Women and Men (155 page)

—that is, my meditations before and after divined what must happen for the high-risk development of powers I had no name for then, God curse me and curse your obsessed but (I Jiave to think) good questions, Jim Mayn, curse you, though—

—that is, when Larry’s sad, fucked-up letter (for you’ve brought people into my field who I then know have often already been there) reported hearing your ladyfriend namely Jean worried herself about you (lucky you!) because you "confessed"—not "claimed"—you’re in the future doubling back upon the past which is our present to see it and us so plausibly that it exists— claiming to her nonetheless that you’re not the type for this deranged stuff, not crazy, not off the wall (like me, or, come to think, the sleaze who hung out with our fine
senor),
nor did you honestly think the future yet exists—

why, it came to me, Brother Mayn—and who says you ain’t crazy as a container ship full of do-it-yourself corn kernels that pass like a shadow over a vein of heat gushing up beamed geyser-like single-minded as lasers bombarding a tornado and no one in designing the containers and the container-ship allowed for these billions of kernels growing like plant cells out of control in the next century or the next room into—call it—popcorn but is it growth or death?—it came to me and my freedom to receive the before and after so they dissolve—that whatever the giant differences in how you look but given the fact I have never seen the two of you together, you and the Chilean’s associate Spence may be one and the same and don’t say no, Jim, because in the great community where the colloid’s facets of human light do not escape us but do not settle either nor readily filter out, this identify of Spence and you might be true—

—that is, with another particle of me, not cruel like the van driver’s voice that gave me back Ruth’s words, I later learned what I knew already. I knew what I was going to do that night though above this meditation went the traffic of particles trucking helter-skelter up the river of the city until—

—that is, having had it up to here, I told Kallman—several bikes still between us—where did he get off blabbing about me and Ruth Heard when he hadn’t been up there in her apartment? What was he shooting off his face to the van driver
(which
van driver?) (what’s-his-name who shared the apartment with Ruth Heard, Miriam’s and my substitute teacher back in school) (—is there any
other
Ruth Heard? cracks the Hungarian and answers: Oh there’s only one Ruthie, we threw coffee mugs at each other over Hungary, I threw a wet cake of soap at her and it hit a picture of Karl Marx and busted the glass—you mean Fred Monk, who painted my apartment, oh Fred Monk I saw him last week, I sold him a three-speed for his little girl)—

—that is, the van-driver-turned-apartment-painting-contractor had known Ruth Heard did business with the German storekeeper Mrs. Erhard and later that afternoon, cutting it so fine you might say I had already given by default my new car-rental job a trial, finding her with her back to me on the phone, I slipped a few copies of the early
Post
onto the sidewalk before entering the store; I stood across the glass counter with its breath sweeteners (or is it suppressors?) and asked Mrs. Erhard, who seemed upset, if the English woman Ruth Heard who had once had a standing order here had had a friend called Fred Monk with one bad eye, a white streak right across the eye; and when she didn’t know what to say as if I had something on her, I kidded her: I said, Mrs. Erhard, that little pistol you got’s going to go off and hurt somebody someday you’re bound to get robbed as long as you got it on the premises, and her face with the big round cheeks was saying, Do you really think so, but she said, "Yes, she would come here and wait for him, and use the phone, and sometimes he didn’t come and she was very mad and talked to me like we were close friends—"

—that is, I didn’t go right to Mrs. Erhard from Kallman, I went and phoned Miriam at her office and made her talk to me. We hadn’t gone together in months. I said I’d like to take her father to court for bad-mouthing me. She kept saying, "It’s so long ago, it’s so long ago, it’s so long ago—" and had to hang up amid—

—that is, Kallman claimed that I had it wrong, as he slowly approached through his ranks of bicycles^—no, man, it wasn’t him who spoke to Monk about me and Ruth, it was Mir’s father who had spoken about me and Ruth to him Kallman, but it was so long ago, you know—

—that is, Ruth on the day of the raincheck had been reading her air edition of the London
Times
and opening it out to continue the article she was reading, and when she noticed me and we spoke, she looked at her watch, she had on one of these heavy sweaters with buttons down the front and a collar, the Colloid Unconscious divides and divides its particles, faceting faster than light so light pauses relieved to be no longer champion—

—that is, Kallman, definitely not smiling as he reached me, heard the very tall woman in the baggy overalls with large smoked glasses and the aviator’s leather cap skull-tight with the earflaps snap-tight under her chin call from where she’d been left staring at the racing bike up on the platform, Hey is anybody selling bicycles around here?—and called again, while I traded words with Mr. K., who, looking all around the store, waved an assistant, a girl with Italian words all over her T-shirt, away from a young boy in a baseball cap and toward the aviator woman, then turned back to me: "Miriam’s father said you were sneaking up to the apartment of that Communist teacher, he said you were always a no-good, I’m just telling you what he said"—

—that is, there’s nothing wrong with Mrs. Erhard, she remembered me from way back, her life is simple, she opens up seven-thirty, has her coffee in a container with a grain of saccharin and a bagel that she breaks in two and nibbles the second half all morning and she closes up at seven
P.M.
sharp when she’s had time to sell most of her late edition; and if she knew I threatened to expose Kallman to Miriam and her father for playing around in the bathroom with Ruth Heard, whose father rode an old black bike to work every day of his life, she would have better things to do than worry about threats. Still, I wondered if she paid anybody off. She was a little upset, probably because I was. For these things communicated themselves in our last (which seemed final) visit, when I told you, Jim, after you said the London
Times
never used to have "continueds" but would end the article on the page it began on, that I was so finely cut into the faces of your particles, their dividing swirl, their timeless beamings, riverings, and wheelings, that I knew you were in big trouble over something, maybe the Chilean, but when the Cuban Brigade leader came on TV with a bag over his head I felt Colloidal Unconscious drawing you near me. I said to Mrs. Erhard someone must have pulled a
Post
from the bottom of the pile because there’s copies all over the sidewalk, could I pick them up for her, but she squeezed out from behind the counter without looking at me as if she’d had it up to here, and went outside and I slipped behind the counter but not to give her job a dry run (smile) and put my hand under the counter and there it was—

—that is, we’d both had it up to here, and Miriam knew it when I told her I had to talk to her father, tell him a thing or two about what she said oh God it was so fucking long ago, and find out why he still had to bad-mouth me after all this time I’m off the scene, I’m her past, I’m not the boyfriend anymore; and she said, Please don’t get into a confrontation with Dad, a shouting match, it’s not going to help matters, is it? But I, being in the more developed state, could tell she would not hang up on me this time, and I hung up on her—’That’s it, Miriam," I said—("That’s it," one black guard at a side door of the Tombs in Lower Manhattan called to a second black guard standing beside the rear door of the correctional bus, stockpiled schoolbus, with its steel-mesh windows which from outside can seem like grime shading the interior, where some insane kid with a little beard calls sex to a couple of girls talking especially intently as they pass the bus and us in it, its rear door now closed upon the one-way all-inclusive tourists who are their own bag self-addressed to be consumed, wasted, or invested)—

—that is, with no place to turn from Miriam, from Kallman, from the van driver who meant me no harm and had inaugurated a profit-sharing plan that gave the artists he employed (to resculpture and cover with two coats of oil-base paint walls in which the customer would then drive hooks to hang other artists) marginal increments of time or other possibilities of experience into which increments of money might be translated, I needed to talk with Ruth M. Heard to ask her—

—that is, about the basic unit of value; but as I wrote Larry, I had not yet found the obstacles that would stand in its way to make me look for it—

—that is, I might have hunted the painting contractor down to finish what he had started when he’d given me Ruth’s story of what she and I had done during much of the two hours even my mother (who said I was all she had) had learned I had spent there because to tell the truth no one had told her—

—that is, beyond little Gonzalez identifying for her who the person was who had rested a hand on my shoulder in the street—

—that is, I went to see my mother, who was in the kitchen on the phone listening to my sister I could tell by her tone of the tired survivor now beyond the struggles of others, a bag of groceries on the table, another with a six-pack in it I could tell by the straight-up sides of the brown paper, and she looked at me and pointed to the clock and looked back at me but didn’t say what she meant because I know she didn’t want my sister to know that I was not at my new job at this hour of a jam-packed day, and she continued to listen with consternation in her eyes until smoothing the gray-brown hairs that had sprung late-afternoon frizzy out of the tight-pulled-hair combed back along her head flat and rolling her tensely blinking eyes around as if my sister’s long-winded stories had made my mother forget and forgive all there was to forget and forgive facing her in the freshly linoleumed kitchen I already recall (but why do I say "already," is it some prompting from a facet of you, Jim?, only a facet when you are tuijned also outward toward perhaps our Chilean said to be involved by his associate Spence in some plot to be exported with an anti-Castro cover possibly from this very multiple dwelling while you shake your professional head allowing that there might be something in it but one hears these stories) my mother pointed at the clock again and meant, I knew, my father, and wanted no fight about whatever the meaning was of my appearing at this hour—
so it’s about time you started paying rent, you drink my beer and eat my food,
and I left—

me to be between my mother -that is, when her voice

—that is, I was down the stairs when I heard our phone above me and knew my father was always a half-hour later than my mother said because he sat at the last stool at the end of the bar at the corner, sat in the window looking out, talking to a couple of his friends whom he hardly looked at but would sometimes interrupt wtyle watching the world go by—well, he would not be as yet climbing the stairs of our building; and so there was no one for

and—

as close to a cry as my Christian name permits came solitary down the old stairwell and I knew the phone had been ours, and I let myself out as gently as I could in the knowledge that the two phone calls my mother had found herself between had kept me from sitting down with her and saying, Look, Mom, no excuses asked but I come this close to taking the advice I wish I could have got all of from my substitute teacher, this close today, but I run into this fellow Fred Monk and I can’t wait for the rest of Ruth M. Heard’s advice, Mom, I’ve had it up to here and you have with me I know—

—that is,
she
found
me
between first my sister’s phone call and my dad’s arrival home her habitual hour or half-hour early, and second my sister’s phone call and a call I caused, though I never thought later to ask which of the possibles it had come from, conveying the information that I, Foley, was thought to have on me a small pistol—borrowed lady’s piece—and had my mother seen her son George Foley?

—that is, I loved her and she me and she had never said a word to anyone but me a year before, to wit "What do you want with that woman she was fired three times and she’s old enough to"—

—that is, I found New York very big and very small at that moment, Jim, you’ve said the same observing that in your memory the city was neighborhood enough, walking your little girl to the school bus stop though at the time as you later told her the city seemed too big and too harsh to be a neighborhood that now in memory you may think it really was all the time because your family’s there wherever you were, Jim, in your sundry travels, you have a son, too, so where’s he? I know you wonder if you should have left—

—that is, I had been looking at electrical equipment in one window and then boats in another, rubber, wood, collapsible boats, I knew I was beginning, I was on Broadway across Union Square from the bench or tree where some historic bomb went off—no legs lost
that
time—and I walked north magnetized by my will—is there a guitar in that street window of the Flatiron Building still?—east on Twenty-third Street fingering a pistol I wasn’t friends with, by the high gray wall of life insurance with a giant clock up there someplace (is it there still?)—post office on the left, hardware on my right side, oyster bar at Third and Twenty-third (still there?), then the public library branch on my side, School for the Deaf across on the left (am I right, Jim?), doughnut counter, and I turned down First Avenue wanting to get where I was going my
own
way, passing the multiple-dwelling development across First on my left named after an early New York settler-crook no doubt, on my right the liquor store, newspaper stores, meat market (not my mother’s), a jumble of steady money-makers whatever they say, all the Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican settlers on this frontier of noise more or less happy in their daily work, many gone home, me just the opposite; past the street where the precinct waits barricaded by all its squad cars double-parked: and before I know it, I’m along Fourteenth Street thinking west and I’ve stopped for a cup of tea and a blueberry blintz and the sky is darkening but not the city, and curbing my westward aim I bend north into Park Avenue South understanding in my magnetic will that all I wanted was to confront Miriam’s father with his socially unnecessary remark at this late date about me and tell him I hardly ever
saw
Miriam and what was I to him or her, or Iris, or their well-kept tenement in whose reaches, well above the electrified interlinked waste-disposal system, I had so transiently visited a vacant "railroad" with the daughter who my own father never spoke of now—though I didn’t always follow him from (frankly) quite cheerful coffee and fresh light cream and glazed doughnut with my mother at the kitchen table through a repeat two hours later at the garage (no fresh cream) through all that friendly talk turning up and changing the oil of big New Jersey cars until their owners, their mat of meshed hair woven all colors across their scalp, reentered the open-ended, dark garage at four as if to get in and drive away with hardly a glance at the white worksheet clamped with a wiper to the windshield, through to his curved corner of late-afternoon saloon and the shared corner of (call it) Life with two guys talking and him almost never looking at them but when I spied him from across the street staring quite happy (frankly), to his speechless reentry into the apartment to go straight to the icebox, then the bathroom, then his chair, never mentioning Miriam any more so why should Miriam’s father pile insult onto exile talking of me when his cup was running over and he had a half-Jewish Hungarian son-in-law-to-be with a late-model foreign car and a surplus of new business every week Kallman claimed he couldn’t handle, and occasional Sundays to please his bedridden widower father he might go to church with Mir’ and Iris and Eddie when he and Miriam were not otherwise engaged driving up the Hudson, down rockbound hairpin curves, along tree-guarded parkways, their bike wheels in the bike rack turning faster and faster hanging in the clean air: all these little things expanded to take up the strange gaps between one year and another, what has Foley been doing? (I heard you ask as if you had said it out loud in my presence)—as stalled as our Chilean incognito at his foundation research sinecure who wrote me that he might as well be our Thomas Jefferson riding through imaginary Andes to see for himself proof of the Universal Flood by the testimony of shells at fifteen thousand feet—there was Ruth M. Heard, a fighter, a brilliant woman, on an immigrant visa questioning our system but whooping it up, here one year, gone the next, back, gone, living her future while talking about the present, providing some action for us slower settlers like me and Gonzalez who had been delivering some plumbing supplies to Ruth’s building around the time my postgraduate school was letting out (smile) that fateful day of the raincheck walk home—"well, at least you’re a dropout, Foley, you don’t have one of those diplomas to keep in working order, you’re free," I thought in her words, fatefully walking round and round, in a narrowing circle you could call it, cutting out Broadway, then Park, cutting out Twenty-third, Twenty-second, cutting out First Avenue, cutting out Fourteenth Street, Fifteenth Street, coming toward whatever was waiting in me, not at all the geographical center of the great oblong of city streets I was narrowing, the Puerto Rican who was still dividing the high cakes of Sicilian pizza waved to me as I passed, and was it my magnetic foresight that his raised hand through the window seemed to stay raised in a long, too-long "Hello, Georgie," and was it my imagination that, when I looked from the bright TV screen and the window of the bar where my father would long since have had his final going-home beer to the curb that had been as vacant as three in the morning a moment ago, I found a squad car in the streetlamp light and two young cops seated below me so I let go the small pistol, and, presently reaching the narrowest circle of my developmental approach, I turned into the school block, the playground where no matter how luminous High Kool’s stormcloud-albino hands, I don’t see them n’more—past the wooden stand outside Mrs. Erhard’s little store taken in for the night, to the corner where stood waiting for me Louise the roughest kid in the class. No one ever saw her pull a knife on a boy but what she said was meant for you and she swung her shoulders just that little bit when she walked so you knew she didn’t care what she did; she said, "Hey Georgie, you got a mustache." I hadn’t seen her in months, not consciously, maybe years, same old dry cleaner, supermarket, very unhip haberdasher, drugstore, dress shop, palm reading, in that neighborhood you didn’t count the months or years; it wasn’t a bad neighborhood, Jim, she had her hair drawn up in a kerchief with a couple of rollers bulging, she’s Italian as plum tomatoes, Italian as a life-long widow sitting on her folding chair in a doorway in the evening, Italian as a church festival banner stretched across the street, none of these things is Louise (sorry), and she was smoking a cigarette against the railing above the basement Chinese laundry, and she had a little girl with her though it’s late and I could almost have stopped to shoot the shit with her, she’s tall and fantastic-looking. "Where you working, Louise?" And I think not that she would pull off a job someday because we often thought that, and there were rumors besides; but what I thought was Louise had liked me, I mean at the moment she looked over her shoulder when we got out of the New-York-Revolutionary-History-Tour van and I was looking at her; and now, years later, Mrs. Erhard’s pistol’s in my jacket pocket and I could dump it in the corner sewer, I could go back half a block and put it under the door— Yeah, Jim, I know the joke but this is true, there’s no way I could leave the piece at Mrs. Erhard’s so it wouldn’t be seen, but drop it down the stinking, smoking sewer to music playing someplace—sure I could have, but I was in love at that instant with the roughest girl in the class, and I say, "Hey they didn’t have bombs like ours in those days," and she gives me the biggest smile and long-drawn-out "Hey r/ght, right" and I couldn’t look at her or the three-year-old kid holding her hand and eating a pink ice cream, and I say over my shoulder, "You’re beautiful, kid, you’re beautiful," and hear behind me, "I never knew you cared," kidding or true, and I’m very clear I can’t go round n’more, there’s no room, the AC working smooth at last, the magnetic field rotating free, I’ll have it out with Miriam’s father, that’ll be it—help I give myself.