“I don’t either,” she said, holding a hand up and making a wiping motion. “No it’s just now. A little. You understand.”
Everybody around them had smoked in the seventies, at college. Against Sameness! could have been their group’s motto. And probably that sentiment as much as Douglas’s idiosyncratic interest in alternative medical notions had been behind the pressure to get them all to quit. Plainly Elliot had relapsed. One of Douglas’s more convincing faxes explained the handful of almonds Ned tried to remember to eat each day.
Ned said, “There’s lung cancer on both sides of my family. It was a gift, when I quit. I was smoking Kools at the time and Douglas had a medical photograph of the lungs of a menthol cigarette smoker, and that worked for me.”
“I like Marlboros,” she said. He could barely hear her.
Mist had flowed into the gorge and stalled there. It was beautiful. He said, “How are you doing? That’s an inevitable question and I know the answer. I’m sorry I even asked. You know how we all feel, Iva …”
She had lifted her chin up and tilted her head back. He felt the gesture showed her trying to keep the tears in. He didn’t know what to say. He noticed that she had a fine, straight, short, horizontal dent in the upper round of her cheeks. He’d seen that in some famous face, Russian, pre-war cinema. He couldn’t think of the star’s name.
Ned said, “I went to the ravine.” She flinched. He shouldn’t have said that. It was almost as stupid as Gruen having mentioned at breakfast his recollection that Douglas’s favorite Poe story was “The Premature Burial.”
One of the kitchen women came in, exchanged signs with Iva, and left.
“She will bring coffee,” Iva said.
A big trope with Douglas had been knowing the names, and as much as seemed appropriate and practical about the servers and helpers and cleaners, the security guards, all the support workers who kept life so pleasant for the student body at NYU. He had been kind of ostentatious about it, but over time it had seemed like the right thing to do, and the working rabble, as Douglas had referred to them, seemed to appreciate it. Ned had carried this practice on in a dilute way in his life and Nina just did it by reflex. Of course Douglas had hated some of the rabble, like Pugnacio, as Douglas called Ignacio, their irascible super in the building on Second Avenue.
Iva was speaking to him and he needed to pay attention. She said, “May I tell you what I am hoping? Thank you. You were the closest to Douglas of all …” Ned hid his surprise.
She said, “Oh yes, you! He said so. You were the one he admired, with your work. Oh, your college group. You were interesting, all of you. But he would say it was Ned carrying on with the idea of the group.” She touched his knee. “Don’t look so strange. I’m telling you what he believed.”
Ned felt murderous. The thinnest of threads had been thrown to him, and thinner and thinner, risible little things, risible invisible. And Douglas had never given a dime out of his fortune to Fair Trade or any of the other causes he brought to the group’s attention. At one time or another, all the others had.
She said, “You were the closest, of course, because you both loved Claire.” Something steely came into her voice.
Ned was shaken. He said, “I wasn’t really in close contact with Douglas, you know. Especially after … well, things happened. You know.” It was true he had loved Claire. And then he hadn’t loved her. And it was also true that whenever he’d been close to saying to Claire that maybe they should think about splitting up, she had come up with a gift for him, a getaway trip, something personal that stopped the impetus. Sometimes a confession of a trivial sort would do the trick for her.
There was something possessed about what Iva was doing. She said, “Claire would write at times, you know. We would hear about your work. Your book, she sent it to us.”
Now he was both enraged and astonished.
“My book?” He knew he was sounding rigid.
“Yes, about Mexico. The movement.”
Ned had self-published his master’s thesis on the ejido movement in Mexico, or rather on its death-throes. It wasn’t even letterpress. It had typos. He doubted he had three copies left. It was paperback. All this had been years ago. She’d had no right to send his thesis to them.
He couldn’t believe it. Something diabolical had gone on that he didn’t deserve.
He said, “She wrote to you?” Immediately he regretted saying it. Because he had cut himself off from the position that he knew all about it and it was nothing, which would have left him a shred of dignity. But then probably he had done the right thing by admitting his ignorance, because the letters themselves would have declared that fact.
“She wrote to Douglas. We have her letters. He admired you both.”
He thought, Great, he admired us because we lived at the material level of graduate students. In the name of something. Ned was drowning in bitterness. And now he was wondering about something else, Claire’s little windfalls, little freshets of cash every now and then, things she got at thrift shops that looked too good for what she claimed she’d spent. Birthdays, cash from family members even though she was estranged from pretty much every single one of them. Don’t be inventing things, he said to himself. He had to get away from this. He got up but sat down again immediately. They weren’t through. The kitchen woman brought mugs of coffee on a tray. He was going to stop thinking of Iva’s staff people as retainers. And he had to stop being a dumb prick about people living so fucking comfortably. He had lived his life a certain way, so enough.
Iva said, “What I want is that you tell the story of Douglas’s mind. From your school days. His ideas …
“Others can tell about his work, about Kundera. The other things the public knows. Elliot can do that.
“We are going to make a magnificent event to remember him. You are the ones to speak, because … I can’t, myself.”
He was afraid that she was about to weep. She picked up her coffee and inhaled the aroma. He waited.
She said, “I have not been a good wife to Douglas. It’s a bad story.”
She gestured broadly, and said, “All this will be gone.”
“What?” Ned said.
“A foundation might take this place, that is possible.”
Her purpose, with him — if that’s what it had been — seemed to have been accomplished. The news she had given him was like acid. The membranes between things in his mind that should be kept separate were being eaten away. He could think of a few more things he would like to know about Claire. He wouldn’t ask. He would not.
He asked, “So did Claire stop by here on a trip, ever?”
Iva appeared to hesitate over her answer. He hated it. Finally she said, “Oh yes, but not very often. I would say, at the most, six times she was here. And she might call from New York. She traveled.”
Rise above this, Ned said to himself. “Yes, she did travel. Well, I’m, I have to say, surprised. Douglas dropped her. She was not a forgiving person. Of course I only know her side of it. And it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about. She made clear. Well. Jesus.”
He saw some relaxation or satisfaction come into her expression. It wasn’t pleasant.
This has to stop here, he thought. He had to leave.
“I’ll do what’s necessary,” he said.
“You’ll write it out first, for me,” she said.
“All right,” he said. It was time to go.
13
He had guessed high blood pressure for Gruen and he’d been correct. He put his arm around Gruen’s shoulder. They were walking to the accident site together.