The Ground Beneath Her Feet (81 page)

He was skinny in Guadalajara; now he’s positively emaciated. I could probably hoist him shoulder-high with one hand. His hair has almost completely gone, and although what’s left is shaved to the skull, the stubble I can see is all white. His nose looks dangerously narrow, and though he has a fine pashmina shawl pulled around his shoulders, he’s shivering on a warm evening. He’s walking with a stick, fifty-four going on ninety. It may be too late to help him.

There’s no eye patch. I realize that he, too, knows about the end of the otherworld. About which he was both right—because there actually were two worlds on a collision course, I know that now—and wrong, because the otherworld was in no way intrinsically superior to our own. In the end, it was that version which failed. Ours succeeded—or let’s just say survived.

This was the nature of Ormus’s madness: that in his thinking he privileged another version of the world over his own. Maybe now, if he can only stay alive, he has a chance to regain his mental balance, to re-enter the actually existing world. Ours.

Thanks for coming, he whispers. There’s just a thing you have to see: to, ah, confirm. At which he turns and totters away through his empty white universe.

The size of the apartment is astounding, dwarfing even his Mexican Hyatt billet: the endless albino spaces, the open doorways, the emptinesses, the
room
. In the distant corner of one enormous vacant zone I spy a white futon mattress and a white reading lamp on a low white table, in another gigantic area there’s only a white concert grand piano and stool. Not a speck of dust or used glass or item of dirty laundry in sight. I can’t imagine how many Singhs it takes to pick up after Ormus, to create this pristine unworldliness.

He’s whispering as he walks. I have to stay close to hear what he has to say.

Curtis Mayfield’s paralyzed, Rai. A lighting rig fell on him. And
then
his house burned down. Yeah. Steve Marriott burned to death, you hear that. Different fire. Right. And Doc Pomus died. David Ruffin
OD’d. I guess too much Temptation, huh. Will Sinott of the Shamen? Drowned. Leo Fender, Uncle Meat, Johnny Thunders, Professor Longhair, Stan Getz, RIP, baby. That little kid falling from the penthouse window too. Just terrible. And the word is Mercury doesn’t have long, and Brian Jones was murdered,
Brian Jones
, they’ve got evidence. What’s going on, Rai, I don’t know what’s going on. They’re wiping us out.

This, I realize, is his strange, isolated, free-associative small talk. I do not judge him. I haven’t forgotten my own list of the dead, which I’d reeled off at Johnny Chow not so very long ago. Different names, same obsession. These are Vina’s new companions, the first social circle of her heaven or hell.

I follow Ormus through the white hectares until we turn a corner, a softly padded white door opens and shuts, and unexpectedly I’m in what looks like a minimalist version of Mission Control, Houston: floor-to-ceiling tv monitors on all four walls of a studio covering over a thousand square feet and, at the center, a space-odyssey command complex: computer banks, audio and video mixing-and-magic desks, Yamaha, Korg, Hammond, MIDI-B and Kurzweil keyboard equipment, and two white swivel chairs.

On every screen—there must be more than three hundred—a different phoney Vina pouts and twirls. The sound’s muted; three hundred dumb not-Vinas dizzily mouth and prance. If I want a model to play the almost-Vina in my unfinished photo sequence—and I guess I do—I’ve come to the right place.

Even after all these years, the money generated by rock music still amazes me. The resources required to own all this space and to build, at its heart, this cutting-edge audio-video facility featuring beyond-beyond PixelPixie morphotech capability and massed floating-point musicomputers that could, if reprogrammed, efficiently run a medium-range-missile guidance system; then to hire a small army of video crews to track down and tape hundreds upon hundreds of Vina surrogates: unimaginable. Unimaginable, too, is the luxury of being able to ask for anything you want, and knowing people will make it so, and you won’t even notice the cost.

To be given the world as a toy.

When my head stops spinning my heart starts to hurt, not only for
myself but for Ormus too. Obsession is the enactment of hidden pain. I realize that I haven’t taken his note seriously until now. I interpreted it, too glibly, as the cry for help of a drowning man; it never occurred to me to make a literal reading. Now, as my eyes swim with fake Vinas, I realize he actually believes that one of these pathetic counterfeits is the real thing, poor crushed Vina whom we loved risen from her abyss-grave and singing her old hits to cowboys, militiamen, possible Unabombers and drunks in Grand Island, Nebraska, or some such humming center of the musical world.

Then Ormus sits down at a control desk, says
Look at this
, throws a bunch of switches, and there she is, three hundred times over and more, blazing from all the monitor screens. He pushes a set of audio slide controls, and her wonderful—her inimitable—voice wells up and drowns me.

Vina. It’s Vina, returned from the dead.

It’s not up to you
, she sings. And again and again, as the old song accelerates towards its conclusion,
no, it’s not up to it’s not up to it’s not up to you
. Her voice is doing extraordinary things—new and familiar—with the song’s melodic line, stretching and bending the sound, bringing a jazzy feel to it, the way Vina used to do when she felt in the Holiday mood. She even throws in a climaxing moment of Ella-ish scat.

Be-bop! Re-bop! Rreee!
Skeedley-ooh!
Oh, mam’! Rama-lam’!
There’s nothin’ you can do …
Wo, pop! De-dop!
Mop! A-lop-a-doo!
Oh it’s not, no no not, whoo whoo
Not up to you
.
 … Oh, yeah …

The invisible crowd goes crazy. She smiles: Vina’s smile, that can light up the darkest room. Oh Vina, Vina, I think. Where did you spring from, this isn’t possible, you’re dead. Three hundred Vinas surround me, laugh and bow.

I don’t recognize the performance, I stammer. What is it, an old bootleg, some gonzo recording from somewhere.

But I can see for myself that the tape carries a date ident. It was made less than a week ago. And I can see, too, that although this is Vina, it’s her to the life, it’s also an odd composite Vina, a Vina who never really was. She has the dyed red hair gathered above her head in that springy fountain I remember so well, that Woody Woodpecker crest, and she’s wearing the sequin-glittered gold bustier and leather pants from Vina’s last performance, but this is not a woman in her middle forties, this is not the mature solo artiste on the comeback trail. This Vina is no more than twenty years old. She is, however, wearing a moonstone ring.

When I turn to Ormus he has tears in his milky eyes.

I thought so, he whispers. I knew it wasn’t just my imagination.

What’s her name, I ask. I realize I’m whispering too.

He hands me a thin white file.

Mira, he says, coughing. That’s what she goes by now.

Mira Celano, from right here in Manhattan, the file tells me. Born at Lenox Hill Hospital in January 1971, so I guessed right about her age. Nineteen seventy-one, the year of Ormus’s celibacy oath,
that’s
how young she is. She is an only child. Her father Tomaso was sixty-one when she was born. She remembers him (here I’m embellishing the detective agency’s filed report with details gleaned from my later knowledge of her) as a short, chesty, thick-maned lion of a man, who became awkward in the presence of the adoring child of his old age, giving her quick rough embraces and handing her off, almost as quickly, to whatever female family member was closest. He was a man of honor, a high-flying corporation lawyer with an Upper East Side address, who nevertheless maintained close links with his community and prized his family roots in Assisi, Italy. He was also a decorated World War II hero with a distinguished service medal for his exploits as the oldest of the American dive-bombing aces who sank the Japanese aircraft carrier
Hiryu
at the Battle of Midway.

He is, additionally, recently deceased, at the age of eighty-one.

Mira’s mother was not Italian. Surprisingly for such a conservative man, Celano, who remained single long enough to disappoint more
than a generation of young Italian-American women, fell hard at the end of his sixth decade for an Indian woman doctor whom he “met cute,” as they say in the movies, when her taxi’s Ibo driver deliberately rammed his cabs Hausa wheel jockey on Central Park South. The two cab drivers, passionate supporters of the opposing sides in the bloody, escalating conflict over the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria, initially identified one another as enemies by their prominently displayed rear- and side-window flag decals and aggressive bumper stickers. They then wound down their windows and engaged in a stop-go exchange of insults—
Tree swinger! Oil slime! Gowon goon! Ojukwu oaf!
—as their cabs inched forward through the thick rush-hour traffic; until at length the young Ibo, hot for secession, or perhaps just plain overheated on that steamy summer afternoon, swung his wheels and smashed into the taunting Hausa’s vehicle in a shower of breaking glass. The drivers were unhurt, but the passengers in the two rear seats were sent flying within their confined spaces, so they took some knocks.

Tomaso Celano, always the gallant gent, insisted on ensuring that the lady in the other cab had not been injured, but then confessed to having double vision himself and sat down on the parkside curb with a bad case, as he put it, of the tweet-tweet-tweets. Fortunately the lady was a qualified doctor. Mehra Umrigar Celano was born in Bombay (still no escaping these Bombay Parsis), came West to attend medical school, stayed on, married Tommy just nine weeks after the Biafran Taxi War, named their daughter Mira because it’s a name in India as well as Italy, plus it’s easy to say, and in spite of becoming a consultant oncologist at New York Hospital died of a perniciously aggressive breast cancer before her fortieth birthday, when her daughter was still only four years old. Old man Celano, declaring himself too antique to care for the infant, farmed Mira out to a series of relatives whom the little girl quickly discovered to be untypical Italians: that is, resentful of their extended-family obligations towards her, deficient in the provision of love, and unwilling to have her around for very long. In spite of this uncertain, peripatetic home environment, and the difficult discontinuities of an education spread across the high schools of three boroughs, Mira became a straight-? student, a model of diligence, who was accepted by Columbia University’s School of Journalism and
immediately ran wild, as if all her hard work and good behavior up to that moment had been a prisoner’s ruse, a way of hastening the date of her release. She had hidden her wings all her life, and now she intended to fly.

In her freshman year she unfurled a singing voice that made her an instant campus star, ran with a fast crowd and got herself pregnant, all in a single semester. She decided to keep the baby, dropped out of college, and was instantly disowned by her father, after which he thoughtlessly dropped dead playing tennis in Cape Porpoise, Maine, thus making a reconciliation impossible. He’d been crouching to receive serve when he was murdered—aced—by a huge heart seizure, and fell face first on to the hard cement court, still holding his racquet, but unfortunately defaulting the game. He died before his arms had time to come up and defend his face, which consequently suffered a broken nose that sorely impaired his gravitas, making him seem, in death, far coarser than he’d ever looked in life. With that eminent nose squashed over to the right he wasn’t a big shot any more but a plug-ugly boxer who’d lost the last in a series of losing battles. It was a quick end, but it didn’t come fast enough to keep Mira in his will.
Not a red cent to my daughter Mira who has been the disappointment of my old age
.

The money was divided. Some went to charitable Italian community projects in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, the rest to the same relatives who had blighted Mira’s early life. The lucky heirs made no move to assist their disinherited relation and even snubbed her at her father’s funeral, as if to say, forget about it, darling, don’t call, don’t write, you’re out on your own. Mira accepted their challenge. After failing to break into journalism, even of the lowliest sort, she started singing for her supper in dingy piano bars, taking her baby daughter along in a carry cot and hiding her behind the stage-area drapes, or under the piano, or in the women’s room, or anywhere, just praying she’d sleep through the set, bribing busboys and waitresses to take care of her if she woke up.

The girl is now a little over one year old. Her name is Tara, meaning—in Hug-me—
star
.

While I’m reading the file, Ormus hobbles off to the bathroom and takes his time there. I should be intervening but I don’t know how to,
not yet, anyway. Also, I’m reading. Also, I’m not too sure where the bathroom is.

Easy to see where this Mira Celano’s interest in Vina comes from, I reflect. In spite of all the differences of community, opportunity and class, she has plenty in common with her idol: the mixed-race family, the early orphaning, the loveless childhood years, the outcast’s deep-seated sense of rejection and exile. That thing about feeling out on the perimeter line and being pushed, by a powerful centripetal force, towards the heart of the game. And she’s penniless now, just as Vina was when she started out.

And there’s her voice, of course, the voice she kept under wraps for so long. Maybe, like Vina, she had secret places where she went to sing. Her own Jefferson Lick somewhere in the park.

I can readily imagine that when she started singing, during her solitary semester at Columbia, she was at once surrounded by admirers calling her the new Vina Apsara, or even better than that, and telling her to cut a demo, to forget journalism and reach for the stars. But then suddenly she was broke, the fair-weather college friends were gone and demos and producers and stardom seemed very far away. The repro-Vina business, however, was thriving. So, as she afterwards tells me:
If I couldn’t be the new Vina, then I’d be the old one. That was the way I looked at it. I taped the picture you took—you know, Vina in the quake—on the wall of my room and decided, Okay, for now I’m her
.