Women and Men (215 page)

Out by the elevator, there was a giant dark-orange couch left by the opera singer Ford North ("Please call me Ford, won’t you?"), and it had tasseled cushions and had been arrested there in the public hall on its way out of the building, perhaps to a new apartment, but it hadn’t moved in three or four days, and anybody could steer around it or could sit on it, for example the liquor deliveryman, while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to Larry too small for the couch even if they took the roof off; and this little guy Ford’s friend with the big eyes and a huge charge of dark-haired energy sat there waiting for the elevator or something like Napoleon on hold, but he had had a fight with Ford North, and Larry had learned from Grace that this strange little dancer-type gay guy who wrote music was probably going to be in her first Men’s (Nude) Workshop. And if Larry had any outside obstacles (not his own) to dropping all this obstacle (well, not
course,
but) hunt, he had no objections to
their
leaving
him
(alone, that is—that is, alone with his new-type friends). So Larry knew that there was a lot going down, but he had not been inclined to reach for the phone (like, to call Mayn, who was back). Mayn had gone to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Washington at a hell of a time, when Amy had been missing and Larry had had an insinuating call from a son of a bitch who asked if Larry had the phone number where Mayn’s daughter was staying, and Larry had had a dumb inkling, like a gentle dopy looping boomerang that came back to him, that the caller already knew the phone number.

The new plug-in instrument (in addition to the kitchen wall-phone) seldom rang, but when it did, it felt in its off-key tinkle like the middle of the night: which it lately had been, for his mother Susan phoned him once at midnight, he told Donald—and once at three-seventeen
A.M.
in red on his clock radio —in tears, wondering how Larry
was
(so he said,
Are you awake?,
the very words Amy had said when she called to ask when Mayn was coming back and if Larry knew if Mayn knew this guy Spence and a messenger named Gustave part of a strange group of retarded messengers Spence was said to employ in connection with a warehouse-theater over on the West Side)—Sue’s call and her words and her tears were light years from that
Larry’s gotta get laid
crap in front of other people, Grace Kimball’s friends many like healthy-looking TV-commercial actors/actresses, none into marriage though some still
in
it, lots of eye-contact friendliness boo-buoying up a confidence training itself by supporting others-others-others, some of these folk in training to see who can be most trim-line, most "up," most free of habit patterns but confusing when they called work "addiction" and love likewise, and listen, quaaludes were definitely not the same thing and less like love than like heroin, O.K.?, so Larry held to his small corner of history, of conviction, surprised that never in the dark of her Major Life Change (though Marv had always done dishes, some cooking, shopped for food, bartered money for forage after hunting down the money in hill and valley), never had she plugged into the available jack of probability circuit in order to imagine that her son upon the Person, Object, though no Obstacle ("Treat me like a piece of meat, Larry!") of Diane of Port Adams already
had
lost his virginity (if of guys it be so called), for he had
given
it and to himself as much as to Diane of the Visine-rinsed eye whites and mouth and eye sockets relaxed into soft stone, Diane of the slow tongue and of the shopping-center shortcut when they all lived in Port Adams—while Susan where she was with the Other or ‘‘Great Spirit" she’s trial-living with seemed for the moment to be doing all the dishes and cooking—simultaneously apologized for waking him up, it didn’t sound like her and not because it was three-seventeen till his red L.E.D.s turned three-eighteen, she didn’t sound like that toughie she used to be, but oh the luxury of having this extra ear against his and being able, through the bedside plug-in, to turn on either side or on his back, to curl up or down (curving his whole reception of the voice so it became part of him), it made other people only as important as they were, not more: unless you gave in to them so you let yourself think about waiting for them to phone, which if he had done with his mother (who was still a strong mother through these flowing, glistening, misting tears, but he might just not say that kind of thing because) it would be understood as pigeonholing women into vulnerable, weak, etcetera, which wasn’t what he was feeling at all!

And while receiving feedback from Donald Dooley on reincarnation as arising out of crisis in your life when the void opening in front of you could outguess you if you put yourself into it so you found you were more than one person which was O.K. and scary and creative, Larry went on savoring the dream of the names, savoring even some reach within the nest of them to a next he didn’t quite get his head around where he was subject of a prediction.

Donald agreed that the evolutionary reincarnation ensued through social history as a whole, not in literal reappearance of souls in new forms they had earned or longed for—speaking gently, slowly as if knowing that Larry had something wonderful and troubling to continue with. But savoring Donald’s words and friendly manner, Lar’ wanted to detour around reincarnation, and not because he savored the dream of names: from Martin (which was one letter off his father’s and the closest but really far away from his father’s self) to Angel (a Puerto Rican name in all probability), Lar’ comprehended a nest of dreams coming up out of good ground bearing more messages than he had regular time for or light to see by, and these included his dad’s own name, which had proved upon waking no substitute for his dad’s presence standing under the shower so quiet inside the falling water, bending his head and curving his whole contentment along the path of the steam iron ironing some shirt of his (he didn’t iron Larry’s, and neither did Lar’!).

So when the phone rang, Larry saw he had been slipping away from Donald, yet was it because Reincarnation of which
un
branch was Simultaneous Reincarnation (S.R.) threatened Larry? No big deal because Jim Mayn looked forward to Lar’s definitive formulation in good heart and faith and a good casual smile lay between them and related to the possibility of breakthrough vis a vis S.R.; yet it was in the air, and Kimball breathed S.R. in and out and Mayn did not oppose research into it, and there’d been this near-dream involving Larry in it as target of a prediction, and somehow shit S.R. in its theoretical warp seems playing into the wilderness of those older people’s lives full-up with
dejd vu
(see recent scientific studies of) cum painful recollection cum should-haves and shouldn’t-haves etcetera so heavy all in all and wall to wall with after-lives that come to think of It they are downright abstract, and Larry doesn’t just now
want
these people’s sympathy and the strings attached, or even praise, specially for his no doubt epochal concepts. Nor wants to even, like, explain that he’ll settle for the mainland-Chinese lady sitting on the phone books.

And let Mayn muse in the night taxi that the noted man whom Amy gal-Friday’d for—where research might well
cover
surveillance—at the foundation, continued still, upwards of four years after the final manned Moon shot, to be mixed up with a hustler whom Mayn would like to throttle who even Mayn the world’s (according to him) least-prone-to-lurid-plot-speculation-much-less-conspiracy-peddling of "current historians" is coming to believe may now be engineering news without quite knowing it in order to make a buck out of being there when the lightning strikes; and let Mayn muse that he felt he might be indirectly responsible for the death of a fellow journalist in Chile in 1963—Mayn’s great to know, etcetera, but this morning Larry thinks
he
would never have moved back into that apartment where Mayn and his family had lived even if Mayn did have some co-oping deal with the landlord (according to Lar’s father) plus Lar’ knew of Mayn’s daughter-inspired interest in a landlord syndicate’s link with insurance groups, O.K., O.K. already— Larry would frankly rather listen to Donald Dooley reveal how tobacco firms borrow great sums from insurance groups in return for soft-pedaling cancer when approaching that mass of client-insurees who matter too deeply to their insurers to be asked to worry about the mysterious workings of inflation
or
cell play: and if, for an awful moment right out of some poetry that Lar’ had read in high school, a shadow passes Between, an unembodied smile, deja-vu’ing weeks-ancient words of the Dreaded Modulus that People (not just) Matter, People aRe Matter, till as—quite far from Lar’s dad Marv’s 1940s sexista
^RU
/
18
(‘less dey raise de age)—R turns into (and therefore equals) = , the wind, with perhaps that secret curve attributed to it in an "off-the-wall family discussion" Jim Mayn half-recalled from "outer space or outer something," bore Larry toward the phone a la part slippage from Donald via daydream warmed by abstraction, part Donald’s fulsome conceptualism (where one sentence became an oration) since his girlfriend was coming over but it wasn’t Donald’s but Larry’s abstract and traced not by D.’s word-content but only by his voice-print though Larry knew Donald was taking off on some of Larry’s guarded remarks on reincarnation being Now and a matter of crisis and a void that opened in front of you that you filled before you hit it, in his opinion, and as Lar’ rose to go for the phone and heard D.D. say wine was good unless he had some Cuerva and saw gratefully the particular Chinese woman of four nights ago sitting on three phone books with covers ripped off, her gray wool socks puffed by her plump feet out of her slippers, he had to speak and hardly knew what he was fast saying (or, rather, why) between the first ring and the second: "Look, my mother is living with another woman out on the Island, and I was freaked out about it underneath all this insane fucking Open Marriage BiSexual Cool that’s going around, you know, but I didn’t know who to talk to but now I’m freaked out that she isn’t happy and probably wants to get back with my father but I didn’t see why they split in the first place but now I don’t feel good about them getting back together." He was moving out of the room toward the kitchen, looking back not at the plug-in phone but at Donald, who was nodding and smiling and saying, "You’ve had a lot to deal with, man, but it’s all right, you know?, it’s all right. It’s all cool. Let it go."

We gotta get outa here, Lar’ thought—a piece of him out there beams back but not so fast as light to its old spot in his shoulder-neck-tension field finding in its place there a living-breathing
eye{\),
wait, an
eye
in his newly relaxed neck-and-shoulder area? as he concentrated it became an all-purpose heart (up there) and in touch with feelings though others’ (don’t please try to explain it!) as fast as light, attractive as somebody else, and charged with such communicative volts it flares the contradictory decadence of the would-be returning
weak piece
into one a billion times less weak as if to take the measure of—

"I think I just saw my father’s death—" Phone ring again before he seize (about to sneeze) . . . "—but it didn’t look like him."

‘That’s heavy, Larry," said Donald Dooley from the bedroom, "but—" Way ahead of him, Larry took the call and sneezed beyond it, receiving in return a current of nothings sidestepping him as they came at him and flowed by, while the voices in the ear-mike of the receiver were not the Chinese woman in the shop who was as real and there as D.D. or D.D.’s girlfriend approaching through the City—or the raspberry on Mayn’s cheekbone acquired in an uptown police station the night he got home and he told Lar’ about it, O.K., O.K., but meanwhile here’s
this
phone call, ‘n . . .

"God bless," interjects the quieter edge of man’s formality like an interruption before he has begun, though opening upon (what?) marriage?, for the courteously strong foreground voice is heard against a woman’s in the background, oh along the waves of a whole life strung out behind him not just accented like his but speaking
in
Spanish, so Larry, who’s (a big piece of his Body-Self) light yards back in bedroom with new friend Dooley, is hardly into this call and picks up from this female background a hysterical
"curva"
something, and a moment later
(curva
what?) amongst all the other words a highly dramatic
"curvadura"
(it sounds like), the man meanwhile calmly asking if he may speak to James Mayn "eef hee ees theyr": and here it is again, this living web that’s nought to do with Lar’ who’s anyhow so far from it back with new friend Donald the noise level rising behind the Spanish-accent man comes down over Lar’ too as if it’s a hood over his heart beamed to Donald’s voluble hands with which he talks, but fuck it’s this outer crisis again, this living maybe even breathing web Lar’s let
go
(man) & doesn’t matter if Lar’ turn out on someone else’s breakdown to be, unbeknownst to him, an employee of this courteous Spanish-accented gentleman, Lar’s having his own crisis, and he names himself (Larry Shearson) at this distance of curve and of letting go
and
of courtesy and asks if Mayn gave the man this number, and the man’s voice with hassle or anxiety skipping a breath tells clearly the truth that he found it on a pad on his secretary’s desk with another number and Mayn’s name (Let’s get outa here, Let’s get outa here!): but sure enough the intrigue of these older people’s lives is nipping through the screen or something, and Lar’s own crisis you can’t put an equals to or formula, its task though is To Be Real—yes, with new friends and the ordinary stuff like the random Chinese woman on the ragged phone books, O.K.? "Sorry to trouble you," the man has said. "No trouble," said Larry. But the man went on: "Everyone has trouble." So Larry: "But not everyone takes it." And the foreign man, who has turned into his sound, is answering strangely (Ah is this the young man who has understood a strange pattern of reappearance, interhemispheric reappearance?—a young woman of the Spanish-accented gentleman’s acquaintance reported she heard this from the man Mayn himself), while Larry, sidestepping whatever trap this is, coming at him with the woman weeping in the charged background and carrying on
(curvadura,
he’s sure he hears but it’s
another
woman’s voice there), and Larry’ll see this cluster not on old two screens but (shrug) one, he knows that the curve (not Rail’s economic graph line or some part of the body) having left him has taken some spinoff force decaying off his
Let-it-go
into
Let’s get outa here: