Women and Men (33 page)

Why "goat"? we many of us pick up the animal name—an animal posing as us?—then sense we asked a question, hovering, for we are not there in them even though they in us mayhap; yet (our) old descent from Insight stands us in good stead for did not we once hear ourselves adrift in the gut feelings of MacDune Scrotus centuries ago?—who really understood angels, defining them as not just Form but Matter too.

Why scapegoat? Because history through scapegoats turns Cruel to Fair, Revenge to Reciprocity, shifts windows to present a parallel sacrifice: so Jim Mayn’s father Mel (upon Sarah’s suicide) is your widowed scapegoat for his ignorance of life’s sweet mystery—when from his office where he’s known for saying, "Let’s look at the history," he came home, though homeward not quite to (and latish) Jim’s penetrating mother—ever late to her who seemed not to leave the house much (when
did
she? and when did lower Main Street see her? when did Jim’s grandmother up the street see her, her daughter? do we not know?)—and coming home, Mel is tired and yet threatening to bend someone’s ear (though never tweak), even hers, he wants to tell all at the end of the day: about reviewing Willkie’s
One World
(oh it was his lovely hair and Saint Bernard eyes—Sarah chilled her husband’s fervor—that made you think Willkie the Democrat’s Republican) but Sarah’s not political—never mind the newspaper in the family since long before even her mother Margaret’s continental adventures of the early nineties; or Mel wants to tell about Should we subscribe to the new wire service (i940-4i-ish)—or Mel’s telling (at the end of the day) all about old Pennsylvania cousin running for mayor "over there," for God’s sake, son of if-you-recall uncle who ran from restaurant to restaurant with the dynamite-tossing anarchists during his vacation in Paris, 1894):

. . . while
she too
is scapegoat—Sarah (if angelwise we many descend on her who one day around the end of the wars put her foot down—but
on the sea,
we hear added as if in poetry as if we didn’t know as if some additive from unknown within us)—and escaped at least that life: though wasn’t
he
the one who wasn’t there?
(he
left to go
downtown!
Jim’s father, the husband Mel Mayn, if not Grace’s Lou).

Yet some of him she kept. Some Lou. So did she throw away the wrong part? (asked our resident angel rabbi with honed wit resuscitating old MacDune’s athletic twist that the Matter angels are part made of is not really corporeal! —which is why angels can in great numbers occupy one place—whereas a human person) . . .

no Jew Lou, the name that Lou is short for’s, yes, Ripley)—her man, her one-time man with R.R. on the combo-lock (tho no more in it than in all the dumb stuff they employ telepathy to send) attache (maybe nuclear emergency) case who goes such a long time without breathing that maybe we expected him to evolve, easing us of our jittery distance which ‘mung angel relations is code for what went on between them, and on and on—just plain inertia—no crying-out-loud, no fistiquiff, ‘twas mystery why
(pir-quoit)
they stayed
nor
split. Man she had come east imagining: until, unseen till then, he materialized and filled the bill, who would be good-looking at a stand-up party and liked by those he told a quiet joke to about insurance that wound up anti-Irish, anti-Scottish, anti-race, anti-French (who cares)—but started not like that (because friendly, not like that at all, as Grace one day after a zingo of a clean-sweep wild energy-rising women-for-women’s sake workshop gently allowed to her dearest young friend Maureen) for Lou was pretty special, it’s what he stumbled into that was wrong, Grace’s homemade white bridal (record-) book gilt spined that would not chemically quite pour down the tube of Manhattan’s vertical Time, if you can wait through the awful mornings which, looking back, seem not so long a wait as the punchline of Lou’s joke when you already remembered it and forgot and remembered and forgot and remembered during the telling, yet really a man who alone with thee would make you an old-fashioned and be talking and/or singing when he came toward you timelessly across the carpeted room at the close of the day and you two were settled in until two hours later you rose to get ready to go out childless to a familiar restaurant—cowboy or Indian
{Pir-Quoit-"
Why" in Serio-pawn-akee) or fifties-early-sixties French of our latish enceinture-ee we’z find our way through any fog of being spirited to at least one of those restaurants, and as minutes wore on,
still
undeparted from the apartment (time lapsing into space) with your smoky, lovely fur-collared coat on and, at an ancient distance, the john cistern filling somewhere, you swooped, Grace swooped—and we stooped with her like air seeking incarnation in breath—she swooped, stooped at the coffee table remembering the luminous dividend in her glass, and suddenly a dream she had apart. The man, her what?
{P or-quoit)
her sleeping-and-swimming pardner, the amiable profile she watched lay out fresh greenbacks for their movie tickets and for a second kept his fingers down on the three dolla’ four dolla’ fi’-dolla’ bill guarding against a wind gusting (it felt) from within the glass booth of the trapped powerful ticket girl—the man (well, Grace loved him—’course she did) he must have been many things to her if, at the crunch when some went, some she kept—the man (he’s
Lou:
say "Lou, dear Lou") well
he
is also an elbow to
her
at one or two
A.M.
as she had been a scented elbow to him in the movies where a star interrogating another star says a second time but menacingly now, "Come on,
you
know—you
know
you know," for if here in their bed Lou’s rib floats her way or his sleeping forearm at that deep mid-time of bed and night seems (and is from his unknown distances determined to contact) that nourishing elbow—what’s its name?—on her side of bed, she can make her elbow be so still at his blind touch, his dragged palm, that her elbow is naked of motion, while she goes on listening with her thence wholly wrist-operated middle-finger pressing— of fingers pressing—down or in or both on the twice or thrice a month rush to meet herself secreting what she had discovered was love, but love in a bag she mustn’t deserve except as such sweet centers of blanketed guilt ambushing its faithful future where flow can no more interrupt flow, not even with angelic scorn conjured of relations sad, unsaid, and fallow-felt.

Yet in those only dark-night more and more slow near silences, she got better: and the months get together a code she takes time for so plain that— to get back to what in later life she kept—the gentle, fun-loving men (Enter, dieted, bearing clothes; Enter, already seated cross-legged) some freed: open as their bare, under-carpeted loins who in future (with firmed-up, ever young, well-swung near-myth) filled the shadow cast there by that part of Lou that Grace kept—the aborted son-of-Grace, the brotherly Son in Lou—loved (these new, light men) to sit around her furnitureless Body Room (these gentle, dieted men) and love to hear and like to do what she up-frontally asked including that
they
say right out what
they
wanted (that is, done) (that is, to them), sharing information, feeling good, and laugh how fantastic it was to let yourself just at last (you know) let go of marriage (yours; anyone’s!), a relationship, find a better way of doing things and laugh and once in a while cry over Grace once upon a really historic time interred beside her bonded husband whom she kept from getting the message month upon month as she kept a smaller and smaller chunk(-y) of herself (we knew but wouldn’t say) just listen and sniff the change brewing in her very forgetfulness of dreams such as where an old winged donkey nips at her digits where she holds on for dear life to a park bench on a high building as city life floods upward, while she stared into the lumped cosmos of her eyelids and softly rubbed off her own wrong upon parts of her she didn’t think about except in those days to think they’re rather inexpressibly (aren’t they?) too floppy, the pistil or the petals, or was it stamen, we already don’t recall, we been so busy knowing we have another body-matter someplace, seeing two places but not being. But how’d she get like that, like a warm soft-shelled clam thinking so hard ‘bout stiffening its will all it kin do is
feel
good, when twice (well, wzit once or wzit twice?) seen when in those driven days she did her rapid down-up toe touching with the mirror’s tranquil caress behind her, her legs divided (see "parted"), and her palms to the floor. But in the doubly bedded night-dark of not looking under the covers (not even moving, babe, except her trusty locked-in wrist) and because it was getting slower, is that longer?, and once upon the stroke of a thousand-and-one after she had let herself go for one luminous half hour, she’d observed sunspots by involuntarily celebrating making a widdle cry of true noise—was she just sex-mad?—went off like a clock radio and the sheet slipped up over her nose or was it her nose down under the sheet?—and it had come to me that I didn’t have to do it with my right hand—forever concerned—
concerned?
says the interrogator, what means "concerned"?—well, afraid—that Lou’d feel her arm moving—God! pick up the
beat,
maybe—I could do it with my
left,
although it took longer—and I still had to keep my whole right side from bucking. Well it came to her that this was quite insane: look what
(por-quat-quaya)
she had boiled herself down to—jerking (but is that quite it?) off—and she says this again (look what I’ve been reduced to) in the pause of having said it once. (You know what’s been going on, you’re no child, and you think just because you haven’t received your hairline fracture when you were scheduled to, and ‘cause you’ve stopped virtually breathing, you can get away without saying.) Reduced to this: so leave. So leave: words like a poke in the funny bone reviving their friend Sal’s fancy-dress divorce bash where they asked too many people (if you call those people real noise!) and Sal’s "husband" ‘s girlfriend and twelve other gals floated in in bustles and there was nearly room to move much less do anything. Which might relieve some percent of the guests. So leave: reduced to this: it’s insane: got to get out of this. It’s mutilation, she’s heard.

And so a few hours later Grace scuffs, stunned—or rather spunkily trots—into her kitchen’s awareness of her in a mind-burst zone of her that found history past and future in the middle of the night and now finds herself in the kitchen of her present like a home come back to after years of nights gray as her brother’s dreamed face but may lose what she found last night (for someone might say, Now that you’ve found it, it will be taken from you)—to wit, a whole account of what’s happened for two thousand years, that she has for Lou but in a decision too complete for words. For it’s tricky there for the skipper Grace Rhodes, nee Rhodes because born married, there at the controls of a changing kitchen where she’s turned on the burner to float under the pretty orange kettle (hers) without first (this momentous morning) reaching blindly through the invisible white door without opening it of the refrigerator (soon to be widely called, from the English, "fridge") for the two-quart family-size Florida orange juice carton substantial as a Monopoly hotel, and without reaching even now, she’s spooned coffee into the new glass cylinder with the plunger-piston purchased after seeing the Michael Caine thriller, ee-und . . .she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and dreaming at a great rate of history being both here and there yet knowing that in between is the act of decision (hold on to it! pin it down! a donkey’s nipping at her hand) that came to her, promised itself to her, alone last night abed beside Lou, who (through secret bond, the bond of a secret!) is such a known body that her act if she goes "thru" with it threatens her with incarnation
(forget
the
re-,
which she never believed in even when her grandmother quoting her friend in support of the poor (around the time of a so-called Panic in 1890-something) "time to quit raising corn and start raising hell," went along with that champion of the unemployed who held that at death the soul like the body spilling its organ chemicals back into the earth, returns to the gross stewpot of the soul reservoir from which children drew what they needed at birth, therefore, therefore, therefore, but)—she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and trying to recall all she must say to Lou now, who’s gon’ say, "Oh cool it, honey" and how hard to do it now—that is, to tell him, tell Lou (medium height upright, medium length in bed a widow’s width away, recall the Irish-Italian old pardner to end all pardners)—tell him without a fight, without a pretext in the convenient shadowy kitchen often so morning-comforted where the only light is the fire buoyant beneath the kettle but her body’s helping her out now so potently she doesn’t think to thank her mother’s God, except, evoking her mother’s word "waterworks" as if centuries of feminine crying were a branch of municipal plumbing planned, see, by (well you got your) managers distributing your monopolies where monopolies are due, she finds the miracle fluid of her morning tears breathing for her anew refueling her force with an angry humor for example that that very instant her face and heart and eyes came unsprung and she wept above the stove—did she hear a cough? the dream donkey ‘tween nips?—and of herself she flickered (watch!) some small communicating part back into the bedroom of these furnished aeons (which part?) that was suddenly certain her husband had been not
breathing
when she had left his side, or was he busy still being the donkey?, while here, buoyed as the kettle itself is by inexpensive flames, she on her side
is
breathing along the small, not unmusical up-beat of the gentle gasps that go with her tears. And this, in union with that experience of her other body inclining in the bedroom to touch her non- or minimally breathing man, puts her in (no, turns her into) her own picture and if she thinks about her being here at the stove (angry or not, weeping or dry)
and
being back in the bedroom examining a wife-poor husband worth not living with, she won’t say the one pure thing she is to say to him, only one thing no matter how you squeeze it, while the practically instant brewer pistons the hot water (which, she sees for the first time, the landlord pays for in property taxes) through the coffee a hair less easily than the languorous spy did it in the movie last month; while, recalling to one side of her memory’s decision Lou’s heartfelt "Ah" of wonder and thanksgiving finding the Way In, the entry that ducked once, twice (like another head coming the other way), against her bone only to cant its way in, third try, with gimme an Ah which she once would answer by voice contact relieved at his swift pang, she now reaches through the refrigerator resigned like a mistress (but tense) to not knowing how long they’d have together this time (why bother to open it like a slave) for Lou’s egg, and finds it with his other eggs (Ah, she’s just this second given up eggs; we know it’s so the future can get a purchase on her if only to hold her in its hand) and feeling it smooth and cool like a thing that ought to be hard and is to the lightest touch, she lets it fly toward the sink before she squeezes it into her hand and hears in the exhaled, absorbed
cack
of egg collapsing on steel what she saved by not holding on to it all gooky in the hand and in the coughing voice at her back what she gained by wasting it against cold steel conjuring a point of entry and departure for a sudden talk between the dry-throated transient who’s himself (!) materialized in a short, white terry-cloth bathrobe (a piece of him lowering notch by notch though not
into
position still sufficiently at the ready to be preceding him and to be called "it" though it’s him)—not destined to drink today’s juice eyeing the headlines of the paper that’s outside the front door we know through him and add (what Lou can’t hear but already about remembers) that it’s black-edged the morning—and, in front of Lou, his first wife Grace, heart breathing by itself for itself scaring not itself, only her, not quite ready to turn but ready to speak beyond the egg to Lou’s "What was
that
for?"