Women and Men (151 page)

Three, four years you seem to have gotten into your head, more years than that join Miriam’s pointed message to mine co-hosted with her dad. Long years in fact afterward her father I am told appeared at the new entrance wing of the prison without visiting permission form plus knowing too well that I could not receive him. His plan was stopped, whatever, and I never asked how he got up here, he never to my knowledge drove.

Through Efrain I have kept in touch. He’s out, as you know because I heard you met him the night he slipped through a pickpocket area suddenly into a warp within warp where your pocket gets a valuable put into it. In touch with the Chilean, that is. Or tried—to be honest.

And he has, the Chilean tried to keep up his pithy letters to me. On economic topics, though he has been encouraged to expand his coverage to those political margins associated with his earlier conversations overheard or not here in visitors’ "quarters" (smile) with friend of reported anti-Castro Cuban in danger of life here inside though reported to be being processed toward some unknown escape and is the Chilean mixed up in that?—it is immaterial, next to that bond between us. Better his letters on full employment, substitutions in the marketplace, the as my friend puts it undoubted motion of corporate inertia against the sinister resilience of this country’s technological inventiveness in the matter of alternative energy though never once at the national level consulting the Colloidal Unconscious as it emerged from body-brain fluid states finding the jump to mind. He names no names, not that of his old friend, the late Dr. Allende, whose fate he I believe sees as his own but I can’t find anything out, I didn’t know the inmate or anyone who did know well the inmate our Chilean gentleman visited that day we met diagonally across the Visitors Counter, there’s a pattern here, no doubt the ever-dividing particles dispersed non-visibly in the colloid total of my self—my whole body is my self, I see; you who may have come among us for political information re: an exile economist and a supposedly pro-Castro Cuban inmate rumored to be set to spring—you have helped me to see it—have plotted in my unconscious this pattern and some message which is to me or from me or both and which will
be
me is in the works. This is more than consolation, as everything worthwhile must be, Jim, and I felt myself, for a sub-micro-instant that’s as small as one of the colloid particles, say it in a Spanish language that I never have studied or learned—you speak it a little, you said, and regret your daughter does not—but the impulse went back into the cloud it came from. Better the instructive letters I now and then receive from the Chilean than those visits Carlos gets from an elder liberal lady with a secret pocket for mints and non-sugar chewing gums in her shiny bag, a lady with scarce a grain of dialectic in her who gives him his subscription to the
Times
and after smiling bravely at him for an hour shows strong, true feeling only when his sister or uncle comes and she plays second fiddle but lately has proven her devotion to truth by a special letter to the Governor reluctantly urging, we hear, that for Carlos’s own well-being he delay Carlos’s clemency despite the seventeen hundred or twenty-seven hundred letters supporting his clemency petition on file in the State House we like to imagine and in a crate of files (the carbons) which Carlos rereads and shares with me by hand since our cells are too far from each other on the gallery for him to read aloud around the corner.

If I do not leave here, I have no need to. The hunt for the unit of value goes on in person and is no respecter of place. Neither is the ever-increasing speed of dual-but-separate-screen grasp, a speed so constant it could be maddening to its host but for the Colloidal Unconscious, its many-faceted spread, calm, content, its endless particles of difference charging the host to make contact from time to time through this medium that adapts itself to centrifugal coagulation-sedimentation to clear things up and to the huge good power mirroring itself in endless division of particles it’s a gift that says we all have it and (let me confess) must misuse it so, Jim—

—so that we penetrate the D-fences, send or receive (i
GOT A NEW BOYFRIEND,
Mir’s message came to me,
ONLY IT’S BEEN GOING A LONG TIME, HE’S AN ACCOUNTANT)
yes, when instead we should be going round and round; and then when we should be sending, receiving, we instead go round and round precipitating a void where the center was. Am I right?

So you came here—well, once a week—started your own brand of social work, more entertaining therefore more valuable than most, at this retirement complex, and it’s how I now have all to myself that family window though you’re almost missing from it, where I see your grandfather with a pistol on the mantel unbending two or three times a year to sing, ‘Tut on your old gray bonnet / With the blue ribbons on it / And we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," almost missing but not quite missing because here you were, singing briefly for a lively audience of cons, a song I’d never heard, and if I hadn’t they hadn’t, though blue ribbon even I a city guy (even now in a multiple dwelling in the country occupied by mainly city guys) know is first prize they pin on a horse at a horse show. Sixty, eighty thousand miles traveled, two or three times round the earth, and still a town boy with a family, though we have pianos in the City too, though none in Miriam’s or my home though I hear the conductor bought my sister a blond-wood upright which no one ever touches, she told me, and you don’t get a man like your grandpa to sing unless he’s accompanied, think who might pass by and look in the window: Foley a generation later, if I broke out—and more interested in how you fit into that window your old white Caddy you bought to give to your daughter in Wash-inton, a grand gesture to be sure at nine miles to the gallon but any guy here could dig it—blue-ribbon horsepower and I’m glad she took your gift in good humor (I sense you’d been unsure): you say the Chilean has a brother in Washington—now that I didn’t know but Efrain (who would never come back to visit) wrote asking if that dealer-duck’s-ass-into-a-ponytail type guy had been back to visit, he’d run into Efrain near Penn Station and asked what he knew about the murder of the wife of a South American newspaper publisher ten, fifteen years ago and had he been in Philadelphia the other day, the economist’s brother was there for some opera singer’s recital—and Efrain is scared—mainly by the guy, not his information, though he would not admit it—but what do they stick your daughter for insurance, she’s under twenty-five, maybe my information is old. But why be so damn
ready
for the future, it’s here, to recall a peculiar point about future you dropped which nobody but me picked up on, so that everybody but me nodded thoughtfully, you know? But a touch of old-fashioned class, give or take a tender valve or two, Jim-Daddy, might even get her an interesting friend or two in the nation’s capital. I wrote letters to the editor once upon a time on the subject of Australia, etcetera, but also of having some good old-fashioned taste in the design and beauty of the automobiles you choose to get into, and I dreamed of seeing an article in the paper with my name on it and of taking Miriam up and down the Hudson River in a hired helicopter, so I must have been looking forward to that corner of your aforementioned window where you can be seen rising off a Manhattan pier in the middle of the day in transit to JFK jet but for the moment watching out the window some cops on the pier, a TV crew, a tugboat, and a diver just coming up the ladder onto the pier in his black rubber suit, TV news possibly but no network sign in evidence and something else wrong with that, you looked back down there as long as you could but—and I, too, sense something in that scene familiar (to you, I mean). Or was it, Jim, that you said sometimes you leave people where they are. ("Very funny," said Efrain, the only one of us then soon to be paroled.) To which I’d add leave some of your stories where they are and don’t look back too close, like at the man and woman upside down in seat-belt harness the blood dry on their alert faces but the car wheels still spinning, I don’t pretend to know where you were, it must have been up in the high magnetic mountains where the air friction’s less (smile), although I grant it occurred to me more than once because Mir’ liked to drive fast, an accident, a fatal accident—well, close the window, if you like—a dual fatality they would have said, leaving us where we were. In time. Oh say her name, Jim, I say her. They can’t hang me for that. Not in the state I’m in (smile) for which the future for all I know may already have developed colloid-boosters to phase out imbalances such as what inclined us two. I mean you and me, since there was little hope for my Miriam to take control of her life. Her father had boxed her in, while only I called her "Mir’."

Dual fatality leaving us where we were, I said.

That way I hold between screens of her which is just my speed back and forth between screens. While life goes on somewhere else, in Chile, in Manhattan, and here, and names do double duty in, say, a room I would aspire to be in in person one day so real you made it for me, the apartment Larry and his father’s, and there was a man whose wife had just had her baby and she was contemplating a chair where she stood by the stereo when a short man with a beard came over and poured her another drink, looking you were sure right through her dress as her husband across the room was too pointedly asking you what you’d do if you learned later that someone else was the father, and you know this guy talking was letting go a little and you looked at his wife who caught your eye so that though she smiled at the guy with the beard she let you know she was uncomfortable and looked from the bearded guy to the chair through you as if a glance at you was the real reason (remember you told me this?) though later she sat down tired but at this moment Larry’s mother walked in the front door which must have been open and Larry’s father said, having forgotten the new father’s dumb question to you, called out, "Sue!"—because he hadn’t expected her, and the guy whose wife had the baby took it as the answer to his question and clapped you on the shoulder, you don’t like him—freeze—cut—frost on the family window but there’s the music, grandpa singing "Your old blue bonnet," Ruth M. Heard disliked singing because she said she couldn’t sing and she thought it was always an excuse not to talk and think, which was why she preferred Scots to Irelanders as drinking companions, but someone is thinking in that New Jersey living room far from current events because a bigger and bigger hole’s being breathed in the frost and there’s your granddad finishing up to applause and the accompanist (it’s your mother, oh yes she played piano too) rising and stepping out of the picture so I feel guilty for hardly seeing she was there, but listen, Jim, I like her, but who cares what I think, I mean in an odd way she’s not there but very much alive, you never got into your family much and I didn’t ask, but it’s definitely a blue-ribbon window, man, I’ll leave them where they are unless they got any objections, like you did a kindness to the woman you know who you spotted crying in the street and stopping by the liquor store and then she went in the phone booth like it was an emergency, it was cool not to offer assistance though you know her though you said so much happening in New York your attention got distracted by three guys on strike in front of the restaurant, I’d like to step into a phone booth, make a call like I used to, though now only to a guy in another block, can’t stay put, know what you mean two places at once, maybe that time you’re in the shower you thought you were in New Mexico because they haven’t got the water out there (no joke if you got arthritis like Aunt Iris have to take three hot baths a day), who’s laughing? someone’s laughing in the shower, you tell me your dream I’ll tell you mine, my uncle’s bar song, oh it’s Miriam, the two of us shivering in our boots a week before St. Pat’s standing like in a phone booth together while she calls home but in a shower stall in a beach house waiting for the water to come on—no, it’s not raining
outside,
I’m telling a true story—and both of us knowing at the same instant why of
course
the fuckin’ water’s been turned off for the winter but a shower wasn’t what we needed as much as a good laugh.

Which was what you had more with Ruth M. Heard (for I’m reminded by one of your queries, Jim, Did little Gonzalez make that back-over-the-head shot before High Kool left the tenth grade or after?).

R. M. Heard had friends, at least the day she walked in and not quite all of us cheered and she said we were going on an educational trip, which substitutes never did, and she had to laugh at that—get out of the classroom situation fast as we can. The friends, three guys, were parked by the playground fence in three Volkswagen vans, no one in authority impeded our descent to the first floor, though at first three girls got together and said they needed permission, they didn’t like this trip obviously, and Ruth Heard said they’d got it the wrong way round, they’d need permission
not
to go, and then she laughed and said they had permission to go to the lavatory . . . no, the water fountain—but urged them to make use of the time (and we’d all realized this wasn’t the last class of the day and we’d be on the trip) and Ruth told them, the three girls who kept staring at one another and no one else, that if anyone came they were to say we were studying City history firsthand and meanwhile sit at their desks and write an account of all they did in the
P.M.
after school was out, even Miriam laughed there, the secretary in the hall office by the front door scowled with her usual confidence, and we had paired off I remember without being told as if we were going to give the New Amsterdam exhibit at the City Museum a repeat visit, which as I remember is a hell of a way, but it was the unknown, that’s why little Gonzalez didn’t slap some kid ahead of him going downstairs in the neck and get poked back, that’s why the black girls didn’t act up as a group, that’s why High Kool paused half bent over the water fountain watching us pass like a thought he had never had before, an unplanned surprise—so we were introduced to our drivers, each of them, our teacher claimed, a rich American—"Light Moving" was the sign on one van, and I predicted to Miriam (who I recall had grabbed my hand after I’d dropped hers and then she’d dropped mine) that the transmission was going to go; and before we knew it our caravan had run a couple of lights and kids were shoving the windows open and we had stopped along one side of Union Square so we could get out and be asked what socialism was and be told who had given speeches here, and someone got Eric mad saying, Hey Eric there’s your father, Eric, of a blond-Afro’d black junky, then back into the vans like a battalion on the move, same seats except Ruth Heard was in our van now pointing out a tree where a bomb went off in eighteen-something, though the very quiet but roughest girl said clearly so we all picked it up, They didn’t have bombs like ours then, but R. M. Heard was asking such things we were too stupid or young for as what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and nobody knew, and someone said, They bombed the tea boat, and when Premier Khrushchev comes for a visit next year what would you show him that would tell him what this country is like? (Fire hydrant in summertime—Yeah, hit oil, man—Gusher City) but soon the fine stone of City Hall was being pointed out in its park by the Brooklyn Bridge which most of us (City Hall) had never seen, and in the middle of telling us that this was where the Flour Riot began with a whole lot of high speeches because flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel which meant that a loaf of bread cost the bakers more to bake and they had less profit, right or wrong?—silence, and a passing patrolman called
Wrong!,
same profit, higher price, Ruth Heard stopped our van and she transferred to the third van without stopping her talk for a minute though I heard through the window that the rioters were marching downtown to offer one of the big flour merchants eight dollars a barrel, and presently we were way downtown near a church so Ruth could show us where an iron door was ripped off and used to batter down the other doors, whereas there was a revolving door now where she pointed. Which when I mentioned this to the old weather-sciencer in a letter he recalled as a building where his (great?) uncle the first New York thinker to weigh wind as an architectural element had hidden a fugitive girl when she was fleeing her "very other self." Jim, I feel you refusing to question me?