The Ground Beneath Her Feet (77 page)

If friendship is a fuel, the supply of it is not endless.

In the middle of my so-called coming-out party, I looked over at Aimé-Césaire and saw the mark of death on him, and the party began suddenly to seem like a wake for that beautiful man who, like Finnegan in the song, was sitting up gaily and enjoying his own farewell do. I knew about Schnabel also, that since his punishing divorce he continued to be at war with his ex-wife Molly, who had successfully obtained court orders preventing him from going within a mile of his two kids, and who visited Mack’s father on his deathbed to tell him, falsely, that Mack was a heroin addict, guilty of both violence towards and sexual abuse of the boys. Johnny Chow had his own saga of catastrophes, mostly connected with gambling. Were these people from whom I was prepared to take advice?

Yes, I said to myself. Better a whore than a nun, better a wounded soldier than someone who never heard the crump of the guns.

At that moment I saw Johnny Chow forcing his way through the crowd of revellers, grinning demonically, with Vina Apsara on his arm.

I’d heard about the impersonation craze, the Vina supperclub/cabaret look-alikes, the underground, heavy-metal and reggae Vinas, the rap Vinas, the Vina drag queens, the Vina transsexuals, the Vina hookers on the Vegas Strip, the Vina strippers outnumbering the Marilyns and Long Tall Texans on amateur nights around these infinitely varied United States, the porno-Vinas on the adult cable channels and closed-circuit hotel tvs, the hardcore under-the-counter blue-video-Vinas, and the innocent biannual gatherings of dweeby karaoke Vinas whose numbers rivaled even the indefatigable
Star Trek
conventioneers. In point of fact Vina had once been a guest star on the
Next Generation
television series, conjured up on the holodeck to sing for an enamored Worf. He taught her Klingon and she taught him Hug-me, or another similar-sounding tongue. When the Trekkies remembered this they invited the Vina people to join forces with them, but Vina was bigger than the
Enterprise
now, she was in a continuum of her own, perhaps even the fabled Q.

There was a famous production of
Hamlet
in which Jonathan Pryce, the actor playing the Prince of Denmark, “produced” the Ghost from
within himself, like a channeler or spirit medium, in an astonishing feat of body and voice control. The Vina impersonators did it the easy way, using costumes and recordings, but the idea was the same. In their own bodies they conjured up their fantasy beloved from the dead.

It’s a few steps beyond Mizoguchi too, I thought. In
Ugetsu
, the poor yokel taken in by the mysterious aristocratic beauty was just in love with a ghost. But these people aren’t merely under a dead woman’s spell, they’re actually trying to be her, wearing her kimonos, powdering their faces, walking the walk. This is a new form of auto-eroticism. Guised as Vina, these mimic women are making love to themselves.

There was some disagreement as to which Vina most merited commemoration, the firebrand Afro-Vina of her younger days, big-haired, big-voiced, big-mouthed and sexually rampant, or red-haired Mexi-Vina, older but still hot, her voice never better, her aura a little wiser, or Death-Vina, the sad-eyed lady of the broken lands. In the end, pragmatism ruled. The younger impersonators did the early Vina, the older men (yes, and women too) made the latter-day Vina their own.

This Vina, the one on Chow’s arm, was unmistakably an older guy. Chinese too, which inevitably made the resemblance imperfect, but he’d put in some hard hours in front of his make-up mirror, darkening his skin, taking trouble with the shape of his eyes. He’d studied her swinging gait, the movement of her mouth, her attitude. And the red wig was very good. Tell me now if this is a bad idea, Johnny asked as they reached me, only we thought it might, oh shit, defuse something if she were in some sense here. Like Adult Children Of Alcoholics, you know that group, it can help to know you’re not alone.

I so don’t want to bum you out, this China-Vina said disarmingly in a fine baritone voice, and actually bowed. That’s so not it. I much honored her, long time now, this is my way to give her respect.

It’s fine, I told Johnny. Really. It’s cool. Great job, I added to the gratified cross-dresser. Do you want to sing later, or what?

I mime, he said, breaking out in a big, proud smile. I brought my tape deck, if that’s okay to do.

Go for it, I advised him, and forced myself to smile dazzlingly back. The look of relief on Chow’s face told me I’d done the right thing. My friends would feel better about me now, and—with a sense of relief on all sides—they’d be more okay with leaving me alone.

•  •  •

For long periods, during year two after Vina, I lived alone by the sea in America.
What do you love?
I had asked her at Juhu, and she answered, I
love the sea
. That, at least, I regained, though she was gone: the ocean breezes on which I smelled her pungent, lost perfume; the beach. This long golden strand was a far cry from Cuffe Parade’s urban graciousness, from Apollo Bunder’s bustle, but it filled me with more than one kind of nostalgia. Cruising to the ocean past the potato fields, the cornfields, the turning banks of sunflowers, the glistened polo horses, the sweet birds of youth and the tick-bearing deer; past the exotically casual American rich in their cut-offs, their halter necks, their chinos, their polo shirts, their classic convertibles, their Range Rovers, their monied old age, their gilded childhood and their potent prime; past the Shinnecock Indians trimming the hedges and cleaning the pools and maintaining the tennis courts and mowing the grass and in general tending to the high-priced, stolen land; past the honk of the railroad and the cry of the geese and the hissing of summer lawns, I was turned back, after a long age, towards thoughts of home. Home as another lost jewel, as something else swallowed up, by time, by choice. As something else now unavailable, glowing up through the water like sunken gold, breathing painfully under the plowed earth like a lover gone down to Hell.

I did pull myself together sufficiently to assemble that show of photographs,
After Vina
, which was well and seriously received. I don’t deny that this pleased me. The truth is that after all I was not immune to the disease of making Vina mean something, and what she meant to me was love, certainly, but also mystery, a woman ultimately unquantifiable and impossible to grasp, my window into the inexplicable.

The mystery at the heart of meaning. That was her.

I invited Ormus to the opening but he didn’t show. I hadn’t really expected it. There was one small fracas: at one point a group of New Quakers burst into the Orpheum gallery to denounce me noisily for implying that Vina was deceased, and these greasy, bikerish figures took some ejecting. When they had gone, I found myself standing next to a slender old Indian gentleman in a J. Crew check shirt and jeans, whom I did not at first recognize in this off-duty manifestation.

I want to thank you, he said in his curious, flat-accented way, for sharing my daughter with me. It surely is a positive and healing experience to be here. Yes, sirree, it surely is.

It was the Rhodopé doorman, Shetty. In the depths of my own grief I had callously forgotten that Vina’s father was still alive.

My encounter with Doorman Shetty is like a whip of cold water across the face. It wakes me from my long unhealthy reverie, my heartsick inwardness, and renews my awareness—which is the essence of the photographer’s art—of the immediacy, the presentness, of things. At the end of his shift the next day I meet up with Shetty, who is back in uniform, and we go for coffee to the Buddhist-organic place across the street from the Orpheum, that Eastern-scented room with its oddly soothing combination of great dark coffee, stripped dark wood and pale barefoot waitresses in white dresses that drag on the floor and button all the way up to the throat. Shetty seems calm, though the joviality I recall is not in evidence. He is happy, he says, that Vina found him in his old age and that the distance between them was thereby at least a little reduced. This he tells me in the new vocabulary of self-regard.
We dealt with some issues. We confronted the anger that needed to be faced and we did some good healing work. We hugged. We became comfortable with each other. We had some quality time
.

They even went into therapy together, he reveals. The therapist, an Indochinese woman named Honey and married to a successful Wall Street arbitrageur of conservative Nicaraguan origins, one day hung a giant pink piñata in the shape of a rabbit from the ceiling fan in her office and handed Vina a wooden stick. As Vina slugged the piñata she was encouraged to say whom she was really hitting out at, and why. She went for it with a vengeance, and Shetty accordingly heard many painful complaints about himself, but the spectacle of his famous daughter beating the bejesus out of a giant salmon-colored papier-mache bunny like a retard S&M queen was so absurd that he laughed. He laughed until he cried, especially when the piñata gave way under the force of Vina’s assault and the usual children’s sweets and fluffy toys tumbled out, all the gifts he had failed to give his daughter when she was a child.

How did that make you feel, Honey the therapist asked him. He wiped his eyes but the chortling wouldn’t stop.

Let me tell you what I think, he began, and guffawed.

Never mind what you think, she interrupted. Let’s stay with what you feel.

Shetty, unable to countenance the hilarious idiocy of this remark, got up and walked out, still laughing.

The trouble was, he tells me ruefully, Vina thought the piñata was a great idea, so she felt like I was laughing at her. After that we, ah, re-experienced our previous unresolved relational negativity. We remained on friendly terms but we didn’t engage any more. This was classic avoidance behavior. We didn’t confront. We sidestepped. We didn’t heart-to-heart.

There is a great deal more he wants to confess: how his long decline from successful butcher to down-and-out hobo began the day after he took the young Vina to dinner at the Rainbow Room and then packed her off to live with the Doodhwalas in Bombay. He wishes to speak of fate, of a self-imposed curse, of having suffered the consequences of his failures as a parent deeply enough and for long enough. He is preparing to ask me for the expiation he never fully received from his dead daughter. Doorman Shetty is pursuing a dead Vina too, like all the rest of us he needs to raise her from the dead to give him peace.

Still too shaky myself to carry his additional weight, I cut him off in mid-flow. So as not to appear too rude, I inquire after his son-in-law, Ormus. How is the rock legend dealing with his loss? To my surprise, my pro-forma inquiry occasions a savage tirade.

Listen, this was all in the
National Enquirer!
This was in
People
magazine! What, you didn’t hear, you were out of town?, I’m guessing on the moon?

Almost, I reply, thinking of the sea of forgetfulness, the sea of storms, the white white sand and the sea.

Shetty snorts, and dishes.

Ormus Cama, the notorious recluse, has added to his list of bizarre obsessions the growing imitation-Vina industry, making a full collection of the available pornographic film and video material, and showing up unannounced and surrounded by burly Sikh bodyguards at
nightclubs and strip joints, to check out the quality of the impersonations. He is believed to be a patron of certain brothels and élite “home delivery” services specializing in celebrity look-alikes. On one occasion he was actually caught
in flagrante
with a counterfeit Vina in the back of a super-stretch, but when the sharp-eyed cop who saw the hooker responding to a signal and entering the limo understood what was going on, whose surrogate was doing what to whom, he didn’t have the heart to take the matter further and let the participants go without further ado. (The whore in question, Celeste Blue, subsequently tried to parlay the incident into a financially beneficial little scandal but was foiled by the absence of any charges. Clea Singh, commenting on Blue’s interview in the
Enquirer
, said only: It sounds like the lady has a big mouth.)

For many years the most private of men, Ormus—eye-patched and earmuffed—is now, says the Doorman, a regular attendee at the mushrooming Vina conventions, often agreeing to adjudicate at the look-alikes’ beauty contest, stipulating only that he should be the sole judge. The winning Vina, if she is thought to be of a sufficiently high standard, is sent up to his suite after the contest, and afterwards escorted out by a firm-jawed Clea Singh and compensated so handsomely that, thus far, there have been no complaints.

Ormus has also—reversing the attitudes of a lifetime—been visiting a guru. Her name is Goddess-Ma, and as the upheavals of the age have become more numerous and dramatic her popularity among the élite of New York society, who are always easily alarmed by global instability and loud noises, has increased by leaps and bounds. Goddess-Ma is from India, allegedly illiterate, made her name in Düsseldorf and arrived in the United States “by a miracle.” It is rumored that there is no record of her journey to New York in the files of any airline or shipping company. Yet her immigration status has never been investigated, which would indicate to the skeptical observer that the truth is more conventional than it is being made to seem, but is treated by the Goddess-Ma people as further proof of her existence within an impregnable aura of blessing and safety. Goddess-Ma is very small, but young and beautiful enough to be a movie star, and has powerful—and anonymous—backers who have installed her right in the Rhodopé Building, three floors down from Ormus. From this splendid residence
she has issued a number of “Goddess Sayings” that have reverberated in the rarefied air of the city’s better locales. India-blah, Bharat-burble, the so-called Wisdom of the East, is definitely back in fashion. In fact, India in general is hotter than ever: its food, its fabrics, its doe-eyed dames, its direct line to Spirit Central, its drums, its beaches, its saints. (When India explodes a nuclear device, the notion of Holy Mother India takes a few dents, but it is quickly agreed by
le tout
Manhattan that in this matter India’s unwise political leaders have betrayed the land’s true spirit. The valuable Oriental Wisdom concept suffers little lasting damage, unlike the much-shaken planet.)