Women and Men (79 page)

Yet again,
What are you staring at?
was Mayn’s line and as warped as his retroactive view of his mother—not worth talking about but if it ever came up, her tragedy, ununderstandable as it was, he talked of it naturally but said out loud that he knew nothing really about it, about the awkward marriage and the annihilatingly downplayed disappearance as if the war ending was what mattered like being strong, and hardly heard Spence say, "I never
had
a family to speak of—or maybe you just remember yours—you certainly got me guessing—I mean, I never had much in the way of family, O.K.?"

—You mean it was natural to talk of it, or he talked of it in a natural voice? we hear the multiple interrogator like a multiple child having to ask—

—Well "What are you staring at?" was what, long ago, ball in hand, he came back at his mother with:

... for his mother, the Sarah of his remembered moment, had been staring in Jim’s direction as Bob Yard, somewhere behind her, hallooed high falsetto cum deep feckless baritone brashing his way across the beach toward her and her alone, Jim understood, while she was really staring at Jim yet at the horizon over his shoulder too: oh shit, Jim knew she liked him even if in Windrow he stayed clear of the house most of the time "from sun to sun," though he lied when he joked about her practicing and even wanted to hear the interruption no the interrupted phrases of her violining cross slowly, backtracking in order to go ahead, halting upon a gap, her whole self or life, or just music, get it right, go back, go back, go back again and get it right not at all like voices in the evening bursting now and again through the pillowed atmosphere of the roomy house in Throckmorton Street only to disappear like hallucinated messages into what might as well be Jim’s mere thought process, which was
like
his grandmother’s house.

What are
you
staring at? said Bob Yard directly above her, a little bent over like in a cave. His charcoal eyebrows vanished under a straw hat as he looked down at the woman who laboriously sat up hunched and swung half round to look up at the noisy man in green chinos who was now not talking, unless he was humming words that Jim didn’t hear.

Up the beach Margaret and the old man were approaching in heated conversation—the oldster maybe not so much older than Margaret—and Bob Yard squatted beside the harshly pale woman—Sarah’s shoulders helplessly conversing with the profound sun, her dark hair defying his arrival, glossy hair, straight hair, her face bending kind of stupidly away from Bob, and her body—her body!—hunched like she didn’t have headroom—

—stupidly? or struck dumb?—

—so Jim knew what his mother was like: she was not just beautiful— and at the very moment when she was warped by an indifference, her look aimed—aimed at him?—so that with Brad and Sammy (who grew younger) and the endlessly plunging breakers pushing Jim to throw the goddamn ball and get the game going, he found himself to be a man:

a man twice told—(he wouldn’t voice
that
one to Ted no matter how close they were, in i960, 1963, 1972, or 1975, when Ted got sick)—but why Jim was this, he didn’t just know, but knew it was her looking both truly at him and yet around him, while Bob Yard raised his biting voice a notch, "He’s that crackpot Indian hustler-scientist from the old days or a relation maybe— isn’t he that old pal of Margie’s she talked about that helped her out when she was in that tight spot in the old days? He was sitting on the front steps like a veteran when I drove by"—which was why Bob Yard said he had driven down to the shore on impulse (nice day, here’s this old friend of Margaret’s—or is it a relative?—or the old
friend,
that is—looking for her because he took the train up from New York to Windrow, didn’t phone; said he
doesnt)
—while Sarah bestows on the man in chinos the intimacy of very cold indifference, but answers—but as if Bob wasn’t there: "Margaret’s romantic adventures are catching up with her"—Sarah’s plain words, but what did they mean? had the oldster appeared here to tell Margaret something? or maybe to
ask
her.

No wind to scatter the controversy, we add, to convey the potential lightness of the picture, and at that moment Jim had to shy the ball at wonderfully wall-eyed Bob Yard (who seemed like a north pole to Jim’s mother’s south, though not in direction, in some bump of touching and unpleasant barrier), but Jim didn’t throw it after all. The voices of the bathing-suited mother and her chance visitor rose tightly, but in their duet had only a funny sound (like strange vocal cords, not human maybe); and Jim imagined them to his chagrin fondling each other, to make up after this raising of voices. How could he? Because he could see that though his mother had been right here in his sight and, earlier, in the car on the way here—the dark blue Buick with the breezy straw upholstery and the knob on the steering wheel that when Jim was Brad’s age he would sit in the driver’s seat and grab—she had been "here" all the time: yet some scene between her and the principal Windrow electrician, Bob Yard, had come before what Jim was witnessing.

She turned away from Bob Yard who stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, and she looked past Jim, catching his eye so he knew he was part of that extent of sea that, when he turned to see what she was looking out at or looking off to, proved to have a slow freighter passing from right to left he could tell by the bow and stern (he had never seen a convoy, they must not come this close to shore); and facing what
she
was looking at, he let go a pure, healthy sigh, knowing that he hadn’t been breathing and he would breathe for both of them—live, play, eat; and the words of his grandmother and the old man in white sneakers she was with came to him like the target within the larger bull’s eye, and—

And he heard—he hears his half-pint brother Brad like he’s getting out of hand with a parent (which he
never
did) insult him and later he doesn’t recall how—that is, the words of the insult—except that they made Jim feel cornered.

Except no one can
make
you feel anything, says of all people the interrogator who has heard these words underwater in a health-club pool or during an intermission at an obscure tryout reading (pre-production) of a new opera, a private opera, pressed upon a major basso by his young beloved the composer where the interrogator had thought to find someone to interrogate after the show;
or
in a therapist’s anteroom, underwater or not—

—made, though,
Jim
feel transfixed by both couples, his grandma in her bathing suit raising her voice at the geezer from New York, and Sarah lowering hers to Bob. So Brad, having uttered his insult to his big brother who felt the sunburned sand tightening and dyeing his strong, contented arms with its dust, danced away a few steps toward Sammy and came back so close to Jim that Jim drew his hand back across his body to his opposite shoulder. Obviously he is about to back-hand his half-pint brother, but Sarah’s voice rings out saying Jim’s name. Whereupon our Brad snatches the tennis ball from his brother’s other hand and darts away with Jim after him angered, relieved.

No, Jim didn’t want to have a fight with Bob Yard, he liked him; no, he liked his mother taking care of herself, and the newspaper would fold one of these days, it wasn’t competitive with the
Transcript’s
advertising. No, he wasn’t just mad; he really didn’t like little Brad. So there they were, for a moment of four, five, or six steps—the baseman pursuing the ball and the base runner in the over-all picture of Mantoloking, New Jersey, the blistering landscape of beach, the horizon out where the water gave way to wind—and Jim, skidding into a little ridge of sand, snagged his brother by the waist of his trunks pulling them and him half-down but letting go just as his mother called his name again, and he knew—though he couldn’t tell Ted a generation later—that he at thirteen had missed some point before when he turned away from her to see what the heck she was looking at so he’d warped her and himself into a real fix he would never get out of, oh it was his future he’d have to go to and look back from, or be only a means of doing that—be used matter-of-factly by others who saw what he did not.

And at the instant his brother lay stretched out in front of him, Jim leaned over him so the shadow or human window fitted Brad exact, with no overlap onto the sand. And before Sarah’s angry voice cut through a tissue of his feeling,
Don’t touch him,
came her shout—Jim had already in fact
stuck
right there in the sand, and Brad screamed.

Jim said to his old professional friend Ted in the bar of a Washington hotel, "If you can beat that," knowing he’d rather be talking some second-hand factual matter to him about the Sprint missile (a favorite of his despite or on account of its mere twenty-five-mile range)—"ewioatmospheric" because it intercepted the enemy missile only after it reentered the atmosphere (last-minute stuff, twenty-five miles, highly personal!).

"What do you mean ‘stuck’?" said his friend.

"I mean I was at an angle sort of one-quarter leaning like the vertical of an L-shape over my little brother—

—a
drunken
L-shape—

—slanted, and I should have fallen but I didn’t, and my feet weren’t that deeply into the sand so nothing was holding me, I was operationally extra-gravitational."

"What were you leaning on?"

"My ankle, my shin, my stomach muscles, my own back."

"Something
was holding you up. Didn’t you ever fall?"

"A moment or two later, Brad decided he wasn’t going to get killed, so he rolled away, and I pulled a foot free, I think, and backed to a standing position and I guess we played Bases."

"There’s an explanation somewhere," said Ted. "We need that little wise guy Spence."

Suddenly here was Margaret in her ample bathing costume, her hair loosely bunned, her face prepared to pass beyond whatever discussion she’d been having with the man she introduced them to: "Must be fifty years ago he told me to go west. I was at Bedloe’s Island looking at the inside of the Statue of Liberty’s face where they’d uncrated it." Jim didn’t recall much more except that Bob Yard seemed to be absent, perhaps receding toward the beach houses and the little road between them and the bayside cottages where Alexander was in conversation with Bob Yard’s wife. Margaret stared at her daughter Sarah on her large towel now again lying down looking up under her cupped hand—"Black and white and red all over" (for you wouldn’t yet see the burn emerging from her daughter)—and Sammy, who was sometimes but not now like a brother, in a rundown trying to tag Brad, had called out, "A newspaper!" "You had more clout if you
didn’t
beat up on him, seems to me," said Ted, in their bar in Washington, who had had "the most boring family, you know, in the world" except for his father who they all knew had wanted often to kill their mother but had never understood "how to have clout by
not
killing her," though in fact he had not killed her, not that he’d not exactly had the chance.

In war there was no substitute for victory, Jim Mayn supposed, paraphrasing General Mac Arthur—quoting him!

Good talking to you—good talking to Ted—well these historic moments, the Russians leaving Finland alone, Jim remaining suspended like a sundial pointer above his half-pint brother, is there a power vacuum to enter or isn’t there?, he was talking to his own child, his daughter Flick so grown-up now in the middle of the eighth decade of the century in question and unlike those of us who are angels of change and jump from relation into being to think
Naturally
he
doesn’t
know she saves his infrequent letters, a form of grace that never occurred to him with his wastebaskets all over, though he does genuinely want her to know him, wants to give himself (no Indian giver) so she’ll know such stuff about him as that he went to that ‘60 press conference the morning after having a drink with a man named Ted who next morning after Jim’s heavy steadfast non-dreaming he felt might after all be his best friend who by midnight of that precedingly bibulous eve had turned into a Scot for when drinking he turned toward argument not song (while it’s rank error to think either that newsmen are, like sailors, hard drinkers—much less sailors like newsmen—or that Jim and Ted would never set their views to music), though there
had
been song encouraged (come to think of it, maybe inspired) by a South American woman journalist Mayga, who had been listening:

that is, to Cold War history as self-fulfilling prophecy (if you want a theme to hang your lost anxiety on), you tell me what my global intentions are and sure enough they will be inspired to prove you right; or more likely you will be moved to prove yourself Rightly Responsive as the Silesian Conference and in particular Malenkov’s speech declared the Truman-Marshall plan part of a global putsch to enslave even remotest South America: after which remarks, it was inevitable that Stalin (who was the real speaker at the conference behind Malenkov and Zhdanov in this non-humorous "Can You Top This") would answer the provocation he dreamed on his giant’s self-fulfilling diet designed to make him mad topped betimes by a dessert of suckling satellite and be confirmed in his prediction when Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg signed "Western Union" the same day Congress was asked to breathe life into the draft, St. Patrick’s Day ‘48—

But, countered this lady Mayga from, as it happened, beautiful Chile (who
was,
as it turned out, ready to sing a bit), the enslavement of South America was
true
if you gentlemen would kindly recall how American business often moved their obsolete machines down to Chile and put them to work and depreciated them all over again— If they worked, they worked, said Mayn — Put millions in but take billions out, she went on without missing a syllable of his, and often in capital-intensive technology that does not exactly improve the unemployment in an underdeveloped nation unless to increase is to improve (Ted laughed some smoke out of his lungs) because for
some
belt-tightening programs it
is.