The Ground Beneath Her Feet (68 page)

Vina was a quick study, and by the time Mull Standish departed she was no longer the arrogant flake who had landed herself and Ormus in Contract Hell. Under his tutelage she had become a sharp businesswoman, as formidable as many of the big wheels for whose brains she showed an exaggerated respect they usually didn’t deserve. She managed the stocks and bonds, the real estate, the growing art collection, the bakeries, the Santa Barbara winery, the cows. Ormus’s fabled love of bread had led Standish naturally into this market; now Vina ensured that the high standards of the Camaloaf franchise were maintained from coast to coast. The bread was already an established brand; but few people thought of Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama as being amongst the finest viticulturists in California, to say nothing of the biggest dairy farmers in the northeastern United States, but that’s what they had become. The winery thrived and the already huge herds of Holsteins acquired by Standish from the Singh estate had become even larger, their milk and cheese ubiquitously available. From goats to cows, Vina told me. Seems I can’t help being on the udder side.

This in spite of the fact that during this period she had gone not only vegetarian but fully macrobiotic. No wine, definitely no dairy products. Occasionally, as a treat, she allowed herself a handful of those small Japanese dried fish. It was always interesting to me that she could make such a separation: that business, in spite of everything, was still business. Mull Standish had been an influential teacher.

Nowadays she was the worldly one, while Ormus’s obsession with catastrophe had rendered him meditative, inward, strange. So, for example, it was Vina who decided for sound fiscal as well as strong sentimental reasons to buy Yul Singh’s old Tempe Harbor place when it, like the cattle, was offered to the band cheaply by the estate lawyers, who informed her that it was the wish of the deceased that they be given first refusal at the most advantageous terms. (This was Yul’s way of making a posthumous peace. He did not insult them by leaving them the property outright, as a gift. That would be to claim a friendship that had not existed for years. It was a finely judged decision. It showed respect.)

It was also Vina who decided to employ the Singhs. The new management at Colchis was dispensing with their services without explanation, and a deputation comprising Ormus and Vina’s first chauffeur, Will, and Clea the châtelaine of Tempe Harbor, seamstress of Ormus’s first eye patch, arrived at the VTO offices to plead the retinue’s cause. Stripped of his black Valentino suit and sunglasses, no longer obliged to play the heavy, Will in jeans and white shirt turned out to be a hesitantly articulate young man. Clea was the same tiny, decent old lady she’d seemed at Tempe, only more worried. These were ordinary people sucked into the realm of the extraordinary and fighting back, playing their one and only card. Rumors had reached their ears of Yul’s covert activities, they said, and they had, with some justice, concluded that they were being punished for their former boss’s misdeeds. Just as innocent Sikhs in India were slaughtered after the Quadruple Assassination—the many suffering on account of the actions of the few—so the Colchis Singhs, too, had become the victims of American jitteriness. If Yul Singh had been a terrorist financier, then, in the view of the label, all his fellow Sikhs were tarred with the same brush. Yet we are not such people, madam, said Clea with simple dignity. We are persons of ability, willing and able to serve, and we ask you to grant our good wish.

Vina took on the whole entourage on the spot.

In 1987 Amos Voight died, Sam’s Pleasure Island closed its doors for good, an era seemed to be ending, and Ormus Cama completed fifty years on earth. Turning fifty seemed to hit Ormus hard. His excursions
from the Rhodopé complex had become few and far between, though once in a while Vina dragged him to a downtown music venue, accompanied by a clutch of Singhs, to hear a hot new act. These were disappointments more often than not, though just lately a young Irish quartet, Vox Pop, had impressed them as a possible start-up act. Mostly, however, their forays into Musicworld served only to confirm that the old order was, improbably enough, refusing to fade. The times were not a-changing. Lennon, Dylan, Phil Ramone, Richards, these old men were still the giants along with VTO themselves, while the likes of Trex, Sigue Spangell, Karmadogma and the Glam had been little more than blips.

Even Runt, the new rejectionism, all snarl and spittle, hadn’t interested Ormus and, after a brief flare of scandal and attention, hadn’t lasted. How could it, Ormus shrugged, you can’t start a revolution in a clothes shop. Runt had been the brainchild of the resurfacing Antoinette Corinth, Tommy Gin and She, the Three Witches, Ormus Cama called them. Back in London, they had indeed dreamed up the angry new sci-fi look—rubber, slashed fabrics, bondage thongs, body piercing, the maquillage and attitude of android replicants on the run from exterminating blade runners—at their new Fulham Road store, and then invented a rock group to sell it. Inevitably they showed up in New York, acting as if they were the tastemakers supreme of London society, come to Manhattan to wreak a little British havoc. She, at Antoinette’s bidding, did Daryl Hannah backflips in a distressed-leather miniskirt down the length of the bar at 44. No knickers, of course, darlings, Antoinette redundantly pointed out at the top of her voice. We call it Runt ’n’ Cunt. New York gave them their fifteen minutes and forgot them. Their band, the Swindlers, the supposed shock troops of the new wave, fizzled in the face of American
pudeur
and ended up fatally shooting each other—and Corinth and Gin—in a suite at the Chelsea Hotel. She alone survived, having jumped ship five minutes before the fight that ended the revolution. She ran shrieking through the lobby wearing rubber and black lace, disappeared into the city night and never bothered to come back for her other clothes.

I remembered She’s old loathing of Tommy Gin and wondered if this might have played a part in the shootings. But She had vanished
for ever, and the question went unanswered. The Swindlers’ violent stupidity was thought to be explanation enough.

Ormus barely responded to the news of Antoinette Corinth’s death. This woman had in all probability tried to kill him once, had caused a car accident that deprived him of years of his life, but he seemed beyond resentment. He was thinking about the coming cataclysm.

They had been married in the Rhodopé Building looking out at the glory of the park. They honeymooned in that same private universe and needed nothing more, neither Venice nor the Hatshepsut Temple nor an island in the sun. And on the morning after his marriage Ormus Cama woke up and opened his pale eye and the otherworld was not there. The dark eye saw the world as it was, this joyous new world in which Vina lay beside him in his very own bed, and the other, accident-injured (accident-opened) eye saw nothing, or little more than a blur. The vision of doubleness had faded and he could not summon it back.

The years passed and the otherworld did not return, Maria no longer came to see him, and with the passage of time he began to have his doubts about its existence; it began to feel like a trick of the mind, a mistake. It was like waking from a dream; into happiness.

For a time he was tempted to let it go, to consign it to the realm of fantasy. To settle for joy, for the long-awaited arrival of completeness, of perfection: what a temptation!
I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see
. But the truth nagged at him, it wouldn’t set him free. It’s real, he told himself. It has turned away from me and hidden its face, but what is so, is so.

If the lost otherworld be likened to a Whale, then Ormus Cama had become its Ahab. He hunted it as a madman hunts his doom. On plane flights he stared out of the window searching for the slashes in the real. He went on wearing eye patches of various colors and fabrics because to admit that they weren’t necessary was also to surrender to the fantasy that the otherworld didn’t exist.

His music changed. In the eighties, as well as his VTO work he wrote long abstract pieces called
Sounds of the Otherworld
, which could not by any stretch be thought of as rock ’n’ roll. He hired Carnegie Hall and a
bunch of classically trained musicians and was greeted with derision for his pains, but he persisted, and a few people began to mention these new works with respect.

The longer the otherworld remained hidden, the more fearful he became.

Like Ahab, he knew that his whale had
sounded
, but he was determined to be near the great cetacean at its next rising. When sounding, a whale may plunge down through the waters, fathom after fathom, at bewilderingly high speed. There in the depths of the black water it may bide its time, then shoot upwards and smash through the surface of the sea, bursting upon the empire of the air as if it were the end of the world.

This was Ormus’s greatest fear. In 1984 he published his thoughts in the international press and was immediately written off as another rock ’n’ roll nut.

My greatest concern is that I feel the fragility of the fabric of our space and time
, he wrote.
I feel its growing attenuation. Maybe it’s running out of steam, coming to its predestined close. Perhaps it will fall away like a shell and the great granite truth of the otherworld will stand revealed in its place
.

Maybe the otherworld is the next world, not in a supernatural sense, not in the sense of an afterlife, but just the world that will succeed our own. (I am still convinced that when our scientific knowledge is greater, we will be able to explain such phenomena as these without recourse to superstition. It is simply a new aspect of the real.
)

Maybe our own world is no more than a vision in some other accidental individual’s damaged eye
.

I don’t know what I’m saying. I do know there is a danger of an ending, of a ceasing to be. I do know we can’t trust our damaged earth. There is another cosmos hidden from us, sounding. When it bursts into our presence it may blow us away, as if we had never been
.

We are aboard the whaleboats of the
Pequod,
awaiting the final coming of the whale. As a man of peace, I am not shouting “Man the harpoons!” But I do say we must brace ourselves for the shock
.

As a matter of fact there was a Parsi aboard Melville’s storied ship, and his rôle was that of the weird sisters in Macbeth: to prophesy Ahab’s
doom.
Neither hearse nor coffin can be thine
, he said. In the story I have to tell, the prophecy does not fit Ormus. But it fits Vina like a glove.

Call me Ishmael.

For all her fearsome competence, Vina didn’t know how to deal with Ormus’s deepening obsessions. I was her safety valve, her light relief. If you believe, she despaired, he wants me to get the mayor to agree to give us an acre of the park, a field for cows to graze in. That way, he says, when the earthquakes come, we’ll get an early warning. He says everybody has to play music non-stop and there should be daily love festivals in major city centers everywhere because all we have to fall back on is harmony, all we have to protect us is the power of music and love.

That, and Ermintrude the cow, I observed.

I don’t know what to do, she said. I don’t know what to fucking think.

I remember her despair. I remember promising myself at that moment, I will break this crazy marriage if it’s the last thing I do. If it’s the last fucking thing, I will set this lovely woman free.

She still fought her daily bout against self-doubt and existential uncertainty, the universal bogeys of the age. Once when she was young, she told me, her mother took her to the state fair. There was a special kind of Ferris wheel with cages around the seats and a lever you could pull that would permit your little capsule to spin right over, turning you head over heels while the wheel took you up and around. Of course you could lock it off if you wanted and have the normal ride, but the bored little rat-toothed runt of an attendant didn’t bother to tell them a damn thing about that, so when they started tumbling they both thought something had gone dreadfully wrong and they were about to die. Those five screaming minutes in the moving cage still returned to Vina in dreams. Now I know what it’s like to be inside a laundromat appliance, she joked, but what she was talking about wasn’t funny. She was talking about being out of control of your little bit of world, of being betrayed by what you counted on. She was talking about panic and the fragility of being and the skull beneath the skin. She was saying she was married to a lunatic and she loved him and couldn’t handle it and didn’t know what was going to happen, how it would end. She was afraid of death: his, her own. It’s always there, death, in a Ferris wheel, in
a loafing shed for goats. In a bedroom where something heavy swings from a slowly rotating ceiling fan. It’s like a paparazzo waiting in the shadow. Smile, honey. Smile for the Reaper. Say
Die
.

In 1987, if you recall, Democratic presidential candidate Gary Stanton withdrew from the race for the nomination after the re-emergence of an old girlie scandal involving sex and death on Wasque Beach, Martha’s Vineyard. Several of the smaller countries of Western Europe—Illyria, Arcadia, Midgard, Gramarye—voted against economic and political union, fearing it would result in a diminution of particularity, of idiosyncrasy, of national character. The Olympic 100-meter sprint was won by a Canadian man who was afterwards disgraced and erased from history. All official photographs of the event were retouched and videotapes were computer-doctored to show only the runners who finished second, third and fourth. There were bursts of unusually bad weather—blamed by the more meteorologically challenged Californians on a Hispanic handyman named Elvis Niño, who got beaten up in the street by irate Orange County residents—and there was also big trouble on the world’s money markets, where the great fictionists behind the long-running
Currency
sitcom were having trouble with their creative processes.