Women and Men (67 page)

It had meant also, Lincoln was sure, some profoundly previous other thing. Oh she lost it, as two stories slid together, complementary scopes, the Rock that absorbs, versus the Ship that transits you plus all those immigrant Indians on the escape—the Rock, if you’re some stolid, lunatic being, knew this like a new country propelled into being by the force of meditation, thus the Rock’s an obstacle to going on
versus
(because she was thinking this way) an obstacle in turn to the
Rock,
the two people who drove miles out to the Rock in order to, in the middle of extreme northwest New Mexican nowhere, lobby against the mine’s peeling of the landscape and the Four Corners plant’s alternative ozone if we may so call it because we’re hastening to say, through the person of the correspondent-woman who has of late a new reason for cooperating, that for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new
us,
that is to breathe it. But obstacle supplanting obstacle, it’s more than the dark view and the bright view of things held in one eye, O.K., it’s more than that old dust of existence itself measured with and against the advanced production of sulfur dioxide shared by volcanoes and coal-burning operations which is, as sulfur dioxide alone, curious enough when it hooks up with the particles in all our smokes of unburned fuel to go on a killing spree in 1930 in Belgium’s famed Meuse River valley to name but one—but with ye old water vapor and sunny-sun-sun it becomes distinctly gamy sulfuric acid which can (we bleep thee not) give you a new set of (not to mention inflamed) lungs, even in signal instances make ‘em burst with or
into
flame, while yet more lasting damage—
Que lastima,
murmurs a tourist catching up with the marbles of Florence, Paris, Prague, Toledo, Ohio, Argentina—slowly wears thin the fabrics of great cities submerged in solution. It’s—she sensed—more than this alternation between apparently exclusive views, it’s also—forgive vagueness—one thing after another: so that while we seem to lose what we had a moment ago, we already remember what’s so soon not here any more. The correspondent-woman, recalling her godawful tape of the monk burning himself up, has fallen in love with the man who wrote the letter to the daughter Flick like thinking out loud. The correspondent-woman was a mere means to a greater end (which was what she suddenly saw her years in Vietnam to have been, incidentally informing her about Buddhism, about fathers, family, children, and taking notes, some mental) when she sat with legs crossed naked at Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop among her New York if not sisters surely kin who kindly exclaimed at her God-given first name Lincoln. President’s name! But like the diminutive correspondent-woman, we see only the immediate means by which she (we still can’t help predicting by old habit actually less angelic than human) will recall at last what’s been here with us so long we had more than a chance to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember, whereas we don’t hate birth, do we?

Not birth of relations, comes the answer but from where? from us or others conceivably
not
angel but likewise evolving toward human, though if an angel is trying to change, it must have a long way to go—light years, some informed soul says.

Yet as the auburn-haired woman and the wonderful Latin man moved around their table and rejoined on the far side and touched arms, he speaking into her ear, she raising her shoulder and snuggling her head to it like he’s tickling her, the correspondent-woman on the point of salvaging the thing she needed in the selection read her from Jim Mayn’s letter found one more intervention in the person of two or more
scope-size
stories sliding slow toward each other and toward her, unless one was the waiter coming to rescue her oval
mariscada
dish before this highly metabolized and busy customer bread-polished it "licking-clean" enough to fool the waiter into lightly laying down upon its white mirror a jiggly dessert, but not before she knew more than she was able to know: that the father Jim’s letter had drawled its way into taking the Ship Rock literally, so it’s sliding through the Earth, masts breaking the horizon; so the Earth—this man reasoned like telling a story to his little girl now grown to irony—was softer, kind of fluid in those days—make sense? —so that when he told of lovers going up the Rock together and coming down separately at accelerated velocity, and reported the volume of American new-lyweds visiting the actual Four Corners twenty miles or so from Ship Rock to stand on an ugly metal plate that she did not like one bit where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico met, he seemed to have an easy grip holding that earlier, fluid Earth together for such newlyweds as held on to each other standing on the plate to be in four states at once but were by some design of theirs in collusion with their future and with the literalness of this man who seemed not the
type
to think himself "between histories." Was the joke some new mixed-blood religion? For was he preaching layer by geofirm layer down to each seashell in its thousand-mile-deep coast where the current of the sea of the gods listens to itself in the dry fires of the plateau? This man will take legend and geologic report, and, as she understands it, it’s history as common in the invisibly slow violence of the land’s change as in the cities of the sky invented upon high mesas by the four-dimensional grid of mind with which the People lived their respect for the forces that made the Encircled Mountain a four-petaled flower or told a singer when he was
strong
enough to sing a healing and when he’d better not. Well, she had put aside what she hardly knew, to find there were many paths all in her from one uninterrupted breath to the next and many even the face of the Earth was consuming. This all came to her, as the woman with the abundant auburn hair leaning into the embracing form of the Latin man she was with, cast back upon the correspondent-woman such a look of tension it darkened the prospect of dessert, but the waiter came between them. And as she ordered her dessert and saw her shiny
mariscada
dish pass away, the correspondent-woman heard her own frank voice questioning her profession. Didn’t newspeople just multiply wants? The preceding week, looking across the semicircle of naked women at the woman Clara who had not really rebuffed her but seemed to prefer not to carry "it" beyond the (naked) workshop, her voice was saying right out as if her whole body-self made her understand, that she had stayed single because she did not want that trip, it was stubborn of her, she knew, it was uncooperative and over-metabolized, it was unwilling: but two people boring into each other? slipping closer into unmentioned disaster she couldn’t put her finger on, her fault no doubt—

No,
said one woman; and, not at all, said the woman named Clara; and stick to your own body feelings, Line, said Grace.

—but the point was that now as a new contingent of five diners rather silent came into the restaurant, her unwillingness brought on a fellow feeling, but who was it with, who was it with? and she knew it was with the father who wrote to his beloved daughter (hoping incidentally that she wasn’t going to find herself high and dry when the funding for her job ran out, and could he do anything? he knew any number of people in Washington), wrote of the rock ship barreling through the once permeable (fluid) Earth and also of the numerically real couples, newly wed two by two but maybe really experiencing four states hand in hand become one for the future.

Until she half-loathed her life alone while sliding forth to meet not the waiter who approached and whom she momentarily slid through, but what lay well beyond, and it was as if the unwilling landscape man Mayn had actually told her this was what would happen: that two persons perhaps without even a vein of bias as to religious or sexual origin might one day disappear literally into one: but the point was not that this need happen each to each in their frequent troth but that under some latest utility dome two persons stood Indian file content because awaiting transport to another section of their future: there, having here been reduced to frequency and thus transmitted hence, they would reconstitute and see each other at once in their new home which would be an Earth-Moon-space colony with native-silica drapes, a lawn on top of the living room, altogether a new consumable life, running, say, a waterless fish-farm where beyond gravity gills won’t collapse, she understands (space spouse).

When in reality through the matter-scrambler utility dome the union of these forward-looking couples was to be sealed literally in a one-for-two eco-switch dreamed up by population-consolidation programmers who cover with the old romance of loved union a new unknown singlehood: that is, the Earthling couples demattered domeside turn out, when reconstituted thousands of miles forth in space in one of the colonies, to be one person now, no longer two.

O where was this coming from?
Mariscada
chemicals? Glamorous couple? (just exited—awesome; dangerous; partial, she had to feel). But more coming from herself, like wind within, drawing her out in all directions, she thinks grandly. To where? Away from that place in her that fired off messages home to friends beginning "I’m sitting on Al and Ginny Kaulilua’s balcony on Statehood Day overlooking the Pacific and somehow at peace listening to a Society Island canary sing in its swaying cage." Or toward the gist of two persons transpondered to an elsewhere of one, like shadow cast back from future. She didn’t carry it further; but she almost did (recalling her reply to a man she momentarily didn’t, because she couldn’t, name, when they were lying in bed in a hotel contemplating shadow shapes on the ceiling made by a sunset among nearby trees—which was "Bliss"—which he then called the highest compliment any gal had ever paid him but she didn’t tell him it wasn’t just that—and she didn’t because she was still touched by his question, which was, "What are you feeling right now?"). And
as
she did almost carry it further now, she heard the line in the letter Flick had read where the man, Flick’s dad, whom the correspondent-woman Lincoln decided she loved, had said, Look
I’m
no landscape man (she heard his voice coming down in his knowing who he was) and she asked how could she ever have taped the self-burning Buddhist monk whose peeling colors—dervish flames drying out the personal pockets of life in the still being of that after all non-renewable person who had had no fat on him, much less cellulite—who was news: and so she scraped onto her spoon’s oval blade all but a trace of smoky caramel dark from the flan whose mold stood once trembling upon her dessert plate; and, wanting that last trace, she might through that girl Flick have felt, through near-relations leaning toward her or toward becoming as human as she or toward becoming
her,
or her and
Flick,
have figured out that her play-by-play taped Statesward many months ago in Vietnam for a pool of reporters had included in its stored radius the very man Mayn, of whom had been said (by his grandmother) what had been said of the correspondent-woman Lincoln (by her late mother) from field-hockey days when the grass kept growing under her furious feet, to her last visits home from further and further away—that she must have a tapeworm inside her. But thinking her new mystery-beloved’s disclaimer when really he
was
a landscape man meant that he might want to become the landscape—spread, disperse himself into it, which was kind of threatening, especially to someone wanting to locate him and meet him; and contemplating the last dark molasses swipe from her creme caramel; and reminding herself that a good Buddhist stays put and plants a tree like her father who planted on the other hand thirty postwar Jap red pines all at once the year after he had given her her Christian name over her ma’s dead body —she had to see that after a given two people were reduced to frequency, matter-scrambled, and sent on like a message to a better way of doing things in that hibiscus-flavored diaphragmatically breathing space colony with timeless sunbaths that might make her impatient
("No
one can
make
you impatient," came a voice seductive if you love being taught things)—and there was only just the one of you when you materialized again in the Earth-Moon-space colony, and you found your head half pillowed by inner gravity or aware of some god in you or an angel or the memory of one with a permanent reservation in some of your newly compounded gray matter if it was really gray—well, which one of you
was
it that wound up on your feet? (as your parents predicted, in spite of their anxiety, which was for themselves?)—and which sex (to get down to shared thighs)? and would you be meeting a new, well, lover soon who had been done likewise?

Fair questions. Did he want to be done that to? Did it mean our feelings would wind up even more mixed, our memories fuller, our sex still less plain (and what about the women-women pairs, and the men-men)? What happened to chromosomes when turned into frequency? Just another male idea, she heard a female group-consciousness verbalize. Yet Lincoln had some lightness or light in her—was it non-serious? So she imagined again these couples compacted and transmitted as a frequency and recreated in the promised land as one person not two, and thought, Did it mean each new person would be even more the song of its parts, but where would Jim Mayn be? would he be internalized in her and she would have to live with
that
fo’ th’ rest of her days in space? But what if ... ? But, seeing the waiter approach and seeing just why this hypothetical man Jim Mayn could be right here—look out!—is also anywhere
but
here, for she is thinking him—oh God she didn’t know the man and never would, unless Flick his dear daughter mentioned Lincoln by name, which could stick in Jim’s mind, a woman with such a name: she took hold of her dessert plate, it had a thin dark blue circle painted round its rim, and brought it up to her face like a comfortable mirror, and, protecting her handsome nose by the length of her tongue, she saved the last curve of caramel from a final meaninglessness of trace, from the dishwasher or the swift fingertip of the waiter, whom for a second of bliss she blotted out with this mirror too close for anything but taste.