Women and Men (133 page)

Jim never let himself quite know this in the atmosphere at Windrow, which bent his efforts elsewhere until years later he felt himself filtered as through Windrow itself one late morning near Fontainebleau within striking distance of Paris, in the information that with his rambling left hand Thomas Jefferson wrote the meteorologist Le Roy regarding Le Roy’s reports on how dew point varies with wind direction, the northwest
mistrao
and the northeast
grec
being not so dry as the north wind (nor, of course, said Mayn, so sane as the north wind, at least if we are talking about your
mistrao
and similar winds)—

ah, his journalist companion for his part added,
of ill repute
—

of ill
ions,
went briefly on Jim Mayn, such positively charged particles as put people into a funk in Egypt when the south wind comes in off the desert, the
khamsin
wind "of fifty days" or the German
Fohn
whose relation to the history of the thirties and the forties could never excuse the Third Reich: so that (continued his French companion), as Le Roy had provoked Jefferson to ponder, dry and moist are relative in air, so dry summer air at the seaside or not may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But Mayn could not tell his correspondent confrere what a filter of Windrow and its everlasting though twenty-odd-miles-distant shore these quite charmed informations veered through, no more than that on the road to Fontainebleau he was listening for transitions to submarines, which presumably were much on the Gallic newshawk’s specialist mind; but when Jim said he thought for a second that he had seen the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the man laughed and said even if it was possible at fifty kilometers, Jim was looking the wrong way
(Easier
that way, rechuckled the American pragmatist)—and when the man very thoughtfully expounded the stress moments in Eiffel’s adaptation from his bridges to this tower, Jim thought they were getting into U-boat waters at last, pressure, distribution, range, cost-benefit breakdowns, formulae rendering congruent a stable peace and an authoritative news supplement if not scoop (in French,
un scoop)
that happened actually to be beyond Mayn’s knowledge: but it all came then to the delightful and hardly alarming "when and how" fact that behind the Tour Eiffel in principle of wind-bracing practice stood an earlier work of Eiffel’s—

—the moving hospital-submarine!

No, the moving hospital, not to be confused with the Wide Load which at times gets as big as (not just) home or house but apartment house capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and only
thus
an articulated structure—the moving hospital was a spin-off of the Civil War as the moving missile emplacement was a spin-off of the Cold like breathtakingly advanced weather observation—

—which was a spin-off of the balloon-observation surveillances that were a spin-off of the Civil War, like concentrated food—

—but no, we do not think so—

—because the balloon observation was of military movements but not of the inertial wind—and other systems to which it was subject,
mais
no, the earlier work of Eiffel’s was the internal steel frame of the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi’s visible outer sculpture like permanent news—solid and fundamental as lives of unknown people Mayn sometimes briefly knew—or saw, without knowing, and
was
seen as by a larger knowledge he joined and sensed his power in, until one day he heard a story of a detective whose client knew more about him than he of the client, a story also of love and freedom told by a fellow elevator passenger so briefly from the floor where he got on to the ground floor, where he and she and her friend, the two leaving Grace Kimball’s workshop, vanished that he knew that very story, had lived it, even if only in advance like sentiments of reincarnality—

—which proved nothing except that Sarah, whose mother told a story of a Princess spirited or sublimated we now say in the guise of a mist into the Statue to foil an Indian transcontinental^ pursuing her, must doubtless that day at Mantoloking
within
the visible woman sitting like a statue on a black towel or lying down have been secretly
standing
within that seated or prone person, before, during, and after the moments when Jim saw her looking out to sea and when Jim found himself founded like a gnomon sundial in the sand above his vulnerably irritating brother; for was she not in fact watching for a German submarine to break the horizon and bear her off to South America or, failing that, Manhattan!

: a possibility we, of their relations, would not rule out, since, as the angry savant had it, "some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first":

: which takes character beyond courage to be sure, though Mayn would leave the formulae and what power went with them to someone else (for he was only taking up a sort of residency in a New York apartment where he had once lived happily and not happily but also happily (lived and not lived) with his wife and children who had moved on:

which Mayn too did, in circles no doubt, until a day came, or he to it waiting, soon after the aforementioned renewed trial residency, when a nice, sometimes worried woman in the apartment house in question, whom he let befriend him without insisting on her husband materializing, told him of a person named Grace Kimball he thought he’d heard of, who said she had withdrawn from this world only to return with new powers, her own, her own extraordinary powers nonetheless very simple, you know, Mayn smiled sharply like a laugh.

Norma added that the withdrawal at least of Grace had been in
marriage (in
marriage, said Mayn, checking) (yes:
in)
while the powers found partly in stories told in Norma’s group of women seemed real—the people, the women and men that had become "family" to nonetheless send on their way at some point—forget the night gapped like Pentothal with all the interchangeable
braceros
translated into and out of the planetary labor force wide-loaded in convoys of super-semis cross-continent: two women technologists sit sipping mixed fresh-crushed juice, getting acquainted, that kind of thing, discussing they imagine two men when, by some small-world economy scrambling whatever used to be the matter, it’s in fact
one
guy they’re talking ‘bout for the longest time, the unknown medium through which they get acquainted: not to mention (for to Norma Mayn didn’t) the couple in Phalanx, New Jersey, a marriage that did and still may play (with revised dialogue) who ritually hitch
him
up like old Dobbin complete with the old vegetable man’s fedora with earholes (that is, for the horse) to a real imported rickshaw (brought it back themselves never thinking what they would do with it, just part of tax-write-off basic research) so he can pull
her
down the garden path with the blue ribbon on it and we’ll hitch old, yes, Dobbin to the shay: not to mention, but he does, to Norma and then independently to Norma’s husband, a couple of heavy-handed economists Gordon proves also to know even better, one from Metz in Alsace-Lorraine which is in France at the moment, the other an Irishman from Los Angeles, "old L.A. people," one (actually employed) cousin marched with Coxey’s Army of unemployed protesters in ‘94—well, took the train as far as Chicago, then walked to Washington—and both economists have red hair and beard (if you looked back and forth they could do with only one set of looks), and once when Mayn and they had a lunch that was a bit awkward at first, then
too
full of talk, Mayn had said he had thought of getting to know some more economics as a substitute for
economists
but economics seemed too hard (which made the red-haired economists laugh and say in unison, You and Max Planck), then later when the waiter got into an argument over the arithmetic of the tab with a man about Mayn’s build whom he’d been introduced to at the bar because the man, who was missing one little finger (though Mayn didn’t recall feeling it) and wore a well-cut blue pinstripe and a red pointed handkerchief and a dark-blue, tiny-red-emblemed club tie, was lunching with a doctor-friend of Mayn’s whose boat he’d been on, now just sold to the Xerox people in Stamford, Mayn had said to
his
tablemates that on the other hand economics was really too
easy,
which made the russet ecologues blush in concert and in concert choke on final swallows of their first Manhattans and say in hilarious unison, You and Bertrand Russell!, upon which Mayn, who had the impression that he mumbled a lot but realized that this was internal and that his speech was normal, caused further hilarity by adding that he would stick to what he could see, like whether people listened when we talked, and seemed to say only what they knew, and whether they used their hands and what
they
looked like (—Their
hands?
the economists asked, but this time kept the joke private, as if it would be one too many):

they were way ahead of him, he told them, like Rogers and Rockefeller when they bought Anaconda Copper with a rubber check they covered by loan collateraled with fresh-printed stock in a non-company that existed to
buy
Anaconda, leaving them with, after they sold the fresh stock, a real copper company and thirty-six million dollars profit: the economists were eating their lunch through this transaction, they did not know those facts—maybe they
weren’t
the facts, said Mayn—seemed impossible, yet so easy; and, as usual, a bunch of people got stung—the economists nodded with mouths too full for what formulae formed higher in each head—the argument nearby with the waiter was over—and the man in the blue pinstripe was grinning at what the elder gent the doctor had said, who was (Mayn knew) "drinking a little" since his wife’s death but who was an easy chap, Mayn had played squash with him a few years back, a man who didn’t believe in making difficulties for himself, so that while, true, he had become a shrink, which is, hour after hour (facts supplanting facts), dealing with folk who make difficulties for themselves, and are made by them—and mostly, though you had matriculated and paid your dues, done training, etcetera, you might just tell them, Take some time for yourself, you know (—A breather?—) That’s the ticket; and for him himself it was after thirty years of medicine and in order to retire into (at his
wife’s
suggestion) seraZ-retirement:

But breathers aren’t what they—
or
we—used to be: once marginal, the breather came to take up major space like a friend in need whom you have to listen to for weeks of personal crisis: once space, a breather has become a person like turning into yourself; witness even those doubtless workshop-trained adepts who hold their (if it
is
really only their) breath and have it too, and, within that body-hold, keep so deep self’s other intake/out-go that coming upon the phenomenon of breathless breathing less like the old tab-less tab men’s collar than the cordless unisexual (little) shaver, we children of the phenomenon may grasp only its idea yet feel its matrix quite absent, while we would drown in our own fresh-squeezed still pulpable information with built-in gaps as if it were the breath of life—not Jim, contemplating reported reincarnation of the noted Grace Kimball from one change stage to the next, from the Great Mother-Sun of forbidden Splinter-Inca lore along the Peru-Chile frontier, and from the Goddess who was Greek yet then a sister renegade who occupied the oracle Tree-Lith on a Mediterranean crag perilous yet organic in the lower Peloponnesian wilds of Mani, until she (still Grace) became the lorn Prince—what just would not blow Jim’s mind because "almost nothing surprises me" (he remarked to Norma and Gordon)—the reported lorn Prince (that Norma reported was of
Nava-Choor
in Kimball’s version) derived like revelation from a detailed account given Grace by a newsperson friend of a Prince or high-born brave who (news though ‘twas to Mayn on his own doorstep and beneath the lintel of his long past or at least as presently adjacent as Little Wind teaches the Hero Twins to throw their breath—for immortality purposes), (this Prince) on being destroyed by some "Princess" type he thought he adored surprised himself by self-resurrecting secretly as two people in the visible form of one, was it man and woman now?—according to all that’s recently been voiced—and not half one, half the other, but both—and since the evening when the news of him had passed from Lincoln (significantly, Grace thought, robed in saffron) to Grace, Grace had, she told Norma, who took some of this with a grain of salt, joked but with some secret rest-reserve of truth that
she
was this Prince reincarnate but that the extreme light like a tiny planet far back in each of the newsperson’s eyes which she did not know were one light told what she also did not know, that the reincarnation Grace had obviously been "ready for" was a new brand and—

—three interruptions converge on poor Norma—first, as is only proper, from her husband Gordon ("Well Grace would like to think that every man wants to get himself up in black lace pants and a garter belt"); second, from Jim, politely entering only as if in part to divide the husband’s roughshod wedge (Puts me in mind of the Krakatoa easterlies above and the Berson westerlies below: they were supposed to be parts of a single zonal current— How do you show a thing like that? asked Gordon—with an unusually mean cycle of twenty-six months—hey Norma, who
was
that newshen-person-lady-woman, and who was her source?) (Gordon, like a lost voice, "They don’t know that
man
as in
chairman
comes from German
Man,
i.e., "one, nonsexual"—"Unisex," retorts Norma, surprising Gordon into softness: "Not unisex at all," he says too quietly); third, we, whom proposition for proposition Grace knows less well than she ever will how she uses us, for
we
—as she
and
such trammeled husbands as Gordon say as if it will all go away if said or, humid lights of breath thrown outward or away, compound with quick noises of sense the atmosphere they mean like walking newspapers when they say, "It’s in the air,"—
we
are each a change in life too personal not to be grouped, too shared to be all shared; while Grace, who for Woman would become a man as mortal as that general He who called the "true security problem . . . man against war," on behalf of
one
woman that she
is
has found, in her one-sixteenth Pawnee root (and touched with her fingers whose prints are arches becoming whorls and back again?) a faith that man the hunter brought back with him not just the fiber and juice of meat but guilt for killing time away from home as real as the opiate receptor molecules (Grace heard of from a delegate to a rolfing conference who had become an inch longer yet now
said
next to nothing) that are one part our history and future waiting only to be activated for romance, dependence, twilight aperitif, any key habit deepening into those that like the key melted into the short-circuited ignition Mayn knows of as facts isolated by the million kept by us addicts as close as out of sight within the tumblers they’ll always make fall into place: which Mayn half-hearing interrupts—what also will not be interrupted like the ongoing time of his computer-wristwatch timing turnovers at a basketball game with Larry and Amy, the same Amy with whom he occupied opera seats in which the Chilean diva expected to see an endangered economist and his wife Clara, who was herself present when the correspondent-woman told the Na-vachoor Prince’s fate and the first and last name of her source, a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter named Flick, though Clara was unable to connect this with a journalist named Mayn she feared.