Women and Men (75 page)

all of which super-rapid communication joins simultaneously as a tear of anger blinds Larry’s eyes as he shifts to low gear approaching a light that’s still his so that two lunchtime Riquenos (or who knows "what" they are?) slowed down if not quite on hold or the worse for wear join in Larry’s tear for him just as he half brakes then accelerates between their merged units and, clipping a coattail, an elbow, a hand, feels the merest swipe of a furious limb as little as a finger or two upon his shoulder as he passes and, heading through the intersection wondering how he could do such a thing yet seeing, as clank gives way to whirr, that Marcus Jones when he couldn’t think of yet another name to call a new variety of royal locoweed called it after himself, his legs so weary, his porous mind desperately interested which at this moment of near accident that wouldn’t make the papers Larry (who has grandparents only in California) finds the grandmother Margaret was as well—desperate—now where did he get that?—but on the locoweed breathing into her from her soft-saddled horse or from some horse or some prior anguish wherein, for sure, that hermit in his portal-shadowed high unit gave her his eye to pivot her from self to self.

So, as the two Hispanic pedestrians, lurching—nay, lunching—across against the light, close ranks behind Larry’s bike, he feels the two of them like one kindred gap he’s passed through when they weren’t concentrating, feels their flesh by way of, first, one cluttered storefront window (in the next block) with two TV sets angled toward each other, one off, one on, as a hand reaches over a partition and switches channels—and second, a couple of seconds later at the other end of this new block, another storefront and another TV set being watched from the sidewalk by a broad-shouldered woman with two loaded shopping bags that like buckets and for balance’ sake she hasn’t set down, while the same TV’s watched from inside by a man sitting in a corner of the storefront window beside a Messenger Service sign, the man for that moment as odd in himself (his dark hair thickly threatening to grow down his short forehead to join forces with the frontier of his stubborn black eyebrows) as Larry, seeing on the screen Grace Kimball in boots (one of them crossed, man-like, across the other trousered knee) and a broad-brimmed hat beneath which she talked, knows that the screen with entirely other contents that he’d seen barely a moment ago at the other end of the block was switched to the same channel. Now how did he know that?

Well, it might be important, he hears—it might be important, Larry, the words say, voicing a female presence that he had an appointment with twenty minutes ago, a motherly voice that catches up with his silences to irritatingly say, What are you feeling, Larry? it might be important—and to say later, You’re irritated, Larry, that every little thing matters—Yeah, that’s right, that does irritate me—that you’re one of these people that every little thing matters to you, it’s, it’s—What, Larry? can you say it?—Oh shit it’s heavy, it’s, it’s, well greedy—But we deserve it, Larry, we’re working together for it, we deserve it—Wait a minute: who said it’s both of us that every little thing matters to? who said that?—Maybe that’s what we find out, Larry, what we’re always finding out, that every little thing matters—Greed is what my father’s paying thirty bucks into, but you’re getting all this stuff you’re going to use, you’re using it already, it’s greed doubled if you ask me—O.K., Larry, what’s wrong with using it?—You’re so moral: that’s what’s wrong—Wait, Larry —Laying down the law—But I’m not an authority figure, don’t make me into one—That’s it, Martha, you’re greedy and you’re moral about it—That’s good, we can work with that, Larry—You go right ahead—But every little thing
does
matter to you, Larry . . . Larry?
Breathe
—What if I don’t?—and we hardly know each other and already we really have something to work on—But
I
don’t want to pay you my father’s money to attack you; after all who are you?—Why not?

The voice of Martha, in her ripe thirties, receded when he turned left; he rolled a block west, silently, fluently, and cut south down Eleventh Avenue (a narrower-feeling two-wayer with a divider), and the voice picked up when he turned north again until the moment when he cut between the two Hispanic lunchers threatening to be one who unanimously could offer him bilingual abuse, which helped to shift him recycled from between them and past the changing light into the new block, to be visited then by genius (I’ll be thinking of you, Larry, said Mayn, who also said that you wouldn’t get
him
on one of those things in today’s traffic)—genius? because now, at the very moment Larry’s wasting his black Raleigh bike (ouch) on the topographical feature length of Manhattan’s theoretic island, the ruts, crevasses, minor lakes dammed where a landmark sewer’s backed up out of sight and his naked tires can’t see beneath the surface the sharp mean trowels of broken glass (tooled from last week’s jettisoned boddles) he finds what he wouldn’t have if he’d kept this third date with (read the Electric Chair, read D-D-D-Destiny) Ma Therapist, Mahtha by name she’ll answer to ‘n come runnin’ while yet seem to stay where she was a minute ago at home curled stockin’ feet in her soft mobile chair who his father (who he wishes would stop thinking of him) has "brought in," though it’s Larry who’s being brought or biked in to the therapist but en route though receding from the therapist, has found, namely, the real action and Larry finds it is laid out for him somehow while the ground plan of it is half asleep there below him and his emotional bike dozing like only a city can doze, steady and gapped, like breath when it comes only faintly, don’ you know—

But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.

So saying, having been told to go ‘way yet retaining (like fluid) the stored (if irretrievable) impression that
she
had been the one to depart: and, thus, so saying, we betray in the best sense, that is to oneself (because we don’ need no one
else
to criticize us we can do it well enough alone), that we are we in two ways—a 2-folded we like him and I, and a
all-type
we (Do you mean, asks the interrogator all but forgotten except by our hellishly independent Pain, do you mean
we all?).

But as soon, thinks Lar’, as that grand ground implied itself to him through the tight-sprung folds of a twenty-two-buck bike-saddle, it found itself obscured by the small tip of an elbow appearing just within the operative TV screen in the first storefront window of the block, before that silent screen was rechanneled to a segment of swarthy marchers flinging shouts, cries, arms, hands, bottles, one at the camera enabling it to pass to a revolutionary man or woman face down in the gutter one bent arm at rest along the curb. So, having registered the well-clothed host on the previous channel and the bright elbow resting on a talk-show chair arm right next to the host’s ribs, Lar’ could hear the broken English abuse projected bilingual rehearsed so often as to be now unrehearsed after him by the guys he’d nearly hit (hence distinguished for a moment one from the other). Which was an improvised audio for the swarthy marchers on the news channel especially since they were at once replaced on camera by the body holding its breath in the gutter. And a moment later, riding past the storefront TV displaying Grace Kimball like a message of wares within, Lar’ knows that the elbow was Grace’s elbow in the other TV in the first storefront where he now already recalls there were
two
TV’s angled half facing each other and one TV wasn’t on.

So that, coupling if not cubing the two operative storefront screens with the two different channels employed and the second, unemployed though not necessarily inoperative TV in the first storefront plus the man inside and woman outside the storefront both employed and unemployed, Larry turns away from the nice lovable therapist his dad fixed him up with who at this instant of her full day is "with" somebody else, not Larry and his wide and klutzish shitload of half-life dream which to tell the truth he isn’t bringing her because she would rather he told her his daydreams, some less
in him
than he’s at large
in them
who himself for all he does know doesn’t know that between him and the therapist (who’s on a high floor) is somebody at street level waiting to waylay Larry and bother him, a fact at least three people know but not Lar’.

Who now—as if his front wheel were his vehicle—turns away and must cleave to his own route, obstacle or no. For Mayn did half-know what he conveyed to Lar’. Such historic debris as might slip between the twin screens twain or just wipe them out: yet Krakatoa, from which arose stratospheric phenomena in which Mayn would one day find (if such a man—though ever off-handedly—
ever
found) cause for inspiration—Krakatoa 1883, which Larry not finding in Hawaii has quickly moved to Indonesia where it belongs, volcano and island near unto congruence, blew up and killed people married or unmarried on the shores of neighboring Java and Sumatra as if they were so much debris to be incorporated, were matter smashed by the continuum, sons, daughters, families of matter, Larry hears them in the shouts of the two men who left just gap enough between them for Larry and bike like the wind to startle them into spontaneous commands to do something to Lar’s mother; so that he with his running shoes stirruped in his pedals’ toe clips can see those People in the light of Krakatoa mattering, and angels, being
in
Larry, are shown what we cannot escape—such as the tip of the elbow, as they say: and that goes for when you can’t see those People well too—although an elbow that talks louder than words on one TV set turns into a Grace Kimball on a set down the block almost at the next corner where nearly causing an accident Mayn’s hermit’s blank gray ingot of an eye high in that Indian cliff dwelling returning young Margaret to the gaze of the East Far Eastern Princess (for one screen deserves another) takes Larry out of a tubeful of womb-men to his sole self for a time, he hopes, not being thought about by
anyonel

Therefore, wishing to be Not Thought Of, Lar’ cut then as diagonally as the city let him back toward the East Side south, pumped so alertly through El Parque Central and beyond that everything he saw signified, and yet was, nothing, though the City’s dormant ground plan had begun to stir, to move Larry—
ipero adonde?,
but where?—well, clear to the busy image of Grace in flesh emerging punctually (it goes without saying) from their multiple dwelling strutting gaily out, her arms swinging as if powered by the small, red, water-resistant, mainly empty pack on her back, so that Larry gallantly risks running her down and brakes at the last second while she grins welcoming him ne’er doubting he will stop, and he understands through a channel-shaped elbow and with a happiness like unexpected basketball tickets or quiet praise from his mother that "frees him up," that the bright patch of cloth on one screen back there on Tenth Avenue was the funny bone of none other than, in the flesh, "Kimball" (as Larry’s Mom Sue called her sometimes), an elbow corner of a puzzle getting you to the other screen where, as TV talk-shows show (even with audio off or behind a storefront window) People Matter and the headless elbow traveling fast as a bicycle made of thought (or light that’s itself at rest) takes you simultaneously to both Grace’s hand and Grace’s face, the one lightly and joyfully slapping, the other telling host, audience, and tube of some mouth-watering surprise that came to her one day as she’s succeeded in living her life, fighting the Habit Patterns, ever making new friends, turning an audience on to how sex and drugs bound to go together in a guilt-ridden patriarchal society, how else can we bear to have sex (—But
is
there that much in sex, a devil’s deviate (southern) woman host asks) but we’ve got to take a break but we’ll be back even younger!

And Grace’s smile—suddenly,
de repente—
meets Larry’s in a kiss under the apartment overhang.

He’s home.

"You can really travel on that thing," she says, and "take me away from all this, darling," flinging her hand across the intersection but oops checking her wristwatch as Lar’ sees his handlebars are out of line and he’ll have to tighten the stem by loosening the expander bolts when he gets upstairs, and so (thinking, "If I could be another person . . .") he sees with one of his heads the neatly-zippered oblong black-leather tool kit on a shelf near his desk in the empty, the absent apartment, and with the other head catches in Grace’s interested eye an understanding question which ran from her hand flung to the winds across this city intersection to her wristwatch to her bright gray-eyed glance, and he feels for his wallet that may have worked its way up in his hip pocket—and for the first time thinks—so he smacks his cheek in ascetic alarm—that if you miss a certain appointment you pay anyway whether it’s the real you or not. And knows then as surely as that he’ll not ask her, that Grace emerging from their multiple dwelling
a las uno y media
or one-thirty
P.M.
also knows when his therapy appointment was.

Yet in her eye he finds himself liked and loved, what the hell!, and passing a meridian where all parallels imagine meeting with the speed of love which is beyond speed, why Lar’ unpenitent recalls what he never could have if he hadn’t run into Grace through veering away from the immovable obstacle of the nice therapist, who is west and north of here (and more than nice and more than pretty), a dream he had last night—"Breathe"—or this morning —"Breathe, honey!"—in which looking right at his mother he finds he can see
his
face
and
hers: but now with Grace’s hand upon his hand which is upon the upper part of his racing handlebar dynamically hard in its very bend and hanging temper, he opens his mouth and breathes like a sigh of relief: to know that Grace has a mother and so does Mayn, and so does Martha, who will charge Lar’s father Marv the thirty bucks (show or no show) and can be heard in one half of Lar’s old brain pushing pushing saying, "Sure the rest of us have mothers, Larry, but it’s
your
mother you’re talking about, give that all the dignity it deserves, it was
your
dream and it was about
your
mother" and a tear blinds the single, warmly clouded vision Larry-son gives back to the woman Grace who squeezes his arm and is off to market, for Martha in this daydream has after all shared his nightdream—which, for he gives in to us at last, means who knows what to Martha, who has or had a mother; or to Grace, whose mother she’s phoned urging her to rediscover masturbation— What do you mean "rediscover"? came back the answer hundreds of miles away—and promising to send her a Hitachi vibrator (change one letter and you’ve got a Japanese import on five thousand multiple-dwelling balconies on a June evening charcoaling what’s left of their buffalo as a seasoning for their veg kebabs)
and,
to continue to Mayn, whose grandmother’s East Far Eastern Princess’s Navajo Prince had a mother for whom the ceremonial "sing" was held the night the Princess arrived and in whose poor head were untold tiny holes but one greater hole full up with demons cramming the entrance so only a special sing might get past them, seeing through her head to all parts of her most real realm.