Women and Men (176 page)

He had told a couple of things to a nice neighbor named Norma one night shortly before Spence’s name entered
her
ear, touched (and probably lowered) her consciousness (itself less "raised" by the woman Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops than reassured by the stories of other women and the gentleness that let the heart speak for variety more than bitterness, at least to Norma, who made Mayn think maybe his own wife could have been helped in workshops like these though he still did not understand why they had relinquished each other); and Norma conveyed to him some of this gentleness, and while deep rainless thunder-pockets cracked the long clefts of Manhattan (which would have been the name for New York if Mayn had had a say) he told Norma that the woman who had been neither Mom nor Mama, yet Mother, and
his,
had told him to go away, to become himself, and then
she
was the one to go, and that way of putting it was the mystery, not what’d happened. Norma did not dispute this. The advice, she pointed out, was still good. But, she heard Jim (this nice, only moderately articulate-seeming, modestly macho man) muse humorously, his mother had taken her own advice, which people didn’t always do. But what was the trouble? asked Norma—that Sarah was s’posed to let
him
go ahead first and do what she after all had said he was s’posed to do? Norma liked Jim more than a little, and whatever it was was gladly unspoken. He tells her that clouds heal the air. She likes that, but she wants to ask him what he’s
feeling.

"You know where I heard
that?"
he said, and then, "Why I think I said that myself, that clouds heal the air. Almost unprintable."

Norma said Grace Kimball for all the enmity she laughingly bore men would say maybe Mayn’s mother listened to the good advice she was giving her son—a man—and one day decided to—

"—She wasn’t well," he said.

She waited.

"Go on and say it. It’s O.K."

"Decided to take some of it for herself."

"You don’t know," he said, unable to tell her, but feeling passion staggering stagy through his heart, the self-pity of cloaked melodrama.

He knew Norma wanted to ask, What happened with her? To leave a husband, two boys, a home, her things! He waited, for a time, to speak, and knew in his shadowy sense of immediate future time that he would have the chance, and saw for the first time that this sense meant he cared about her. He wanted to know, Did Norma ever have people she’d been getting ready all her life to see?

"Well,
you.’9

He didn’t mean himself!

"You mean you look forward to knowing them?"

He guessed he meant that.

"No you didn’t," she said. But she didn’t press him. She said she didn’t buy all of Grace Kimball, her best traits were warmth and intuition that gave her listening a power of itself—though she was supposed to have had enormous influence on dozens of women breaking up relationships—no, that was putting it clumsily, but ... the workshop did get heavy, you know dogmatic—inner-clean, clean-break, get rid of all that furniture, honey—but Grace you know was still in the place she had lived with her
husband
in, though so what?, but the workshop’s too supportive, so much womanness you sometimes aren’t sure it’s old-time female, but Grace she liked, she had such a lot of bounce in her, she put her hand on your wrist rather than put you down—a beggar on the street with a brown paper bag over his head with eyes, a crazy old lady Grace told her of, some bum she’ll stop as if she’s barefoot too, give him a buck, tell him about A.A., she sees things so simply but what she says about men and history gives her all this preachy power and influence but when she uses it in all the talking she does (which includes putting
down
words, words!) it’s humor and a little-girl ("little-w^m^m"?!) changeableness breaking habit patterns (being constantly her funny, bumptious self . . .) that is left with you like some good medicine that hasn’t anything to do with power and living-room politics, well Jim knew what she meant, didn’t he? Norma asked— Grace always meeting the most ungodly people, you know what I mean—

—have to get around to meeting this woman, there’s a Lucille in her group of friends, isn’t there?, who sounds like someone I knew—

—the strangest people, this red-bearded Canadian economist who O.D.’s on pastries and attends—

—Which one? Mayn asked; I know two of those.

Do they attend swings?

Do you? asked Mayn—wait, what’s a swing? ... oh yeah.

With tea and apricots. Maybe these other street weirdos "came" to Grace or something.

(Are there never any
women
bums? Mayn murmured, and then answered his own question, Of course, of course: they’re sleeping in the doorways with their bundles—as if he had to find out all over again what he didn’t know he knew.)

—like an old, irritable man shepherding a demented and beautiful old lady, Grace is looking them up again, she liked them. The man’s a wonderful grouch, very serious, the old woman spoke of his laboratory but obviously didn’t know what she was talking about.

Don’t be too sure, Mayn said.

Then one night Norma received a call which was like a call from Spence. A woman in Norma’s Body-Self Workshop, who evidently did not know that Mayn lived in the building, had been concerned by a phone call from a certain Spence who asked if she knew that her friend Flick Mayn had once lived in the multiple dwelling where her workshop met, attended significantly by a woman suspected by a visiting south-of-the-border counter-intelligence ‘‘enforcer" of collaborating to set up a major act of leftist bloodshed plus the abduction of a venerable Masonic socialist who’s father to this woman’s friend who’s herself more famous than her father and recently seen with a distinguished young naval officer known to be diplomatically trouble-shooting for the regime now in power in her country which may be Chile in her heart and soul and body but not on her passport. "Yeah, sure, the opera singer," Mayn answers promptly, "and I think I know the other woman you’re talking about; but bloodshed?"

But the new friend of Mayn’s who has phoned him this data, Norma, residing in his building and with whom he had talked only two days before deeply about his life yet leaving out one huge space of Fact, now asked him if it was true, as Spence said, that his mother had committed suicide—the one huge fact—and that he had investigated it; and he said very calmly, that there’d been nothing
to
investigate, nothing to look into, there was a note, a boat, perhaps a motive. She did not ask why he hadn’t told her before, and he was privately impressed because he should have told her—because they had talked about Sarah’s leaving as the thing she had originally told Jim
he
should do—which, granted, was just a parent telling a kid to make his way in the world, though advice inspired by disappointment.

Mayn remembered Spence being in the bar years ago because he had responded typically to hearing Jim tell Ted about—yes—the day (was Mayga there, too?) when he as a boy in a raincoat had questioned a man surf-casting who had sensed something terrible in the questions and had changed the subject—"Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that"—but when Jim asked if he had seen bodies come in or if a body might sink for good for sure, the man looked back at the high, windy breakers (oh yes, that’s the name of a fine old firetrap hotel, The Breakers) on the Jersey shore, and later when he asked another man down at the pier about the incident, the boat, etcetera, why the man laughed and said there were things that mattered more—gratuitous remark that Mayn recalled ever afterward as being revealing of the quality of, well here come deep waters, "so much" (as very serious folk are wont to say) "so much" that is our life right up to but not including what we call history but do not ever grasp, "un . . . photograph . . . able," but is this a view of history even in its absence? as Ted used to say to Jim, Ted now has a hard knot of cells in his neck on the right side "arrested but merely resting" (Ted jokes very precisely and Jim knows the cancer is memory but can’t take the thought anywhere, potential force resting up inside you that you can’t tap for yourself except, in its time, to launch you out of here). Ted goes on working out of Washington, and now during these curiously pressing days somewhere going round in Jim he found Spence out making a buck, a nickel, again, and recalled he had agreed with Ted he had been hard on Spence, this this this . . . words had refused him like angels flapping humorously at the dim margins of his eyesight, words that were actually there already put, already remembered—this little bastard (simpering scavenger, looking, looking, sniffing, listening) . . . but wondering now, a decade and more after that chat with Ted, if Spence had acquired data Mayn knew nothing of, he phoned Washington to find that old Ted had just left for San Antonio, and in the gap of this phoned also in Washington his own daughter, who was not home; phoned the Albuquerque woman here in New York to get Spence’s number if any and she had left her hotel; phoned Norma for the other woman’s number but hung up in order to phone Amy to ask if her distinguished Chilean economist, who Mayn had never stopped knowing was there at the foundation, had acquired the opera tickets Mayn and Amy had used from the diva Luisa in person, only to hear
Larry
answer (hey, hooray for Lar’) in a voice very grown-up through a storm, a virtual apparatus, of systematic static Jim-jamming by load factor divided by search-intensity quotient, divided and divided by his journeyman self falling forward in lieu of looking, looking, looking for it might have been Spence
sotto voce
reporting-in with information in the form of a question—or turn that inside out, a mountain of a dream Margaret thought up for him that supposedly the East Far Eastern
Princess
dreamt: a grave she saw into but had no mouth for words, words, words, it was too full—of words? of something solid?—and she dreamt she woke and was wet all over with tears of every feeling you might feel, and she went through maple trees, their leaves’ undersides blowing up palely in the wind, and passed an old swimming hole and got to a pretty field and found the grave of her dream which was so deep that all it had in it was the egg the lion left, not a hair nary a finger of that grave’s tenant who kept at best a low if not departed profile until, surrounded by dirt-tired Indians not dressed for our weather, she felt them edge her toward the grave only to get her attention to tell her
she
had lived the life of this dead person and now
was
this person and ready to go on as such, and, relieved, she told them
they
had no such belief in reincarnation, to which they replied in a unison all the softer because they
all
spoke, that
she
was the one who had told
them:
and when she felt awful about this, they lowered gently into one fluid thicker than blood and as live and glinting as the tongue of the whole world and before she could reach for that egg down there, they simply flowed into the grave, which became the hillside:

: inspired by Spence, who was nonetheless real and if (give him credit) turned down by the U.S. Marines nonetheless
semperfidelis
to know what he would not report himself but package for even Mayn to bear:

: who in turn is uninspired himself no doubt, a journeyman who among the violence of an indelible child’s bike devoid of training wheels falling on a small, caged leg, and the violence of an unknown husband’s head that, with all its holes, would not pass, by terminal magic, through the grid chamber of gut pressure he himself has had strung into his wife’s racket frame so she can kill him, and the violence of an anonymous wife’s love for her husband precisely when he (having spent an evening having Hemingway prove that it’s people that are the matter) is telling her her women’s workshop puts down men, and the violence of a teenage child whose anguished anger normal for her age multiplied by (and perpendicular to) the parents’ separation after years of uncertain vibes (read
frequency,
read
in-frequency)
divides and divides until the simple knowledge is too large to quite see, to wit that when you get to the age when you want to kick your parents around it’s easier if they’re living together, two still one—among all these violences which were not a newsman’s reportable Delaware Water Gap development or income-tax reform or wind energy used right in the backyard (read
roof)
of a Lower East Side apartment building—Mayn could see Pearl Myles on her ambiguous exit from Windrow High School, urging her Journalism Circle swansong fashion to remember that anything might be news but it must be
something, something,
and while you were wondering remember that in the City was where you found—and some snickered, including Jim—"human nature posing in the nude."

Good material for Spence blown adrift in the vitals of a divided history. Looking through Mayn’s daughter’s keyhole in Washington? Or her address book while she’s down at Tradewinds, having a beer, talking to a boyfriend about another apartment, being possessive or being low-key (well, her father himself would like to know, but not through keyholes), or thinking about conflicted parents but about important stuff like her life? Good material for Spence, who come to think of it liked cappuccino and pistachio or vanilla ice cream like a regular person who, disreputable skew-handed trash-purse that he was, had had at least a father or a mother (grant him that!) maybe the bad bean of a good marriage (for that could happen, like wondrous spinoff of a supposedly bad marriage), didn’t seem to need to go to press briefings to find out, for instance, as Ted, who ran into him "retailed" to Mayn, that the unthinkably rich relation of the low-profile Argentine silver magnate who ran the string of eastern papers Mayn worked for for a time had not gone up in smoke with his plane but was redesigning a private golf links surrounding a green-bean plantation once owned by the Presbyterians of Cameroon.