The maps are wrong. Frontiers snake across disputed territory, bending and cracking. A road no longer goes where it went yesterday. A lake vanishes. Mountains rise and fall. Well-known books acquire different endings. Color bursts out of black-and-white movies. Art is a hoax. Style is substance. The dead are embarrassing. There are no dead.
You’re a sports fan but the rules are different every time you watch. You’ve got a job! No you don’t! That woman powdered the President’s johnson! In her dreams—she’s a celebrated fantasist! You’re a sex god! You’re a sex pest! She’s to die for! She’s a slut! You don’t have cancer! April Fool, yes you do! That good man in Nigeria is a murderer! That murderer in Algeria is a good man! That psycho killer is an American patriot! That American psycho is a patriot killer! And is that Pol Pot dying in the Angkoran jungle, or merely Nol Not?
These things are bad for you: sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism! No, au contraire! Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise buildings bring us closer to God, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves children’s academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I’ll thank you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let’s not get all preachy about this, it’s better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally specific! This circumcised woman is culturally happy! That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric! Pictures don’t lie! This image has been faked! Free the press! Ban nosy journalists! The novel is dead! Honor is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they’re all alive, and they’re coming after us! That star is rising! No, she’s falling! We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! No, you were late! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.
Music will save us, and love. When reality bites, and it bites me almost every day, I need Ormus’s music, his take. Here it is in my hand, shining like a National guitar: “Song of Everything” ’s the track I’m choosing, the first song he wrote in America, at Tempe Harbor, within days of his arrival. I’m sitting here at the end of time with my good friend Mira Celano—and there’s a lot to tell you about her later in the program—so, Mira, this one’s for you.
Everything you thought you knew: it’s not true. And everything you knew you said, was all in your head. And everything you did and everywhere you went, well you never ever did that and you were not sent. I think you’ll find we’re trapped in someone else’s mind. Yes I think you’ll find we’re trapped in someone else’s mind. And it’s only make-believe but we can’t leave it behind.
Everything you think you see: it can’t be. There’s just me.
Darling there’s just me, just me.
In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty. The beatific bathe in almighty love, wear smug grins and play their harps and acoustic guitars. Safe in their cocoon from the storms of metamorphosis, the blessed give thanks for their unchangingness and ignore the leg irons biting into their ankles. It’s eternal bliss, but nix nix, you can keep that jailhouse cell. The Beats and their Generation were wrong. Beatitude is the prisoner’s surrender to his chains.
Happiness, now, that’s something else again. Happiness is human, not divine, and the pursuit of happiness is what we might call love. This love, earthly love, is a truce between metamorphs, a temporary agreement not to shape-shift while kissing or holding hands. Love is a beach towel spread over shifting sands. Love is intimate democracy, a compact that insists on renewals, and you can be voted out overnight, however big your majority. It’s fragile, precarious, and it’s all we can get without selling our souls to one party or the other. It’s what we can have while remaining free. This is what Vina Apsara meant when she spoke of a love without trust. All treaties can be broken, all promises end up as lies. Sign nothing, make no promises. Make a provisional reconciliation, a fragile peace. If you’re lucky it might last five days; or fifty years.
I offer all this—the airplane terror and doubt, my own post facto musings, his lyrics (which some British professor calls poetry, but then there’s always a professor; to me, set down on the page without their music, they seem kind of spavined, even hamstrung)—so that you can have a sense of the amazing realizations to which Ormus Cama was quickly coming. He’d been given a second chance at life, a second act in a country whose citizens’ lives famously don’t have second acts, and he had concluded that he’d been allowed back for a purpose. Chosen. He was struggling for other language, language that didn’t imply an allower, a chooser, but the inertia in language is hard to resist, the inexorable advancing weight of its accumulated history. And all this had filled him up with new music. He was bursting with the stuff, and now that we know the stuff he was bursting with, the image of his arrival in America—that pale man in his mid-thirties with haunted eyes, still gaunt-faced and dressed in crummy bluejeans—feels like a hinge moment, around which turned so much that would become our shared experience, part of the way we saw and constructed ourselves.
Ormus Cama sees the mighty pincushion of Manhattan puncturing the haze of the high dawn air and begins to smile the smile of a man who has just discovered that his favorite fiction turns out to be no lie. As the plane banks and drops he recalls my father Vivvy Merchant’s love of Queen Catherine of Braganza, through whom Bombay and New York are forever yoked together. But this recollection fades almost at once: because from the start it was the cloudscrapers of the isle of the Manhattoes that pricked Ormus’s heart, he shared my mother’s dream of conquering the sky, and never itched for the thronged streets of Queens, its bazaars bustling with the polyglot traffic of the world. Vina, on the other hand, Vina whom Ameer Merchant loved, never ceased to be a street urchin in her heart, even when immense celebrity forced her into its glittering cage. But New York, for Ormus, was from the beginning a doorman, an express elevator and a view. You could say it was Malabar Hill.
The city is temporarily withheld, however: in the words of Langston Hughes, a dream deferred. Yul Singh has arranged everything—documents, permissions, limousine—and has placed one of his country residences, for the purpose of “decompression,” of effecting a “soft landing,” at the disposal of the “lovebirds.” This it’s a hell of a place which I say so myself, the winery there makes a powerful Pinot Noir, you two should take time out, drink some wine, think about the future, which okay you’re not so young Ormus but the old guys are doing okay, you catch my drift, there’s potential, and with Vina beside you she’s a doll I don’t have to tell you and that voice of hers like a fuckin’ steamer horn pardon my French, it could work, no promises, it’s down to the material which I don’t have to tell you you should get to work on right away, but what the hey, take thirty-six hours, take two days, you wouldn’t believe the line of talent at my door, longer every day, you know what I’m saying, forget about it.
Ormus receives this welcoming monologue (in which Yul Singh’s tongue is shown not to be as clean as he once claimed) on the car phone in the back of a black-windowed stretch driven by one of the legendary tribe of Colchis factotums, those Americanized heavies of Punjabi descent who are Yul’s bodyguards and chauffeurs, bouncers and valets, accountants and lawyers, strategists and enforcers, publicists and A&R men; who dress in identical black Valentino suits and molded shades; and who are universally known, though never in their imposing short-fused presences, as Yul’s Sikh jokes. Will Singh, Kant Singh, Gota Singh, Beta Singh, Day Singh, Wee Singh, Singh Singh, and so on. If these are not their real names then everyone has long forgotten what those prosaic handles might have been. Ormus and Vina’s present companion is the aforementioned Will. I’ll be taking you as far as the helipad, he says, barely turning his head. Mr. Yul’s personal Sikorsky will take care of your onward journey today.
No point resisting. Giv
e in gracefully. Ormus and Vina settle back into the deep leather upholstery. Where is this honeymoon lodge, Ormus idly asks.
Sir the Finger Lakes area sir. Does that make any sense to you?
Vina sits up. It does to me. Where’s it near to?
Yes ma’am, it’s located at the southern tip of Lake Chickasauga. Heart of the state wine-growing region. Ma’am, this would be in the neighborhood of a little town, maybe you’re familiar with it, by the name of Chickaboom.
Captivity in Egypt, Vina moans, closing her eyes. Even the Israelites didn’t have to return once they’d got away.
Excuse me? Ma’am? You lost me there?
No, nothing. Thank you.
Yes ma’am.
The house at Tempe Harbor, in wood painted pale gray with white trimmings and the sort of ornate carved “lacework” more typically glimpsed through the tropical palm fronds and bougainvillea creepers of Key West, is in fact the creation of a perverse Floridan millionaire of Swiss-German origin, Manny Raabe, who escaped in old age from effete Southern warmth (and occasional hurricanes) into these bracingly nostalgic northern latitudes, and promptly died of the cold. Yul Singh has since put in an underfloor heating system and installed numerous extra chimneys and fireplaces. It’s a mighty place, with two slated mansard roofs conceived on the grand scale, like Swiss Alps. Singh keeps it hot, and stuffed with parakeets and tropical plants: as if rebuking the late Raabe for his folly. There’s a sauna. The chef—Kitchen Singh—is under instructions to concentrate on a strongly spiced sub-continental cuisine. Tempe Harbor has been transformed by its new owner into a shrine to heat. Which if you don’t care for it I apologize, Yul Singh is on the phone the moment the chopper sets down, but if you buy a haunted house you should it’s my opinion make it unattractive to the ghost.
There’s no trace of a ghost but they’re not the only guests. Another pair of “lovebirds” is in residence, the art-house-movie director Otto Wing and his newlywed bride, a long, gummy Nordic beauty called Ifredis, who insists on skipping naked across the midnight lawn to go skinny-dipping in Lake Chickasauga’s cold black water, pursued by the scholarly, bespectacled body of her similarly nude husband, who can be heard shrieking out the An die Freude as the water hits his genitalia. Joy, shrieks Wing in German. Joy, thou lovely spark of God, daughter of Elysium.
There’s a lot of shrieking, as it happens. Wing and Ifredis can’t get enough of each other and fuck uninhibitedly whenever and wherever the spirit moves them, and it moves them all the time and all over the place. Ormus and Vina witness the lovers’ passion again and again, in the mansion’s many living rooms, in the lakeside gazebo, on the pool table, the tennis court, the deck.
These people, says Vina, slightly put out. They make us look like virgins.
When they’re not fucking and shrieking, Wing and Ifredis are sleeping, or eating quantities of cheese and drinking orange juice by the quart. (They appear to have their own food supplies, and usually forgo Kitchen Singh’s lavish banquets. They generate all the heat they can handle without his culinary aid.)
Their conversation, such as it is, touches mostly on Jesus Christ. Ifredis is a hundred-and-ten-percenter, a girl who holds nothing back. She goes in for religion with the same naked, cold-water zeal as she evidences in her shrieking sex bouts. Swiftly identifying the weak point, the wavering heathen, she pursues Ormus into the hot tub in the spa wing and interrogates him with pitying wonder dripping from her wide blue eyes. So is it really true you no god at all have? I guess not, says Ormus, unwilling to discuss his new visionary condition. There follows a long sorrowing silence, until Ormus understands that reciprocity is required of him. Oh, right, he mutters. Er, how about you?
Ifredis whoops, a long orgasmic sound. Uhh, she purrs. I just love Christ Jesus. Wing arrives, leans on the side of the tub and kisses her deeply, as if drinking at a spring, then emerges from her mouth to offer this thought. I adore in this woman her directness, he says. Her lack of irony. At the point we have reached in the century it is important to eschew all ironic communication. Now is it time to speak directly to avoid a chance of misunderstanding. In all circumstances to prioritize such avoidances.
His bride is tugging at his sleeve. Otto, she pleads, making a rubbery moue. Otto, I want to sit on your arm. She rises like a steaming Venus from the tub and they scamper off. Her English is not good, Otto sings out at Ormus over his departing shoulder. To avoid misunderstanding I should explain that at her present vocabularial level she makes occasionally a confusion of the limbs.
If one were of a paranoid disposition (and these are paranoid days) one might suppose that Yul Singh has engineered this long weekend with great deliberation: that even from distant Park Avenue Yul Singh the blind puppeteer is pulling his guests’ strings, the way George Bernard Shaw up there on his godlike cloud manipulates his Higgins and Eliza marionettes on the cover of the original My Fair Lady cast recording.
Every detail of life at Tempe Harbor, after all, bears witness to the long reach of the mogul’s influence. Even in his absence, Cool Yul is a hands-on host. There are the unpredictable but frequent phone calls to both guests and staff, there is the meticulous attention to detail: the vegetarian menu for Vina, the doctor in residence in case Ormus’s health should suddenly deteriorate. The décor is a curious mixture of European high good taste and Indo-American flaunt-it brashness: antique Louis Quinze chairs imported from France and reupholstered in monogrammed powder-blue silk. YSL. The monogram (for Yul Singh Lahori, his rarely used full name) is ubiquitous: on most of the furnishings, on the specially rolled in-house cigars and cigarettes, on the silver cufflinks presented as keepsakes by the housekeeper Clea Singh to all male guests, and even on each thick square of the personalized toilet paper rolls and the house range of TH condoms, sanitary napkins and tampons discreetly positioned, according to gender, in the his-and-hers bathrooms that are a feature of each guest suite. Framed gold and platinum records line the walls; also portraits of the great man—who bears more than a passing resemblance to the actor Vincent Price, that smooth nocturnal prince of the fanged classes—and of his aristocratically etiolated and long-suffering French wife Marie-Pierre d’Illiers. Who I must personally admit is my symbolic ideal, my immortal tea cake, who when I taste her lips I remember everything important in life, Yul Singh confides to Ormus on the phone. Okay, so you want to ask now about my, don’t bother to pretend you don’t know this, on the surface contradictory and also extremely public liaisons with as they say a string of young beauties, he goes on. The famous disarming grin, the helpless spreading of the arms, come across to Ormus even down the telephone. Alas, Singh confesses, quite unabashed—his Indian reticence supplanted by this adopted American confessional style—memory is a great quality, also possessing considerable erotic force, by the way, which strictly speaking you don’t need to know that, it’s a private matter between myself and the lady, nevertheless as I was saying remembrance is tops, but sometimes by way of contrast it is even better to forget.
Yul is a ruthless visionary, an amoral schemer. Might it not be a part of his grand design to throw cold water over Ormus and Vina’s grand renewed passion, by offering them, in the form of Wing and Ifredis, an admonitory pair of Vargas caricatures of themselves? Happiness writes white, Montherlant said, and Yul Singh, an educated man for all his down-market posturing, is able to take a smart tip. Lovebirds bill and coo and don’t get much work done. A little trouble in paradise might well be worth stirring up.
And the Jesus-freak material? Just adds an extra piquancy to the sauce.
Is this scripted dialogue and action? Are these actors?
Probe a little more deeply into the Tempe Harbor episode, and further reverberations can be felt. YSL is a lifelong philanderer who nevertheless loves, honors and can never get away from his utterly admirable and evidently complaisante wife. In Vina, perhaps, he has already discerned a sexual adventuress as daring as he, a woman in search of an anchor, of solid ground from which to make her nocturnal
leaps into the unknown. Ormus—Yul Singh has intuited—must be once again that anchor, the still center of her turning wheel. If he’s the rock she can be the roll. This will fuel his music and her singing, both; for art must be made secretly, in quiet places, while the singing voice needs to soar into open space and seek the adulation of the crowd. Yul Singh has his own visionary blind eyes, which can see into possible futureworlds, enabling him to bet heavily on them, even, sometimes, to bring them into being. This is what he has seen: that Ormus and Vina’s genius, their future, their ability to become what they have it in themselves to be, depends on the engendering and perpetuation of special forms of pain. The noisy pain of the compulsive wanderer and the dumb pain of the one who’s left.
Wing and Ifredis need neither sleep nor food except for their secret cheese. They are found fucking on the kitchen table, and under the living room rug. The whoops and shrieks grow louder, longer, somehow less human, by the hour. Vina and Ormus feel swamped, stalled, by this pornographic operetta. They are rendered temporarily incapable not of desire but of its physical (and vocal) expression. Like a couple of maiden aunts, they sip drinks on Tempe Harbor’s farthest-flung terraces, and disapprove.
Up early on the third morning, Vina finds a dead stag lying in the reeds at the lake’s edge: not shot, just deceased. Its head is half under water; antlers break the surface like hard weeds. Insects buzz their requiem. The legs are stiff, like a giant toy’s. More specifically, it occurs to her, like the legs of a wooden horse. For some reason she cannot at once identify this unbidden thought makes her cry. Huge sobs burst from her; after a few of these, the memory follows. Of, outside the long-vanished Egypt cigar store, a wooden charioteer and his horse. A one-horse town and the one horse was made of wood. Vina summons a house limo—driven by Limo Singh, as the turbaned and uniformed chauffeur informs her without a tic of the irony forbidden by the avantgardist Otto Wing—and, abandoning Ormus to the screaming lovers of Tempe Harbor, is driven at speed into Chickaboom.