The Ground Beneath Her Feet (58 page)

I came out just now, he says—knowing it’s the wrong time, not able to help himself, sensing that things are about to slip away from him
again, that his wildflower wedding has vanished down a fork in reality along which he won’t be able to follow it—I came to ask you to marry me.

I already done tol’ you, honey, she answers, the cornpone accent only just taking the edge off the rebuff. I ain’t the marryin’ kind. I’m jus’ the girl who cain’t say yes.

She won’t do it. Can’t bring herself to. She loves him, she loves him to hell and back, but she won’t put it in writing and sign her name to it. Freed from the nagging pain of her childhood memories, she refuses this new captivity. She offers him the conventional anti-nuptial radicalism of the time. Monogamy is a manacle, fidelity is a chain. A revolutionary not a wifey will she be. A changer of the world not of diapers she’ll become.

He isn’t listening. High purpose has descended upon him. If you won’t marry me now, then I want to know when you will, he demands, with a stubbornness so deep that it has metamorphosed into something else, into, perhaps, destiny. And the force of his wanting it is so palpable that Vina—who loves him with her life, who knows his love is the equal of hers, who can’t trust either his love or her own for five minutes at a time—takes the demand seriously. Name the day, he blazes. As far in the future as you want. Your one hundred and first birthday if you want. But name it and hold to it and I’ll never ask you again until that day comes. Give me your unsinkable word and it will keep me afloat all my life. Just name the fucking day.

She’s twenty-seven years old, and if there’s one thing she’s learned it’s that nothing stays the same for five minutes, not even your goddamn name. So this demand for an immutable day, it’s a storybook device, it’s some retro Knights-of-the-Round-Table Camelot-and-chivalry deal. A courtly love revival. He’s asking her to mortgage the future, but in the future she’ll be someone else again, she’ll have changed a dozen times, and nobody can expect your unknown future self to be bound by the mistakes and promises of youth. It’s like selling the moon. You can sell it if you’re able to find a buyer but only a fool would expect you to deliver. Make the fucking promise, she thinks, and after that it’s
caveat emptor
. Let the buyer beware.

Okay, she says. Okay, already, keep your rug on. Ah, ten years from now, she says, how’s that. (Thinking, ten years is an impossible eternity.
In ten years, the music business being what it is, and taking her own volatile temperament and tempestuous life history into account, she could be mad or dead. Or thirty-seven, which feels worse. In ten years the light dying around them this evening will be fifty-eight thousand six hundred and fifty-seven billion miles from here and she might be pretty far away herself. Ten years is never-never land, you turn right at a star and go straight on till morning. No rules apply. Besides, behind her back, rabbits rabbits, she’s crossing her treacherous fingers.)

Ten years from today? From right now?

(He’s being serious. Jesus. Never mind, he’ll get over it, it’ll be fine.)

Sure, Ormie. Ten years, the clock’s running, three, two, one, go.

Then he tells her his side of the bargain.

Waiting for her, briefly possessing her, then losing her: this has been his lot. He waited for her to come of age, there was a single night of love, and then at once she vanished. He fell, he rose again, he strove to become worthy of her, to perform great labors, to solve the riddle of her departure, he set himself after many vicissitudes back upon his true course, and then a chance accident felled him once more; suspended his animation. She returned and worked a miracle, which was undeniably a miracle of love, and then for a few moments they were together, while he healed. But in spite of her continued avowals of their love, of hers, she refuses to offer him the fixity that is only natural and which, in his bizarre two-eyed condition, he needs. He finds that the waiting—another ten years, as she has specified—is preferable to her daily vagaries, her whims. The waiting is at least solid, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, he can lean his weight against it knowing it will not step away at the last instant and let him fall. But in waiting there is no inbetweenness, no acceptably nuanced position, no half measures or relativity theory. As there is none in love. One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices. As she has chosen waiting, so he chooses now to amplify what waiting means.

For ten years, until she is thirty-seven years old and he has turned forty-four, he will not touch or be touched by her. Not so much as a clasping of hands or a caress upon the cheek will he offer or permit. What he suffered for love when she was under-age he will suffer again
now that they are both in their prime. She has made a promise and he has no doubt that she will honor it. She should also be clear that he will honor his. These promises will be their substitutes for marriage vows. This non-performance, this empty vessel—this suspended absence, swinging hammock fashion between the twin poles of their stark choices—will be the bed of their
grand amour
.

To put it another way: for ten years, it will be strictly business between them. Stricter than business; for this is not a parting, not a divorce agreement, but a lovers’ pact, that ends in a long-delayed but much-desired tryst. It ends in for ever. Therefore he submits himself to the rules of love. Though he will not
lay a finger
on her for her stipulated decade, he enters freely and without coercion into a condition of celibacy. He will not share with any other woman what he cannot share with his beloved.

All this he swears.

Ten years from now, the time of denial will end and they will enter into joy.

The love of God, as Otto and Ifredis, the beatifically beating Wings of desire, have abundantly proved, need not hinder your sex drive. Alas, mortal love all too easily gets in its own way.

A Russian man goes into a car showroom and is approached by a sales representative. There’s no car actually on display in the showroom, they unfortunately don’t have any showroom models at present, but, the salesman explains, we have photographs, and certainly, sir, I’ll be happy to take your order. The customer quickly signs the purchase papers and asks, How soon can I have it? In two years from now, the salesman replies—Okay. But will it come in the morning or the afternoon?—I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think you understood, I said it’ll take two
years.
—Yes, that’s right, but in two years’ time, will it be the afternoon or, preferably, the morning?—This is ridiculous, sir, what can it possibly matter?—Well, you see, I’ve got the plumber coming in the afternoon.

This is a post-communist joke. I place it here anachronistically, around eighteen years ahead of its time, because it’s a parable about people who, like Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, are obliged by circumstances to take a long view. Whether these two, the loves of each
other’s lives, whose gift of loving is exceeded only by their talent for erecting mighty obstacles to that love, are the creators of their circumstances, or destiny’s fools, I leave to others to decide.

Vina can’t bear it.
Not this again, your fucking heroic oaths
. She rails, implores. He’s throwing away what is wonderful between them in the name of an archaic convention. He must reconsider. He must come to bed at once.

You could have said ten days, he points out. You could have said ten minutes. The length of the engagement was your choice, its nature is mine.

Stopped in her tracks, almost panting in her desperation, Vina faces the crisis of her life. And, as always, when tenderness fails her, as she believes it always has failed her and always will, she has recourse to ferocity.

Fine, she says. Have it your way. Strictly business. Deal.

For ten years, he reminds her. Your word is your bond.

And you can live like a monk if you want?, she snaps her exit line, but don’t expect this little lady to follow your lead.

When she’s out of sight, Ormus Cama takes off his eye patch and the otherness streams in. He reels, then gathers himself. Little by little, he must learn to see double without growing dizzy and losing his balance. He will have, if not love, then whole sight. That, and music.

From the moment their pact is made, that devil’s contract that will make neither of them happy, there’s no stopping them. At the epicenter of the American earthquake that is VTO lies this very Oriental disorientation. Abstinence: it becomes their rocket fuel, and flies them to the stars.

13
O
N
P
LEASURE
I
SLAND

A
journey to the center of the earth. (Cab fare from Vina’s place, $4 with tip.)

First stop, just around the corner from the center of the earth, is the artist Amos Voight’s studio, alias Slaughterhouse-22. Amos was born Wojtyla, and years later, when the Polish Pope comes along, Amos in his great old age will seriously announce he’s suing John Paul II for nomenclatural plagiarism.

At the Slaughterhouse, amid the printmaking and photography, small billionaires hang out in corners like gargoyles eager for rain, watching the curvy girls with the thick dicks go in and out of the movie studio. Amos never forgets a billionaire, never ignores them for longer than is enjoyable, so they’re happy. At this moment Amos is holding forth to Vina about his dead friend Eric, who has been found naked in an empty bathtub in a seedy apartment on the Upper West Side. Like David’s Marat, killed by tragic heroin, Voight says in that unsparing voice like a woman’s sigh. It’s too bad, he says. At least when the Lizard King went, his bath was full. Vina puts her arms round him, holds him. I took a ride up there, he says. It was horrible. $11 with tip.

To cheer him up, Vina takes Voight over to the center of the earth for champagne and orange juice and a steak sandwich ($36.93 including taxes). It’s just a couple of blocks away. Its name is Sam’s Pleasure Island, and there’s no Sam, never was one, but if pleasure is your pleasure then you’ve come to the right place.

(Even those who never come to such places derive a form of perverse satisfaction, vicarious, perhaps malign, from knowing that they exist, that an essential part of America’s contract with her citizens is being fulfilled. The pursuit of happiness; and of death.)

Oh, gee, says Amos, entering. I love New York. It’s full of people still doing stuff they gave up years ago.

Lou’s singing.
Wagon Wheel
. Boy, she’s hot. Look, here are Rémy Auxerre and Marco Sangria, nobody knows more about music than Marco and Rémy. What do you say, boys, asks Amos, do you like what she’s doing now.

Rémy answers, We must free our soul from the everyday and open it to
influxus mentium superiorum
, the influence of higher minds. To this end, our tools are vacantness and alienation. When influence finds our reason unoccupied, it shows it something of universal knowledge.

Oh, good, that means he likes it, Amos says to Vina.

How can you tell, she asks.

But it’s so easy, because he’s Martinican, you know, says Amos. It’s that great French bullshit, he does it nearly as well as the French. People dance differently in different towns, most of us adapt, but not our Rémy. I love that, it’s so great, so confident and empty, don’t you think.

I want you to meet Ormus?, Vina says. We’re now a band.

Just don’t ask me to produce your album, Amos says. (He’s really down tonight.) Just ask some other sucker, okay.

Nobody’s asking you for anything. Vina smacks him playfully on the head, and his thatch of hair flies out like a soft explosion. Be nice now, Amos. You’re on the Island.

Here’s Ormus, wearing his eye patch, looking even gloomier than Voight.

I’ll tell you what we’ve got in common, apart from almost having the same name, Amos confides, slipping an arm through his. We both came back from the dead. You had that crash, and somebody shot me,
can you believe it, a woman, so butch. I wasn’t supposed to make it but I just thought I would.

You old fraud, Vina scolds him. You know everything about everyone. You just pretend you’re an ignorant blinking little mole just out of his hole.

Like a mole in the ground I will root this mountain down, says Ormus.

Oh, gee, a Negro spiritual, Voight snaps, deliberately invoking the archaic term in the age of Black is Beautiful. Suddenly direct, he peers at Ormus. Colored cels wash their faces in red and purple light. What color are you, anyway, it’s so hard to tell these days, he demands, sharp as a rebuke. You know what they say about Vina. They say she’s a brown girl trying to be black, which is just plain snippy and so unfair to a girl with naturally frizzy hair and a liking for trouble. Now I’m clear what color
she
is, but I am not fully briefed on the pigmentary orientation of Parsi males, so I guess I’ll have to ask you straight out.

Do I have to be a color, Ormus mutters, coloring. Can’t we get beyond, finally, I mean can’t we get under our skins.

Aw, spoilsport, couldn’t you even be lime green or something? green is nice. (Here Voight turns to the nearest femme of a group of sequinned gender illusionists.) And you, my dear, what color are you.

Oh, I guess velvet, honey, is that a color.

Sure, velvet, that counts; how about your pal.

Her? She’s Gemini.

Voight turns back to Ormus. You see, here at Sam’s they have every shade and variety of color in the book. Do you know Anatole Broyard, by the way? He’s got the greatest trick. Every day when he enters the subway in Brooklyn he’s black, but by the time he shows up for work at
The New Yorker
he’s pure white. And did you ever hear of Jean Toomer? The most important writer of the Negro Renaissance. His book
Cane
, you know, way back in 1923, Waldo Frank called it a harbinger of the South’s literary maturity, of its emergence from the obsession put upon its mind by the unending racial crisis. The dawn of direct and unafraid creation, that’s what I believe he said. Seems to me you’d like that old book.