Women and Men (214 page)

THE CURVE SPEAKS UPON THE VOID

If it could speak—and he and his new friend were discussing whether it actually could—his heart would have had a thing or two to say about how two older friends of his, Amy and Jim, had acted. Larry’s heart wasn’t going round in circles so much, and had let some part of itself go. He had plenty of heart; he wasn’t cold no matter what his mother had once said about how he kept the lid on, and no matter if his father said Lar’ needed to see Martha and he paid the bills.

But, O.K., what had looked like danger the other night still might be; but he cared a lot less now. So hosting his new friend Donald Dooley from Economics class in the clear light of a cloudy day, Larry thought of Amy as quite far away, far more than thirty blocks’ bike ride (or walk); an older chick, an older (O.K.) woman, or anyway person; or a government agent implicated in something. She had vanished from her apartment (and she only five or six years older than Larry!), and, that night, had left her things all over that made it look like she had been abducted. Meanwhile, Jim Mayn mattered much more to Larry, who could not understand how on the morning after Amy’s apparent disappearance if not abduction Mayn had emplaned from La Guardia airport on a tristate business trip without knowing if Amy was all right for God’s sake, so maybe he didn’t even care; yet the night before upon learning from Larry that Amy was gone, Mayn had made with him a whirlwind visit to the East Side foundation where she worked (maybe one more interruption before Lar’s life finally began): it was a building and block where nothing was happening at that late hour, no abductions, no light rape (like what Maureen and Grace kidded they would subject a man to someday), no thefts, no cop cars screeching up onto the sidewalks, no execution of babies, nothing at that late hour except a Mexican watchman Mayn knew in suspenders playing a battery-powered electronic game at a rickety little logging-in table, one knee crossed over the other (while, as a bike flashed past exactly like Lar’s old Raleigh and come to think of it with a black kid on it but painted
silver
—repainted? a bit thickly?—down the street in a closed but brightly lighted shop that sold mainland-Chinese shirts, pants, and trinkets, an Asiatic woman who stayed in Larry’s mind had been sitting on some phone books).

Anyway (but God! nothing was
any
way), the next morning and early afternoon Larry
had
bothered to check out Amy’s fate, though she was drifting away from him, well always close at heart for he would never change toward her, he’s her friend for God’s sake and prob’ly on some strange parallel trip to hers, meet for a beer some year or cross jaws on some far-future phone waiting maybe just around the
rincon
if some angel (Hell’s or other or all of the above) hasn’t ripped its hookah out by the roots in anger at the system, drifting ‘way from Lar’ along her own parallel path, but his own orbit had to be
his
course, which was no-going-in-circles any more but was heady-looking toward unknown new friends, new people, wing out to the West Coast (New York’11 be here waiting) so, then, if, given, a heady orbit into the immediate future, well just a bit of a spin, if skewed—but fuck skew! let it go, let it crawl up Dr. Rail’s blackboard graphed out of someone else’s mind who was controlling the economy if not every day—Amy, Amy, the fine beautiful elsewhere-skew-orbital Amy’s all right—she had come to work at noon, having called in; and Larry had finessed the switchboard lady into telling him that Amy was wearing what he knew to be the same clothes as those in which she disappeared the night before, though then he contemplated her underwear and that upset him, skewed him, he didn’t know why, it was because (yes) he started to take off her clothes only to fear her helplessness. But having finessed the switchboard operator he then spoke to Amy in the flesh and she sort of said she was sorry. Oh she had been summoned on an unexpected research chore— What chore? Lar’ didn’t block himself from asking— Oh a deadline, some music, some ethnic music, they had to get some information on it, her boss needed her, she should have left Larry a— Sure, sure, he said—but she was O.K. And Larry did not seem to surprise her by not pursuing the matter.

But now four days later, Larry thought he was over Amy, and Larry’s Economics classmate Donald Dooley, a new friend, put his great backpack on the floor of Larry’s room and leaned up against the edge of Larry’s rolltop desk purchased for Larry by his mother shortly before she had split (split? but she was the one who had stayed—or, that is, stayed on in the Long Island house). Donald was agreeing at length, that the heart as a bodily organ had little to do with your feelings, for that was bullshit, though your chest was for sure a key area in the feelings and the heart of course could be affected
by
the feelings, even a plastic heart, if there were any yet; feelings, whether heart-rooted or not, must never be dismissed, especially your own, and happened to be the basis of most
thought
(not all) and might be more (than brain) why thought went on and on, though sometimes it was hardly, you know, thought.

You say "sometimes" quite a lot, Larry said. Actually, Donald and Larry awaited Donald’s girlfriend, who was meeting Donald at Larry’s apartment house in Murray Hill. Larry and Donald were discussing not exactly anatomy or "capital pun." or Mai thus in a Radioactive Era or straight Economics assignments, but reincarnation; God, Donald had brought it up, not Larry, Larry was sure of that, though they shared the view that there were different forms, some in action from moment to moment though Donald wasn’t sure how.

Donald had raised his chin aiming his brown beard at the photograph of Sequoya, the Cherokee genius whose English-alphabet syllable notation for his people’s language enabled them to put out their own newspaper and influenced them to write their own constitution. The picture had been given to Larry by Mayn and had come from Mayn’s father’s basement in the old hometown in New Jersey. A relative of Mayn’s had taken the photograph. Donald said he wasn’t sure they ought to be discussing reincarnation, because it didn’t feel too good today, he didn’t know why, did Larry know what Donald meant? And Larry, who was envisioning Donald’s girl, whom he had never met, recounted a dream he had had the night before.

First, however, he added that he had an elder friend who claimed never to have had these regular sleeping dreams, and Donald, who turned out to be surprisingly just Larry’s age to the week and with whom Larry realized he wanted to be . . . not
outa
here, though it’s like that, but—outa here
and
here at the same time, or left alone ... but
with Donald
(or whoever) who had seemed militant and superior when Larry had heard him in Eco class try to carve Professor Rail limb from limb, silver horseshoe belt buckle and all, but now was just Donald (
yea D.D.!)—
nodded rapidly as if he too had known someone who didn’t dream, and, though listening to Lar’ here, then abruptly so softly interjected, "You might be dreaming/or him—know what I mean?"

In Larry’s dream, driven on but braked and reined in ("You’re a dream, guy," sillies D.D. suddenly), a dream that in fact Larry had set
out
to dream so maybe it didn’t really count or so he’d told himself
as
he dreamt it—and Donald shook his head reassuring Larry that it did count)—Larry had (and here was the point) lost his father’s name. Martin, Dave, Donald (!), Ted, Stanislas, Asa, Lou, Beebe (!
there
was a first name for you), Jaime, Manny, Angel, Sandy. But then it came back to Larry underground like a thing or animal and so he could introduce his father to an eligible woman who by chance had shaved herself according to the cunt-positive program of his mother’s friend Grace Kimball who dropped in on Larry and rapped about whatever
he
wanted to rap about and licked the drip flow off the rim of the buckwheat honey jar having generously sweetened her coffee hit—for Lar’s into making finest (home-ground) Colombian lately. Donald Dooley frowned at all or some of this, maybe the Cunt Positive?, but tilted his face to show he was still here—and it was still hard to see through a piss-saffron shower-curtain-type robe which in the dream Larry knew was no big deal, it was like taking a pee, and the "underground" through which his father’s name came back to him in the dream was ducted into Larry’s vein so when that name "Marv" came back to him it was wired into circulation
desde luego
(at once) if he could only figure how, but in the dream his heart was a big octopus-eye with its friendly arms curved back into it and
it
knew how the stuff in the dream got wired into circ but didn’t let on how except within the motion of its own "dream" system, except Lar’ felt that where the curvature of the at least left ventricle was greatest the pressure of the emotion was, too—which was the reverse of some Dreaded-Modulus-mode ratio stuck in the back of his mind like he had a windpipe in his mind but the
curvatures
in question under varying degrees of dilation might contour-code an
actual other person
which in some mode you
were
—under certain unknown pressures. Yet, God knew, Larry was so tired coping (and mainly with his parents), that—he had given up and woken, knowing that his father was not here and knowing, as he resisted the coincidental drive to make waking up congruent with getting up, that it would be all right to lie in bed—chewing chalk, his gums felt like—and let his dreams—(Be good to your body, said Donald.)

Larry had a lot of dreams, a real load of dreams, while this older friend the newsman Mayn claimed never to have ‘em at all, and Lar’ privately, because it was complicated to get into with Donald, knew that Mayn awaited Larry’s latest and (who knew?) definitive views on Simultaneous Reincarnation—not, he hoped, so Mayn could retell them over a fatherly beer with Amy (who Larry knew now could never love him), or even to a humorous, husky, and husky-voiced man named Ted though Ted had only a few more months to live and wanted to spend it in memorable conversation—but to settle if Jim’s past life could really have been in future, for Larry cared about Jim and not in just the sense that all people matter more or less). Jim, O.K.,
did
have
waking
dreams, though ofttimes thorough and far-grasping. Larry could say almost anything to Jim but could not for some reason disagree with him on this if only to the point of reminding him that infants dreamed far more than grownups. Champion of all dreamers was, you know, the fetus. And if with twins or triplets (the Ur consciousness-raising group) your fetus didn’t have on average as much privacy and freedom of growth to get the circuitry developing, maybe on the other hand sibling interference
multiplied
the voltages, and if during gestation the individual fetus didn’t have much content to dream about, God, think what it had been recently through, arriving into
being
!—plus the fact that humans had nothing to do during gestation unlike shark fetuses that had teeth from the seminal moment or absolute beginning—
Conceived
with teeth? challenged D.D.—and went after each other in-womb, getting right down to it, obstacles each to each uniting a good fight and nutrient value where only one can win, that is, the one that survives for the mother-sub to fire forth her one surviving offspring (but shit! it’s astern, of course) full-speed on B-day.

"Ur?" asked Donald, and Larry explained, while envisioning with some happiness or other the Chinese woman seen the night he and a tight-lipped Mayn had gone in search of Amy at the foundation ("Nice space here," Donald indicated the apartment as a whole) and Jim when they were on their way downtown later gave Larry a five-dollar bill when he left the cab. But now Larry hardly heard himself answer like homework the "Ur" query, for he and Donald had not necessarily stopped discussing the heart, and a beatless, perhaps timeless measure came to him and was gone as if
it
had thought better of
him!—md
he reported that Mayn had told of a lighting designer-dealer whose girlfriend had had four miscarriages and had been told by her doctor that now she was again with child she would have to take it super-easy virtually like a flat-on-her-back invalid, and the man, who had once been Jim’s wife’s employer (when she had
been,
obviously, Jim’s wife) had actually seen the thumb-size fetus, and the fetus (if you want to hear the news) was
all
heart, and he talked to it and hoped it would know his loving voice when it came out; but Larry could tell that other parts of the body could dream, so why not a heart?

This was Larry’s first new friendship since his parents had split up— hey, he had just come out and said that! to himself, that is—yes, first since his parents had split up, launching him into a Manhattan apartment with his dad, while his mother and her friend lived on the Island (whom Larry wanted to talk to Donald about but he was shy about betraying his mother and also didn’t really know much on the new road of
their
life—
their
life? their
life?
—which was in the house in Long Island where Larry grew up. Donald pointed out that your feet and arms could go to sleep, so presumably they could dream. They laughed and Larry said there was some vino in the fridge. Donald asked if there was a vacuum handy and Lar’ said he’d been cleaning house when D.D. arrived. Good, said D.D. Yeah, said Lar’, what did he need it for? His typewriter needed a vacuum, said Donald, tapping his pack beside him on the floor. Larry felt that Donald liked taking off his backpack with its twenty-degrees-below-freezing down bag rolled on top, and putting it back on. Donald was rural-oriented but also, he said, urban-oriented; and Larry could see he liked being on the move. Larry had not been reaching for the phone to dial anyone when Donald Dooley had rung from the lobby to say that he was here, unexpectedly, and he would like to come up (because D.D. made statements more than asked questions).