Three of the nine people he’d talked to on the phone had asked him if he was all right. He’d explained about Douglas’s death to everyone, but still what they wanted was some more evident elation out of him when he got the repeated majestic estimates for participation in the Convergence. He was elated, but apparently not enough. Rise, he said to himself. A day of streets like rivers of fists was from a poem.
After Nina’s ablutions, Ned had gotten the shower to work better by unscrewing the head and clearing it of a clot of matted leaf shreds. He should have done it before she’d used the thing. It had been a simple task. Nina was always nice about showing gratitude for small tasks, and it wasn’t flattery. Ned knew he was benefitting by comparison with her all-talk ex-boyfriend Bob.
They were both cleaned up and ready, or thereabouts. In fact she was still busy on her hands and knees behind the bed.
“You know what I hate?” she said.
“I already do.”
“Okay what?”
“Puncture wounds.”
“No. What I hate is when you lose your shoes and have to look all over the place and when you find them it’s just your shoes.”
The deodorant she had brought smelled like pine. She apologized for its not being their customary scentless type. Ned said, “That’s okay. In fact I like to use this kind once in a while. It makes me feel regular.”
“Like the masses?”
“Right.”
“Where are the masses when you need them?” she said.
“You’ll see. Just wait.”
They were both wearing jeans and black sweaters, which made no difference at all to her. Claire would have complained that they looked like twins. Hume was on his mind, still. Douglas’s original plan had been to name his son Godwin, after William Godwin the cosmocreator of anarchism, ignoring the static the abbreviation of Godwin would have brought down on the child. Now Gruen was saying that in fact Douglas had been claiming in the last couple of years that his son hadn’t been named for David Hume, as they all knew he had, but in honor of Hume Cronyn, the actor. What was the point of that? It was annoying.
It was time to go. There was something he wanted to tell Nina first, an item he was carrying around from his adolescence. Sometimes certain memories just emerged from his consciousness and if she was around, he could vent and be done. She had gotten used to it.
There was a secret he was going to keep from her, though. Before he had gotten into the shower they had tried again and to get hard he had resorted to an image of Iva, naked except for her apron, bending over and presenting a rear view to him.
Nina was finalizing the placement of barrettes in her hair. It was pulled straight back. She was looking at herself in the mirror. She said, “I need beauty treatments of some sort.”
He approved everything about her appearance. He said, “Something I want to tell you. It doesn’t exactly relate to Hume.” Bringing this up from nowhere might soften the light on Hume, it occurred to him.
She sat down on the bed.
“Okay, I would shoplift paperback books from display racks in drugstores, mostly. Mostly science fiction. The racks were usually near the door and you could slip out quickly. Once I was getting set to take Slan, I think, but I got flustered and stole the wrong book, which turned out to be a thick little compendium of the plots and librettos of the great operas, something I had zero interest in. So but when I got home I was seized with the feeling I had to read the damned thing to justify taking it. I took science fiction for the pleasure of reading, so since I had this opera book in my possession some Catholic notion said I had to read it.”
Nina said, “Aaah, so that’s where you get all the minutiae about operas that you use when the subject comes up. You impressed me, you know!”
“Well then my crime was providential. Composer biographies were in there, too. A lot stuck. Is there anything you want to know about Donizetti?”
“Not right now. Are you saying this in defense of Hume, by the way?”
“I don’t know.” She would want to know more about his criminal past later. She identified him with a sort of unfailing law-abidingness.
“Was that the last one? Did you stop then?”
“No, I stole one more. From Holmes Bookstore in downtown Oakland. A big hardcover book, a history of stage magic by Ottokar Fischer, with big gorgeous plates. It was the maximum size I could fit down my pants. I wanted it and I put it down the front of my pants and pulled my stomach in and zipped my jacket over it and walked out of the place almost fainting. And that was the last, forever. I stopped before I was ever caught.”
He could see that she was relieved.
She said, “His first name was Autocar?”
He said, “No, Ottokar, with an O and a K. Funny. Say that’s your name and you end up working as a mechanic in a garage? You know what that’s called?”
“No.”
“Nominative determinism. We collected examples. There was an insurance agent on Mercer Street named Justin Case. Douglas found them everywhere. The last name of a famous embezzler was Overcash. And there was a sewer commissioner whose last name was Dranoff.”
“My life was uneventful. Shouldn’t we go?”
23
There was the big house, all lit up in the gloaming. Nina seemed almost lighthearted. He imagined, just before they went in, Nina jumping up on his back and putting her legs around his waist, going in that way. She was so light and compact.
He didn’t want to track water into the house. They both conscientiously ground their boot soles into the doormat.
24
She hoped she was ready. There were some particular facts in Ned’s thumbnail portraits of his friends she should keep in mind. A cousin of David Gruen had died in the 9/11 horror. What else? Gruen was a Zionist. Elliot had been raised Bahai. She didn’t know what was sacred to them, though. Supposedly Joris believed in nothing, so possibly she shouldn’t insult the memory of Nietzsche or Robert Ingersoll, haha. Recently at lunch in a two-star hotel a colleague of hers had come back from the men’s room to rejoin the group, saying It smells like the Ganges in there. There had been two Hindu gentlemen among the diners who had ceased contributing to the conversation.
She wanted the friends to like her. She wasn’t going to rub some holy foible the wrong way if she could help it. Be mindful, her mother would say. Once, after she and Bob had had a meal at Ma’s, her mother had said Drive mindfully. Bob had been in the midst of a mildly New Age phase in his life and thought she was making fun of him. She had stayed with Bob mainly because leaving him would have revealed how she felt — about his being boring, oh God. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to Bob, judging from how often he mentioned it, had been finding a rubber band in his soup at Denny’s. And then by the grace of God, he had cheated on her, so hosanna. She thought she was ready for the friends.
No one answered the door so Ned let them in. Here we are, she thought. Inside, Ned seemed to know where he was going. She wanted to have a relaxed look at the glamorous living room and its furnishings, but Ned took her quickly through a door and into a small room that felt like the world’s greatest conversation pit. Around the walls ran continuous black leather sofa seating interrupted in only three places where there were doorways. Ned’s hand was steady on her shoulder. This would be a good place for committee meetings. The back angle of the sofa would keep the committee members sitting up straight. And there was nice ivory ambient light, nothing like the bleaching fluorescence in library basements and union halls. The wood paneling suggested good acoustics.