He began again immediately with his dilemma, talking fast. He said, “Well I had the idea of beginning by shouting a parture to the crowd. Everything has a history … Douglas got a certain satisfaction out of fishing up lacunae in the English language, so there was a game called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary—”
Nina interrupted him. “When you said start by shouting something, I thought, For Christ’s sake he’s talking about that Great Pan Is Dead idea which is the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard of. And by the way, what is a parture?”
“No no no, not that. And partures was the antonym Douglas invented for greetings. He said that a single word for the business of taking leave was missing in English, so we had our own, partures. One was Peace to Your Loins! Also Watch the Skies! And …”
“No!” Nina shouted, deeply agitated. She made as if to get to her feet but he restrained her, overwhelming her distress with insistences that the idea wasn’t a serious one, it was just something he remembered.
She said, “Well don’t yell things out as though they’re hilarious or something. They aren’t. Not even faintly. They’re very annoying.”
“And then we did another thing when we went our separate ways, slapping and punching each other and shouting Basta! as though we were Sicilians disgusted with one another.”
“Are you trying to drive me completely insane?”
Ned said, “No. Really. Just thinking about things that happened.”
Nina thought, I have to be more directive, it can’t be helped and time is passing and he’s lost, still. She said, “So now before you say anything else let’s get it clear we are leaving Iraq out of it, okay? People are here for a very specific purpose which is to remember Douglas, a complicated person who was not so nice and who, and correct me if this is wrong, never distinguished himself as antiwar, and so Iraq doesn’t include Douglas, do we agree?”
“Well, he was for the nuclear freeze.”
“Who wasn’t? That was twenty years ago!”
She’d done all she could on that one.
He said, “When I first saw you, I thought you looked exactly like the pretty girl in profile they had with If You Can Draw This on matchbook covers to recruit art students …”
“You told me that. It was nice.”
What could she do? He wasn’t focusing at all, poor lamb. She said, “I have so many things I want to say to you—”
Ned said, his voice raised and not steady, “I know what I’ll say if you die first, Nina. I know. I don’t know what you’ll say for me. I don’t know. I know you’ll be kind. I’m mixing things up. I’m sorry.”
She got out of her chair and bent over him and stroked his neck. She said, “Oh, my guy, just put two things in front of you. Whatever he was, this man, your friend, lost half of his mortal life. People who depended on him are suffering. He had attainments—”
Ned said, “You’re going to outlive me, by the stats.” He was wrenching it out of himself. She fell to her knees in front of him, embracing him.
“Are you trying to destroy me?” she said.
“No. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but we did something I still think is very funny. We got a bumper sticker printed up at a place on Mott Street. It said, HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. DON’T IF YOU DON’T. I’m not going to mention it, I’m just telling you.”
“Well I think that’s funny, too. Look at me. You can just stand up and say what it was like when you knew him as a friend, forget everything since, just what he meant to you at that time, and that you’re sorry he’s dead, this mixed creature, like all of us, and you honor his good works. And then you sit down. Look at me. And swear to me that you are going to leave out all your murmurings about the connection between personal death and social death and so on into the night. Swear to me.”
He nodded. She inhaled extravagantly. They sat watching cloud shadows on the distant hills.
52
Nina said, “Since we’ve been here, I get a shiver sometimes when you’re talking, like when I realize the tree I’ve been admiring is really a cell phone mast disguised as a pine tree. Or it’s like your voice is dubbed for a minute. And then you come back. Now you’re back.”
“Nervousness,” he said. Nina was eating raisins from a little box.
The striped tent they were in was enormous. A steady wind was blowing, surging at times. The tent walls bulged in or out at intervals. The crowd filled the tent. Coir matting had been rolled out across the sodden grass. Lights, cameras, and microphones were concentrated toward the front of the space. There was a director. There was a printed program. The friends, except for Elliot, were in the front-row reserved section. Ned had told Nina she shouldn’t be talking to him too much, but she kept bringing things up. He wanted her to stop counting the crowd. It didn’t matter if there were two hundred or two hundred and fifty, did it?
He was looking at Iva, who was seated in a high-backed gothic chair. She was at the center of the row of notables behind the podium where he would be standing soon enough. Iva did look markedly happier, which went along with the latest from Jacques, who had intercepted them as they entered the tent to report that the critical part of the great settlement/deal with the powers that be had gone through very suddenly, overjoying Iva and Elliot. Iva was resplendent in what Nina had described as a Restoration wench mourning gown. It was true that she was showing a certain amount of flesh. A question that was never asked was, Why are you staring at that naked babe? was something Douglas had said. Joris was on Ned’s left. He had his eyes closed. Gruen was on Joris’s left.
Ah, death, Ned thought. Probably he would have to fight Nina to get her to promise no ceremony for him, when his time came. He’d never been to a funeral he liked. He felt cranky. It was Ronald Reagan who said Beware of empty hoopla.
Iva was doing something unattractive, which was to straighten her arm and pluck at the loose flesh on her elbow. Nina had pointed out that Iva did this when she was excited.
He was, he felt, attending reasonably well to the proceedings despite thinking about himself too much. A woman was singing “Für Elise,” accompanied by a CD. It was a song that always drew him into negative thoughts. He took Nina’s hand. He was convinced that she was pregnant. Children hated having old parents, and their child would have one old parent and one not old, and that would be the best he could do for the little creature. The Israeli consul general for Newark had gone on interminably. According to Jacques, there were numbers of what he called plainclothes Israelis around the premises, some of them removing cartons from the tower basement. He was going to break Nina’s heart, but he would strongly prefer not to see Jacques, with his black headband, ever again, not even in his charming caravan in a cowfield in Lyon. The consul general had said too much but the representative of the Ligues des droits de l’homme had said almost nothing. Ned knew who he was. He was a personal hero of Ned’s.
There was a shuffling going on in the audience. The feet of the metal folding chairs were sinking unevenly into the matting as it absorbed water.
He was on next. Then it would be Gruen and Joris reading what had been given them, like zombies, despite having said they wouldn’t. For a funerary event there should be something like a black tent available, not this festive entity they were in.