Women and Men (61 page)

Disaster forestalled. Headed off, yeah. But where
did
these events come from? Far back. One becomes the system for a long second, one finds the Chief Executive’s uncertain wife, his
mujer,
sitting in a New York health-food restaurant incognita, thinking of broccoli and the smell of a certain face, only to be handed a note as she reads her menu that the young meteorologist she would love to help has been pre-empted by an unforeseen future-emergency. Rising angrily, she leaves the table; she elbows someone in order to flag a cab; she takes the cab two blocks to a phone booth where she dials a distant golf course collect wondering if carob is an adequate chocolate substitute, while the driver knows he’s seen her somewhere. But one steps now outside of the system and into the beautiful face of one’s potential girlfriend, Amy, who is asking a question which one cannot hear through all the outlinings she has made over one’s name and through the sound of that now silent telephone containing the voice of one’s mother’s date. And so one is thrust between some echoing openness of fucking minds and, on another hand, a taxing institution with a capital M one cannot get away from—while through the traffic and smoke of one’s name is asked, "Are you saying that these three events are linked by something like marriage or the breakdown of marriage?," while one substitutes an Amy for oneself asking—but one can’t make the words—asking—one can’t say them—while, ah, for that weird equation between Volume-Receiving-Stress in physics and Velocity-Conceived-Under-Stress in economics, substituting another equation between Lorenz curves that correlate income distributions in economics and the (note the Lorentz, with a
t
for) transformation by which space and time in physics may be coordinated between two frames of reference at relative velocities.

So that—the bell will ring—so that—the bell will ring and the audience disperse, the class disperse—so Eco can be transformed into Physics in another space or in another space translated into English where another maniac wielding a borrowed ax by Walden Pond can huff and puff, "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools"—so one’s father can enter one’s room and one can ask, "Who
was
that on the phone?" to which he answers, "You don’t know the half of it," but he has entered one’s relatively new room to ask if one would like to go out to eat at the Middle Eastern restaurant—so one’s family curve adds to the National Net—so the bell can ring in one’s absent mind, the vacuum between Openness and Marriage, two possibilities locused at the phone bell which may ring from Amy in one’s absence if one goes out to dinner now with one’s father who is not happy but is being reasonable, cool, yea scientific—about being open and married. So one makes an
effort
when he says,
"What
may I ask is this Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity?" And one answers that it’s the arithmetical relation, see, between a percentage change in the sales of a substitute like tea, yes?—while at the bell which in the silence of one’s vacuum has saved one for the higher cross of Rail’s science and his curves, one knows one must not be saved, even from the crazy tale one admits to an Amy who has not phoned except this morning to ask for James Mayn’s name-and-address (when she must already know—though maybe not enough about mineral cartels, Mayn’s interest in)—to an Amy who is not present in one’s room at one’s roll-top
escritorio
bought by one’s mother—not present, not here, as one’s father looks down at one’s textbook graphs and says, "Well maybe the bookkeeping stuff will help, but if you get a job in business you’ll have to forget all this and learn some
real
economics"—to an Amy to whom one says almost but no longer with the scientific fiction of the impersonal "one" which one can’t maintain any more than one is Rail or would wish one’s first name to be Lawrence, "I think I am the reason my folks stuck together."

I am.

But if they have not stuck together, what am I?

I am.

If they have not stuck together I am not the reason.

I am Larry.

I am.

the future

After the event he will have his story and she will have hers. The event Lwill amount to little more than a brief, unwelcome scare. They’re the same people before and after the event, the mother and her twelve-year-old son, her "twelve-year-old." They are still there. They won’t go away. But he will have his story and she will have hers. After all, they never were the same. There they are at the end of the day, at seven-thirty, quarter to eight, when she swung open the front door and he was waiting for her and tonight not on the phone but right there in front of her standing in the entrance to their living room. He was sort of smiling, as if he had seen her coming. He was wearing the pale-orange collarless shirt she’d about decided he didn’t like, and his new, expensive sneakers. He had combed his hair wetly, having apparently taken a shower. Waiting for her there between living room and front hall, he made her think of times she had come home from the office thinking, What if he isn’t there?—aged ten, aged eleven. It was his sneakers that made her think of those times. And she knew now, in the instant before he said, "Can we go out to dinner?" that, getting in ahead of his mother, he was going to say what she was about to say. Her keys in one hand, in the other her shopping bag from the fruit-and-vegetable market, she went and kissed him and seemed to walk around him and into the apartment. "Shall we?" she said. She put the two pink grapefruit and the beautiful bluish-green broccoli and the watercress in the refrigerator and the bananas in the wooden salad bowl on the kitchen table. Had she really been about to say, "Let’s go out to dinner"? She remembered the large, unripe avocado in her leather shoulder bag on the chair, and she removed it and put it with the bananas, laid it within the curve. She had not paid for the avocado.

In the small, narrow restaurant are two rows of tables against either wall. At one end, the kitchen; at the other, the street window, maybe fifteen feet from their table. Tonight she was facing the street.

There was the door to the street, to the vestibule, actually, and between the door and the first table, across the aisle from where she and her son sat, was a nook for the cash register. This was an ornate, old-fashioned thing that, if you looked at it, maybe didn’t go with the fresh, elegant plainness of the place. It was a French restaurant, but it was cheap. A black man who she was sure wasn’t French worked in the kitchen and the owner, a tall, gray-haired, gently tense man who looked as if he had been in another profession for years, did much of the cooking. They served mainly crepes and quiches. The tables were set with green-rimmed butter plates and a flower in a cheap glass vase. All around was a composed look of care and economy. Her son usually faced the street window and she faced the rear of the room, which gave her a view of all the tables. Tonight he put his hand on her elbow as they entered, and she went first; so she was sitting with her back to the kitchen and to most of the restaurant.

She would see her son and herself before and after the event. The event itself will be in question, come and gone along the greater event of their life together, which is also in question, and she will know that she could have predicted this—she had the power, the experience; for a long time she let her power be.

They are quite content together. On several other visits here, they never once found this table occupied; it was their regular table. When she and Davey sat down together here at the end of a long day, she didn’t care about anything, not even—but in a good sense—the questions she asked him about his day, his friends Michael and Alex and the others, homework, the cleaning woman, a thank-you letter he was supposed to write. These questions he answered. Actually, tonight he had been talking since they left the apartment about his weekend arrangements. She always wanted him to tell her what he was feeling when she came home at night. It was important.

The waitress, a young Frenchwoman, who wore a white blouse and a black skirt, brought a glass of white wine and a Coke and the menus. The wine, like a lens, held a pale-saffron transparency, and for a minute it stood untouched between the butter plate and the flower in the vase while Davey drank his Coke and, changing the subject, told his mother about a new record. He had only three dollars left from his allowance. She smiled with skeptical indulgence. She liked reading the menu, which never changed.

Davey had it all planned. He laid out the weekend and she listened. She sipped her wine and thought about a cigarette. He would take his suitcase to school in the morning and he and his friend Alex would be picked up in the car by Alex’s mother. Alex’s father came out by train in the early evening. They were going horseback riding and deep-sea fishing, and Alex’s parents had a tennis court and a pool. The pool was empty until next month. The weekend was
a fait accompli,
Davey’s mother was going to point out to him, for she had not been consulted.

"I see we’re getting something for the money we’re shelling out on your tuition," she said.

"Yeah, Ann, you’ve got the weekend off," he said.

She liked him. He was surprising. "Yeah, Dave, I’m glad for you," she returned.

"For me?"

"For both of us."

"Are you going out?" he asked.

"Haven’t been asked," she said.

"You poor thing," he said.

"But I don’t need to be," she said.

"But you’ve got stuff to do around the house, right?"

"Don’t I ever surprise you?" she said.

The waitress came, and Davey had what he always had, cannelloni with meat sauce—not exactly French. His mother decided to have marinated celery roots first, and then a vegetable crepe. Davey asked the waitress if they had avocado. The waitress smiled and shook her head. He had developed a taste for avocado.

The waitress came back with the julienned celery roots. Ann tasted some; she held it in her mouth like wine, and her stomach seemed to contract. The taste swelled in three or four distinct waves.

Two couples came in together but sat at separate tables. The place was quiet and private. Davey asked his mother if that stuff was any good. She nodded. He broke off a hunk of bread.

She was feeling O.K., she thought. She let the marinade dilute along her tongue before she drank off her wine.

She told Davey he could have asked her before arranging his weekend. Call them, he said. She certainly would, she said; he would need money for the horseback riding. No, he said, the horses belonged to Alex’s aunt, who was in the hospital with arthritis. You don’t go to the hospital for arthritis, she said, and wondered if that was true. Alex’s aunt had to go, said Davey; she was having an operation. One horse was a palomino.

Davey looked at the bread he was nibbling, and kept an eye on the kitchen. His mother offered him the last forkful of the celery roots, but he pulled in his chin, shaking his head. The waitress paused to see if Ann was through and discreetly crossed to the cash register and wrote something down. She came back and took Ann’s plate.

"So Alex’s aunt has galloping arthritis."

"My God, that’s sick," said Davey, shaking his head and sort of smiling.

"You, my dear," said his mother, "mentioned the operation and the palomino in one casual breath."

"It’s what Alex said."

"It’s what
you
said."

"Well, ‘galloping arthritis’ is what
you
said."

"That’s true."

"You just don’t want me to go," her son concluded.

This wasn’t true, but she didn’t say so. For a moment they looked over each other’s shoulders.

The waitress came with Ann’s vegetable crepe and Davey’s cannelloni. She held her tray and with a napkin put Davey’s dish in front of him; it was an ovenproof dish with raised edges. "It’s hot," his mother and the waitress said.

A year of weekends, a future of learning the deep seas and the American trails. A back flip so slow above the blank tiles of an empty April pool that the diver holds virtually still among all his dreams of action within unlimited time, and before he finds the pool below him it has been filled.

She raised her empty glass and caught the waitress’s eye.

‘They have a diving board," said Davey. "I told Alex you were a champion diver."

‘That’s not true, dear," she said, startled.

"Well, you did it in college."

"For a while I did."

"We’re going to a drive-in movie Saturday night," said Davey. "They’ve got a drive-in right near this golf course, Alex said."

She’s already there, but it’s somewhere else, and she imagines a couple passing on an adjacent highway, and the giant heads of the two romantic leads stand high to the left at an angle like that of a door ajar. And she has arranged for this night highway to run in the opposite direction at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour, so that the couple can keep driving and still see their movie from that tall and curious angle all the way to the end.

"If I give you money for the movie, you won’t spend it on that record, will you?" said Ann.

"I was thinking of giving the record to Alex," said Davey. "You know, as a present. I know he wants it."

"Why don’t you give his mother something; she’s picking you up and driving you out there."

"I don’t know what she’d like," said Davey.

Ann did not care any more than he did. They were enjoying the advantage of the menu’s variety, as they would not be able to do at home, where an avocado was slowly ripening and watercress didn’t need to be bought for tomorrow night’s salad. Her hand dropped to feel her shoulder bag hanging from the back of her chair by its strap. She had enough money to fly to Boston and leave Davey in front of the TV set watching the game; the Yankees were on the road in a different time zone. She’d fly to a city that was part Boston, part San Francisco, and fly back before the game was over, as if Davey couldn’t put himself to bed. But, once begun, the picture would not stop, and something stirred in the kitchen of her dark apartment and she heard him get out of bed and go see what it was. She kept forgetting what it was that was in Boston and San Francisco, and she kept falling asleep when she knew he was in the kitchen alone with that sound that didn’t stop. It was the avocado sprouting from its pit—hard to believe but easy to hear—and he was having an educational experience in the middle of the night watching it, but she couldn’t keep awake she was so mad.