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.”
Nina said, “I think we can go now. Don’t be mad at me.”
“I won’t,” Ned said.
The descent was harder than the ascent had been. The whole thing had been too strenuous for her. A nice thing about the forest was that there was always something handy to sit on. She found a stump for them, and pulled Ned down to sit next to her. She realized that only one of his buttocks had made it onto the stump, but they weren’t going to be there long. Their minds were on divergent tracks. She could feel it.
There was something she wanted to say that she couldn’t. She had to know everything about him. The reason behind it was innocent, but she couldn’t tell him because he would think it was emasculating and possibly it was. She was afraid of something bursting out from the cracks in the past and destroying everything. She was trying to protect an arrangement, a consummation, she’d thought she was never going to have. So she needed to know everything and there was nothing he could do.
“What is this CYO you’re murmuring about?” she asked Ned.
“I didn’t know I was. It’s the Catholic Youth Organization. Don was important in it as a kid. I loathed going.”
She thought, Get him a beautiful notebook like Joris’s as a surprise.
“I’m going to get you a notebook like Joris’s for your birthday,” she said.
“No, don’t. His is a bound book and you have to tear pages out and that fucks it.”
“Okay.”
He tore a page out of his spiral-bound memo notebook, crushed it into a pellet, and put it into his pocket. He said, “You know what that was? It was about a competition we had that ended up in a tie between The Lovo-maniacs by Rona Barrett and The Cypresses Believe in God by a Spaniard whose name I forget. It was about what was the dumbest novel title ever. It doesn’t fit with what Gruen has to come up with.”
Nina said, “You know what you’re going to say, I guess.”
“I think so.”
“That’s good. It’s tomorrow.”
There were still things she needed to tell him, things she knew, but only one of them was in any way uplifting, and even it came with a disagreeable surround. The good news was that he could forget about the Hare Krishnas wanting to be in the Convergence. Somebody had talked to a receptionist of theirs, not an official person, and it was all a misunderstanding. The bad news part was that Elliot had complained about messages coming through his communications Wurlitzer for Ned, and for her. Somebody had taken down a message from Ma, who wanted her to be sure to save the unusual bug she had found on her pillow in case it needed to be checked out. And the other piece of news she had was that in her detections she’d come across a letter from the Program Against Micronutrient Malnutrition with a six-month-old bounced check Douglas had sent them stapled to it.
“What is to be done?” Ned said softly.
“We need to be cheery,” she said. He was leaking anxiety all over the place.
“What is to be done?” he said again.
“Oh Ned, you just do your best is what needs to be done. You’ve done enough free-associating about the meaning of life and you need to just go with something you’re satisfied to say.”
“That’s what you see me doing. The meaning of life is the subject I hate most, unfortunately. And by the way in one of the last emails I got from Douglas he quoted something about the meaning of life. It was the philosophy of a young Frenchwoman quoted in a book on contemporary French culture he was recommending. Anyway, the girl said, For me the meaning of life consists in the ability to meet new people.”
“I used to feel something like that when I was very young and first left home and was meeting a bunch of new people.”
“Okay …”
“I was still looking for you, I guess, all unknowing.”
“I am not the meaning of anyone’s life.”
“Well of course you are.”
“Please stop helping me, Nina.”