The Ground Beneath Her Feet

  I find myself rising to my feet, bellowing formlessly, waving my arms at the blind sky, with cold tears freezing on my face. As if my rooftop’s a Tower of Silence and Vina’s living memory lies here, naked, beneath the circling vultures, helpless and unguarded except for me.

  After forty days the crowds vacate the stadiums, in response to Ormus Cama’s direct appeal, and slowly the surface regularity of the planet’s daily life resumes. On Ormus’s behalf, the Singhs are frequently in court, seeking to protect the “Vina property” from crass exploitation. The new Vina look-alike Quakette, a doll that sings a stupid song untli its stand first begins to vibrate, then cracks open and gulps her down, is a particular target. It seems that all the cascading emotion of the Vina phenomenon will end in the slave market of capital. One minute she’s a goddess, and the next she’s property.

  Once again, I’m underestimating her. It is true that commercial interests will do their damnedest to possess and use her, that her face will continue to appear on magazine covers, that there will be video games and CD-ROMs and instant biographies and bootleg tapes and cynical speculation about her possible survival and every kind of Internet chat-room baloney. It is also true that her own “side”—her record label and, in the rôle of her management and business team, Ormus and the Singhs—will capitalize on the Vina Effect too, putting her face on the milk, the bread, the wine, as well as the vegetarian meals and records.

  (I once read a story about a woman who loathed her lazy slob of a husband. When he died she had him cremated and put his ashes in an hourglass, which she set on her mantelpiece with the words, At last, you bastard, you’re going to do some work. Ormus’s love for Vina is not in doubt, but he, too, is sending her ghost out to do business for the family firm.)

  All this is true. But what will become evident during the course of the year is that something like an earthquake is building within people, that in countries all over the globe Vina’s adoring constituency has acquired a taste for collective action and radical change. Instability, the modern condition, no longer frightens them; it now feels like possibility. This is Vina’s true legacy, not the acres of mawkish commentary or the bad-taste dolls.

  And the heaving earth, too, has more changes in store.

  This is the way I remember it.

  That whole first year after she died, I was badly off balance, not knowing what to do for the best, where to put my own distress, how to continue. I kept recalling a day on Juhu Beach, and a girl in a Stars-and-Stripes swimsuit bad-mouthing everything in sight. That was the day I drew my picture of the world as I wanted it to be, the picture I inhabited from that day on, until the day she died. Now it felt like somebody had snatched the picture out of my hands and ripped it to bits.

  When you have no picture of the world, you don’t know how to make choices—material, inconsequential or moral. You don’t know which way is up, or if you’re coming or going, or how many beans make five.

  (Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year everybody else’s picture broke, the year we were all plunged into an unframed limbo: the formless future. I’m aware of these facts. But that’s politics and seismology, and I’ll come to it later. I’m talking now about what happened to me.)

  I’d wake up thinking she was in the room, and then lie in the dark, shaking. I’d see shadows move in the corners of my eyes and they were her too. Once I rang her private phone line at the Rhodopé and she answered after the first ring. Hello. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I understood that Ormus had not been able to make himself erase her voice. After that I called the number a dozen or more times a day. Often, when I rang, the line was busy. I wondered how many other lost souls were pushing buttons on their phones, just to hear those two dozen words. Then I thought that perhaps there was just one other caller. Ormus Cama, like me, needed repeatedly to hear his dead wife’s last recording.

  I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, a promise I needed her to keep. But what was the message I should leave? What was the communication that would bring her back from the dead?

  Briefly, I felt my heart go out to Ormus Cama, my rival in love. Now my rival for nobody’s hand. In the midst of that ocean of “love,” here were these two shipwrecked lovers, Ormus and Rai, unable to open their hearts to each other, unable to help each other, making stupid telephone calls to the dead from their sinking rafts.

  One year after her death, somebody erased the tape—I’m guessing it was Clea Singh, trying to haul Ormus out of his despondent slough—and that day I wept again, as if Vina had just that moment been gobbled up by the hungry earth.

  Of all the things said and written about her, the comments that made most sense to me were the ones about death being just death, the arguments against interpretation. Don’t make her a metaphor. Just let her rest in peace. I wanted to fight against the billowing firestorm of meanings, I wanted to put on my fireman’s hat and turn a hose on the flames. Meanings beamed down from the satellite-crowded skies, meanings like amorphous aliens, putting out pseudopods like suction pads and sucking at her corpse. At one point I tried to construct a text of my own, some nonsense about the heroism of rejecting interpretation, the abrasive but desirable embrace of absurdity. But I got bogged down in ethics. How to live a moral life in an absurd universe, and so on. I didn’t want to opt for quietism, to say it was better simply to cultivate one’s garden. Something in me retained a desire for engagement with the world. I tore the piece up and spent my days leafing through my portfolio of Vina pix and, until the tape was wiped, calling her on the phone.

  During that first year, noting that I had largely ceased to go out, that when I wanted to eat I would order in, that most of this food was liquid, and that my long-term cleaner had quit because the place was getting to be like a slum, my fellow Orpheum residents took it upon themselves to “save me.” Johnny Chow came to advise, gravely, that I was paying too much attention to death. That was a laugh. Sugar Ray Robinson, Lucille Ball, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Laurence Olivier, R. D. Laing, Irving Berlin, Ferdinand Marcos, Bette Davis, Vladimir Horowitz, “La Pasionaria,” Sakharov, Beckett and Vina, in one year, I pointed out thickly: it’s Armageddon out there. Never a great debater, Chow withdrew, shaking his elegant head. Mack Schnabel suggested I make a selection of my Vina pictures and then hold a show in the building’s gallery space. That was a tough one. Would such an exhibit look like a dignified personal tribute or just another case of an opportunist schmo jumping on the unstoppable Vina bandwagon? I couldn’t make up my mind. Anyway, it was a while before I got round to finalizing the selection. Most days I suffered from blurred, or even double vision. Clarity was not my strongest point in those unhappy months.

  Basquiat came up to talk to me about girls, which was sweetly conventional of him, considering his own astonishing preferences. Fantastique weemain are beursteeng out all ovair, he wanted me to know. Aftair so long, it ees no good to be alone ’ere weez your fantômes.

  Fantômes is correct, I told him. There’s a beautiful woman who keeps getting into my pictures, I don’t know how. I photograph an empty room, my bathroom, maybe, I’m spending a lot of time in my bathroom, and when I develop the roll she’s looking at me out of a mirror. No, it’s not Vina, it’s someone else completely. A haunting stranger. So you see that now there are two.

  This dooble expozhair idée of yours, he said. Eet ees gone too far, I theenk.

  Finally they approached me as a group to read me some loving version of the riot act. Say yes to life, clean up your act, take a minute to smell the roses, the usual formulae. I must admit they made quite an effort. They got the place into some sort of shape, cleaned out the drinks cupboard and the bathroom cabinet, dragged me down the street for a shave and a haircut, and threw a party in my apartment, featuring all the most desirable unattached women they knew (and this, given our profession, was a great many). I understood what was being done for me and why. Mostly friendship, yes, and for that I was
and remain profoundly grateful. But there was also the other side of the coin. People don’t like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irremediably broken by life, is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we’re bored. I understood that I had good and true friends in these three men, that it was all for one and one for all and these were my musketeers. I also saw that I needed to behave better for their sakes. I had become their nagging toothache, their dose of gut-rot, their ulcer. I needed to get better before they decided to cure themselves of me.

  If friendship is a fuel, the supply of it is not endless.

  In the middle of my so-called coming-out party, I looked over at Aimé-Césaire and saw the mark of death on him, and the party began suddenly to seem like a wake for that beautiful man who, like Finnegan in the song, was sitting up gaily and enjoying his own farewell do. I knew about Schnabel also, that since his punishing divorce he continued to be at war with his ex-wife Molly, who had successfully obtained court orders preventing him from going within a mile of his two kids, and who visited Mack’s father on his deathbed to tell him, falsely, that Mack was a heroin addict, guilty of both violence towards and sexual abuse of the boys. Johnny Chow had his own saga of catastrophes, mostly connected with gambling. Were these people from whom I was prepared to take advice?

  Yes, I said to myself. Better a whore than a nun, better a wounded soldier than someone who never heard the crump of the guns.

  At that moment I saw Johnny Chow forcing his way through the crowd of revellers, grinning demonically, with Vina Apsara on his arm.

  I’d heard about the impersonation craze, the Vina supperclub/cabaret look-alikes, the underground, heavy-metal and reggae Vinas, the rap Vinas, the Vina drag queens, the Vina transsexuals, the Vina hookers on the Vegas Strip, the Vina strippers outnumbering the Marilyns and Long Tall Texans on amateur nights around these infinitely varied United States, the porno-Vinas on the adult cable channels and closed-circuit hotel tvs, the hardcore under-the-counter blue-video-Vinas, and the innocent biannual gatherings of dweeby karaoke Vinas whose numbers rivaled even the indefatigable Star Trek conventioneers. In point of fact Vina had once been a guest star on the Next Generation television series, conjured up on the holodeck to sing for an enamored Worf. He taught her Klingon and she taught him Hug-me, or another similar-sounding tongue. When the Trekkies remembered this they invited the Vina people to join forces with them, but Vina was bigger than the Enterprise now, she was in a continuum of her own, perhaps even the fabled Q.

  There was a famous production of Hamlet in which Jonathan Pryce, the actor playing the Prince of Denmark, “produced” the Ghost from within himself, like a channeler or spirit medium, in an astonishing feat of body and voice control. The Vina impersonators did it the easy way, using costumes and recordings, but the idea was the same. In their own bodies they conjured up their fantasy beloved from the dead.

  It’s a few steps beyond Mizoguchi too, I thought. In Ugetsu, the poor yokel taken in by the mysterious aristocratic beauty was just in love with a ghost. But these people aren’t merely under a dead woman’s spell, they’re actually trying to be her, wearing her kimonos, powdering their faces, walking the walk. This is a new form of auto-eroticism. Guised as Vina, these mimic women are making love to themselves.

  There was some disagreement as to which Vina most merited commemoration, the firebrand Afro-Vina of her younger days, big-haired, big-voiced, big-mouthed and sexually rampant, or red-haired Mexi-Vina, older but still hot, her voice never better, her aura a little wiser, or Death-Vina, the sad-eyed lady of the broken lands. In the end, pragmatism ruled. The younger impersonators did the early Vina, the older men (yes, and women too) made the latter-day Vina their own.

  This Vina, the one on Chow’s arm, was unmistakably an older guy. Chinese too, which inevitably made the resemblance imperfect, but he’d put in some hard hours in front of his make-up mirror, darkening his skin, taking trouble with the shape of his eyes. He’d studied her swinging gait, the movement of her mouth, her attitude. And the red wig was very good. Tell me now if this is a bad idea, Johnny asked as they reached me, only we thought it might, oh shit, defuse something if she were in some sense here. Like Adult Children Of Alcoholics, you know that group, it can help to know you’re not alone.

  I so don’t want to bum you out, this China-Vina said disarmingly in a fine baritone voice, and actually bowed. That’s so not it. I much honored her, long time now, this is my way to give her respect.

  It’s fine, I told Johnny. Really. It’s cool. Great job, I added to the gratified cross-dresser. Do you want to sing later, or what?

  I mime, he said, breaking out in a big, proud smile. I brought my tape deck, if that’s okay to do.

  Go for it, I advised him, and forced myself to smile dazzlingly back. The look of relief on Chow’s face told me I’d done the right thing. My friends would feel better about me now, and—with a sense of relief on all sides—they’d be more okay with leaving me alone.

  • • •

  For long periods, during year two after Vina, I lived alone by the sea in America. What do you love? I had asked her at Juhu, and she answered, I love the sea. That, at least, I regained, though she was gone: the ocean breezes on which I smelled her pungent, lost perfume; the beach. This long golden strand was a far cry from Cuffe Parade’s urban graciousness, from Apollo Bunder’s bustle, but it filled me with more than one kind of nostalgia. Cruising to the ocean past the potato fields, the cornfields, the turning banks of sunflowers, the glistened polo horses, the sweet birds of youth and the tick-bearing deer; past the exotically casual American rich in their cut-offs, their halter necks, their chinos, their polo shirts, their classic convertibles, their Range Rovers, their monied old age, their gilded childhood and their potent prime; past the Shinnecock Indians trimming the hedges and cleaning the pools and maintaining the tennis courts and mowing the grass and in general tending to the high-priced, stolen land; past the honk of the railroad and the cry of the geese and the hissing of summer lawns, I was turned back, after a long age, towards thoughts of home. Home as another lost jewel, as something else swallowed up, by time, by choice. As something else now unavailable, glowing up through the water like sunken gold, breathing painfully under the plowed earth like a lover gone down to Hell.

  I did pull myself together sufficiently to assemble that show of photographs, After Vina, which was well and seriously received. I don’t deny that this pleased me. The truth is that after all I was not immune to the disease of making Vina mean something, and what she meant to me was love, certainly, but also mystery, a woman ultimately unquantifiable and impossible to grasp, my window into the inexplicable.

  The mystery at the heart of meaning. That was her.

  I invited Ormus to the opening but he didn’t show. I hadn’t really expected it. There was one small fracas: at one point a group of New Quakers burst into the Orpheum gallery to denounce me noisily for implying that Vina was deceased, and these greasy, bikerish figures took some ejecting. When they had gone, I found myself standing next to a slender old Indian gentleman in a J. Crew check shirt and jeans, whom I did not at first recognize in this off-duty manifestation.

  I want to thank you, he said in his curious, flat-accented way, for sharing my daughter with me. It surely is a positive and healing experience to be here. Yes, sirree, it surely is.

  It was the Rhodopé doorman, Shetty. In the depths of my own grief I had callously forgotten that Vina’s father was still alive.

  My encounter with Doorman Shetty is like a whip of cold water across the face. It wakes me from my long unhealthy reverie, my heartsick inwardness, and renews my awareness—which is the essence of the photographer’s art—of the immediacy, the presentness, of things. At the end of his shift the next day I meet up with Shetty, who is back in uniform, and we go for coffee to the Buddhist-organic place across the street from the Orpheum, that Eastern-scented room with its oddly soothing combin
ation of great dark coffee, stripped dark wood and pale barefoot waitresses in white dresses that drag on the floor and button all the way up to the throat. Shetty seems calm, though the joviality I recall is not in evidence. He is happy, he says, that Vina found him in his old age and that the distance between them was thereby at least a little reduced. This he tells me in the new vocabulary of self-regard. We dealt with some issues. We confronted the anger that needed to be faced and we did some good healing work. We hugged. We became comfortable with each other. We had some quality time.

  They even went into therapy together, he reveals. The therapist, an Indochinese woman named Honey and married to a successful Wall Street arbitrageur of conservative Nicaraguan origins, one day hung a giant pink piñata in the shape of a rabbit from the ceiling fan in her office and handed Vina a wooden stick. As Vina slugged the piñata she was encouraged to say whom she was really hitting out at, and why. She went for it with a vengeance, and Shetty accordingly heard many painful complaints about himself, but the spectacle of his famous daughter beating the bejesus out of a giant salmon-colored papier-mache bunny like a retard S&M queen was so absurd that he laughed. He laughed until he cried, especially when the piñata gave way under the force of Vina’s assault and the usual children’s sweets and fluffy toys tumbled out, all the gifts he had failed to give his daughter when she was a child.