposed to be free-form when it came to the tributes they were going to give. But now it felt like Elliot wanted to take it back. Elliot was entering the room back first, attempting to close the door on some insistent person he was being emphatic with. It was Iva. He leaned against the door and he got it closed. He locked it behind his back.
Iva seemed to have departed. Ned was seated on the leather sectional at the end closest to the left-hand door. Joris was next to him but Gruen was still standing up in an apparent trance. Ned had felt faintly embarrassed when Nina said to Gruen, Did you get that cold you were getting? He reminded himself that people all up and down the cultural ladder said dumb things, like the young woman who had come to him about a homeless panhandler wandering around inside the co-op, saying of herself that when she’d seen him she’d become visibly moved, or like the
Oakland Tribune
intern who had introduced herself by saying, I’m a young journalist.
Gruen, one ear plugged with cotton, his inhaler momentarily abandoned in his right nostril, was studying what was for Elliot a strange new gait—Elliot was moving slowly and appeared to be placing his feet carefully as he proceeded, rather than ambling in the standard automatic mode. Joris tugged on Gruen’s pant leg and Gruen sat down. Joris sighed, because lively knocking at the door had resumed. Tediously
Elliot retraced his steps and minimally opened the door. Iva thrust an aggrieved sliver of herself into the room. It appeared that she was wearing a Day-Glo blue velour track-suit. Nina on the other hand had been excruciating herself to dress appropriately for the different tones and phases of the moment they were caught in. A hissed exchange between Iva and Elliot ended and Iva withdrew, still angry. No doubt she wanted to be included. So did Nina, but she wasn’t beating her fists on doors. What was going on would make a good libretto. Elliot began his modern-dance-like return to his station, a cubical black club chair set closely opposite the sectional. The coffee table had been dematerialized. Elliot was dressed in a well-cut high-end dark business suit. His slab-like shirt cuffs were held together by ornate cuff links featuring a gem that might well be tanzanite. In his right hand Elliot was clutching a couple of sheets of yellow legal-pad paper that had been tortured into the shape of a carrot or cypress.
Ned felt a pulse of alarm. Just for an instant, Elliot’s eyes seemed magnified. Was he sick? Circumstances had conspired to make Elliot the majordomo of everything that was going on. Ned wondered how unfair he had been to Elliot. He’d really done nothing to separate the man, Elliot, from the whatever they should be called, the odious duties he’d been called on to perform. And Elliot had been just as much his friend as any of them, in the old days. With relief, Ned realized that the alarming moment had only been tears pending, but not yet sliding free, as they were doing now. Elliot was holding himself stiffly. Unexpectedly, he raised his paper creation and flicked his tears off his cheeks as they got there. It would stop. Here we are, we need to do
more for Elliot, Ned thought. Ned looked into himself and concluded that he was using Elliot’s long-term intermittent trouble with his back as a cover for not asking why he was walking so peculiarly.
Ned said, “El, are you okay? Is it your back?”
Elliot said, “It is, and I’ll be okay. I was doing too much lifting, is all. But now I’ve got plenty of help and I have meds.” He took tissues from a pocket and blew his nose.
Ned had an explanation for what was happening to them. It was that they had been recalled, after outbursts from Iva, which were continuing, to get them to take back their mutiny and do what they had been instructed to. They were scheduled for a tale of woe. Elliot was going to build a platform of personal stress to stand on and appeal to them from. I forgive you, Ned thought.
Elliot began. It was not a supremely well-organized presentation they were getting. He had never seen a Windsor knot as monumental as Elliot’s. The emphasis was on the physical, the medical, all of which was depressing and a lot of it new to him. His own life had been lived on the West Coast, away from the scene. He was feeling bad.
As the friends all knew, a couple of years after Elliot married her, Muriel had been diagnosed with ALS. Her decline was rapid. It nearly killed Elliot. Five years after they were married, the poor woman was dead. They had had only a brief period of normal married life. Muriel had declined rapidly: to a walker, to a wheelchair, to bedridden, to a nursing home. She was an only child, and had expected to be an heiress, but her father had died leaving behind a substantial burden of debt. That had been a surprise.
Something confessional was coming.
Elliot was a stockbroker. Under the pressures he was describing he had been pulled toward more and more risk in the deals he was making, which had worked out bigtime initially, he was saying, with a stress on
initially
. “Emphasis on initially,” Joris muttered, and then he said something Ned didn’t understand. He repeated it for Ned. “Qualcomm.”
Ned knew what Qualcomm was. It was a stock that had soared and then crashed. He hadn’t known that it was a major holding of Douglas’s and Iva’s. Joris knew a lot. If fascism ever came he would pick Joris to be in the maquis with, and, okay, Gruen if he lost weight. Ned wondered if Joris had been put into Qualcomm by Elliot, too, and Gruen.
At forty-five, Elliot had undergone a prostatectomy. This was new. Apparently it was new to all of them. There was a group murmur of sympathy. Ned felt something in his genitals, not his physical genitals but in the idea of his genitals.
There was a bevy of details on the protracted healing process. One detail that was tough to hear was Elliot’s account of discovering, through an embarrassing incident, that he had become insensitive to a faint odor of urine it seemed he was carrying around with him although he was faithful about changing his pads. Changing them timeously, Douglas would have said, during the phase when he was pointlessly trying to lard Briticisms into everyday discourse at NYU. Arvacado. They all wanted to hear the grim minutiae of Elliot’s path back to continence. Or rather, they didn’t and they did. It could all go under the heading of cautionary information because every man in the room was entering the prostate trouble zone. And of course crouching there was the
other
thing.
The other thing was impotence. Of course impotence would probably be the universal masculine fate if you lived long enough. But everything is timing, Ned thought. On the plane he’d read in something that the human body stops aging at ninety. So … something to look forward to. Elliot had the traditional open prostatectomy. Now there was the robotic option. Ned had read about it. Elliot had suffered postoperatively. He was not giving them the
Reader’s Digest
version of his tribulations, either.
Elliot said, “What you realize is that it takes away something you were used to and depended on.” It was difficult for him, where he was going with this. Ned was full of sympathy. Elliot was grimacing. The friends waited.
Elliot was saying, “You lose the stupid imaginary availability of the women you run into. I was a widower when this struck, and I had been for a while, so I was single, you could say. Also the example of getting my continence back in less than a year turned out to be misleading. But this thing about women, until it’s gone, you never realize how calming, automatically calming, it is, to have these fantasy images running in your head, this imagery. And then the material basis of the imagery is gone and of course you have the history of getting lucky in the past in the fairly recent past that supported the imagery.”
They were all uncomfortable. Ned wanted urgently to think about something else, something amusing if possible, and felt cowardly. Nina would find Elliot’s existential discoveries, or discovery, interesting. But he knew if he told her she would say, So how well does that describe
your
inner life, by the way?
His mind wasn’t wandering, it was resisting. He didn’t want to think about death or impotence, either one. Since Nina, he had been living in almost a burlesque show with sex and comedy going on nonstop after the years when it had been so otherwise. Take blubalub, for example, he thought. Blubalub was a conceit of Nina’s. One summer they had stayed for a month in a cottage near Stinson Beach. And the cottage’s Dutch door had opened directly on the driveway. So once when he was coming back from the mailbox she had opened the top section of the Dutch door and stood there topless and invited him to put his face between her breasts and nuzzle side to side, which she’d referred to as blubalub. Trees kept anyone in the vicinity from seeing. So then she’d said blubalub was something for the UPS driver, something she had worked out with him one day when Ned was off swimming, and that when Ned had come to the door just then and she was topless, it had been a mistake because she’d been expecting the UPS guy, with whom the deal was that he would come to the Dutch door and she would let him have blubalub and he would give her the parcel meant for them and then she would get to go out to the truck and take her pick of any other parcel she wanted. Ned wanted it all to go on forever. On his very tall tombstone he wanted inscribed at the top Fun Had, and all the rest would be a list of things dating from Nina coming into his life. He knew he had to keep it to himself.
He got back to Elliot, who apparently was doing pretty well with erections. He was saying that getting used to orgasms that produced only a puff of air had taken some doing. Ned was a little unprepared for the degree of intimacy Elliot was providing. Their life together on Second Avenue must have been more decorous than he remembered.
Now this is interesting, Ned thought. Elliot was implying or imparting something that seemed cryptic. It was about a woman who had been his lover. He was being flowery. He was being obscure and intricate in his references to whoever she was. Nobody knew what to say.
Ned got up, feeling he had to. He said, “What a thing for you, man.” He wondered if others would want to say something, too, but Elliot was moving rapidly on. The pitch was coming. Ned sat down again.
Elliot was retracing the part of the story that had to do with Douglas’s economic situation. It was a crisis. There was nothing else to call it. A lot of his investments for the family had been under-hedged, as he put it, and Douglas had plowed much more into the physical estate than he should have. He was profligate. And Douglas had done that on his own, not letting anyone grasp the dimensions of it. Even Iva had been left out of Douglas’s finances. This place they were in was surrounded by collapsing walls of debt, was the way Elliot expressed it. And here was the Elliot who had been a star in the Drama Club at NYU, always in character parts because of his unusual height. Emoting, was what he was doing.