Subtle Bodies (21 page)
She selected a sheet of paper from her collection and
handed it to Ned, saying, “This was bookmarking a section in the
Study Guide to DSM-IV
, the part on Borderline Personality Disorder. These other papers were in the book too.”
He began reading and he grimaced and she said, “I know.”
What he was looking at was a photocopy of a second-grade English composition of Hume’s. The text was crudely typed. On a letterhead cover sheet, the principal of Tremper Consolidated had written, in a forceful hand:
Please look over the herewith:
The names of the lunchroom staff
are not fictitious. One name has been
misspelled, where Hume has written
“Venerable” for “Venable.” I have of
course passed it to the nurse, but I am
eager to have your comments or those
of any colleagues at Mental Health you
think might shed light. I sent
you material on this pupil last year
and you were most helpful. One
other thing I should mention is
that it has been reported to me
that Hume was organizing a raffle
whose 25 cent ticket would allow
the winner to go behind a bush with
one of the female pupils in order to
watch her urinate, but there were
denials by the girl, so no evidence.
Looking to hear,
Jack Ryder
Principal
Tremper Consolidated
Hume’s composition was entitled THE GREATEST OF ALL LUNCHTIMES AT TREMPER SCHOOL.
Oh my a hord gathered! Dork
girls screamed. Ken the mastermind
of the cretens cried out something
or other. There are mostly boy cretens
but a few girls are too. More hords
came, like lackeys and vermin. Mrs.
Venerable opened the doors. She
has one shrinked arm and one regular arm.
Another hord came in from soccer
practicing. They were mostly varlets
with some poltroons and lackwits
strewed in. The head cook Mrs.
Murdock stated “Our vegetable
today is lovely fresh skunk cabbage.”
So the atheletes began cheering,
because they loved the breakfast
of scrambled snake eggs of that
very morn. “Oh please don’t forget
the stink weed salad, if you please,”
said Mrs. Murdock, who also had a
job as a murderer and stabbed peoples
eyes out with frozen carrots and killed
peoples pets by feeding them left overs
she sneaked into other peoples houses
with.
Ned said, “I’m working on my assignment, you know, but what is
my
philosophy, Nina? My philosophy is No Hitting. I don’t have time for a philosophy.”
“Ned please don’t tear yourself up. You’re a
fine
person! You keep forgetting that. Do you want to know something I told Ma when I first met you, when we first started dating? I said, Even his id is nice.”
“Well, that’s pretty beside the point. Anyway, thinking about Douglas’s philosophy is a laugh. At one point we were all supposed to hate Immanuel Kant because he singlehandedly sold out the Enlightenment. I remember the whole thing. He authorizes religion to be in charge of any question where certainty is impossible.
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
1793. Do you know what stromata means? It’s Greek for rag rug, and that’s what
Douglas
called his philosophy.”
“You’re overreacting to this task for some reason.”
“Okay. Now I’m not.” He resumed reading.
The cooks have a trick langwich.
They can talk like humans but they
can also talk to each other by their
behinds.
WE ARE TALL! the atheletes said.
“Some of you are” the girls screamed.
Nina said, “That’s only the first page.”
Ned said, “That’s enough. But does it get worse? Don’t
tell me if it does. I blame a lot of this on Douglas. It took him a long time to take fatherhood seriously, I think. When we were in school he said if he had children and one was a daughter he was going to name her Groucha or Tendril. And a boy was going to be Dagwood. He was presumably kidding. And how hard would it be for Hume to pick up that Douglas loved him to be outrageous? I know I told you about the time Hume invented his own personal practical joke, the one where he dipped all the points of the sharpened pencils on Douglas’s desk in Elmer’s Glue. Douglas put it in a fax, he was so proud of it.”
Nina said, “Your friend had a compulsion.”
“You don’t see me arguing with you. There were the gallstones. A retired surgeon was a friend of the family and they were visiting him in Kingston. Douglas notices a jar of gallstones in the living room. The old surgeon had been accumulating them for years. The short of it is that Douglas begs the guy to give them to Hume as scientific curios. What Douglas actually had in mind was for Hume to use them in the battlements of the forts he built for his toy soldier armies, which he did.”
“Grotesque,” Nina said.
Ned said, “And Douglas would never give it a rest. The four of us would go out walking in the Village on the way to a show or opening and fucking Douglas would jump inside a restaurant we were passing and shout in a giant voice
Save room for pie
.”
“Gruen has pranks. Remind him about that.”
“Good idea. And go ahead and show me anything else you think I can take. I can take anything.”
• • •
Nina considered her papers. She said, “I have something from fourth grade. He was in the Steiner school then. I want to read it to you. You’re going to like him better.”
“I don’t dislike him. I just said I felt sorry for him. And I blame Douglas, anyway. It’s a rant. He was a second grader dealing with rage, letting it out, and it’s not so terrible anyway. And who knows, maybe that’s better than trying to digest a doorknob for twenty years. Read me something, go.”
The Thanksgiving Meaning
Twas one of the first Thanksgivings;
But none of the best, we know
,
For this Thanksgiving, I’m sorry to say
was full of sleet and snow
.
But this doesn’t mean that Thanksgiving’s bad;
Or that it has no meaning
.
Thanksgiving’s a wonderful thing;
For it is a time of feasting and dancing;
What a wonderful time to sing!
The Pilgrims came from faraway England
In a little ship called the Mayflower;
They came to America freedom to find
,
And could worship every hour!
Not only could they worship for long
,
But worship as they pleased
,
But good and great as Thanksgiving is
,
The Pilgrims were not quite eased;
For by the end of the very first winter
,
Half of them were deceased
.
They sat in silence. “There’s just one more,” she said. “It’s not by Hume.”
“What is it?” Ned asked.
“It’s a poem by Douglas, I mean the beginning of one, and it’s pretty recent. You’ll be sad.” She handed it to him.
The poem fragment was in Douglas’s familiar spineless loose cursive hand.
My son Hume had two
friends when he was very young
Belgerman and Johnsont
Invisible but always on his
side
Now he’s lost
Please go and find him
,
39
She liked Ned in jeans. The two of them were a symphony in denim but it didn’t matter. It was appropriate for what they were doing. They were bushwhacking. She stopped to study the beautifully sketched little map Hume had given her. She had also seen some other artwork by Hume that was lying around in Douglas’s studio, or office, but she wasn’t going to share it with Ned,
necessarily. One had been a large cartoon head of a woman who looked something like Iva, wearing earrings that were little globular cages with tiny men trapped in them.
“Ned, stop brooding.”
“Let’s get this hike over with,” he said.
Hume had provided her with a route map to a place he wanted her to see, on, as he’d put it, his side of the mountain. That apparently included the entire reach of forest on the other side of the death stream, all the way up to the next ridge. The ascent to Hume’s Inspiration Point wasn’t exactly a gratuitous thing. It was more an act of solidarity with the boy. The spot meant something to Hume. She wondered if Hume might come to visit them in the future. It was just an idea.
Ned was scowling into his notebook.
Nina said, “We can stop for a while if you want. Or do you have something you want to say to me?”
“Yes, I want to say something, but what? I’m feeling bad. I called Don at Christmas, but I should do it more. I have a brother who has to get permission to come to the phone. But I’m going to do it more often anyway.”
She wondered why he was bringing up Don. Ned was estranged from his brother and he didn’t like to talk about it. And her past efforts to get him to be friendlier toward Don had been met with a confused resistance. It was complicated. Her impression from meeting him had been that Don was gay. She’d made the mistake of asking Ned if he assumed he was. The timing was bad, because this had been during one of the surges in the Church’s pedophile scandals when Ned was stomping around referring to the Roman Catholic Church as a criminal enterprise. Ned had been
impatient with her. He didn’t care. What he cared about was that he didn’t have a brother.
“It was good you called Don, but that was months and months ago. And these men … I don’t think you should be complaining about friendship. These are decent, intelligent men, and they’re interesting. And say something substantive to Gruen! Ask him what he’s reading! Half the time he has a folded-up copy of the
New York Review of Books
in his pocket …”
Ned said, “I agree with everything you say.” They resumed their climb.
Their destination had been this overlook, a small clearing open at one end on a fine northwest view of rows of medium hills. A semicircle of hemlocks closed the venue at the back and on the sides. Getting there had taken them through raw brush, tangled deadfall, and, here and there, around stinking sumps. The rough little meadow felt untouched. If you got too close to the view, you could step off into a sheer drop. It was a lover’s leap. They stood for a while watching the grassy field around them creasing in the warm wind.
Ned said, “Somebody appreciated this spot in the past. There’s an overturned sundial back in the brush, and I’ll bet it was set up here originally.” He was looking melancholy.
He found a tree to lean against. He brought out his notebook and began to write in it. And when Nina drifted toward him with the intent of being granted a look at what he was writing, he bridled. She was used to it. He had said, “My notebook is my unconscious.” And now he was going to say that he often wrote down things that he couldn’t understand
later. We don’t hear ourselves, she thought. Ned said, “Sometimes I can’t even read what I’ve written.” She couldn’t help being curious about what he was writing, but based on his asides on the trip up through the woods her guess was that he had turned his attention to thinking of subject matter for Gruen. She knew him. His own assignment, he hated.
“Why did Hume want us to come up here?” Ned asked.
“He didn’t say but I know he thought we’d like it.”
“I wonder if Douglas ever came up here.”
She was sick of everything linking back to Douglas. She was starting to feel like Douglas was Rebecca, ready to come to life and jump down out of a picture frame over the fireplace.
Ned was still writing. She would leave him alone. She walked around moodily enjoying the ambiance as well as she could.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing. Oh, well. Do you think you were homophobic in the old days?” She genuinely had no idea why she was asking that question.
Ned was startled. He closed his notebook. He said, “You’re kind of uncanny, asking me that right now. Because what I’ve been doing is recalling and rejecting stuff, prank-related stuff Gruen might use. We made up gay comic strips. I remember Prince Variant … and Vaseline Alley, and Gene Autre. There was no animus behind it, I don’t think. I don’t remember, if there was.”
Ned was thinking hard, she could tell. She wasn’t liking herself right then. She regretted the question she’d asked.
Ned said, “I mentioned Dale, a gay black guy who was part of the group … he wasn’t out of the closet, exactly, but
we all knew, and it was irrelevant. He was just part of the group. Sophomore year he transferred to McGill. Wouldn’t you like to have a cabin built right here?”
“
No
. And don’t change the subject.”
“I wasn’t. We’ve talked about this before. You think my brother is gay. You know, Stonewall had happened around the corner just a couple of years before we got to NYU. We weren’t troglodytes.”
“Was Dale around for Prince Variant et al.?”
“There wasn’t anything to be around
for
, you’re talking about a flyspeck, a
nothing
. And it was freshman year. Maybe it was even before Dale came aboard, and before Gruen, too. That summer Dale got a full scholarship to McGill and we fell out of touch. Gradually.”
She knew what had started her off in this direction. It had been Ned’s mentioning that he’d phoned his brother.
She said, “I know you considered yourself feminists, all of you, and we’ve talked about this, too, but there were no women in your group.”
Ned laughed. “No sane woman ever wanted to be in on our nonsense. Or only one woman did, and I don’t know how sane she was, and that was Claire. At Halloween she bought a fancy harlequin costume and after Halloween she wanted to go around with us, wearing it. Nobody was amused and she implied it was sexism but she got over it.”