Women and Men (123 page)

—till, as cramped as her own personal tapeworm that flew in from the Minnesota territory and descended toward her gravitational center, and was flushed out of its own coils and crannies by a loving physician’s recommended dose of atabrine, she lets herself forget murder, forget the threatened bond with Clara, in order to know—as she knows when in her morning tub (so still) she lets a dream forget itself—that she hit upon that woman-in-the-restaurant’s profession for one second—but now what was it; what was it? (her very certainty had lost it): and with that, she sings a phrase with intervals so slight they are primitive, a cry, a thought—that still gets an echo far off in her apartment, for he is not behind her phrase. It takes her, while her twin sense that some half-conscious community rhymed this proposition to her lets her rest both with her abrupt decision (to sing two roles, the second Horatio, the ultimate friend) and her wish (which even Judith might have entertained could they have run a power line to Holofernes’ tent) to watch bedroom TV with her lover whose hand (yes) palms her belly pregnant (yes) and with shared peperoni pizza sent out for, and meanwhile she is reading in his mind places elsewhere where he thinks of her—yes, he thinks of her—even to the point of telling someone, a stranger to her, how much he likes her (it’s a man friend he’s having lunch with) yet she can’t get off the—the unavoidable phone call from her compatriot Clara that tells her in the guise of possible friendship that (whatever you call it, the chilly bowel below the Swiss bank vault or the prisons of acoustical foul-up suddenly offstage)
this is it:
she wants Clara’s friendship despite what her loneliness also hears in the long words of her father (thou shalt love, well, thy father)—she could hear the breakers like dreams of mountains stagger distantly down her father’s known words until, hearing her lover en route somewhere between here and the kitchen, she hears as if for the first time her father defending Karl Marx, a man real as her own father—lest we forget that the shortcomings in his thought are the shortcomings in our own—his history ours (she recalls)—and she, who gives pleasure and pleasure that begets pleasure to those who pay to come to Lincoln Center
and
to those who do not pay because she has given them free tickets whether they use them or not, would say this about "Marx" who comes back to her like her father as "The Moor," the dark-faced, the naked shape now rejoining her in (after all)
her
dark bedroom, she listens while her lover lubricates with the essence of her refrigerated Deaf Smith peanut butter
du pays
the softest of predictions—that’s "unknown," he grants, but "forced" upon him by what he cannot but infer—that in the near future she may forget what stage she is at home on and find herself before a small but far more risky audience: upon which she does not bridle (after all, she warms to him, if, granted, now with some cute irritant of fear, some additive that does not yet subtract though it could strike in the midst of anything, of
love,
like a woken tapeworm track), and handling the back of his neck, "Do you
know
Shakespeare?" she asks, "do you know
Hamlet,
do you know his loyal friend Horatio who is around at the end, isn’t he?, to pick up the pieces? What’s it matter what small closet stage downtown, what auspices?—Momo is my friend and—" drawing her lover to her so that, of their four hands, only the fingers of her left upon the back of his neck come into play, breast to breast, leg to leg, she hears his breath intervene, "It was not Momo—"

"—you were thinking of?" she finishes, knowing, though, that he meant
calling (phoning)
not
thinking,
so who but his mouth inquires finely of the skin of hers, smiling she is certain, neither asking nor telling her, "Oh Ford North is not your friend in that sense, I think": so that both of them are in control, shared (less than two but for the moment more than one); and she’s for a second French, then for a second a grain of history, as Sayao’s emerging equal in
Boheme
(she won’t do
Boheme,
she prefers to avoid lingering coughs) or a gifted girl from a legendary hemisphere who heard the great American Iago in Buenos Aires and upon speaking to him later in Europe got invited to visit him and his wife in Greenwich, Connecticut, at his "South American house," paid for by tours through Rio and B. A. up until Evita banned American singers, from Iago on up or down: no, Luisa is Clara’s and yes definitely Clara’s husband’s friend, what would she give up for this?, but she is being thought of at this instant, nor would she believe in living through others’ thoughts of her, yet has done it, she has
been
that priestess mother murderer, she could not otherwise have raised her acting hands so rarely through three hours of onstage carrying-on (she’ll
look
at hands always, she knows the hands of four heads of state, always looks); uses her own onstage so sparingly it has been noted in the press—could not have stood before her audience and on occasion turned her back to them all, stood so still in the flesh of that living "house," the mass, the masses who (of customers, that is) alone matter if they take her away with them so there can be still more value of her and more, multiplied, spread everywhere—so there, Father, and yet she will be to Clara, woman to woman, in this way more resonant, a friend even should she become so active a compatriot she’ll risk her skin, even her still clean Swiss passport, a risk worth being not less than a friend with Clara and her aloof husband who once recently had rather hear the opera at home, and Luisa here in her home, a vastish unused apartment with a duplex kitchen where you can get a balcony’d view of an egg frying, knows, too, that all this sea of rapture, this air winding out from her passion, her art, also gets shut off the minute the show stops and the curtain call smiles its (one) way into the eyes of a thousand people now standing to go elsewhere with or without her.

"You exist," comes the soft voice touched off by her fingers on the back of his neck, "in the hearts of so many people; have you ever thought about that?" and she laughs loud a simple laugh from her sex, from which then comes "Where are they
now?"
so she in her words can just think what it might be to be him, not so much with a slight (pretty unimaginable) erection in the dark—puce? prepuce? she must see!—as with his wide, taut chest about to meet hers, yes—and no notion amid the small sweep of his male but threatening propaganda that she has, through some new dependency (that’s banana-peeled between present and future), left him in this scented and odored bedroom (made larger not smaller by the bed) if not escaped him into an event, discovered her same old self in an event she didn’t order curtains for, for where would they hang?, hence an event she couldn’t escape—

—oh she’s more real? ‘z that it? oh she’s reckoning a political or national conscience into the cost of her tax-relieved Alpine passport? (while hearing her father once call nationalism just another brand of competition which is death next to cooperation)—

—oh let no one call her more real now than when vicariously singing, singing all these years, but—

—is she then recklessly involving herself in the for-the-moment gratuitously naval intelligence officer’s pursuit of happiness, being authentic, plus some knowledge or intelligence of her apparent friend Clara’s exile-economist husband whom Luisa might in some womanly (or theatrical) way unveil to her lover: because there isn’t enough drama in her life—or in lieu of having a child? (her medicine man speaks within her like the trace of the expelled worm)—

—let no one call her less than friend to Clara now after how many months of the New York sojourn of Clara and her husband (who is or is not imperiled, for a lot of people seem not to know, yet): yet suddenly it’s
would-bt
friend, for Clara may hate her if she knows who she’s been sleeping weeth, or Clara might not want to understand what’s between Luisa and this man whose national employers’ planned violence has over it like a blinking sign the alternating hence moving words both of save Chilean business and Chile’s old families, yet words, too, of her own father’s house-arrested position which now she feels but also because she ought to feel it and in varying words which may be not how many thousand persons the conjurers in power like population controllers cause to disappear behind the very wall those about to vanish stood against a moment past,
but
how many millions the persons in power
represent;
and all the time there (for is she growing by necessity more intelligent?) alternately appears like a sign the mere fleshly face of a father who brought her and a brother and others, always others, sometimes quite silently along solemn (damn serious) mountain paths, casual precipices in her little hook-and-thong boots so she wondered if at the height of the hike they would find again a coterie of serious men smoking in a room talking hushed or angry (though the amount of smoke held constant) led, inspired, moderated by the man her father who expected possibly nothing of her, a mystery, she couldn’t tell, she’d seen him close those eyes of his listening to her sing at the age of seventeen, seen him close his eyes and frown as at some idea, while also he sent her a telegram here and there, or once upon a time and then again, like a bouquet of local flowers, Milan, Los Angeles (where she
really
ate), London, Vienna, "take it back to the birds and the bees and the Viennese" Momo’s
pouf sang
upon Momo’s piano one night in Momo’s apartment building which God help us is just where Clara goes to the women’s workshop, which couldn’t be any less helpful (at least, if one were thinking of taking it) than a very, very tall young American woman poet who did not know that she was pretty—from cheekbone to upper knee and all, she was secretly pretty (and her adored daddy had called her "giraffe" until the day he died! animals first,
then
habitat, for she’s) secretly pretty instructing Luisa that Luisa’s country equaled some (no doubt American-made) shadow: O.K., Chile is a long shadow, O.K., good (and why is she listening moist-eyed to this girl in a noisy, aromatic room? she knows all the ways to get away politely, and all the other ways), yet (And do you come from a line of poets?) she with a Swiss passport gotta wait for this long shadow spoken more from the secretly bruised eyelids, melancholy and self-swelled, than from the wonderfully wide (not wide open but wide-long) eyes of the young woman—a shadow (she’ll swear) "cast" (maybe out of one of her own poems) "by the lapping sea which is the overlapping silence of the world breaking upon the hemisphere, a ghost coast like a mapmaker’s lost lore"—Luisa’s homeland, Luisa’s country down there a million miles under New York, "a planet," the girl goes on, "a planet in essence long" (and does this description of Chile make the American
poeta
political?—heavens no! only nostalgic for a nation she has not yet visited for Christ’s sake): let
that poeta
help herself, O.K.? . . . "what is in others ..." (but these words ... do they ask, do they interrogate? or do they tell you? or are they part of words to come?) . . . You asked if I came from a line of poets, senora? oh God no!—did you ever hear of a financier named Jay Gould and did you ever hear of the blizzard of 1881 ?—(she had heard of the blizzard, actually)—O.K. you heard of the blizzard, well it blew down the telegraph lines and Jay Gould had to keep sending his rapid-fire orders to his broker in the stock market—(was the poet descended, then, from Jay Gould?)—and his broker was doing O.K., too, you can be sure—(was the poet descended from Mr. Gould’s broker?)—No, senora, so Gould sent a messenger through the snow with his buy and sell orders, the fastest he could find and, well, the boy was kidnapped—(ah, you are descended from the messenger boy)—let me finish, senora, and Gould’s rivals put another boy who looked just like the kidnapped boy in his place who would tell them day to day what Gould was selling and what he was buying—(ah, you are descended from the lookalike)—No, from the boy who was kidnapped: he survived . . .

Are these words that ask, that interrogate, are they part of words to come? ... as in this same noisy room one man, two men, three men, all (though she’ll guess their occupations) unknown to Luisa who is so gloriously known to them at this reception on a Sunday before the new production, a different magic lantern in each set of season-subscribing eyes, all with attentive mouths (and noses!) each with raw carrot stick and glass of urine-tinted wine, approaching made the literary girl in the midst of further utterance perhaps fade proudly away into the rest of the room with a chandelier, two chandeliers more heavy with glass than light, and a large bell on a leather-and-mahogany bar that the Australian consul will pick up and ring in a moment—fade proudly away and toward no one special when she could have been talking to Luisa the diva, the opera
singeuse
(joke, we get gladly from her and she throws back to us half knowin’ we’z there only as
{qua)
need for change as we’z individuals being we’z race and we didn’t get wise to this overnight and haven’t even yet, which is why we’z currently angel-human alternant, you mayba gon’ not like this—halva takah chances—truth be maybe not so true as ye made up) so that to adapt to Manon’s or Piaf ‘s language (not Bidu’s or Luisa’s) Luisa’s own adoptable New York accent (turnoffable, turnonable depending you pay the bill) in order to double or treble or make her ever-various self even more many in the also still
singular
(if pidgin) French
of singeuse,
which does not in French exist, gave her a kick, hence some precious sense of entertaining herself, a solitary pay for those who are incorporated and much in demand, and, not wanting these three men whose lives might be waiting to become hers, nor anyone she can think of except Clara maybe, nor quite wanting the twenty-two (odd)-year-old
poeta
(who’d understand Luisa probably much better than Chile) to come back to confirm from just what collaboration there has come to Luisa’s brain through her ears—or (!) vice versa! —the words
What is in others yet has others in it?
and she is having help, she knows it, to hear those words and to know that it doesn’t matter if these people, the "others," are part of a statement or of an interrogative, she’s having help from somewhere, inspiration from the foothills (thank you), or from a dreaming person possibly whom she has never listened to, a mother in her (say) that she wished to be to her own father—the
poeta
would understand this of all things—when in 1950 or so he opened the great door to look at her standing fifty feet away beside a grand piano that was an intelligence in itself, with a tall window bright with a sky like sea beyond her singing voice upon which he shut that door again as if to say, You are here and I am elsewhere—he was then himself moving someplace: while she, with whatever back-straightening and shoulder-yearning, stayed where she was unless interrupted by herself or her teacher or the thought that her father had poked his nose through that door to look beyond her to the sea view out that nineteenth-century window: while the heavens knew we’z content to be foothills or her own mother herself, since we in never staying still might, since the sea becomes us, shrug seaward albeit thus yielding Easter or other half-known isles,
or
fault our half-known funking ways upward to Andes we may have felt we had to try being for ourselves however many (granted, temporarily) missing per-sonae would tell us convincingly what it was (you know) like to be ye Andes when not even her former resident tapeworm could tell (apart from living the—take it day by day—reality of) what it was like to be her or at least a parceled part of her team: but relation as we but are of her we found it not easy to swing away from her of late, since her vicarious habits kinda worked both directions, so, in process of getting suddenly real, she was living us, and only the sternest kind of asshole talk was going to keep her from going kind of crazy upon the creation of the distance necessary to move on, which us had to do constantly anyhow, being ourself as essentially relations as the coast of that ghost country
is
that country so long as its length is long: yet even then, our semi-amorphous, multicellular shrug-forth that draws along from behind our lengthening, contracting proposition, which will seem at times a century in question, at other places a curve of something like land, and at others a conclusion we drew that then drew us: and so, to get that distance from her, we were all (be quiet, be quiet) hearing us say, quote, "She is, but now we see always
was,
in a dependency structured to cope better than it knew with a multiplicity of small-scale" yow-knows, say ongoing kinship not to be either totaled
(qua
dependency) or—