Women and Men (207 page)

"Can I see?" he said to her.

She showed him her hand and there was nothing, no blood.

In that future, then, they’d do it together, give up.

That is, split.

Compared to their parents, this was progress.

But oh Christ he knew her! It would have to be exactly mutual, the relenting; and like long-distance phone receivers coming down at the end of a call, it would have to be at the same time.

Was that due to suspicion? Was it stubbornness? United we fall.

He loved her young face. Her father had looked young up to and beyond his death. But she looked at you as if there were something in you that was beyond you. She got like Lucille Silver sometimes and would look at him so he felt elsewhere or like falling apart, scrambled, and she’d musingly say, "I don’t think you care about your work enough—isn’t that crazy?—the thought came to me—it doesn’t make sense, I mean with all the time you’re away doing it—but the thought came to me from you."

Like their daughter Flick, Joy remembered every damn thing he said, or he felt she did, and sometimes more than he, and she knew he had an idea of what it was like to be her—as if the story or thing he’d said that she recalled more of than he had been delivered by him to her sealed—and she remembered not just stories told more than once. She told Flick about Spence and his cemetery story. And the man who sabotaged a wire-service plot at the Lindbergh trial: the plot pretty tacky for these later days of free-lance electronic technicians traveling the AP circuits, old stuff compared to days of video monitor screens that AP bureau staff watch hour by hour; but still a pretty advanced plot for the thirties—to scoop the Lindbergh verdict. And this man, this saboteur of spies, who knew nothing of the lady handwriting expert who, instead of being allowed by the defense to testify, hid out with a farmer for she was afraid for her life, knew the men who were to be secretly stationed up in the old wooden bell tower: for there they were waiting to get word from their own man in the shirt-sleeve-sweltering courtroom below who was the only one in the courtroom wearing an overcoat, he was hiding a transmitter —but the men in the bell tower, poking a head up now and then you can be sure, got along so well with each other that they reached a state beyond mere news—and by the time the jury came back in, the men in the tower were so well along snorting and recollecting other times quietly guffawing that they got the code wrong from the man in the courtroom and in their turn signaled from the bell tower to their relay at an outside phone that the guilty verdict included a mercy recommendation (which it did not) and this news hit the headlines first.

But for heaven’s sake, Lucille’s musical, witty, calm voice of the Now future says, What’s so great about the Lindbergh case, I don’t even like him, what’s so great anyway? I know he was a hero flying the Atlantic all by himself—it was a chance to be alone!—but why did the kidnap sell so big? you can find more awful things to sell than that.

It was an immigrant stealing an heir, said Joy.

Mayn’s own words, pretty near. For he had said—more than once, he saw—"An illegal immigrant appropriating an American hero’s son."

But Joy hadn’t picked up that that answer didn’t satisfy him. He was too dumb to do better, even the ransom notes had been written by someone other than Hauptmann. And he saw that his words coming from Joy had come from him and not just previously but right now (and off balance because of Lucille)—as if he’d said them now instead of quite a while ago.

Listen, said Lucille, that case was a sensation
before
they arrested Hauptmann.

Newsprint can make anything a sensation, Lucille.

That’s my name all right, Jim, but if you want to get personal, do it right. The papers don’t pick up just anything. They had a direct line to the family mind.

It was a two-way flow and it was all one mind, Lucille.

But what did it?

Lindbergh made history.

History made Lindbergh.

No, Lindy made history; newspapers report it; a daily paper is like a molecule of history—how’s that?

Not good, said Lucille.

Not
bad,
said Joy.

She was looking at Jim the way Lucille did, with that precise, clear, yet tediously sexual attention that was like sympathy yet maybe meant to make him need something less good. Need something less good? (He couldn’t say it or feel it better than that, he surrendered to a nation not himself, voices that passed through him. They wanted him to weaken, to say dumb things. Did he hate them?

Wait—hold on—did he hate
anyone?
Displaced at left halfback by the Indian Ira Lee, he’d taken over fullback in the single-wing days of Texas A&M’s line-bucking Kimbrough.) And he said in answer to Lucille, even to Joy: Oh the big deal was wealth and safety, wealth’s safety, the safety of safety—oh (he said, feeling as free as not knowing what came next) safety in a country house with the cash stacked up in the basement with a flag tucked in around it, but—(he ran out of freedom) . . .

Yes?
came a fourth voice after him, a male voice,
Yes?
—money in the
basement
—incredible—unheard of!—and it might have been a brother voice speckled with electronic shivers in transmission and pressing him from an emptiness—a
what?
—but
what
fourth voice, when here he had with him only Joy and her friend Lucille, suddenly
her
friend, and he knew it hadn’t been like that always, not in ‘64, Lucille’s year of the young cop Rick ("Don’t let
me
hear you call cops ‘pigs,’ darling!") nor ‘65, Joy’s year of Wagner and the year of that awful scuffle leaving Wagner on his own floor with nose and neck deflected left and right respectively, but Wagner’s trouble or pain distinctly greater than his assailant’s jealousy, which in its lessening was a new unknown.

—but a fixed trellis up the side of the house must not become a movable ladder, said the semi-retired assailant, how do you like that? how’m I doing?

You’re crazy, said Lucille, that’s how you’re doing. It was men, it was a men’s promotion, said Lucille (who had once been heard to say, like a quietly embarrassing bad joke, that she preferred to be with men
once).

But what if the Lindbergh kid had been a girl, then? said Mayn.

Men even more, said Lucille at once.

Innocent women and children, said Joy between them.

They’ll
say
"my son and heir," said Lucille, but
never
"my daughter and heiress," and even if they thought those words, they’d mean her honor, they’d mean the money that laying her would bring.

A gap occurred, he was sure, and as if he were being commented on beyond him, it was a model invitation to him to be not here, or he was the head of a slain enemy now honored with best tidbits stuffed into its mouth, insert an honorary cigar and a word or two—and if the gap or void was different from him, it still gave off a scent of almond, nature’s unsalted, unskinned almond, sweet wood (familiar but thinned past something or other, the grain, the tongue-dissolving grain or meat of the actual nut)—was it Joy’s shampoo? and was that tongue of his
her
tongue, that dissolved the way crazy people thought they had someone else’s limb, say? And he looked at her hair all around her eyes while she and Lucille looked at him.

And together with this almond essence (bathroom cabinet) occurred a creamy-salve slipperiness to his mind, yes—well this is getting pretty hairy, pretty sensitive—and this slipperiness (damn it) was being where no traction was, but none only if he tried to find it, tried to move. And an impression passed through his lostness that friends Joy and her confident (confidant—
conf\daunt!)
Lucille would like him to go back where he came from though in the wordless interim Joy seemed to (damn it) say to him: You never wound up the Morgan story, the man in western New York? (oh yeah) who in the middle 1820s had threatened to tell certain local secrets of the greatest secret society in the Western World, the Masons—are there Tibetan Masons, aboriginal, arctic?—and one day was charged and jailed in Canandaigua and still more dubiously allowed the next day to disappear with the help of an abductor pretending to be his friend (I did finish it, I just didn’t fill it out) (or, said Joy, connect it to anything else like the price of eggs or—), his friend whose identity and connection with a famous resident of Washington was learned by a village lawyer’s daughter from her secret lover, a plump journeyman printer, who vanished from Canandaigua taking with him only his secret, the tools of his trade, and the heart of the attorney’s daughter, and reappeared in the employ of a Socialist
Free Press
run by a workingmen’s party in Philadelphia: there the village attorney’s daughter joined him, was pursued all the way from western New York by her lean and wheezing father, a prominent Mason, and through an agent of the great man met Jackson himself in New York City where that yellow-skinned gaseous and indigestible smoked Hickory fell in love with her, for herself or for her secrets none knew except, apparently, the father or uncle of that very Hermit-Inventor of New York City who helped Mayn’s own grandmother Margaret when she came home from the West in 1893 or ‘94.

That is, that is . . . Joy only seemed to say to him, Tell us how Andrew Jackson defended women and children against the childlike Indians he thought he was the father of—

and how (Mayn continued) the woods were full of insane survivors missing the tops of their heads which had held each its own Manitou or private god dreamed in bird or snake form, say, and these were being collected to make a new common denomination of mutual god. And Mayn asked himself off the top of his head, Why do I tell these stories as if they were finished? (He heard his little daughter start to sing in the next room.)

But Joy had not spoken out loud.

Joy ran a hand through her hair and looked as dumb as her husband had felt, but she’d gone pale in honor of his picking up a piece of her thought,
her
picture,
his
scalped lunatics,
her
bumpy debumped scab heads, his Jackson, her Andrew,
their woods,
woods owned mutually, like the dreaded Red Sticks, the Creeks, the Cherokees, what have you? more hatcheted than hung, tradition had it—and in which woods were to be found the Choctaws who gave slain enemies a month of mourning to make friends of them. But Joy and Lucille could not hold out and their eyes met and they shook their heads at his whimsy, which, like the message the blindly obedient messenger unexpectedly opens to see for himself, turned out to be a remark that he hadn’t foreseen and that seemed smarter than
he
was, while—wait—

But he wasn’t there (was he?)—since that was future. So Joy’s absence was not either.

Which accounted for why right now (right here and now) he could jolly her gently, here and now in a kitchen with Lucille: "Flick’s no heiress but thank God she has Joy’s looks"—Lucille ignored him—"and brains"—the three of them hearing also the words that traditionally occupied the space of "brains" understood to be Joy’s—but what the hell, only a saying, and men can’t equal women—all in all he didn’t have to cope with this new tedious intelligence thrust around him by circumstance in order to accept their— their—all-around strength. They were agreeing, Joy and Lucille; agreeing— there in a kitchen more or less with him and as, suddenly, the mid-sixties looked up at him like a mere substitute for the late sixties—agreeing with some nodding of heads, Joy’s dark, Lucille’s gray-blond, with papery craters under her eyes enlarging their blue more than showing as her full cheeks and wide mouth worn and used and powerfully impressed by its own thought and coming-on-to somebody to move and to kiss (he felt—he felt her final contempt)—they were agreeing, Lucille and Joy, that you was never safe from relapse, the words you said always carried other words underneath them that said it isn’t really you making the demands; no, be your gentle self, kid, be cool, that’s a way to yield, and later tonight or tomorrow you’ll get him to give in and stop the check with which you paid the black (chauvinist) electrician who left one dimmer switch so it won’t hold the brightest notch, or 'That’s a relapse?" said Mayn, crinkling his grin, Lucille looked so steadily at Joy, while she recreated a mid-marital reveille the gist of which was her arm, "my big soft arm," slamming over onto her husband’s sleeping face—"Oh I did that once," said Joy, quite happily and Flick never got quite into her mother’s head at these times "of" Lucille, so what Joy felt or agreed etcetera, was kind of clear but only kind of—at an instant when Frank had claimed to be dreaming of a good fuck that cleared the air whereupon he opened his eyes into the inner spaces of Lucille’s arm, got out from under, dripped blood out of his nose onto the sheet and was so angry, not yet awake, that he cocked his leg and kicked her out of bed the way you break down a door.

Into a next room. Of things said but too long unsaid. You tell me what I’m feeling.

A void of things ran through him he’d never said: You never tried to have power over me, you thought; and this was because when I made love to you you never had to ask for anything, not that a woman
could
ask.

A void of things he’d never said ran through him, fronts hitting him but a ground beyond him to be known if he wasn’t so damn lazy, known like some math he didn’t yet know for weather prediction, evolution of the atmosphere, ray on ray breaking him down into future—was he
in
the future? —redoing him more than a pretty fast stick of Acapulco Gold when an ounce had not caught up yet with the price of fifty minutes with Joy’s shrink (the man himself used that word)—wait, he meant not that, not that (and he didn’t smoke much)—he meant rays like when he had a fast stick alone having started smoking apparently full of relief at having phoned Joy in New Hampshire (therefore summertime? not necessarily) after he’d had dinner with their eighteen-year-old daughter Flick (eighteen? but she’s only ten in ‘66—Flick? Flick? from flicks, flickers, movies) who wasn’t getting along too well with her mother and didn’t always listen to her father’s jokes and stories but would break in sharply—Who was this Spence Mom said was snooping around New Jersey? But relief wasn’t what he was full of after all as he took his second pull on some good ballooning Hollywood and held it, thinking (or letting himself be grown into a thought), but instead losing breath, his heart running around him, and for being wrong about his own state (for it wasn’t relief he was full of but fear and absence) he paid the price of dying and dying and dying—his heart turned pot black, then no-color—until, afraid to call room service for what he wanted, he wobbled, sallied forth like rolls of a wave yet down the elevator shaft (and as if up) and then out into a midtown wind and to a newsstand he created as he walked toward it over the pavement in brand-new size 11!/2 wing-tips springy and slippery, a newsstand where all the tough guy standing outside his stand had was two big stacks of the
Daily News
and Mayn asked—he didn’t know how slowly—for an orange—"Have you got an orange?"—and the man (broader even than Mayn) looked at him like a leper disliking another leper and scowled like a competitor in a card game who’s been successfully asked by his neighbor for what he happens to have —and then—because Mayn (along some multiple web-route of New York veins and cracks)
knew
the man would—the man reached inside the counter-window of his stand and produced one, a large, thick-skinned eating orange, and watched Mayn as Mayn bit it skin and all, while families of tourists three or four abreast—one grandma whose feet hurt—sauntered like incognito posses uncertainly home to hotels, seeing him, he was sure, and maybe not telling him that while he thought his one-time wife Joy was in New Hampshire, she it was who was the gap standing beside him smiling into the orange, though not knowing that whereas he suddenly wanted, like a pastrami sandwich and another where that went, a
News,
he would not give the man the business as if in return for the life-saving orange Mayn had foreseen, but would give the man something in future even if he had to through a substitute.