Women and Men (69 page)

—(hear the song—song that’s just naturalized American noise,
Lez-bee-in;
once said, so what—the foreign plural of a visitor from an olive island. But all that funny material or its sources isn’t why he wouldn’t get into hating Grace Kimball. For she’s funny; O.K.? And she’s open (as opposed to—are you ready?—
closed),
but Larry thinks her book of changes, one a week minimum, had better not get too into ideas, even if where else is it at?— because as the energy level does in a roomful of people jerking off or in their heads, so the room leans its sides in on each other, driving the other equally parallel pair into slant formation, the room is energy-shimmying and maybe the building’s being squashed or at last looking like us to think as a whole building which even then may be but one of those parts of units within units capable of being accommodated in the articulate structure Mayn woke up in to hear a visiting economist preaching decentralization many months ago, but as the energy level of all those people in the happily collapsing room going public rises to some great explosion, you’ll smell the sandalwood but Larry thinks that in the very Near East (right round the corner, maybe) or Far East where some of this stuff comes from, the sandalwood and all the postures in our New York picture book may be easier to smell—and haven’t they relegated the shit to a book of pictures?, although in a western vein among fellow discussants Grace’ll talk about bowel movements
(squatting
heel-and-sole on traditional horseshoe seat or traditional buttock-contact support) as if they’re a recent layer of awareness which is what Larry means, speaking to himself more than to this older guy Mayn, when he says G.K.’s O.K. if she no slide into Ideas: where she has, she says, done the Freud Trip, the Art Trip, the Marriage Trip, the Separation Trip, the Booze Trip, the Romantic Love Addiction Trip—the addiction number, how she makes the long trip equal the short trip: well, says Mayn, is it destructive addiction or not, would be what I would want to know—while, however, the best seedless grass is not addictive, Larry happens to have heard, for just you look, whatever she says about dudes, at the black truckers downstairs in the middle of any Monday through Thursday afternoon taking you know their break to breathe a king-sized Caribbean back-home-style baseball-bat(ty!) joint biggest Larry’s seen so fast their eyes can turn blue ‘f they didn’t wash the stuff back with Colt 45 you know and you can be sure they don’t rinse their eyes before repairing homewise, what would be the point? calm their wives and girlfriends? Wing it—and if Grace talks a lot it’s in a naturally fertilized voice—and
to
you— for she rides in on other people’s energy wings too, she flies
them
too, so it’s like she’s listening to your feedback as she herself says, while meaning only that she wants a supportive opinion for, say, her still-on-the-drawing-board nation(-cum)wide women-bathhouse chain: keep the sexes apart for the time being, just a working model, teach ‘em the wings they fly ain’t only yr joint wings twain bonded in the ground of birth, and Hey Lar’, she asked, where
did
the sexes first split? (I think it was the Paramecium, I go check the book or was it Jim who got it from the prison inmate
appendicularia
zooplankton that house themselves in their own mucus (read imprison self in own ideas), the more I think appendicularia the more I think Paramecium, ah go check mah book, want to get outa here—I know you do, baby, but come back soon, it’s just an elevator ride away—all this as noisy as your own mind).

But we see Larry, and he knows Grace’s mere wish for supportive reaction even better than Grace, but he doesn’t
know
how much he knows, and knows the feedback mechanism is sometimes a homunculus-soul of Grace sucked actually back into him to listen to herself; but also she listens in the customary sense and in a jiffy would be naked almost without your knowing it and execute a hatha yoga number resectioning her old abdomen to music (if you call that music real noise), resectioning it in ultra-deep ripples that’re waves and are erupting muscle pregnancies now-you-see-them, but Larry won’t let her listen to his two-on-one oscillations, he knows he is no crazy after all, and everyone else probably has this same ballgame going, where there are long like pauses, your weak forces when things break down, or are in low-low-energy configuration, then will come like the strong force but you’re not getting them together, there’s a jump going back and forth, but Larry won’t show himself this scramble-minded in talk with Mayn (though there’s another person quiet and clear beyond the scramble and it isn’t anyone else but Larry, he knows) but he’ll guard his gourd, which was what they called your head in Mayn’s day, a day that sounded, when spoken of by the visiting man himself, physically rough in that old New Jersey township where he grown up, up—not that the man bragged—quite the reverse, don’t you know, but a lot of semi-serious sparring and shoving went on in his memory of the edges where everyone lives day to day not in the midst of what once was thought of as history, according (casually) to Mayn: edges where (though his father in this scene was on what you call the
sidelines)
Mayn drop-kicked a football for a field goal on a cold day that smelled, as he stepped forward on his cleats, of apples and cowbarns and a horse’s hide right under your nose spun magically to him at the twenty-yard line on the breeze curving around the recent brick of the high school and perhaps around his father too, where, to give another example (and another and another, for Horace Greeley, founding the New York
Tribune
some fifty miles away and but a few short years after the weekly Mayn-family
Democrat
burst upon Jackson’s strong-handed but anti-central-izing scene, believed "news" to be plural!), Jim Mayn got an unexpected lip, an enraged foul swipe on the mouth which he had to return though he knew he would smash his kid brother Brad, who was justified in his anger at Jim the older (though now to Larry Jim went on to something else, and didn’t quite tell what had been so important about) observing (through a mother-load keyhole) less than he could hear and hearing less than he felt he understood and understanding less than he had words for when he accosted his little angel kid brother Brad about the overheard scene with their mother in the music room, an intimacy with the scrawny Brad when Jim regarded himself as the preferred, the admitted animal of the two sibling species but though the admired animal of the two siblings not the child she would sit with in the closed music room, and that was Brad.

No head for music, Mayn told Larry; an ear for noise, all kinds of sounds shilling about in the gourd, oh maybe back home in Grandma’s old brass-ring-handled highboy chest of drawers, and Larry felt something personal in the introduction of that piece of furniture and did not wish to be Mayn’s equal yet. No stamina for the opera, you know, Mayn said, speaking of noise. Mayn’s mother had played chamber music. It’s intense, said Larry. I’m told it’s like talk, Mayn said, and I believe that. And it’s nice, I won’t take anything away from chamber music.

Mayn is in on something beyond Larry, maybe the Us that Larry feels invading; and Larry is tired and ready to be put on hold, an eighteen-year-old who really hears those three, four, five lone singing boxes, high-strung cabinets of explanation playing and singing, in a music room of a shingled house in a corner of a county seat, a house where Jim Mayn grew up on a street where trees had been put there by your ancestors and
their
chamber music or anyway beautiful homemade tables and cabinets: Yes, chamber music, said Mayn into the phone to his new young friend. Mayn was partial to supperclub numbers such as "Lush Life" ("the axis of the wheel of life") or "It Never Entered My Mind." So that Larry, listening hard and talking silently, drawing words out of Mayn’s mind to work into thoughts of his own, could have said, If you don’t have any head for opera, why didn’t you let
me
take Amy Tuesday night (answer? the tickets were Amy’s!): the words are coming Larry’s way. We see how Lar’ feels, camped above a receding economics assignment, or, where lately when his father stays home to work he makes many of his phone calls, in one of the two booths around the mid-City corner from the apartment, face (then) to voice with this guy Mayn who’s in his late forties. Oh well, Larry would broach the Two-on-One "Quantum Regress" to Mayn, if Mayn didn’t instead talk and talk—this distinctly listening kind of guy—interesting to Larry because two so different impressions, and Larry is weirdly feeling long-established, whose long-time mother thinks that she is a Lesbian and follows Grace Kimball in supporting all those desiring to get
out
of relationships— though wan’t
desire
wrong according to some doctrine itself paired with one that there is no right and wrong, which Larry shrugs roughly in favor of— and he vows to consolidate his gains of self, if only voiced in mind but voiced no less so that we already remember his words
I am,
and he complains to himself that Mayn, who’s supposed to listen, isn’t he?, is instead wiping Larry out just about, so Larry’s mere ear complementing one of the City’s earphones, a voice but we hope with eyes, for Mayn must at least see eye to eye, he couldn’t not
picture
the Lar’: a conductor of information indirectly to or from a voice third party possibly named Amy decorated in the old-fashioned way with a body—whatever his function, that’s what the Lar’s been reduced to, a presence included
in Mayn s voice
and a function brought into being with all these Mayn-generated bits that are interesting stuff just in their own right.

And a rueful energy comes across from Mayn to Larry (you take it, Larry) in word Mayn brings of an elder meteorologist now working "out of" a Greenwich Village railroad flat whom Mayn visited on impulse having heard the man had been blackballed as a maverick and Mayn could not fathom— only pass on, now—the coastline of that man’s theory: but Lar’ did not stop measuring it ‘gainst what he already knew: and so while Mayn and he went on, Lar’ yet reviewed that Maverick Mastermind Weatherwright’s theory— namely, that some new force roughly west-to-east is now altering the modified sine curve which said Maverick long since worked out for the relation between sea/air temp, differential along selected coasts, and consequent updraft deflections of air current; but as this sine curve of late alters erratically, so does the configuration equation for the coast itself which the elder meteorologist worked out by a math he would not trouble Mayn’s mind with except to say the equation for the possibly
limitlessly
wrinkling and, perhaps literally,
broken
coastline in question felt like a Canadian sine curve worked out for the coastlike pattern path taken by our own neurons retrieving memories yet sensing always that, traveler, there are no paths, paths are made by walking: in short, the Maverick Meteorologist is sure something
else
is arriving, apparently from the West, and collaborating with coastal configuration perhaps by some odd congruence as if a possibly metallurgic radiation affected temp, and pressure differentials along coastlines, affected in fact weather, through indirect congruence with coastline itself possibly complicated anew (or even broken) by this same radiation not to be confused with radiation as in radiation fog where radiational cooling over a land mass reduces temperature to around dew point: yet Lar’s mind swarms, now, with coasts, and now margin seems so central, there seems no boundary at all to this promontory or island as its successive discoverers invent words for it and Lar’ feels drawn toward maybe weirding-out an equation relating the (possibly due to radiation pollution)
variable coastline
and—

and while Larry’s feeling a shade less Real than, say, he had planned to, in this and other phone exchanges, the stuff that’s piling down the wire out of Mayn is (granted) told like conversation along a well-tended bar; like chat in transit through the Happy Hour, while conversely what’s this guy doing, where’s he coming from, ‘z’he just
like
Larry? and why why this absolute stream of talk taking for granted that Larry had no other reason for phoning than to be there: for example, to hear what one knew already, that standing on the subway platform in Lower Space doing some last-second drifting so as to end up in front of the subway-car doors, you never knew any more which half of the two doors was going to open since now only one did; and before long (the man Mayn spoke as if he’d been away from the City a long time and was coming home, well he was moving back into an apartment he had once lived in) the (said) subway doors wouldn’t open at all and hopeless passengers would turn into a new mode of expectations, stand hopeless on the platform in Lower Space, watch linked cars roll into the station, stop, and slide out without opening their doors, and, interjected Larry, if you looked hard into one of the windows you would see two workmen inside the car sitting legs crossed chatting as if there wasn’t a platform with its dim exhibit of stalled passengers outside, and a toolbox on the floor of the car near one workshoe, and a kit at the belt, and a length of rope. Mayn remarked that his grandmother had taught him to look at things and had traveled widely in the last century when the family newspaper in New Jersey had still been going strong. Larry said he was envious. But no news can be good news, said Mayn, for Andrew Jackson in whose behalf the
Democrat
was founded went right ahead, first week of January, decimated countless seasoned British troops because the news of peace signed Christmas Eve didn’t reach New Orleans for what is sometimes known as a fortnight, so that for Jackson no news was good news, otherwise known as first win the war, then win the battles—Larry, there’s a key there if I could only find it, for—(I mean history has its laws, said Larry)—If so, said Mayn, I haven’t spotted them, they’re like the laws of a humanly lazy if insane visiting despot, there’s just no telling, except they are barricaded behind Fort Nightmare which we can pass through and never feel, like books almost read in one’s youth such as the heavily grandfather-recommended
Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
—while, thought Larry, was he kidding about his grandmother at some pre-twentieth-century age maybe still in her teens (he certainly seemed to like her) traipsing off to the crystal fountains of Chicago’s World’s Fair then changing her plans and traveling West further than the eye can see, fields of globe mallows and all manner of southeast Utah and Colorado May flowers, magenta, darkening violet, down to the very finest royal purple locoweed swaying not far above the ground— but Larry’s phone is lost to that We that’s bigger than the both of them—that drives a whole canyonful of color-blind Indian horses to the winds of princely addiction and was known once in the beat of its digested purple to penetrate through her soft Indian gift-saddle to the actual blood of its noble rider the East Far Eastern Princess who must have sat her horse at least as well as this Mayn’s grandmother Margaret tripping out there a decade and less after the botanist Marcus Jones negotiated the terrain on a bicycle who, when he ran out of names for all the specimens of locoweed he found there, named the next one
desperatus,
bicycling such rockland!—the cliff-dwelling circuit— (Wait a minute, breaks in Lar’ like an emergency operator, a
nineteenth-century botanist bicycling hundreds of miles through southern Utah?
—but Larry’s always got the little-known Modulus, it will be known as Larry’s Modulus, it came from math but made him its own, working turning and remixing.) Mayn’s talk into-onto the good old screen closer to home so if Mayn persists in not sensing that this phone call was because
Lar’
had a thing or two on his mind, Lar’ will do the understanding
for
Mayn—cliff dwellings, Mayn went on, I’ve seen some of them; apartment houses call them, the sun shines up against them and makes shadows that seem to wander way way back into those apartments: one of them had eight hundred units but whether the Anasazi six hundred years ago had co-op ownership like your modern Pueblo Indians (and the pueblo at Taos is thought to be
nine
hundred years old) I don’t happen to know, and just about all I know about anything I just
happen
to know. What are you doing out there in a pay booth? did I say I had basketball tickets? I’ll call you back—and Lar’ thinks Mayn hangs up without having been told the pay number. Larry is absorbed by the thought that Mayn himself passes easily between one thing and another, the peculiar Princess he’s got one or two low-profile stories about—a guy whose interest in meteorology, perilous dusting of our atmosphere in, for example, the Junge-layer of aerosol particles above the tropopause, and the mother-of-pearl night-lucent clouds and the "twilight" effects first pondered when Krakatoa blew a shitload of volcanic dust into the stratosphere, takes him two thousand miles west to check out reports of sky scraping windmills, though it’s one of those somewhat technical though probably not boring assignments of his: a guy who has done, for his boss, as much homework on arms limitation as, if not more than, the government guys whose fringe personal habits he’s got anecdotes about as if he doesn’t want to deal with the "bolts" (for example, one missile delivery system he specializes in, he knows all about that one, yeah); a guy who flies from a Vienna conference to Stockholm, where the disarmament information center is, but then to New Mexico in order to examine strip-mined land at first hand to see if he believes the corporate claim that that landscape can be duly re vegetated within twenty-five years (for
whom?),
while he stands thirty miles away scratching his head afloat upon desert in front of a giant rock-thing through which he passes himself hardly thinking about the Four Corners coal-into-gas plant but of a red convertible automobile driving across the water of a New England lake once when he was in the vicinity of his daughter and his son, at any rate a man (whatever his unknown personal life) up on what’s being thought right now even though just a journeyman journalist, he claims, and inclined to keep lowest possible profile, anyway a journeyman, an "adult," really into the East Eleventh Street "sweat equity" windmill, called by local Puerto Rican kids "the helicopter" and by the East Eleventh Street older residents "the fan": yet so easily, with Larry, this guy Mayn seems to—What’s "sweat equity," Jim?—Oh, fancy talk for, well, more fancy talk . . . "urban homesteading," Puerto Rican low-income tenants’ tenement renewal, do it yourself, in this case a five-story disaster area becomes the pioneer wind-energy installation if the thing doesn’t fall off the roof, don’t forget New York’s a harbor city—so easily seems to, yes, switch between his son in college who doesn’t talk to him, and his daughter in Washington whom he gave an old white "auto" (he calls it), and an environmentalist group in New Mexico urging him to come back and report in "depth" what strip-mine interests are doing to the land—(which Jim says means "their side of it"—though granted the
right
side) so where’s the chance Lar’s ever going to broach with James Mayn the Two-on-or-in-One Quantum-Regress shifts, when Mayn’s got not only QR shifts of his own but Larry as a mere
function
of it, so it’s more germane to ask where
is
Larry in this momentary empty breath along the phone connection, i.e., where (to wit)
is
Lar’ except in the husky space nearly guaranteeing Mayn is there still, and Lar’ names the numbers: so now Mayn rings back, which in the middle of the visible noise of the City gives Lar’ the illusion of inventing a way to beat the system and more of being able like a pedestrian who flags a vacant vehicle and is given a free ride which the materializing driver will be repaid for elsewhere in the system and not necessarily in kind, a sense of being able naturally to use the public furniture of the City, a comfort subtler than mere economy.)