The Ground Beneath Her Feet (56 page)

No point resisting. Give in gracefully. Ormus and Vina settle back into the deep leather upholstery. Where is this honeymoon lodge, Ormus idly asks.

Sir the Finger Lakes area sir. Does that make any sense to you?

Vina sits up. It does to me. Where’s it near to?

Yes ma’am, it’s located at the southern tip of Lake Chickasauga. Heart of the state wine-growing region. Ma’am, this would be in the neighborhood of a little town, maybe you’re familiar with it, by the name of Chickaboom.

Captivity in Egypt, Vina moans, closing her eyes. Even the Israelites didn’t have to return once they’d got away.

Excuse me? Ma’am? You lost me there?

No, nothing. Thank you.

Yes ma’am.

The house at Tempe Harbor, in wood painted pale gray with white trimmings and the sort of ornate carved “lacework” more typically glimpsed through the tropical palm fronds and bougainvillea creepers of Key West, is in fact the creation of a perverse Floridan millionaire of Swiss-German origin, Manny Raabe, who escaped in old age from effete Southern warmth (and occasional hurricanes) into these bracingly nostalgic northern latitudes, and promptly died of the cold. Yul Singh has since put in an underfloor heating system and installed numerous extra chimneys and fireplaces. It’s a mighty place, with two slated mansard roofs conceived on the grand scale, like Swiss Alps. Singh keeps it hot, and stuffed with parakeets and tropical plants: as if rebuking the late Raabe for his folly. There’s a sauna. The chef—Kitchen Singh—is under instructions to concentrate on a strongly spiced sub-continental cuisine. Tempe Harbor has been transformed by its new owner into a shrine to heat. Which if you don’t care for it I apologize, Yul Singh is on the phone the moment the chopper sets down, but if you buy a haunted house you should it’s my opinion make it unattractive to the ghost.

There’s no trace of a ghost but they’re not the only guests. Another
pair of “lovebirds” is in residence, the art-house-movie director Otto Wing and his newlywed bride, a long, gummy Nordic beauty called Ifredis, who insists on skipping naked across the midnight lawn to go skinny-dipping in Lake Chickasauga’s cold black water, pursued by the scholarly, bespectacled body of her similarly nude husband, who can be heard shrieking out the
An die Freude
as the water hits his genitalia. Joy, shrieks Wing in German. Joy, thou lovely spark of God, daughter of Elysium.

There’s a lot of shrieking, as it happens. Wing and Ifredis can’t get enough of each other and fuck uninhibitedly whenever and wherever the spirit moves them, and it moves them all the time and all over the place. Ormus and Vina witness the lovers’ passion again and again, in the mansion’s many living rooms, in the lakeside gazebo, on the pool table, the tennis court, the deck.

These people, says Vina, slightly put out. They make us look like virgins.

When they’re not fucking and shrieking, Wing and Ifredis are sleeping, or eating quantities of cheese and drinking orange juice by the quart. (They appear to have their own food supplies, and usually forgo Kitchen Singh’s lavish banquets. They generate all the heat they can handle without his culinary aid.)

Their conversation, such as it is, touches mostly on Jesus Christ. Ifredis is a hundred-and-ten-percenter, a girl who holds nothing back. She goes in for religion with the same naked, cold-water zeal as she evidences in her shrieking sex bouts. Swiftly identifying the weak point, the wavering heathen, she pursues Ormus into the hot tub in the spa wing and interrogates him with pitying wonder dripping from her wide blue eyes. So is it really true you no god at all have? I guess not, says Ormus, unwilling to discuss his new visionary condition. There follows a long sorrowing silence, until Ormus understands that reciprocity is required of him. Oh, right, he mutters. Er, how about you?

Ifredis whoops, a long orgasmic sound. Uhh, she purrs. I just love Christ Jesus. Wing arrives, leans on the side of the tub and kisses her deeply, as if drinking at a spring, then emerges from her mouth to offer this thought. I adore in this woman her directness, he says. Her lack of irony. At the point we have reached in the century it is important to eschew all ironic communication. Now is it time to speak directly to
avoid a chance of misunderstanding. In all circumstances to prioritize such avoidances.

His bride is tugging at his sleeve. Otto, she pleads, making a rubbery moue. Otto, I want to sit on your arm. She rises like a steaming Venus from the tub and they scamper off. Her English is not good, Otto sings out at Ormus over his departing shoulder. To avoid misunderstanding I should explain that at her present vocabularial level she makes occasionally a confusion of the limbs.

If one were of a paranoid disposition (and these are paranoid days) one might suppose that Yul Singh has engineered this long weekend with great deliberation: that even from distant Park Avenue Yul Singh the blind puppeteer is pulling his guests’ strings, the way George Bernard Shaw up there on his godlike cloud manipulates his Higgins and Eliza marionettes on the cover of the original
My Fair Lady
cast recording.

Every detail of life at Tempe Harbor, after all, bears witness to the long reach of the mogul’s influence. Even in his absence, Cool Yul is a hands-on host. There are the unpredictable but frequent phone calls to both guests and staff, there is the meticulous attention to detail: the vegetarian menu for Vina, the doctor in residence in case Ormus’s health should suddenly deteriorate. The décor is a curious mixture of European high good taste and Indo-American flaunt-it brashness: antique Louis Quinze chairs imported from France and reupholstered in monogrammed powder-blue silk. YSL. The monogram (for Yul Singh Lahori, his rarely used full name) is ubiquitous: on most of the furnishings, on the specially rolled in-house cigars and cigarettes, on the silver cufflinks presented as keepsakes by the housekeeper Clea Singh to all male guests, and even on each thick square of the personalized toilet paper rolls and the house range of TH condoms, sanitary napkins and tampons discreetly positioned, according to gender, in the his-and-hers bathrooms that are a feature of each guest suite. Framed gold and platinum records line the walls; also portraits of the great man—who bears more than a passing resemblance to the actor Vincent Price, that smooth nocturnal prince of the fanged classes—and of his aristocratically etiolated and long-suffering French wife Marie-Pierre d’Illiers. Who I must personally admit is my symbolic ideal, my immortal tea cake, who when I taste her lips I remember everything
important in life, Yul Singh confides to Ormus on the phone. Okay, so you want to ask now about my, don’t bother to pretend you don’t know this, on the surface contradictory and also extremely public liaisons with as they say a string of young beauties, he goes on. The famous disarming grin, the helpless spreading of the arms, come across to Ormus even down the telephone. Alas, Singh confesses, quite unabashed—his Indian reticence supplanted by this adopted American confessional style—memory is a great quality, also possessing considerable erotic force, by the way, which strictly speaking you don’t need to know that, it’s a private matter between myself and the lady, nevertheless as I was saying remembrance is tops, but sometimes by way of contrast it is even better to forget.

Yul is a ruthless visionary, an amoral schemer. Might it not be a part of his grand design to throw cold water over Ormus and Vina’s grand renewed passion, by offering them, in the form of Wing and Ifredis, an admonitory pair of Vargas caricatures of themselves? Happiness writes white, Montherlant said, and Yul Singh, an educated man for all his down-market posturing, is able to take a smart tip. Lovebirds bill and coo and don’t get much work done. A little trouble in paradise might well be worth stirring up.

And the Jesus-freak material? Just adds an extra piquancy to the sauce.

Is this scripted dialogue and action? Are these
actors?

Probe a little more deeply into the Tempe Harbor episode, and further reverberations can be felt. YSL is a lifelong philanderer who nevertheless loves, honors and can never get away from his utterly admirable and evidently
complaisante
wife. In Vina, perhaps, he has already discerned a sexual adventuress as daring as he, a woman in search of an anchor, of solid ground from which to make her nocturnal leaps into the unknown. Ormus—Yul Singh has intuited—must be once again that anchor, the still center of her turning wheel. If he’s the rock she can be the roll. This will fuel his music and her singing, both; for art must be made secretly, in quiet places, while the singing voice needs to soar into open space and seek the adulation of the crowd. Yul Singh has his own visionary blind eyes, which can see into possible futureworlds, enabling him to bet heavily on them, even, sometimes, to bring them into being. This is what he has seen: that Ormus and
Vina’s genius, their future, their ability to become what they have it in themselves to be, depends on the engendering and perpetuation of special forms of pain. The noisy pain of the compulsive wanderer and the dumb pain of the one who’s left.

Wing and Ifredis need neither sleep nor food except for their secret cheese. They are found fucking on the kitchen table, and under the living room rug. The whoops and shrieks grow louder, longer, somehow less human, by the hour. Vina and Ormus feel swamped, stalled, by this pornographic operetta. They are rendered temporarily incapable not of desire but of its physical (and vocal) expression. Like a couple of maiden aunts, they sip drinks on Tempe Harbor’s farthest-flung terraces, and disapprove.

Up early on the third morning, Vina finds a dead stag lying in the reeds at the lake’s edge: not shot, just deceased. Its head is half under water; antlers break the surface like hard weeds. Insects buzz their requiem. The legs are stiff, like a giant toy’s. More specifically, it occurs to her, like the legs of a wooden horse. For some reason she cannot at once identify this unbidden thought makes her cry. Huge sobs burst from her; after a few of these, the memory follows. Of, outside the long-vanished Egypt cigar store, a wooden charioteer and his horse.
A one-horse town and the one horse was made of wood
. Vina summons a house limo—driven by Limo Singh, as the turbaned and uniformed chauffeur informs her without a tic of the irony forbidden by the avantgardist Otto Wing—and, abandoning Ormus to the screaming lovers of Tempe Harbor, is driven at speed into Chickaboom.

Later, searching the grounds for her, Ormus wears his new eye patch in burgundy-colored velvet (run up for him by Clea the obliging housekeeper) and, with his single available eye, spots the stag, roped to a small tractor, being removed from the water by the chief gardener, Lawn Singh. For an instant he thinks it’s Vina. Then his good eye mocks his pounding heart. Four legs not two, hooves not feet. Don’t tell Vina you made
that
mistake.

He goes indoors, still oppressed by the residue of fear, the jangly biochemicals coursing through his veins. He makes for the music room—it’s soundproofed, you can’t hear Otto and Ifredis in there—and sits down at the Yamaha baby grand. You see a dead animal, you
think it’s the woman you love. You can’t trust your eyes. You can’t trust
her
. There’s music pouring out of his fingertips.

Everything you think you see
, he sings.
It can’t be
.

And if Yul Singh—Machiavelli, Rasputin, he’s never minded what people call him as long as the artistes keep signing on and the customers keep buying—is indeed watching his anguished guest through blind eyes from his Shavian cloud up there in the cloudless sky, he will certainly, at this point, be breaking into the widest of self-satisfied smiles.

The cigar store’s gone but it’s a small town and Egiptus is an uncommon name. It doesn’t take much more than an hour of asking around to learn that the old man choked on a bone years ago but the woman is still just about alive, though emphysema should ensure it won’t be for much longer. Mrs. Pharaoh, one old-timer called her in a bar. Now Limo Singh is driving down a long straight country road between vines and corn. There’s a red silo and one of those newfangled windmills. It’s hot when the wind lets up but the wind isn’t letting up today, it bites and plans to go on biting.

The road begins to bend and narrow, loses its confidence, becomes uncertain, sputters into sidetracks, with the wind blowing up a dust cloud to blur things even further, and then in a back-road graveyard of machinery, a place that’s lost definition and grown jowly like a plain man’s ageing jawline, they find the rusting Winnebago, standing at the edge of a cluster of wrecked and cannibalized automobiles and tractors, surrounded by tall grass so it looks like it’s hiding.

She’s in a trailer, Vina thinks, but there’s no movie to follow. The limo stops and she keeps sitting for a few moments, feeling the loop of time close, and feeling, too, the advent of an unexpected sentiment beyond anger and revenge.

Compassion.

She gets out of the limo and walks through the scrap yard. The trailer door opens. A small gray spike of a head sticks out and starts hollering furiously, with intervals for lung-sick gasps.

What you looking at lady I ain’t no fucking sight to be seen. I ain’t no local curio you can check out just because you read about me in a
fucking guidebook. I should charge admission. What is this. Somebody send you up here? You got business with me or did you just come up here in your fancy vehicle to gloat at folks who didn’t have your luck?

A fit of wheezing. Vina just stands there.

Do I know you?

Vina takes off her shades. The old woman looks like she’s been hit.

Oh, no, Mrs. Pharaoh says. No thank
you
. That’s the past.

She slams the trailer door in Vina’s face.

Vina stands there.

The door opens an inch.

You hear me I got no comment at this time. You got no entitlement coming here and invading my constitutional right of privacy. To come accusing me. I ain’t in your law court missy I’m in my personal fucking place of residence on my personal patch of mangy fucking grass and I ain’t in your court of law. You and your flunkey here you’re trespassing and maybe I’ll call the cops on you. You think because I can’t fucking breathe.