The Ground Beneath Her Feet (64 page)

Is this new twist part of Piloo’s posthumous revenge against
his
murderers?

Vina and Standish sit in air-conditioned coolness and contemplate this gift which India, greatest of all gods from the machine, has just dropped into their astonished laps. Outside, just a couple of miles down the road, the revenge slaughter of innocent Sikhs is being carried out by bloodthirsty mobs led by officials of the governing party.

Mull Standish, ordinarily the most fastidious, most thoughtful of men, is so carried away by what he has been given that he makes an observation which, in the circumstances, could be said to be in extremely poor taste.

The more I see of the West, he says, the more I realize that the best things in life come from the East.

When a great tree falls in the forest, there’s money to be made from the sale of firewood. After Standish, back in New York, mails Yul Singh selected photocopies of the material in his possession—at his home address, for the sake of discretion—the record company boss invites him over to Park Avenue for a drink, and meets him at the elevator without a trace of rancor. You got me fair and square, he admits right off. I call that good work. I always told those kids they got a good one in you. A man wears many masks, few people strip him down to the bone. The criminal and the detective, the blackmailer and the mark, these are close connections which there’s not many marriages more intimate. These are bonds of steel.

Vajra
bonds, Standish thinks. Thunderbolts and rocks.

My wife reads the mail for me here at home, Yul Singh adds, which I don’t have to tell you means I made a full breast of it all, so she’s fully up to speed. He leads Standish into a vast room with much on the walls that is of interest to this India-loving man: an elephant’s silver caparison, stretched and framed; small bronze Natarajas; Gandhara heads. Marie-Pierre d’Illiers is at the far end of the room, standing very still with a long flute of champagne in her hand. Her dark hair drawn tightly back, hanging in a chignon at the nape of her long and now slightly scrawny neck. She is tall, thin, utterly possessed, utterly unforgiving. She makes Standish feel like what he probably is: a blackmailer and, which is worse, the burglar of all her joy. I have for you just one question, Monsieur Standish, she says in faintly accented English. You and your charges will be owed now an immense sum of money, but truly immense; wealth beyond dreams. (
Question
and
immense
are spoken as French words.) So what I ask is this: If a good price can be made, will you buy my cows? I always detested that we were in the dairy trade, but in the end I grew fond of my Holsteins. I am sure you will be suited to the business ideally. The milking and so on.

There is a brief touch of hands between the blind husband and the all-seeing wife. At that moment, with her use of the past tense tolling in his ears as if it were a death knell, Standish understands what Yul Singh has told his wife about his future intentions, and what she has promised him in return.

Please, this way, Yul Singh shepherds him to a table covered in papers. The documents are retrospective, the terms are now at the outer edge of what is earned by any performer in the world, and there is favored-nation status. Please take your time and make any changes you care to make.

When the reading is done Standish takes out his pen and signs many times. Yul Singh’s signature is already there.

He rises to go.

There is no possibility, Marie-Pierre d’Illiers murmurs, of an accommodation being arrived at regarding these documents?

The bull is on its knees waiting for the coup de grâce.

No, Mull Standish says. I am sorry. You must understand that I have simply been used in this matter, by a principal whose identity I don’t
know. If I do not move, the principal will surely bring these papers to light by another means. So, I can’t help you. But as to the dairy herd, yes, if the price is right, we’re interested.

He leaves them there, in long shot, at the far end of the great chamber of their lives, sipping Cristal champagne as if it were poison. Hemlock, Standish thinks, and then the elevator door closes and he’s going down.

Their death (too many sleeping pills) is announced the next day. The obituaries are as large and as fulsome as any great star’s. News of the end of VTO’s dispute with the Colchis label is withheld for two weeks, as a mark of respect for the genius of the music man who has died.

The Sikh documents, interestingly, are not released into the public domain, even though Yul Singh, in a farewell message to the Colchis board, has sketched out their contents to explain his actions. The interests of the label are not served by making this final missive more widely known. Standish chooses not to say what he knows, and nobody comes forward in his place. Death has apparently satisfied the principal. Yul Singh is not pursued beyond the grave.

At Sam’s Pleasure Island, Cool Yul’s booth is left unoccupied for one full month, guarded against the incursion of the crass and ignorant by a formidable phalanx of Singhs. During this month, the Pleasure Island staff make sure that a Manhattan on the rocks and a thick Cohiba cigar are always waiting at Yul’s absent elbow.

After that, however, the city’s life moves on.

14
T
HE
W
HOLE
C
ATASTROPHE

M
ore sadness, before joy. Mull Standish does not live to enjoy his great victory for long. The night before his 1981 disappearance he’s working late at the office and makes midnight telephone calls to both Ormus and Vina to read them the riot act. Standish who never spoke up for himself hectors them both about their love, the pending, freeze-frame love which blots out his own. The ten years are almost up, he says, and its time you both stopped acting like fools. To Ormus he says, that you were not able to return my feelings for you is of small concern to anyone but me, and I can handle it, thanks. (No, he couldn’t, not really, but he carried his grief stoically, like the English gentleman he wasn’t; he had acquired the stiff upper lip that went with the Savile Row tailoring he liked.) But that the two of you should squander what’s left of the immense fortune of your love, he scolds, having already wasted so much time, that would be a thing I could not forgive. To Vina he adds, The suspense is killing me. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you. I say join the goddamn dance. And let me say that if you don’t the disappointment might kill me too, and if it does and if there’s light at the end of that famous tunnel maybe I’ll come
back and shine it in your eyes. If I have to haunt you into doing the right thing I’ll find me a white sheet and howl.

The next day the richness of his life is reduced to the thin finality of a crime scene: a wrecked office, broken windows, an absence. Some, not much, blood on the carpet: a nosebleed, perhaps. A broken cane. Unexpectedly, there is what looks like a suicide note, in an open notebook on his desk.
Suicides are most frequent in the spring. When the world is falling in love, your own lovelessness hits you hardest
. Why would a man write such a note, then trash his office, punch himself in the nose, break his walking stick and vanish without trace? This isn’t a suicide note, Vina tells the police, it’s a diary entry. He was just talking to us about love on the phone and I guess it made him sad. But this was not a man to take his own life. This was a great fighter, a person who overcame.

This version is, after some initial hesitation, accepted as the most probable. The event is classified as abduction, and murder is suspected. Suspicion focuses on a certain jilted lover, but no hard evidence comes to light, nobody sends anyone a fish wrapped in the morning paper, no charges are ever laid. Nor is Standish’s body found. Time must pass before he is legally declared dead and Waldo Crossley, Spenta’s simpleton gardener, becomes a seriously wealthy man.

(When Spenta Methwold in a white mansion high above the rural Thames hears the news of Standish’s disappearance she bundles Ardaviraf and Waldo into the back of her Mercedes and drives aimlessly for three hours through the surrounding country lanes. Spenta is an old woman these days, there are cataracts in both eyes, so it’s like driving in blinkers, half blinded by a lifetime’s accumulated tears, the stalactites of grief. In the local village of Fawcett, Bucks., she ignores a Give Way sign and is hit simultaneously from both sides by surprised farmers’ wives in Mitsubishi 4WDs. It’s a slow-motion accident, nobody is really hurt, but Spenta’s car doors won’t open. Without apology or complaint she drives to the nearest garage and the three of them wait patiently while mechanics cut them free. She goes home with Waldo and Virus in a mini-cab and when she reaches her front door she tells Virus and Waldo that this was her last journey, she is no longer interested in the world beyond her doors. I
will just sit on and think of the departed and you, our sons, will take care of me
. Then she calls her doctor
and cancels the planned operation to remove the cataracts. Blinkered sight, tunnel vision, is all she now requires. The big picture is no longer a thing she wishes to see.)

Standish has gone all right. Ormus and Vina at a high window watch spring dance across the park. Here we are without family or tribe, having lost our greatest ally, he says. Now its just you and me and the jungle. Can we stand together against whatever comes at us, the worst and the best of things? Will you? he asks her. Will you keep your word?

Yes, she says. I’ll marry you, I’ll spend the rest of my life with you, and you know I will love you. But don’t ask me for high fidelity. I’m a lo-fi kind of girl.

There’s a silence. Ormus Cama’s shoulders drop in lovesick, dumb surrender. Just don’t tell me, he says. I just don’t want to know.

I like to remember Vina Apsara the way she was in those last years, the years of her marriage and greatest happiness, when she became the world’s most dreamed about woman, not just America’s Sweetheart like Mary Pickford long ago but the beloved of the whole aching planet. Vina in her thirtysomething prime striding down Second Avenue, wafting past the aromas of Thai, Indochinese and Indian food, the tie-dyed clothes, the African adornments and basketry. Her Afro had long departed, though her long hair would never escape frizziness, and her fist-clenching days were over. Her old fist-clenching buddies were Republicans now, successful community fat cats or gimcrack entrepreneurs whose designs for erotic bluejeans—with built-in penis pouches flapping absurdly beside the zipper—started to bomb the day they left the drawing board. What’s gone is gone, Vina would say without regret of the old days, adding the half-complaining admission that, try as she might, and even taking into account her youthful troubles with Marion Egiptus, even allowing for her years of harassment by taxmen and policemen, she had never had to endure one hundredth of the racial abuse and hardship that came the way of her African-American friends.
Face it, Rai, we’re just not the target here
. That’s right, I confirmed, and didn’t need to add that celebrity has a way of washing whiter too.

Nobody understood the workings of fame, upside and downside, better than Vina. Those were the days when the first crossover stars
were making their way through the firmament: O.J., Magic, people whose talent made people color-blind, race-blind, history-blind. VTO was a high member of that élite, which Ormus always took in his stride, as if it were the most natural and proper thing in the world. He had taken to quoting biologists, geneticists. Human beings are just about identical, he’d say. The race difference, even the gender difference, in the eyes of science it’s just the teeniest-tiniest fraction of what we are. Percentagewise, it really doesn’t signify. But life at the frontier of the skin always made Vina uneasy. She still sometimes had nightmares about her mother and stepfather persuading a Virginia head teacher that her daughter wasn’t no Negro, she was half Indian, not no redskin Pocahontas neither but Indian from faraway India itself, India of elephants and princes and the famous Taj Mahal, which pedigree naturally excused her from local bigotries and entitled her to ride on the yellow bus to the white kids’ school. Vina also dreamed of lynch mobs, of burning crosses. If such horror was happening to anyone, anywhere, it might yet someday happen to her.

I remember Vina on fire with the dark flame of her adult beauty, flaunting on her ring finger another man’s sparkler and platinum band, and, on her right hand, a cherished moonstone too. I truly believe she never knew how it tore me up when, using me as her confessor while lying in my arms, she told me about herself and Ormus, sparing nothing. Now that they were married she had somewhat reined in her public tongue and kept from the insatiable world a few at least of the privacies of her marriage bed, but she did need to talk to someone, and for all her liberation theology she was a woman without close women friends. I was her secret, to whom she told her secrets. I was what she had.

By the early 1980s I had moved a few blocks north, joining forces with three other photographers—Mack Schnabel, Aimé-Césaire Basquiat, Johnny Chow, all of them former Nebuchadnezzar hands who had quit, rebelling against the agency’s worsening habit of treating its lens-men like dogs on a short leash—to buy an old whale of a building on a leafy stretch of East Fifth Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery, just across from the
Voice
offices on Cooper Square. This was an immense defunct dance and music space called the Orpheum, a
name which, by conjuring up memories of my parents’ cinema in Bombay, brought a lump to my throat and left me no option but to buy my share of what was then little more than a crumbling shell. Its purchase and renovation cost me more than I’d ever planned to spend on mere accommodation, but we’d got in on the ground floor of the property boom, so a big paper profit was quickly made, though by that time none of us would have thought of selling. We of the vagabond shoes, all four of us lifetime globe-trotters, had the strange, sure feeling that we had found our true home in the belly of our NoHo whale. I’d ended up with the vast top floor and a studio and terrace on the roof above. In addition, its ownership shared by the group, there was a cavernous double-volume former auditorium that could serve as giant studio, soundstage or exhibition gallery.