Did you ask her, Vina demanded. Even if you did, you didn’t do it properly, your heart wasn’t in it. Now I’m going to tell you a thing about your life. Your life is dirt. You’re more like Ormus than you know only he’s all cleanness and light and you’re all mud and darkness. If you’re the best on offer, we should all give up right now.
Thanks, Vina, I love you too, I murmured, more shaken than I cared to show.
Yet when I’m with you I feel you’re part of something, some lifestream?, she went on. I think that’s what each of us is, a part of some larger river, and no matter how muddy and poisoned any individual bit of the river might be, you can still pick up the sense of that larger flow, that great and generous water. This is the life and death business I’m talking about, Rai. You’re a heathen, you pretend there’s no life afterwards, but I’m telling you you’re a part of something right here and now and what that is, whatever it is, it’s good, it’s better than just you on your own?, only you’re just rolling along, you don’t even know the name of the river of yourself.
Stop now, I said, it’s Wednesday, on Wednesday I put out the garbage.
The way I saw it, my uninterest in her mystical side nagged at her, she needed to conquer that resistance, and that’s one of the things that kept her coming back. But in the end the ordinary physical things, the man-woman things are primary. We were good together, end of story. Even though she was an old married lady now I allowed her to think she didn’t have to be. I asked nothing, but gave what she needed. With me she was single again. She was free.
Oh, one more thing: Ormus, her one true love, was beginning to scare her.
About VTO’s victory over the Sangria-Auxerre assault, however, she was spot on. In those days there were more women fronting bands and making solo careers. Some of them were angry because men and love had not been good to them, many of them had eating disorders, others were deranged on account of things that happened to them as children, touch me daddy don’t touch me, hug me mama don’t hug me, love me daddy won’t you leave me alone, love me mama wanna be on my own. You know that I remember too much. So I don’t know what to do with your Tender Touch. Still others were super-cool smooth operators with an empty thing in their eyes. Marco Sangria’s angry sister Madonna, also now an influential critic, was already saying that gender, the body, was the only subject. Once upon a time the Crystals sang he hit me and I’m glad. Now it was hit me and I’ll break your fucking jaw. (This was an improvement, evidently.)
In the middle of all this misery Vina, uniquely, looked like—she was—singing out of pure happiness. That single fact made our hearts soar, even when she was delivering Ormus’s most jaundiced lyrics. The joy in her singing showed us there was nothing we could not overcome, no river too deep, no mountain too high. It made her the world’s beloved.
(On this occasion, I use the words “we” and “our” to denote a collectivity of which I was certainly a part, as deliriously infatuated as any front-row fan.)
It began to be seen as her band. Ormus produced the records, dreamed up the shows with the design team, wrote the songs, and looked on stage like a small craggy god down from Rock Olympus, but he was encased in glass, which distanced him, made him abstract. He became more of a concept, an animatronic special effect, than an object for our dreams and desires. Also, we could tell he was a control freak. Those ten years of waiting, they hadn’t been natural. This mythic monogamy of his, this excess of determination, there was something domineering about it, something obdurate that would not be denied. We could see how she might react against so possessive a love. How, even loving him, even adoring him, she might run to find room for herself.
So it was mainly Vina for us, Vina the Voice, Vina whose non-stop motion on stage was like a message saying Ormie, baby, Ormie, my only boy, I love you my darling but you can’t tie me down. You can marry me but you can’t catch me; if I’m the blithe spirit, you’re the genie in the bottle. You can run the show but I can run. Yes, it was Vina we wanted, Vina of the horribly injured childhood who instead of whining on about it in a million interviews just shrugged her shoulders and made nothing of it at all, Vina who without ever asking for or expecting our sympathy told us about her abortions and barrenness and consequent grief, and thereby earned our love; Vina who took books by both Mary Daly and Enid Blyton with her when she went on tour, Vina of the thousand fads and cults who could look right into the future President’s face and ask him how it felt to be named after a woman’s pubic hair.
I will tell you now what I have not sufficiently expressed throughout this long saga: the thing with Vina, being her spare prick, coming off the bench for a few minutes per game, this was hard for me. There was too much time and room for my imagination to work. I imagined their lovemaking so often, and in such Kama Sutra variety, that I would break out in a rash. I actually would: whether of heat or fury I cannot say. Only a foreign war, a fresh batch of photographic models just off the plane from Texas, or a cold shower could bring my temperature down, restore to normalcy the beating of my heart.
I tried to make myself believe that the marriage with Ormus wouldn’t last. When she told me that she had reached an understanding with him, that he would turn a blind or at least a patched eye to her amours as long as she didn’t flaunt them in a crass and obvious way, at first I felt a spurt of hot joy because she had gone to such risky trouble to make room in her life for me. Later, in the shower, where sometimes when her absence became too painful I’d ask my soaped hands to play her part, just as her hands had understudied Ormus during his decade of non-performance, I felt my reactions becoming more complex. It was, I thought, as if I were a clause in their marriage. A sleeping partner in their merger. This doomed me to play second fiddle forever; it was in the contract. My rising anger informed me of a truth I had thoroughly suppressed: viz., that I still entertained hopes of having her all to myself.
Often I practiced feeling contempt for glass-boxed, reclusive Ormus. What sort of man would consent to become the mari complaisant of as major a beauty, a presence, as Vina Apsara? To which my mirror replied: And what sort would agree to take the droppings from another man’s table, the leavings from his bed? There was a malicious and probably untrue story about the novelist Graham Greene according to which his mistress’s husband would position himself on the sidewalk outside the apartment block in which the author of The Quiet American resided, and at the top of his voice shout abuse into the warm night air: Salaud! Crapaud! To which Greene, when asked about the story, allegedly replied merely that as his apartment was on an upper floor he would not have heard the cries, and so unfortunately he could not confirm or deny the tale.
Salaud! Crapaud! In my case, it was I, Vina’s bit on the side, who felt the urge to hurl abuse. I, who with my photo-journalist’s khaki hat on prided myself on my ability to blend into the background, to disappear, quickly came to loathe my invisibility in the story of Vina, the erasure from the public record of the great matter of my heart. But the more Vina and I were seen in public together, hiding in plain view, the less people were inclined to gossip. The blatantness of our association proved its innocence, yes, even to Ormus. Or so he always maintained.
One day in the Orwellian year of 1984—a time to dispense with doublespeak, to tear down the dreadful Ministries of Truth and Love—I could bear the situation no longer and rushed over to the Rhodopé Building, hot for certainty. In my hand was an envelope containing a set of photographs of Vina, nude photographs taken by me in the immediate aftermath of passion. She, who found it so hard to trust or to be trustworthy, had trusted me to make and keep private such explosive images as these; but it was the trustless marriage she preferred to her stolen hours with me. And as my behavior amply demonstrated, she would have done better not to trust me, either.
The point was that even Ormus Cama could not fail to understand what the pictures proclaimed: that for many years I had enjoyed the favors of his beloved wife. He must surely name his weapons. Prussian sabers, baseball b
ats, pistols at dawn by the Bethesda Fountain, I was ready for anything. For, as Vina would say, closure. I roared red-misted into the Rhodopé lobby, where I was restrained by a uniformed doorman.
It was Vina’s father, the ex-lawyer, ex-butcher Shetty, now over seventy but looking ten years younger. His dreadful life had not marked him. Hearty, even jovial, he took what it dished out and stayed upright. Vina had hired a small army to find him after the newspaper article about his plight. When they unearthed him she’d flown to Florida for the big reconciliation scene and offered him whatever he wanted: retirement, a place of his own in the Keys, maybe, and of course a healthy allowance, but all that he had turned down flat. I’m the type that prefers to be in harness, he told her. Get me something where I can die with my boots on. Now he was installed in this new job, delighted with the uniform, beaming at the world. Cool in summer, warm in winter, a nodding acquaintance with the city’s finest, he said. At my age and with my track record it’s better than I could have hoped. India, forget about it. (His Indian linguistic education, which had stressed the importance of precise enunciation, made a strange match with his freewheeling U.S. idiom.) India, it’s gone for all of us. I’ll take Manhattan.
In my confrontational fury I hadn’t remembered it might be Doorman Shetty’s shift, but there he was, fit and ready and eager to please. Hey, Mr. Rai, sir, how is it hanging, what do you say, can I be of any assistance.
I just stood there holding my envelope, determination draining from me. Should I call upstairs, Mr. Rai? You want a ride in the elevator? Or just delivering a letter for Mr. Ormus or my daughter, can I get that for you, no problemo? Sure thing, leave it to me, it’s my job.
Never mind, I said, exiting. Just a mistake.
He called after me, raising a cheery hand. Missing you already, Mr. Rai, you come back now, do you hear?
A terrible din was heard from the street outside; a junk band had showed up. Shetty’s mood darkened. Charging past me, he confronted a group of youngsters playing a kitchen sink, a shopping cart, a dustbin, a wheelbarrow, buckets and, perhaps in VTO’s honor, a strange chimeran fudge of a stringed noisemaker they called a guisitar, put together from the scraps of two wrecked instruments.
What do you call this, Shetty wanted to know. Where do you get off.
We’re the Mall, said a red-eyed, goateed youth, asserting his leadership over his rag-haired, trembling tribe. (Not just a junk band but a band in search of junk, I noted silently.) We offer this serenade, he proclaimed, to the rock gods living in the sky. In the face of the radical uncertainty of the age we make odes to materialism, paradoxically utilizing items of no value to society. We celebrate donut culture, it’s sweet and it tastes good but there’s a void at the heart?
Get away from my canopy, Shetty commanded. Do it now.
There is no arguing with the authority of the New York doorman. The Mall obediently packed up and skulked away. Then, like an avatar of the Age of Greed, the leader turned back, shivering slightly, to glare at Mr. Shetty. When we’re big, mister, I mean when we’re monster big, I’m gonna come back here ’n’ fucking buy this fucking building, and then it’s your ass, baby, you have been warned.
My threat, the envelope I bore, was just as empty, I understood. Vina was right to trust me after all. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk her withdrawal from my life. I too was an addict, hopelessly far gone, and she was my candy girl.
It occurred to me that in the field of love and desire Vina was just behaving like a man; showing herself capable, like most men, of loving wholeheartedly and simultaneously—halfheartedly—betraying that love without guilt, without any sense of contradiction. She was capable not so much of a division of attention as of multiplying herself, until there was enough Vina to go round. We, Ormus and I, we were her women: he, the loyal wife standing by her philandering husband, settling for him in spite of his roving eye, his wanderlust; and I, the simultaneously wanton and long-suffering mistress, taking what I could get. That way round, it made perfect sense.
I remember her hands, long-fingered, quick, chopping her beloved vegetables as if she were the high priestess of a pagan cult, matter-of-factly getting through the day’s quota of sacrificial offerings to the gods. I remember her hunger for information, the way her bright, half-educated mind latched on to the many information-heavy intelligences her fame and beauty brought her in contact with (newspaper and tv bosses, Hollywood studio heads, rocket scientists, heavy hitters from Morgan Guaranty and D.C.) and how she pumped these sources for all she was worth, as if facts would save her life. I remember her fear of disease and early death.
Vina was a quick study, and by the time Mull Standish departed she was no longer the arrogant flake who had landed herself and Ormus in Contract Hell. Under his tutelage she had become a sharp businesswoman, as formidable as many of the big wheels for whose brains she showed an exaggerated respect they usually didn’t deserve. She managed the stocks and bonds, the real estate, the growing art collection, the bakeries, the Santa Barbara winery, the cows. Ormus’s fabled love of bread had led Standish naturally into this market; now Vina ensured that the high standards of the Camaloaf franchise were maintained from coast to coast. The bread was already an established brand; but few people thought of Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama as being amongst the finest viticulturists in California, to say nothing of the biggest dairy farmers in the northeastern United States, but that’s what they had become. The winery thrived and the already huge herds of Holsteins acquired by Standish from the Singh estate had become even larger, their milk and cheese ubiquitously available. From goats to cows, Vina told me. Seems I can’t help being on the udder side.
This in spite of the fact that during this period she had gone not only vegetarian but fully macrobiotic. No wine, definitely no dairy products. Occasionally, as a treat, she allowed herself a handful of those small Japanese dried fish. It was always interesting to me that she could make such a separation: that business, in spite of everything, was still business. Mull Standish had been an influential teacher.
Nowadays she was the worldly one, while Ormus’s obsession with catastrophe had rendered him meditative, inward, strange. So, for example, it was Vina who decided for sound fiscal as well as strong sentimental reasons to buy Yul Singh’s old Tempe Harbor place when it, like the cattle, was offered to the band cheaply by the estate lawyers, who informed her that it was the wish of the deceased that they be given first refusal at the most advantageous terms. (This was Yul’s way of making a posthumous peace. He did not insult them by leaving them the property outright, as a gift. That would be to claim a friendship that had not existed for years. It was a finely judged decision. It showed respect.)
It was also Vina who decided to employ the Singhs. The new management at Colchis was dispensing with their services without explanation, and a deputation comprising Ormus and Vina’s first chauffeur, Will, and Clea the châtelaine of Tempe Harbor, seamstress of Ormus’s first eye patch, arrived at the VTO offices to plead the retinue’s cause. Stripped of his black Valentino suit and sunglasses, no longer obliged to play the heavy, Will in jeans and white shirt turned out to be a hesitantly articulate young man. Clea was the same tiny, decent old lady she’d seemed at Tempe, only more worried. These were ordinary people sucked into the realm of the extraordinary and fighting back, playing their one and only card. Rumors had reached their ears of Yul’s covert activities, they said, and they had, with some justice, concluded that they were being punished for their former boss’s misdeeds. Just as innocent Sikhs in India were slaughtered after the Quadruple Assassination—the many suffering on account of the actions of the few—so the Colchis Singhs, too, had become the victims of American jitteriness. If Yul Singh had been a terrorist financier, then, in the view of the label, all his fellow Sikhs were tarred with the same brush. Yet we are not such people, madam, said Clea with simple dignity. We are persons of ability, willing and able to serve, and we ask you to grant our good wish.
Vina took on the who
le entourage on the spot.
In 1987 Amos Voight died, Sam’s Pleasure Island closed its doors for good, an era seemed to be ending, and Ormus Cama completed fifty years on earth. Turning fifty seemed to hit Ormus hard. His excursions from the Rhodopé complex had become few and far between, though once in a while Vina dragged him to a downtown music venue, accompanied by a clutch of Singhs, to hear a hot new act. These were disappointments more often than not, though just lately a young Irish quartet, Vox Pop, had impressed them as a possible start-up act. Mostly, however, their forays into Musicworld served only to confirm that the old order was, improbably enough, refusing to fade. The times were not a-changing. Lennon, Dylan, Phil Ramone, Richards, these old men were still the giants along with VTO themselves, while the likes of Trex, Sigue Spangell, Karmadogma and the Glam had been little more than blips.
Even Runt, the new rejectionism, all snarl and spittle, hadn’t interested Ormus and, after a brief flare of scandal and attention, hadn’t lasted. How could it, Ormus shrugged, you can’t start a revolution in a clothes shop. Runt had been the brainchild of the resurfacing Antoinette Corinth, Tommy Gin and She, the Three Witches, Ormus Cama called them. Back in London, they had indeed dreamed up the angry new sci-fi look—rubber, slashed fabrics, bondage thongs, body piercing, the maquillage and attitude of android replicants on the run from exterminating blade runners—at their new Fulham Road store, and then invented a rock group to sell it. Inevitably they showed up in New York, acting as if they were the tastemakers supreme of London society, come to Manhattan to wreak a little British havoc. She, at Antoinette’s bidding, did Daryl Hannah backflips in a distressed-leather miniskirt down the length of the bar at 44. No knickers, of course, darlings, Antoinette redundantly pointed out at the top of her voice. We call it Runt ’n’ Cunt. New York gave them their fifteen minutes and forgot them. Their band, the Swindlers, the supposed shock troops of the new wave, fizzled in the face of American pudeur and ended up fatally shooting each other—and Corinth and Gin—in a suite at the Chelsea Hotel. She alone survived, having jumped ship five minutes before the fight that ended the revolution. She ran shrieking through the lobby wearing rubber and black lace, disappeared into the city night and never bothered to come back for her other clothes.