Women and Men (32 page)

If one could make a suggestion, why didn’t she close her eyes, turn round three times here on the rug, and see if she could find her way into the next room, and if she could, there would be a prize surprise for both of them. But she stood looking at him. "With the opera on in there, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge finding my way."

He smiled and shut his eyes because cells in the right wing of his head had fused, discharging a duty he didn’t argue with. And in that head he heard her say, If you had used your genius to create a mineral cartel of our own to buy back the nation instead of proving that a preliterate American cartel appropriated it and destroyed our good man—I would not take your money, I would not take your love.

"America’s involvement is not worth investigating any more," he said, "though this man who said the journalist was dangerous and might be even in cahoots with him keeps up the game for money while I no longer care about proving it, and we do not need the money and he does not go away."

"A.I.," she said. "What’s that?" he asked. "American Involvement," she said humorously, and then he guessed she didn’t know "Artificial Intelligence."

Did she remember the retarded messenger he had told her about with the dark fuzz all over his face who—

"Of course I remember."

—who had turned up with a huge manila envelope—who lurched and had that deceptive vacancy of eye considering that he would stop to tell whoever would listen stories quite funny in a lisped, unpalatable gargle . . .

"Yes, yes, I remember," she said, so he wished she might close her eyes against some chance of tears blurring the situation.

Well, there were three or four of them that came, not only one, and once one began looking around the city there were God knows how many retarded messengers, eh?, plodding, marching up the avenues not acknowledging each other but you could swear all were part of a fraternity, an underground fraternity. Maybe the city’s messages retarded them.

"Why underground?" she said, and he didn’t know exactly what was eating her. "And what’s the point?" she added.

The point? He thought of a dozen. Oh, that girl, the research girl that these vacant messengers with their huge brown envelopes always went to, to her desk, this girl Amy had seen her one day recently, the girl said she was certain from the picture on his file cabinet, plain coincidence, the very same person, she said.

"Did she say where?" asked his wife, who could not be unfaithful to him.

Well, she’d been vague. He turned his head away, raised his eyebrows wrinkling his brow, shrugged without the downward completion of his shrug, and eyed her out of the maniacal corners of his eyes. But it was downtown.

"Vague," she said, not missing a tempo.

He guessed his wife, who had been so wifely much to him she hadn’t had the chance to find strength in playing defeated or fragile, wondered who really was the vague one here, her husband or the research girl Amy.

Her purse lay on the blue shawl in the apartment where they might pretend to be alone in a city unknown to almost anyone. A trickle ran down one eye, from this large oval seed.

"It’s an organization of retarded messengers," she said. "A secret society. You know what I think? I think you are jealous."

Oh yes, a very bear, a fox, an ape of jealousy, but wasn’t it that the city that united them in one secret security divided them in its time and size?

"You have nothing to be jealous about," she said.

Her hand caressed his noble dome. He caught a dull crank of gears in the street below and had again in his head the void of these volts, the push of a long river moving water against banks which were his right temple. He seemed to mumble as he told her he could tell every little part of her hand no matter where and with what small crease it touched down on him. She asked what he had been reading and he held up the small Shakespeare. She knew the title but not the comedy.

Had he not heard the phone? she wanted to know. Yes. He had answered one call and felt someone checking if he was home. The second one he let ring.

Now he showed her the prison inmate’s letter and he read her a few lines ending with Gibbon, which they had a good laugh over: "Among barbarous nations, women have often combatted by the side of their husbands. But it is
almost
impossible that a society of Amazons should ever have existed either in the old or new world."

She went away now toward a low, rising sweep of applause, and again he had the half idea of private life but as if it were hiding and not itself power, and he still didn’t know how she was.

The applause stopped short. She came back. She stood in the middle of the living room upright as a cedar, his harmonic mean, until he felt that
between
them was the angel, not she herself.

She closed her eyes and turned round and round again, her lids one expanse of sweet humor. She had turned more than three times around and was facing away. She held her arm half out before her and made her way to the threshold of the bedroom. She was on her way to be awakened. Was jealousy what he had not wished to spell? She was in the bedroom and turned. He was in view if she opened her eyes, copious economist. He was supposed to go to her. Everything got in the way. Railways, trees falling, the ends of opposed winds, places waiting for wood to make railroad ties, a desert laid end to end with solar reflectors and among these blinking dishes swallowing sun, an uneconomically single set of tracks along whose bed an antique railway ran as quietly through his thoughts as the ancient bilingual subway here blinded his ears to another volume of silence.

Elsewhere people, brawny Landburgers, waiting for the train not knowing the tracks haven’t been built yet. Baja York growing substitute parts and waiting for them to be shipped to the place of assembly.

Trees as thick as a horse is long, being sawn by remote control from an urban eyrie where an unseen private hand appropriates a public sector to its heretofore self-contained environment. Trees for the crossties in the railroad —laddering charming old locomotives up over still older mountains to bring pornography to New Castle, crossties to Denmark and Sweden once upon a time, and this was his lost country—what folk do during a given day, a matter of hours. The dizzy discharge hit again, he wanted to see his children thousands of miles south of here and he himself was still fairly young, and they were grown and he was disgusted to think the regime menaced them only because of
him
not because they stood against it which they didn’t. Some source as unseen as where a wind begins was loading this noise into his inner ear like torture that wasn’t normally painful. He breathed fast (hhh-hhh-hhh-hhh), there was also the messenger who, coming into one’s office, tried to speak through his impediment and gave up and left a card that said outlandishly, "Readings" or "Psychic Readings" or some such. He called to his wife, who opened her eyes squinting into a distance he was at the other end of unexpectedly.

It was nothing he wished to identify, but he did. And saw it was not jealousy. Was it the threatening absence of jealousy? They were not one of those couples here who had an "understanding."

He fell again onto all fours, neither child nor beast, his open jacket hanging down like his cheeks, and visualized against his will a surprised man missing his beloved legs blown away with the ignition keys of his American car; and growled and growled, and imagined a blue shawl tossed over him, and on hands and knees he stalked toward her, a shell of breaking troubles on his back the very least of which, if trouble it was, was an impulse toward verbal play at an ongoing moment of apparent lust and/or passion, and she smiled, uncertain, for he had not come silently to her side to open her eyes as he often did. "I like your shawl," she called softly, and he snarled or miaowed—they weren’t sure. "The better to see you with," he growled, pulling the front corner over his bald head and knowing he did not bore her. An immense weariness got the better of him, a fatigue beyond the repetitive, a repetitive insight that he might never reach the bedroom where she laughed. "Oh why is your breathing so labored, grand dear?" Finding the distance less, he growled, "The better to make you hear." "Come closer, so I can share your breathing." He sighed, seeing her around the doorway that opened between them as if he could actually see her, her silky knees. "Division of . . ."she began, and he heard, like a beast, "labor," "dolor," and "all this and more." Heard a matching sigh of the bolster that, like the one they had had before they had had to come here, she loved to be under with him.

She sensed the mood and waited around the corner. And then she said, "Are not you the man whose great-grandfather met Darwin on his great journey? And gave his wife for Darwin’s entertainment?"

"The myth is she played for Darwin."

"While he and Darwin discussed murder as human all too human."

He growled in agreement, in double understanding, and had to laugh being an animal that could laugh, and growled and made his way toward the threshold, the blue Peruvian shawl in the corner of his eye. They were not speaking the same language, word for word, and she did not know he might not love her without jealousy. He would take and hide her light under a bolster. "Your other earplug?" "No; only one." "So you heard me?" "No. I just knew that you were there." "I don’t believe that."

He knew how much she knew, and curves of privacy joined their thoughts often.

But she knew she would always find him funnier than life, and she knew he had not been unfaithful; she knew he would sometimes look through a window, for so would she, and see not a kid walking a mongrel or a pedigree but somebody going to execution, some one, some two, a dozen interchangeable poor persons, interchangeable even if you recognized one of them in that executioner’s dozen; she knew that wherever he turned he found home and

her; she knew that Lord B ‘s cousin had reported that Lord B , after

using the Atheneum Club’s convenience for years whenever he was in New York, had, upon being stopped and told that he was not a member, replied, "Oh, is it a club, too?" and she knew what passed through his mind often after she had done her weekly volunteer stint at the natural-childbirth office under a modest assumed surname. And she knew it might be tantalizingly hard to reduce the pressure they didn’t need the high-priced friend-of-a-friend physician who tried to treat them free to tell them was not only an
effect
of his deafening discharges but a cause, and a cause caused by causes. And she knew she was his harmonic mean, his chess mate, his past, his walking memory, and in a language he liked even more than American (and to use the Shakespeare words he had just read but thought that she had not) his "ventricle of memory."

BETWEEN US: A BREATHER STILL AT THE BEGINNING

All things to him she was.

But where, then, where, who, what was she?

What is this questionnaire form the report comes in, as if it weren’t her own heroic fault, whatever she thought she’s doing being all things to him? And she wasn’t getting any younger as the world turns, so your launch window gets smaller by the second until it’s maybe ten minutes wide if you want to launch to gain your desired orbit, because everything else is also moving in
its
directions and you won’t need a computer to process that stuff because women know. But whichever She it is that we relations raise into this window as a trial sacrifice, it was not consciousness alone we raised and targeted-for-Being, but the body she was becoming. Evolution of angel into human seemed illusion it seemed so slow at times. No easy fit, for hear it bump up ahead, grab, grope, grit—this body language we knew in their bones as Earth turned its windows in and out of line with the unknown aim of this evolutionary launch inclining toward undreamed potential. But
can
angels love inexperience enough to assume it. If build upward or inward, why not downward?

Did we
want
this grotesque marriage? Which
one,
even? And grotesque only in
practice.
And yet inner speech must needs get what it came for. So we relations angel or not will single her out: Grace Kimball—hear the noise. It’s the history of the restless window shade that’s now spent its spring and won’t go up. No matter, the history ignores the shade being broken and our sight-sacrifice in the window speaks for herself. And then we add, against her body’s effort to reject it, that the angel of today aspiring to Change—if that still
is
a thing in us—will claim the age-old human chance to sacrifice others as part of the package. And if you’re stuck in pecking orders or old coordinates, then along the curve of this new
angel
revolution (if it makes it), consciousness could make heroes of us all or feel like one more con, or raise
or
lower itself.

He, Lou, her one husband, medium height, could go to sleep for years to dream through the smoke of double signals all things she was to him: lover, co-breadwinner, co-coughing breakfast-nook-bar celebrant; calm, graceful swimmer to his mad, chugging lapper awash in his own potential; elbow at the movies; sister to him who’d been denied one, daughter-if-she-could-just-make-it to his would-be-power-vacuum-father-surrogate brotherhood; female pocket-billiards pardner once a month at a little West Side tavern with collectible red-and-green traffic light in the window; hostess to his growing problem, yet fair’s fair, both have drunk at length after the latish often not largish din-din of this working life (we hear them in American think, "But it works"—or
her
think—almost think—and all this awkward-sounding—
was
this
sound
their way of
seeing
things?) or if largish, oft not finished; and have brushed lower gums upward and uppers downward out of the shared tube, lest the proof from mouth to mouth not cancel whiskey-aura with vodka-wash along the route that lines the masses from stomach to gullet to mouth with the aroma smoke of spirits; that winds its fume up from the breadbasket but breath-broken and wind-gapped into old smoky signals blanketed soon out of your mind and to be lost in the next day’s blank; where also she was priestess of belongings and of the vacuum cleaner; mother of what have you (home, him, the object or ruled nucleus of daily life), and she’s daughter, too (throw in daughter with the bath salts);
and
recorder in scrapbooks (one the untouchable album white with gilt spinal lettering), and sometimes scrapper, scrimper, reminder like a co- or fellow sleeper who—look out!—wakes after twenty years (a "yore") of hours to tell him their dreams (twenty’s overdoing it)— a popular number in the Lincoln Van Winkle system if not quite his and her for it was just shy of ten years—(well, seven and a half)—they stayed together even it off e’en with jagged-jogged fibroid edge like your dream made you live an unnatural grotty voice not yours surely phase it out if you can’t even it out from ten and a half times per week to three and a half per month (or seven times one-half)—"from quantity to quality," she hears him laugh when her back is turned at a baby brunch—and "we" this, "we" that—and back to quantity in its preoccupied absence on the year-and-a-day anniversary of her hearing herself say during a long phone gab so unexpectedly that Lou, whom she was looking at across the living room now less crowded with wood and metal, looked dimly away from the eleven
P.M.
eyewitness news, "Well what you do," she said down the phone, "is you live with a friend," even it off, as we said, cut it off (ouch-ouch), we heard it said; clean break, hear the soundless snip, the lone hand clapped to the suddenly-not-there-for-you butt—the soundlessness of it wiping the noise and music and gross silence of those dreamable years out like a few late-model hours of our century that along its warp aged the grain of Grace and Lou. And scapegoat of him she also was.