The Ground Beneath Her Feet (67 page)

One skeleton was not dragged out of the shadows to dance its hideous bone-clicking dance in the public eye.

One year and one day after their marriage, Vina had returned to my bed. Not often, not for long, but she came back. She came back to me.

I’ll tell you why those poison-pen attacks flopped, Vina murmured in my arms. It’s because everybody loves a lover. I’m a lover; everybody loves me.

Then what are you doing here, I asked.

It’s that Amos dance pattern, she said. If you want to solve the riddle, you’ve got to step out of the frame.

But that was just a clever answer. There were others. One of these was that Vina wanted to save me. Look at your life, Rai, where you go, what you do. You dive with your camera into the cesspit of the human race, so obviously you think we’re all made of shit. Then back home with the flat-chested knickerless clothes-ponies, that’s hardly an improvement, is it. Those girls only open their mouths for one reason and it’s not to fucking eat or speak. Look at your pathetic life. There was that girl who loved you, you left her behind, what was her name. (She knew the name. This scolding was a ritual. She wanted to make me say it.) Anita, I said. Anita Dharkar. She chose to stay home.

Did you ask her, Vina demanded. Even if you did, you didn’t do it properly, your heart wasn’t in it. Now I’m going to tell you a thing about your life. Your life is dirt. You’re more like Ormus than you know only he’s all cleanness and light and you’re all mud and darkness. If you’re the best on offer, we should all give up right now.

Thanks, Vina, I love you too, I murmured, more shaken than I cared to show.

Yet when I’m with you I feel you’re part of something, some lifestream?, she went on. I think that’s what each of us is, a part of some larger river, and no matter how muddy and poisoned any individual bit of the river might be, you can still pick up the sense of that larger flow, that great and generous water. This is the life and death business I’m talking about, Rai. You’re a heathen, you pretend there’s no life afterwards, but I’m telling you you’re a part of something right here and now and what that is, whatever it is, it’s good, it’s better than just you
on your own?, only you’re just rolling along, you don’t even know the name of the river of yourself.

Stop now, I said, it’s Wednesday, on Wednesday I put out the garbage.

The way I saw it, my uninterest in her mystical side nagged at her, she needed to conquer that resistance, and that’s one of the things that kept her coming back. But in the end the ordinary physical things, the man-woman things are primary. We were good together, end of story. Even though she was an old married lady now I allowed her to think she didn’t have to be. I asked nothing, but gave what she needed. With me she was single again. She was free.

Oh, one more thing: Ormus, her one true love, was beginning to scare her.

About VTO’s victory over the Sangria-Auxerre assault, however, she was spot on. In those days there were more women fronting bands and making solo careers. Some of them were angry because men and love had not been good to them, many of them had eating disorders, others were deranged on account of things that happened to them as children,
touch me daddy don’t touch me, hug me mama don’t hug me, love me daddy won’t you leave me alone, love me mama wanna be on my own. You know that I remember too much. So I don’t know what to do with your Tender Touch
. Still others were super-cool smooth operators with an empty thing in their eyes. Marco Sangria’s angry sister Madonna, also now an influential critic, was already saying that gender, the body, was the only subject. Once upon a time the Crystals sang
he hit me and I’m glad
. Now it was
hit me and I’ll break your fucking jaw
. (This was an improvement, evidently.)

In the middle of all this misery Vina, uniquely, looked like—she
was
—singing out of pure happiness. That single fact made our hearts soar, even when she was delivering Ormus’s most jaundiced lyrics. The joy in her singing showed us there was nothing we could not overcome, no river too deep, no mountain too high. It made her the world’s beloved.

(On this occasion, I use the words “we” and “our” to denote a collectivity of which I was certainly a part, as deliriously infatuated as any front-row fan.)

It began to be seen as her band. Ormus produced the records, dreamed up the shows with the design team, wrote the songs, and
looked on stage like a small craggy god down from Rock Olympus, but he was encased in glass, which distanced him, made him abstract. He became more of a concept, an animatronic special effect, than an object for our dreams and desires. Also, we could tell he was a control freak. Those ten years of waiting, they hadn’t been natural. This mythic monogamy of his, this excess of determination, there was something domineering about it, something obdurate that would not be denied. We could see how she might react against so possessive a love. How, even loving him, even adoring him, she might run to find room for herself.

So it was mainly Vina for us, Vina the Voice, Vina whose non-stop motion on stage was like a message saying Ormie, baby, Ormie, my only boy, I love you my darling but you can’t tie me down. You can marry me but you can’t catch me; if I’m the blithe spirit, you’re the genie in the bottle. You can run the show but I can run. Yes, it was Vina we wanted, Vina of the horribly injured childhood who instead of whining on about it in a million interviews just shrugged her shoulders and made nothing of it at all, Vina who without ever asking for or expecting our sympathy told us about her abortions and barrenness and consequent grief, and thereby earned our love; Vina who took books by both Mary Daly and Enid Blyton with her when she went on tour, Vina of the thousand fads and cults who could look right into the future President’s face and ask him how it felt to be named after a woman’s pubic hair.

I will tell you now what I have not sufficiently expressed throughout this long saga: the thing with Vina, being her spare prick, coming off the bench for a few minutes per game, this was hard for me. There was too much time and room for my imagination to work. I imagined their lovemaking so often, and in such
Kama Sutra
variety, that I would break out in a rash. I actually would: whether of heat or fury I cannot say. Only a foreign war, a fresh batch of photographic models just off the plane from Texas, or a cold shower could bring my temperature down, restore to normalcy the beating of my heart.

I tried to make myself believe that the marriage with Ormus wouldn’t last. When she told me that she had reached an understanding with him, that he would turn a blind or at least a patched eye to
her
amours
as long as she didn’t flaunt them in a crass and obvious way, at first I felt a spurt of hot joy because she had gone to such risky trouble to make room in her life for me. Later, in the shower, where sometimes when her absence became too painful I’d ask my soaped hands to play her part, just as her hands had understudied Ormus during his decade of non-performance, I felt my reactions becoming more complex. It was, I thought, as if I were a clause in their marriage. A sleeping partner in their merger. This doomed me to play second fiddle forever; it was in the contract. My rising anger informed me of a truth I had thoroughly suppressed: viz., that I still entertained hopes of having her all to myself.

Often I practiced feeling contempt for glass-boxed, reclusive Ormus. What sort of man would consent to become the
mari complaisant
of as major a beauty, a presence, as Vina Apsara? To which my mirror replied: And what sort would agree to take the droppings from another man’s table, the leavings from his bed? There was a malicious and probably untrue story about the novelist Graham Greene according to which his mistress’s husband would position himself on the sidewalk outside the apartment block in which the author of
The Quiet American
resided, and at the top of his voice shout abuse into the warm night air:
Salaud! Crapaud!
To which Greene, when asked about the story, allegedly replied merely that as his apartment was on an upper floor he would not have heard the cries, and so unfortunately he could not confirm or deny the tale.

Salaud! Crapaud!
In my case, it was I, Vina’s bit on the side, who felt the urge to hurl abuse. I, who with my photo-journalist’s khaki hat on prided myself on my ability to blend into the background, to disappear, quickly came to loathe my invisibility in the story of Vina, the erasure from the public record of the great matter of my heart. But the more Vina and I were seen in public together, hiding in plain view, the less people were inclined to gossip. The blatantness of our association proved its innocence, yes, even to Ormus. Or so he always maintained.

One day in the Orwellian year of 1984—a time to dispense with doublespeak, to tear down the dreadful Ministries of Truth and Love—I could bear the situation no longer and rushed over to the Rhodopé Building, hot for certainty. In my hand was an envelope containing a set of photographs of Vina, nude photographs taken by me in the
immediate aftermath of passion. She, who found it so hard to trust or to be trustworthy, had trusted me to make and keep private such explosive images as these; but it was the trustless marriage she preferred to her stolen hours with me. And as my behavior amply demonstrated, she would have done better not to trust me, either.

The point was that even Ormus Cama could not fail to understand what the pictures proclaimed: that for many years I had enjoyed the favors of his beloved wife. He must surely name his weapons. Prussian sabers, baseball bats, pistols at dawn by the Bethesda Fountain, I was ready for anything. For, as Vina would say, closure. I roared red-misted into the Rhodopé lobby, where I was restrained by a uniformed doorman.

It was Vina’s father, the ex-lawyer, ex-butcher Shetty, now over seventy but looking ten years younger. His dreadful life had not marked him. Hearty, even jovial, he took what it dished out and stayed upright. Vina had hired a small army to find him after the newspaper article about his plight. When they unearthed him she’d flown to Florida for the big reconciliation scene and offered him whatever he wanted: retirement, a place of his own in the Keys, maybe, and of course a healthy allowance, but all that he had turned down flat. I’m the type that prefers to be in harness, he told her. Get me something where I can die with my boots on. Now he was installed in this new job, delighted with the uniform, beaming at the world. Cool in summer, warm in winter, a nodding acquaintance with the city’s finest, he said. At my age and with my track record it’s better than I could have hoped. India, forget about it. (His Indian linguistic education, which had stressed the importance of precise enunciation, made a strange match with his freewheeling U.S. idiom.) India, it’s gone for all of us. I’ll take Manhattan.

In my confrontational fury I hadn’t remembered it might be Doorman Shetty’s shift, but there he was, fit and ready and eager to please. Hey, Mr. Rai, sir, how is it hanging, what do you say, can I be of any assistance.

I just stood there holding my envelope, determination draining from me. Should I call upstairs, Mr. Rai? You want a ride in the elevator? Or just delivering a letter for Mr. Ormus or my daughter, can I get that for you, no problemo? Sure thing, leave it to me, it’s my job.

Never mind, I said, exiting. Just a mistake.

He called after me, raising a cheery hand. Missing you already, Mr. Rai, you come back now, do you hear?

A terrible din was heard from the street outside; a junk band had showed up. Shetty’s mood darkened. Charging past me, he confronted a group of youngsters playing a kitchen sink, a shopping cart, a dustbin, a wheelbarrow, buckets and, perhaps in VTO’s honor, a strange chimeran fudge of a stringed noisemaker they called a guisitar, put together from the scraps of two wrecked instruments.

What do you call this, Shetty wanted to know. Where do you get off.

We’re the Mall, said a red-eyed, goateed youth, asserting his leadership over his rag-haired, trembling tribe. (Not just a junk band but a band in search of junk, I noted silently.) We offer this serenade, he proclaimed, to the rock gods living in the sky. In the face of the radical uncertainty of the age we make odes to materialism, paradoxically utilizing items of no value to society. We celebrate donut culture, it’s sweet and it tastes good but there’s a void at the heart?

Get away from my canopy, Shetty commanded. Do it now.

There is no arguing with the authority of the New York doorman. The Mall obediently packed up and skulked away. Then, like an avatar of the Age of Greed, the leader turned back, shivering slightly, to glare at Mr. Shetty. When we’re big, mister, I mean when we’re monster big, I’m gonna come back here ’n’ fucking buy this fucking building, and then it’s your ass, baby, you have been warned.

My threat, the envelope I bore, was just as empty, I understood. Vina was right to trust me after all. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk her withdrawal from my life. I too was an addict, hopelessly far gone, and she was my candy girl.

It occurred to me that in the field of love and desire Vina was just behaving like a man; showing herself capable, like most men, of loving wholeheartedly and simultaneously—halfheartedly—betraying that love without guilt, without any sense of contradiction. She was capable not so much of a division of attention as of multiplying herself, until there was enough Vina to go round. We, Ormus and I, we were her women: he, the loyal wife standing by her philandering husband, settling for him in spite of his roving eye, his wanderlust; and I,
the simultaneously wanton and long-suffering mistress, taking what I could get. That way round, it made perfect sense.

I remember her hands, long-fingered, quick, chopping her beloved vegetables as if she were the high priestess of a pagan cult, matter-of-factly getting through the day’s quota of sacrificial offerings to the gods. I remember her hunger for information, the way her bright, half-educated mind latched on to the many information-heavy intelligences her fame and beauty brought her in contact with (newspaper and tv bosses, Hollywood studio heads, rocket scientists, heavy hitters from Morgan Guaranty and D.C.) and how she pumped these sources for all she was worth, as if facts would save her life. I remember her fear of disease and early death.