Free Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush Page B

dangling lefthand. In back of the couple it was sea and cumulus. Iva was wearing sunglasses. Light blond, he would say her hair was then, and it was swept up and fixed in a sort of fan. She was wearing a black caftan with fragments of mirror sewn into it. And there were images of interest showing in the fragments if you had the time to look. He identified Mick Jagger in one of them, and, surprisingly to Ned, he saw an image of Claire. Douglas was his thin, willowy, standardly handsome second-lead self. His hair was combed straight back, flat against his head, and glistened with something like pomade. The artist had caught the quality of latent surprise that was always resident in Douglas’s main expression, had always been there. Nobody was smiling. Ned thought, Fahn fahn fahn on the autobahn. And the name for Iva’s sunglasses was harlequin. Nina would be interested in the details.
    He and Elliot moved on.
    It was nice, this new room. The main vista was of a wooded gorge. Iva had her back to it. She was seated in a voluminous rattan armchair and pointing to its twin, which was set close to hers, at an angle and at a fairly intimate distance, in his opinion. She had a stack of papers in her lap. There were more papers in an accordion file between her bare feet. Iva’s all-black outfit was, he thought, a little shiny for the circumstances. Maybe it was satin. She was wearing silver bracelets.
    Elliot was in a corner using his cell phone. Ned had gotten a look at what Elliot was calling “the hub,” a room loaded with telephones, fax machines, and computers. Hewaved to Ned and left them, still engaged in his phone work.
    “Have you a cigarette?” she asked Ned, in a hushed voice.
    “Hey I’m sorry. I don’t smoke. Due to Douglas, by the way.” It was something he was grateful for, genuinely.
    “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. Heshouldn’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