Women and Men (125 page)

—and here I am letting
my
marriage go? he asked—which made her unhappy but not unintelligent because she will be at peace with him lying down
or
sitting at a bar or in a restaurant booth—with her going home to South America and "going home" with
him tonight
each has said to the other that this is the first time unfaithful to spouse:

: which Mel never could have been, and that’s all there is to it: and while his fidelity to Sarah, who hadn’t loved him, survived her presence in his everyday life, though he became capable of passion expressed (in volubility) to Margaret ("I could have made her like me—" "She
did
like you, Mel, she certainly did—" "At least I could have made her love me, there was something about the shape of my feet, the front end of them, she couldn’t take, it wasn’t my lack of music and she didn’t mind John Charles Thomas, at least I said what I liked, no, it was me, it was that I was on the ground trying to take off but knowing my limits, and she was in the air, trying to find the ground—" "She was
not,"
said Jim to his grandmother, when told, "she was not up in the air," and Margaret to each of these males, the husband, the son, said the same thing, "It didn’t gel, so I guess it couldn’t"), Mel fell in love with Brad for a while, they comforted each other, Mel told him please not to feel he ought to work at the newspaper office, and got into the longest talks at the kitchen table with Brad so they took the consequent years of Brad’s growing-up, it seemed, and when Jim got back from a date, or, once, from the most terrible scare involving Bob’s pickup truck, and once got back from the whole summer away bartending at the shore, there they still were at the table and the only thing Mel wouldn’t discuss was Brad’s (to Jim, dumb) nightmare of her, of Sarah, coming close to him, drawing bow across string, marking time with a conductress’s finger, reaching for Brad in the most loving way whereupon, his fault, his fault, he awoke, fighting himself free of the sheets to find her not reaching for him any more, or the reach was there but not his mom—but still Brad had his Day (as Margaret said to Jim one day at the cemetery), and Mel insisted Brad take more piano, with Barcalow Bran-dywine’s sister-in-law who jabbed the keys as if to position them, smiling, and, when she served as accompanist, could keep up the pounding and still look away from the keys and up at Barcalow in his orange-and-maroon horse-blanket sport coat that excited him almost like college colors on felt pennants or football jerseys, he got taken to the Princeton-Harvard game by the bibulous doctor who was Dr. Range’s main competitor in town and whose house Jim had taken to visiting unannounced not hesitating to go on in and sit down even when often the doctor and wife and sometimes daughter looked interrupted in the middle of something not too good, and the wife and daughter shivered on their stone seats in Palmer Stadium and glanced but didn’t want to look at the program, while the doctor hollered somewhat embarrassingly to particular guys on the Harvard team, because he had gone to Harvard, to get cracking, which was a little like Barcalow Brandywine arriving at a gathering and beginning a little too soon to lead some singing and standing up with a glass in his hand to announce that he was still enamored of his wife after seventeen, eighteen years, nineteen wasn’t it?, years of married love (which was the title of a book Jim got hold of from one of his friends who actually had gotten it off a girl in the eleventh grade)—and once, to Jim’s amusement and Mel’s discomfiture, the doctor got unwound enough in the midst of the singing (for he—and his wife at least—did attend more than once, though why was not clear in memory), so the doctor told Barcalow Brandywine he had never liked him, and now he was thinking that he
still
didn’t like him (he burst out laughing) and never could understand that family of his either. But then there was Brad, right there, saying hotly—aged eleven or more—"Then you’re not welcome here because my mother was Barcalow’s friend and played for him," upon which all laughed except Jim who could have brained or throttled Brad whichever was surer (forget "faster"), and Barcalow genially told Brad it wasn’t
his
house but his grandma’s.

But Sarah could do strange things all right, like in the drugstore insult her old long-unseen acquaintance Leona Stormer revisiting town who lived in Chicago (which she said was nothing like New Jersey), and Jim at the insult his mother spoke didn’t get embarrassed, did he?, and she did things posthumously for if Brad’s Day a month or so after Sarah’s very own drowning —a Sarah special—had been Brad’s coming out into the open and grieving like an African, like an Italian, like a Jew, like a non-crazy old Indian speaking to the winds that cornered the world maybe, there still Sarah was, talking through Bob her one-time quite secret lover’s mouth and creating the swift, breathless hate of Brad when Bob put into
his
own mouth his
own
recollected remark re: winds, "What a lot of stuff—" he had told Sarah—
"they
ain’t curved."

Unless you were talking about a hurricane spiral, Jim observed out of the blue to Bob, who didn’t know Jim had been sitting here in Bob’s basement thinking, but now said, "We had a false alarm that day your brother carried on," as so they had, for no less a member of Brad’s Day than Mel had arrived in that strangely focused living room like a "living" wake with the info on his lips.

And so Jim found and soon afterward must have left it there unsummoned where it belonged in what rapidly developed into—hell!—the past (shrug), that he could collect if he concentrated (sun heat, uneven Earth shape, airflow cells, pressure belts, horizontal current)—all there was to it, you had to concentrate—not be confounded with "Get centered," from Grace Kimball which three whole decades later nonetheless comes out as unison to
our
ears, relations though we only are, the skeleton of that Brad’s Day talk about the weather. (You’d make a good newsman, joked Ted in their Washington bar not twenty years later and got a wrinkled forehead from his hunched, heavy set friend and a snicker from none other than Spence, whom they often had at the end of the bar pigeonholed but too sleazed-out and too silly for Jim to ever contemplate picking on him—under layers of slightly ugly comings and goings.)—and the skeleton was attached to people: for it was grandfather Alexander who had claimed that air travels from your high-pressure areas to your low, because to begin with, as Mel had pointed out, you get your pressure belts because air heats and cools and when it expands and contracts to put it ass-backwards (though isn’t that where the ass was, the last time we didn’t look?) and your pressure belts move because, to begin with, like stays with like, so you get cells of wind despite the warm always moving if not spending itself toward cold—which it becomes—for to begin with, whatever is true of the water which Alexander predicted would be on the warm side should anyone sample it this afternoon, the air moving at speed over an erratic Earth’s land of mountains and valleys, beauties or pockmarks, is not warm, as Margaret said with something like faraway anger, but not because water is slow to lose the sun’s heat, land fast (which is why the far, far more than cozy warmth of the sun’s radiation journeys so many million miles earthward while Earth in its ball of damp vapor is always moving but cannot ‘scape this given life, though by what or whom given the shouting tenor of the doctor-organist Sundays when Jim for a time, then, at (what?) fifteen attended service, could not say).

But Bob, why did Bob, eyebrows and all, dispute what Sarah supposedly had said? Well, Bob himself was the
source: ‘course
wind curved, Jim thought, yet when Jim did think about it one Sunday in church beside Anne-Marie Vandevere, who set no more store in church than Jim
and
did not find the doctor-organist much to applaud as a person perhaps because his daughter Cornelia wasn’t in her group, Cornelia could hear the horses whinnying for their corn in the stalls at the military school down their street (Do they
feed
them corn? Jim asked), Jim had to wonder if Bob all in all wasn’t right because what could nudge a wind off course except another wind and yet his father said there was no question about it, winds do curve: until one day that like other days in that year of his mother’s suicide might have been easy to forget he kept Anne-Marie waiting in Bob’s pickup discreetly (because illegally) down the street a couple of blocks clear of school because he had been thinking analytically and nonetheless passionately about dropkicking in a wind and whether his father would come to see him play since his father really didn’t have the time (But
yes
he did, intervened Mayga, swapping her stronger old-fashioned for Jim’s while Ted looked on)— As it happened, he
did,
said Jim, for Jim had been discussing basketball with Ted, the enclosed court, the trick of taking up position so it was (you hoped) clearly, stably yours then by law, and preferred not to find his father in the discussion, though then Mayga’s kind interruption had turned the talk to that afternoon of the pickup truck parked two blocks or three from school, Anne-Marie still sitting upright in the cab (as it happened, the driver’s seat) of Bob’s vehicle while Jim was somewhere (he had to admit it) thinking—if "thinking" didn’t make it more than it really was—why yes, leaning on the glass above that great old green-gray-brown relief map of South America somebody’d donated to the high school: thinking that if the fucking wind (which might curve around buildings like New York City or mountains) was in cells like individuals, well, how about a football? it got going
its
way up above the ground, but the land wasn’t promising to be there where it was when the ball came down. Ted and Mayga and Mayn all laughed at that expurgated evocation of what he did not for a minute know was a well-known effect that got named eventually after a Frenchman far more recent than it and that at some time had inspired Mayn to go get stuck in some difference between inertial and non-inertial systems, which explained why science had no satisfactory way to acknowledge this Coriolis effect; but there was Jim leaning on the glass above South America, as a familiar commanding voice called at him, "Get off the glass," and he removed his arms, transferring the support of his extended weight to his stomach and back muscles (no doubt), exactly at the instant he had seen that distant continent move beneath him and understood with a shiver, hearing scary words from his otherwise friendly coach, not just that it depended whether you were here on Earth or beyond it; and if you were out beyond it the wind down here crossing at right angles to the kick that he’d aimed downfield goal-postward, was straight as a die, even if Earth wasn’t; but if you were on Earth the wind with indubitable deflection warped—wait, I thought the
football
was yer wind, said Ted (and
Yeah,
echoed the wise little bastard free-lance photographer and news "dealer"—if the deal wheeled to his sleazy satisfaction—at bar’s end)—but coach John Rocker was asking if Jim had heard what them two girls in tenth grade had done, and at that moment like another discovery even more confounded unless you just stated it and let the fucking flickering mystery be—like the would-be dream that kept Jim "busy" (as Margaret said dreams kept her when asleep), the would-be dream Jim had-and-lost the very next dark, dark morning when he saw he wouldn’t have the chance to understand it except he did hear singing in the next room and it wasn’t his brother’s (room, that is)—which was in one sense the only next room next to Jim’s— but the music room downstairs and his mother was singing interrupted bits of a song teaching it to apparently Brad who was there with her and the word "world" and the word "morning" that came through the emptied, dark air were all Jim knew or was let know and what was between—well, yes, what
was
between, except the usual nothing—and yet hearing John Rocker’s hairy, husky voice
discovering
what it was saying just as its own words croaked out happily, "Why they damn near killed themselves in that pickup truck of Bob Yard’s I heard—hey, don’t you go with the Vandevere girl? what’s she doing driving a pickup truck when she can’t drive, the Pietrangeli girl was with her and I heard the right door was open when Anne-Marie swung the truck around in the middle of Manalapan Avenue so it almost tipped and the other one fell or jumped out and a car hit the right front headlight but they’re O.K.": so it wasn’t clear whether this was something two girls or one had done: but, leaving the glass counter covering the crocodilean relief map of South America and angry and reluctant but expressing only surprise and concern to John Rocker to whom he told the factual truth at once and John certainly did help out in the next couple of hours, he found pockets of relief in the middle of his anger and chaos—because his
mother
was dead and he was expected to, he was expected to, he didn’t know at all what? but pockets in the anger that were independent minds self-protected where the understanding had come along with South America moving beneath the glass (maybe you
needed
glasses, said Ted)—which marked the limit of what Jim could confess to
this
good friend whom he would go on joking with and detailing packages of fresh information to year by year over a drink or at a ballgame, baseball that became football that became basketball Washington, New York, Washington, home ‘n home, two decades upwards of—while to Mayga—

—Did he not broach these remembrances with his wife, asks the interrogator whose empty face has grown tender eyebrows and sprouts smallest tufts from shadow-erased nostrils, maybe he don’t got a nose—

—no mo’ (sang Barcalow Brandywine, upstaging the doctor in a warm, boisterous room at grandmother’s house)—

—I mean, adds interrogator, you have such friendships really in American Marriage or so our informants report—

—to Mayga, while she was available, Jim brought out the subtle blanks between the lines, explaining that the insight of South America moving beneath the glass above which he had been watching (thinking about, perhaps, wind and Earth) had been not utterly blown away by Coach Rocker calling the disgusting news of that girl apparently making a botch of the afternoon, the two of them too—but the insight had held to
Jim,
that is, without his havin’ to do anything, and it was that Bob, who had heard actually Sarah say that owlish junk ‘bout wind and all at the beach (—at the beach? asked Mel at the kitchen table and both Brad and Mel looked in wonder at this intruder Jim Mayn standing in the doorway, come home—When were
they
at the beach? —but Brad said, The day that old man came to see Gramma at the beach)—