Women and Men (14 page)

Does it slip as he gets up? His hand rises to it like a woman’s. But he’s just going through the motions, next to the other man in the T-shirt who’s jerked half around already talking.

"You go on and tell her, go on tell about the heat shield."

"But," says Mayn to the void of the man’s unexpected face, "it’s not what I want to tell her about; she can tell
me
about it; why I can do without the micrometeoroid shield" (but where do these words come from?) "and I can dispense with the multiple docking adaptor and I’m already trading in my molecular sieve beds that purify the two-gas atmosphere of smells, heat, humidity, carbon dioxide—all but the smell of
no
-smell."

He took his mouth for granted. Some press release refracting like real life off a slice of brain? Future commonplaces from which he was leaning back into a 1973 past that was more vivid than present? His whereabouts comes at him along a long curve winging through him just as he is about to grasp it—the speech of some other hustler’s information, as for Mayn he just does his job. Is he picking up ripples of the girl’s learning?

"Think they’re going to get right away from the Earth," says the man, "but they be lucky if they find some old germs on Venus to live off of; that’s what
I’ve
seen and it’s not such a long ways."

The girl’s voice gets automatic: "Venus is too hot for viruses." She is changed by the other man who has bowed her toward the vacant stool while coughing and stepping away from his own and fingering his cowhide medallion and smiling and backing away along the bar until a friend in a yellow wind-breaker reaches an arm around his waist and speaks to him, and the man in the bandanna replies in an odd voice, a voice Mayn can’t place partly because the broad man with the thin crewcut—hair white-thin—is saying, What’s Skylab after the Moon? He’s saying, If they can bend a man round to the dark side of the Moon they better get on with the real business, send a man out to colonize Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, time’s short, split their time between this solar system and the next—"split your time, split
timer"
—what redneck is this infra-talking?—"But no, they got to shoot three fellows into a Skylab tomorrow so close it’s like spitting out the window (if the window’s
open)"

"Tomorrow’s off," says Mayn, about to sit.

"They not going? Well, hot poop," says the man, ready to stare Mayn hard in the eyes.

The girl, who was going to sit on the outside stool vacated by the bandanna man, slips in front of Mayn into the originally vacant one in the middle next to the man in the T-shirt.

"We are not alone," says Mayn.

"Well, hot scoop." The face is definitely void but pressurized. "Put that thing on automatic’s what they’d ought to do; save the men for the real trip. Save the loot, spend it right. All the money they poured into space, I ain’t smelled a cent of it."

But as soon as the girl is sitting, she’s leaning back to look behind Mayn at the man with the leather eye on his throat, and says out of the side of her mouth, "You’re spending it right now," and Mayn across her arched chest wants to ask her if she was the one who mentioned these libration points because how would he know? But Mayn explains to the man in the T-shirt (who after all acts like
he
already knows, too) the multiplier effect. Look what happens to capital created by a U.S. firm when it sets up an operation in a South American country.

If they didn’t take it over first, adds the man and Mayn finds an effort converging in him and going on, the noise inside Mayn and outside is incommensurable except as levels, yes they talk about noise levels of course, but they multiply, not rise, if that’s feasible, and he’s lifted with them, an object of science (as close as he’ll get) immersed, afloat, so his own noise directed at the redneck with curvature of the brain comes from other levels of him, from his vibrating wishbone shoulder to the redneck’s vibrating wishbone shoulder, or from knee to knee voiced like old phlebitis spasm of burn or between each other’s half-inflamed veins of humor heart to heart, don’t think this drivel unless you really think it, for profit—is Mayn drunk on a curve of light, sight, drink, indifference? A superpower sneaks from each individual nostril and sniffs this angel as he is about to touch the girl’s wrist, his libration between a past Now and a later Then—it’s never been so bad—got to fight this compositeness or be pushed into waking up and erasing it all—plus this guy—say only what you’re sure you know, oh well Skylab is a modern custom kitchen.

Well, it’s the same thing (Mayn has floor now) or similar, with the President, with Congress, NASA, the contractors, you name them: Chrysler makes one stage of the Saturn in New Orleans, North American Rockwell makes the Command Module in California which gets the astronauts up
to
Skylab, Martin Marietta makes the multiple docking adaptor in Denver, and Whirlpool designs and launders your Skylab food system in Michigan, rotate your kitchen, it’s a lab—and the space suits come from Delaware, where there’s a lot of business being piloted through the water gap. This isn’t just money paid to contractors; they get it but they pay it out too—so your local sporting goods dealer sells three more two-man inflatable rubber dinghies, and your supermarket manager moves more six-packs, more soap, more cryogenic pizzas, he hires another boy, who gives twenty bucks a week to his mother, but people move like money and the bus company puts on another vehicle on weekends and one driver blows his overtime pay taking the wife and two kids for a pizza Saturday night—wait—no, he finds himself balancing thirty Saturday nights plus a piece of a third kid against the alternative, let’s say, of on the other hand a long-held dream of a pool—and wow this balance works out for twenty-eight Saturday nights, not thirty, and he finds himself buying a complete pool package circular four-foot-deep collapsible rust-proof aluminum so big it only seems to take up the whole back lawn turn your backyard blue—

—(how much acreage, asks Mayn’s companion of the Void, have the DuPont family pushed for for public parkland in Delaware?)—

—which is good for the pool company his bus route goes past because it’s business for them—and so on—as if that first million of appropriations will never end.

Somebody shouts at the instant the man in the T-shirt, so quietly that it seems to come from his face in general, says,
It
ended.

Of course it did, says Mayn. It’s leakage, ever heard of leakage?

The space program is a luxury in the end, why not enjoy it, says the young woman, who should know.

Leakage
—he has to get this across to the man in the lowish light, but the words, which are work, are a prefab substitute for work thus rank, too— for someone was once overheard to say a sign of high rank is exemption from industrial toil.

Sheer mysterious luxury, the young woman adds.

Leakage, yes the principle of leakage. That’s what they call it, the money that escapes the multiplier. Where does it go, this mysterious money leaking away? Some gets saved, right?—and some never existed in the first place.

Explain that, says the man in the T-shirt meaning whatever the angry opposite might be of that.

It wasn’t new capital because it was a substitution for other investment that got aborted; and some of the new capital (a woman is chalking her cue, and some of Mayn’s force leaks toward her dyed black hair), some of the fresh spending power lifts prices, so consumption-buying might actually decrease in some sector, you see. But what we’re saying is that after we subtract leakage, what we still get is the multiplier. We divide—you still with me?— divide the original new investment by one minus
r
(I think it is) where
r
is the marginal propensity (tendency) to consume—

You’re out of your mind, says the man. You’re no businessman. You must be—he ponders Mayn—some
inventor.

—no, no (Mayn’s laughing) and your marginal propensity to
consume
is the
percent
of your raise you’d
spend
if you
had
a raise. So if two-thirds of the new income is spent, the multiplier comes out as three (because you’re dividing the investment by one-third)—so you keep tripling the nation’s money—which makes a hell of a lot of money running through the economy. They talk about its velocity.

You ain’t going to find it up there, the man says; for a home has passed again overhead and Mayn looked up to it, last chance for an hour or so, and he and the girl again hear "La Moneda," which he gets now: it’s the government palace in Santiago—the guys talking are the Cuban skydivers.

The furniture is all screwed down, he wants to tell the man, but then says, Do you understand gravity? I mean, do you understand it?

I got it inside me, I don’t have to understand it, the man retorts.

Gravity may not even exist, says Mayn. The girl has laughed, and the man wants to know how many launches Mayn’s got on his belt. Well, the man’s not an expert but he can rebuild an engine if he has to. Brother-in-law’s got a body shop, says the man, heavy oval face and thinning crew, maybe sometimes you got to go ahead and try to do the job when you don’t know how in hell it got that way, people are crazy what they do to good simple machines. Last week he’s down Route 12, it’s a back road, and right beside a palm tree’s a little red car upside down, foreign car, hell to install pollution devices into, upside down, that’s all there’s the matter except in the front buckets a man and a woman upside down in their seat belts—dead, you know, fairly dead—and the woman in the driver’s seat is grinning: but here’s the thing—front wheel’s spinning away like it’s on the blacktop still—might think it’s got a back-up ‘mergency motor in the bearings, and when I stand there looking, do you think it stops?—no sir, wheel keeps spinning—going to report it, it must have just happened if the wheel’s spinning, even if the wheel should have stopped spinning, little red Renault front-wheel drive but the engine’s not running, got a big cut of darker red across the door and rear fender but the woman here’s the thing—

—the thing you’re going to fix, says Mayn—

—even ‘f I don’t know how it got that way, right!—woman’s got blood all over her face but it’s dried almost black—but her wheel’s spinning.

Got hurt before she got in the car, Mayn and the girl say raggedly.

Well, only that she was grinning.

The wheel stopped? inquires Mayn.

Right about the time the police car came along.

On a back road? says Mayn, looking impolitely past their T-shirt man at a friendly argument between the woman with paint-black hair standing behind a man with a big nose who is sitting at the bar and talking over his shoulder.

Newspaper reporter on an expense account, right? says the man in the T-shirt. My point is that it don’t
keep
going. I’m no expert on nothing. Stop in here, have a few beers—"multiplier," you said; "velocity," right?—the companies made the helicopters for Vietnam, they spent their money and gone away on vacation but where’s the helicopters?—blown up, rusted out, stuck up in a palm tree. Like the newspaper now, what man ever lost his job because he missed today’s paper?

The man with the big nose is not looking back at the woman with black hair now, but he on the stool and she behind him are talking in profile as if an audience were out there in front of them in the array of bottles, but there’s no mirror and the woman is talking into his neck.

Mayn can’t say, Let’s get out of here; for the girl is angry; she’s saying, What about the men
in
the helicopters? and when the man in the T-shirt looks at Mayn and turns to look away where Mayn is looking, he shrugs, Hell the men is easy to replace, it’s the helicopters, ma’am.

He leans behind her to catch Mayn’s eye: What they paying you to come down here?

A price schedule looks up and passes overhead: one war equals ten launches, two multinationals (read
bottom-line American)
equal one potential earthquake or two (non-cancer) lab breakthroughs; but how many more launches will Congress find it fun enough to fund?

So the girl swings off the stool—goes and stands squarely in front of the juke.

Oh they’re paying me the same whether I come down here or I’m a thousand miles from here. (Comes out sounding mysterious to Mayn himself but not the man.) She’s the one covering Sky lab.

She frowns over there.

Didn’t think she was the wife coming along for the ride.

Your spinning wheel, you didn’t get to the point.

The man digs out a yellow alligator wallet and smooths a fiver on the bar, checking the other room, it’s on his mind. The point? Listen, the cop swings his door open, and quick I put out my hand, stopped that wheel myself. Them foreign cars they must know something we don’t about cutting friction.

The girl’s looking at Mayn, and the juke box isn’t playing. But as he nods to her he finds in some gap between himself and the man in the T-shirt words that he wanted to say before they were said by the man, as if the man were responsible for his having missed the Chilean as if in turn the Chilean had been here in Florida yesterday and today to
be
missed. So Mayn says the words as the girl takes a couple of steps toward him and his hand goes up to the bills in his shirt pocket and on the third of the three words "Shoot some pool" he knows that the man in the T-shirt has said only the first two, and has said them in unison with him. Mayn isn’t like this; he’s getting compacted, or is the man some window that’s picking up traces of Mayn, who isn’t drunk?

The man in the T-shirt has reached him. The man with the nose passed a bill to another man when the couples racked up their cues.

Does the girl want to play? (She wants to go; he didn’t have to ask; then the noise says, Ask, ask, ask). The music parties up, and Mayn holds her and slow-dances her down the bar, curving along people. He can listen to her thoughts later, irritated or all the rest she is capable of, and he sees in himself after this two-day junket two or maybe three years during which he hardly runs into her but then he does and is still fifteen to eighteen years older.