Women and Men (64 page)

To stretch a point. On dual screens wall-eyed twain. ("Bleeps," adds the interrogator in some South American brogue, meaning
blips,
meaning
points,
we know by new intuition having internalized the interrogator. Points of light on a vintage radar-substitute we picked up at God prices everybody and her uncle can charge.) Not content with one set. Some inner leap between two separated screens being essential before we end the century in question seated upon the shoulders of Einstein-over-Euclid-man, if not
over
the shoulder (read
soldiers).

But we meant more than weather-air-and-traffic-controller receiver-monitors-you-can-live-with, two screens in every relative home itself tilting always tilting round as we approach. We meant renewable duals between newer screen
substitutes
that for a day trip
or
night might accommodate Grace Kimball (who is more or less the multiplier of her workshops) and James Mayn (with his by our calculations parallel
and
intersecting populations) hear the noise, duple music from two really wonderful people as human as any angel-san could role-model, though two who may yet not meet in person to make (and
brand
name) exploratory history Recipro-Cal.

But happy with any proven home, we don’t argue with that femoral limb they share: thigh in the beginning angles cohering among the legs holding assembly under that conference table where agreement was general that a power vacuum was a real possibility: power vacuum a daughter found in and
(para)
for her Dad, but gap of such inner route it sings beneath your skin as if it thinks it’s that quaint spawn the worm we have been out of contact with: not
our
fault, it’s
its
turn to phone
us
we sort of remember on principle. For the one who calls, needs; but the one who
is
called, is that the strong or the weak?

The mother who left those sons or double-son is still somewhere and so is the promise she left behind that not she but they were the ones to leave. And if receding, she could still be reconstituted at a later libration point ‘tween pulls, because one looks after one’s mother, too, though rebirth’s what we were into, winging it or waiting on it, and if you are going to start taking responsibility, you might let your relations know.

Whatever. It was an intrahemispheric tapeworm yet slower than a gas-sped bullet spun out the rifling of a Colt revolver’s barrel belonging to the Mayn family: a tapeworm slower than the ready-to-eat horses loping down a western valley of red, brown, gray, and darker stone, past a thousand natural sundials, cantering so gently it’s in a slow scale, side by side mindful unmindful of their riders—the East Far Eastern Princess upon her gift from the Navajo Prince, as she called him, a compact black-and-white pony the Princess’s pale bird refrained from consuming; the Prince beside her upon the midnight-blue Mexican mare, his own thick-withered, tempered mesa-bird, whose land of monumental stone and desert-sea, of spring firmament starred red, petaled white, spread blue-violet, among the green of owl-eyed cactus and sinewy pihon scrub, and of winter space, finds its own four corners infinitely outward-bounded god-given; while still further, but, in the gridthink of territorial plot, less than a generation away from a state called statehood, the Four Corners are also, for administrative (read
white Anglo,
which is—just in case—redundant) clarity,
ordained
interior (the better to clear you with, my dear, my Laughing Antler, my own Doe Water escaping me yet lingering) and that administrative intersection neat as four joined squares of document paper or an idea in someone’s basic-four-color brain, where the mapped lands of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, abstracts in an infinitely vanishing cross divisions within, willed from a distance remote as that departmental will must always stand from the far corners of the Prince’s cosmos that’s held like his people in his heart where one day this cosmos of his is in part told to the visiting East Far Eastern Princess, who knew only then what she had come to understand, and thought the Indians had something—it all worked together quite sensibly, the forces were visible, by and large—but she thought, too, that there was something more the Prince himself was after.

And to go on (against the returning undertow of an interrogator’s interruption—
had come?
he demands, had come so
as
to understand? he complains as if he had not the wherewithal to implement his feeling by juicing our embedded electrodes: you spoke out of both sides of your face): to go on, to bypass these continental sentimentalities Mayn was clandestinely formed by until they questioned themselves one day, our noted tapeworm, intrahemispheric spawn though slower than trajected bullet or breathing horse, has, in case temporarily forgotten,
other
speeds,
other
inferred breathing like sound we picked up with our ear to the thigh of the divine that could make us, who now breathless need somebody to recapitulate by, forget that it was just any old fish tapeworm to be flushed out by gently acting bacteria prescribed by him who’s been your G.P. since not even your dying great-grandma can remember; a tapeworm taken out of Minnesota’s thousand lakes by air accompanied by the Ojibway medicine man’s diamond squint (now increasingly embedded in, if not pegged to, the soft swells of the dollar sign), this tapeworm arrived via the Manhattan physician’s fond attention to his diva, tapeworm extraordinary, which was perhaps not hers alone to do with as she pleased, for even after it got flushed away down the diva’s silver toilet, its track clung like experience to the insides of the slowly self-understanding society we’re in that’s capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale world views, even after it had been flushed by the afternoon diva, the swinging, well-sung songbird (read
mezzo,
read
mezzo persona)
from her soft system during the two hours between the exit of the brunched, rueful physician and the intercom announcing the elegantly lapeled, mustached, infamously gifted mufti officer whose hands upon neat-cuffed wrists delegated in his other, political sphere to marginal interrogators themselves trained in the best amputation may have crashed clapping through the earshot of friends of her father’s and perhaps her old father’s own amplified earshot head (faraway under house arrest) tortured but not by doubts. But this mufti officer’s elsewhere delegated hands have also here in New York (these very hands alive with knowing knuckles) clapped for her at two performances:
Rosenkavalier
we remember and (with a significantly different audience)
Norma,
the Druid priestess—slimmest she’s been during this several-weeks diet campaign, rather dangerously slim as danger approaches across the footlights of opportunity in the officer’s passion and across the intrahemispheric league-upon-league in awesome fear for her outspoken father back (down) home in South America where she the diva no longer hangs her passport, she of the divinely resonant (formerly-until-last-week tapeworm-echoing) thigh (daughter, priestess, officer’s lover, and, in today’s last act, beyond biweekly physic brunches and the hard-core soft-wear spawned much later over every half-lighted inch of her shared bed, now, in her brisk but high cuisine, sacrificing her stomach to her ringed pyre’s flame and a ghastly multiple spawn—(Norma’s little children-san to
eat
—) she offered in her Manhattan apartment to the military but naked appetite beside her at the stove, his breath upon her shoulder, trading for the omens of her duplex kitchen the real love she’s had of him in her own hemispheric-feeling bed)—where his hands that were out of sight she felt but hands right here, not delegated, also clapped for private performances where each of his "strong-arms" moved each hand to clap on its own in a silence not Zen-proof though contemplative because heard in the warm light of the diva’s bedchamber by the twain. And self-helped by feedback, awareness nowadays gets refined in some adepts such that the soul picks up within the common thigh a noted tendon’s oath that the next rash stride around this jogging track around New York’s Central Park reservoir will cost this lonely jogger a pulled hamstring, but through this oath that the soul picks up it can send back its fine tune to monitor the blood pressure risen expressly to this occasion of two independent observers watching the jogger if not his blood pressure which has risen to turn the neck muscles bound to the shoulder slope to stone (to lead, to consolidated scrap metal he an economist has thought) which in turn made him throw forth his middle-aged knee with a kick so his hamstring foresaw itself about to be yanked and thereupon flashed its elastic oath into that soul-center that’s everywhere but nowhere, and a painfully hobbling hamstring pull was spared the tall, bald, distinguished foreign jogger-economist who’s being watched, he knew, through the sunny trees and rocks of Central Park by the mufti naval officer and elsewhere by the journalist James Mayn, who, unknown to the jogging exile-economist and his enemy and fellow-national the mufti officer, came there to watch the officer as well, whose subtly callused palms even at this moment of political action (read
surveillance,
read
commitment)
hold the memory of those dual clappings joint and one-handed in the diva’s bed as, elsewhere in this city which is also an articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, that dimpled, divided, but stereo-attuned buttock-life he clapped also remembers: as when, in turn, bent into a spinal twist in a basement yoga class, the diva’s body complained, except then she could not be sure where the complaint was you know coming from, her upper thigh apparently all kinked but a pulse banging along her other instep thence brinked spaceward—across the room, the roof-like carpet, the floor under the carpet shared by the others of her yoga class—space anyway outside herself like someone’s coat hung in the hall while her soul’s complaining she’s not together.

For, figure it out, you’ve had more than enough time to take responsibility for what you see, even if you now think all you’ve been doing is waiting to remember. For see the diva’s (the lovely songstress’s, the recently officially Swiss-passportable transplant’s) painful if prolific, faintly lyrical, divisions of heart and head: think of it,
there
was the infamously gifted general officer of a South American navy whose regime’s unspeakable intelligence arm—to its own music—endangers her loved, outspoken father; and
here
was (in mufti) the graceful man who touched her even with a Japanese ballpoint which left its impress with code-like interruptions upon her satin thigh backstage the night of
Rosenkavalier;
yes and, to go on, by the same dual but separate-scoped oscillation,
there
thousands of miles south was her broad-faced, silver-mustached widower father guarded by that navy like an electrified coast to the point of apartment-house-arrest; whereas
here,
in New York, which is an articulate structure accommodating for her a multiplicity of grand commutes to Munich, Vienna, La Scala, Covent Garden, Adelaide or Sydney-Melbourne (anyway Australia) where
Lohengrin
and
Otello
are housed by two turtles copulating if you’ve ever looked at that opera house above the water and if they even bred above water—here in New York, she grants that her operatic life and body fill to bursting with small-scale honesties accommodating her career, her flow of breath—of blood—the breathing of her thought, the honest ungated thinking of . . . of—but, to enlist the lyric of that American wartime hit,
is
it
all
of her?—of all the range of lusts even to the faintest infidelity of plot-twisting thrill in sauteing for her naked Chilean visitor in her seldom-used kitchen, which is duplex and balconied, the pink, dense shad roe her old friend the Boston-born Manhattan physician had brought her earlier hoping to tempt her for brunch, her own family G.P. if she had a family.

And what is the yes or no answer in question?
Do
we take all of her or don’t you? It sounds like rape, we mean a little light rape, rape in hopes of romance—but wait a minute, we said nothing about a yes or no answer to that song?

For we move if not exactly from war to peace to war, still from question to question, through long or brief the light makes equal, we move well together, you are magnetic. Yet if meaning something is (really) like goin’ up to someone, as the philosopher saith (to unquote the lisp of some grownup who, hearing the wind the far side of an obstacle drawing us toward the obstacle, hears not the noise of the wind but a song because leave it to a grownup to hear a song in the wind), we now know how to lighten that wide load of going up to someone: what you do is answer a question
with
a question, a trick used by endangered peoples under interrogation (older far than the manipulative modern Can I ask you a personal question?) but you talk to the question, point to it, and you promise it all the feedback it can hold of questions that readily come to mind, like would any Us worth its self settle for being relations?

Which turns her stomach—though she doesn’t catch on at first why—toward her lover where—this third visit to her well-loved apartment—he stares softly at her bedchamber’s birthday-cake ornate whipped-cream ceiling considering her much more than she thinks amid her post-coital wonder (that the tryst goes on) and a premenstrual void that feels like a dressing room that keeps out a dozen people she’s got to see in short order, which is not now but tomorrow when her week begins, not now in the cushioned interstices of this fantastic love meeting, her stomach against his arm, her mind upon his which she can’t quite hear until he speaks: and then what she hears in his idling question upon question may be not some hunt for information but a funny comfort with her, in her, for her.