Women and Men (150 page)

Eric was a black kid who squinted and concentrated when he talked and the only black kid I ever knew who did squint, said they had to get high up in the unions to get power in City Hall, but his father made good money rewiring people’s apartments, he just knock a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling, wiggle his cable up inside the wall and along inside the ceiling, never know it’s there—Joey, an Italian kid who was always saying he was giving a big party at Easter, at Christmas, you name it, and there was always a hitch (I’m going off the screen), this Joey said, "Georgie, you can start any car, so come over my house, my brother got carburetor problems, he got to go to my cousin’s wedding in Jersey," this was what I had to put up with. But when Hector Ramirez—whose brother is a super but he races his car every weekend—was watching the game, says, "What if the Jews don’t want to go to Australia? they got a desert there too," little Gonzalez, he’s the only Jew listening besides Miriam’s father (who’s ten miles or ten millimeters away and don’t want to get into a shouting match but my name is mud now), little G.’s dribbling round and round the back court, they’re all after him only he sticks his ass in High Kool’s face and dribbles right away from the basket, fakes his ICBM right back over his head then looks left and fakes a dribble right and just starts backing in toward the basket, two, three guys faked out, right and left, and all the time Gonzalez is talking, talking, "Jews willing to share City Hall, that’s the way, it ain’t who’s commissioner but whose pocket is he in," while High Kool’s bending over Gonzalez’s shoulder, those half-albino speckled hands, it’s only a matter of time, and Gonzalez can’t last and at this moment, Jim—like I know in the beginning of your trips here you said you didn’t know why you were here but at that time really you thought you did, so now when you wouldn’t say it, you maybe truly
don’t
know, but only because of the two-screen system, am I right?—little Gonzalez about to be wiped out calls over one shoulder, "What’s the southernmost state in the Union?" and during the second that High Kool’s body awash with colloidal fluids counts one-two and High Kool calls out, "Hawaii, man, Hawaii," Gonzalez with double-wrist snap topspin like gravity, man, like a tough pitcher’s sinker ball, two-hands the ball blind back up over his shoulder and everyone except H. K. and little G. turn and watch the mother go in.

But what, then, Jim, is it you are watching wherever you are? Miriam’s father disappear? Mrs. Erhard’s little pistol under the candy-and-cigarette counter with the lottery tickets? The whereabouts of a known Chilean economist living quietly in a great American city? But you know by now where. But you know, otherwise I couldn’t communicate it to you, that you got to follow both screens, they’ll always overlap not too much. So Jim once I was someone that knew the Chilean economist, while now I am just someone, am I right? And sometimes kidded dreamlike by these queries of yours—like, you sure the forkful of mashed wasn’t a spoonful?—you know, inertia between the tines? no matter how gluey the missile.

And you are a guy who comes here to do when you get down to it what
we
want: talk about our travels (smile) and the effect on our magic armchairs of the energy crisis, we being ahead of our times; talk about our trials and travels (smile), swap news; and where you position a photo, and while the colloidal particles with billions of unseeable faces and more all the time if we could only economize and move at random unless you commence the centrifugal, which is only in emergency unless you can make yourself either do it unconscious or find the neighborhood of messages that’s meant for you and for you to grain in on ‘cause it’s impossible not to give when you receive, you might lend your ears but there’s no lending there’s only giving, and you better live with your particles so you know how to work with them and their feeling for all other particles and so send what
you
want to send and only to whom it may concern and wherever my ma is in all this, her mashed potatoes ain’t gluey, Jim, but wherever the Chilean economist and wife live, she, he tells me, in her independent tailing of the journalist who has been after her husband, met a feminist leader named Grace Kimball and through her a woman named Sue, who left her son and husband and talks about nothing but sex and the mirrored candlelighting ceremonies of the sisterhood, which makes the Chilean economist think himself in a new world with customs strange as some early language—but makes me, Jim, think, Isn’t Larry’s mother named Sue?

Sometimes the gap between screens is so great, Jim, it’s hard I have to say from personal experience (which may not be news, pal, but—) like between that Sunday (remember?) and three going on four years later like nothing in between, although the apartment that came vacant in Mir’s building can’t have been the first in all that time but was only the second that she and I had ever used.

And you go back and forth between that Sunday when Miriam’s dad got my unconscious message as I did, just before he disappeared either up the block or into Mrs. Erhard’s, and all those months that there’s no calendar for later when I got Mir’s message unknown to herself
as
one, which by then I was advanced enough to know she only thought she was holding back from me, covered as it was by the irrelevant, immaterial News—conveyed to me when I visited her at her part-time full-time office that shall be nameless and probably hires out its own huge return like a dentist his own teeth ("To whom am I speaking?" she says when she before I hardly said Hello excuses herself and picks up the phone and names her employer whom I will not give free advertising to and listens to some doubtless lunatic for a moment—oh, "to whom am I speaking?" was message of herself enough but not the aforementioned News when she gets back to me to the effect that (if Jim you are really there) she thought her father didn’t like her seeing me, my family Catholic, this after how many years, oh what a memorized speech, yet then plus an unrehearsed He thinks you’re anti-Semitic. Well, did I let her have it, oh yes. But I was reacting to her unsaid message my particles had taken on their collective kissers and gotten together (without telling me so I knew what’s happening to me).

Later I have more words for it. Oh coarse as a suspension of undrinkable water, unpalatable air, slippery as emulsion of milk, pure as a solution of salt water do with it what you will, ladies have been known to douche with it, lovely Chilean llamas lap it up, great men not realizing others of their era have come upon the same discovery independently gargle on it while once in a century a grasshopper will sail three hundred seventy nautical miles over it without wetting a knee like psychopaths who get from one place to the next without concern for route or their shadow cast along it—no wonder the message hit the colloid stuff and population of my brain and body as it did carrying its sender with it though she would never be advanced enough to tell why she then felt so clutched and intruded on in all her little folds and joints, oh I knew her, Jim, this beloved that I had to go to since she wasn’t coming to me, right?

Not right, you tell me in secret, Jim, as quick as Miriam’s father quite long before on that Sabbath at the playground fence when I was a bit old for that scene and Miriam had overslept and not come, but her father had.

In order to receive along that diagonal between my aging (smile) scene and the newspaper store of Mrs. Erhard, who I kidded warning her I might have to take her arsenal off her if she did not manage to get held up, a message from his beloved’s beloved that he couldn’t have received, but
could not,
if he had not been in me already, I give him credit I had reached him as if he and I had found that we knew the language of crows or of bloodhounds and always had known and he wanted to be reached, we sought each other and a billion particles had already joined in that encounter which is peaceful energy though not slow, believe me beyond speed, why the opposite of any lower speed, and the not exactly wordless message registered between us for me as for him, gelling and de-gelling with all that power meshed across our charged, multiplying surfaces (oh thanks Juan and Juan’s ancient book and all later confirmations of what, like the dual screens, was gift if not essentially needed), yet knowing what you’re doing is often best while centrally and at bottom none, Jim, is like the message that comes unforeseen from a meeting of suspecting minds:
YOU WANT TO CONTROL MIRIAM TO GROW UP TO STAY HOME
WITH YOU AND IF THE LATEST YOU’LL LET HER BE OUT IS SO EARLY WE JUST HAVE TO OUT-EARLY YOU AND HAVE OUR PARTY WHERE THERE’S NO NEED TO
COME HOME
(where we were, the only direction was
Stay Put).

But Gonzalez is into his dribbling dialectic that lasted for ages and High Kool with the half-albino hands now gone from here except for Sundays, and gone from tenth grade to unload hosiery trucks in a high, echoing workday street in the West Twenties, not gone on to some all-black college "five" your TV imagines for you reaches around Gonzalez further, further, and Miriam’s dad is gone but not from my closed-circuit screen between which and its counterpart screen I’m your correspondent at a slambang Red Communist Mainland Chinese world Ping-Pong final, snap my head back and forth carrying nose, eyes, eardrums, and that jaw of mine which sustains its own separate but relative motion until it is once and for all fixed in immobility yet even then with the strap of totalitarian homogeneity across it the immobility of a ventriloquist whose power source is limitless: I see on one screen here a Friday sundown (for I was almost there) and with fish a needlessly costly offering to the day when no one in the house cared for it and when you could have sun-yellow rice, sizzling green peppers, hottest chorizo sausage, and ice cream to wash it far away and one candle because a fuse blew just as the phone rang, and at my end of the line I heard Iris say, "Forget it, I got a candle." "Forget it?" says Mir’s father. "Forget it until after dinner." "Well tell Miriam get off the phone, it’s time to eat." "You tell her." ("So what’s for supper, kid?" "I gotta go." "Come on, make my mouth water."
"You
know, for God’s sake, pork chops, rice, peppers." "How do I know?" "You know what I mean." "I’ll buy you an ice cream." "I got a gallon in already." "Can I have some, Mir’?" "How much?—oh shoot, I gotta go." "So I’ll see you later, Mir’?" "How much later?") The screen runneth over with— hard softening.

Old Testament or New, Jim?—oh you wouldn’t know.

Runneth to that other screen, there
is
no
over-
screen, and on that other is a Friday-night white tablecloth, white T-shirt, white mashed potatoes, white haddock on a large, white oval platter, one still-folded white paper napkin held down by an unconfessed knife pointing (a) between a dish of (raw) onion slices and a white saucepan of peas and diced carrots, (b) through a can of beer and the diamond ring on the hand holding the can lifting it, tilting it without a hitch as a voice not of the hand, a voice picked up silently by racing, bombarding particles swirling round until there is emptiness at the heart, says, "So where’s the tartar sauce?—and where’s Georgie? Who does he think he is, he can start paying room and board, that’s what he can do."

So where’s Miriam’s Friday-night Jewish father get off calling Catholic? On the day of rest where’s young George Foley but substituting world affairs for my mother’s beloved Mass prior to having a beer later with Mir’ or once on a blue afternoon, the sun pouring through the meshed bones of my uncertain head taking (as they say) a drive to see the animals ganging up on each other in Coney Island or to walk an early spring beach when perhaps I was at my best.

Round and round I’ve gone, you’re tossing the rich, dark-red tie material across once, twice, before casually but just-right drawing the long end through the big knot, and like some history I read you’re following me, although the questions have changed, though never like Barbara-Jean and Larry’s—oh what an evening that was! Do many guys get extra food from home? Anybody play chess? Do you get to go to trade school as soon as you arrive here (haven’t put it very well, she said)? Get any airlifts?—got a landing field next door—

and now you want (if that’s the word for you) to know how Mir’s old man (not too old, I confess; fifty-eight? a lifer ready to see parole board, trying not to miss any shadow of his shaver) was there to hear my New Israel comments (you’re quick for a guy who acts slow though drives like a demon), and what had my particle message to Miriam’s father to do with her unknowing one to me three, four years later?

Well, I might not be able to keep two former missionaries (in sweaters) straight, but I keep my two screens close and I know the street-dealer type that came with the Chilean economist who you stopped asking questions about (though truthfully you got me to speak of the Chilean and never asked me a direct question about him or his sidekick who had to be the one known to have speckled wrists who threatened to blow the Chilean’s cover because he sure as hell had speckled wrists: but that’s for spies and) the Chilean isn’t spying, is he?, but wants privacy for himself and his wife (right?) who I hear did counter-intelligence of her own against this journalist who may be the same as the one with speckles I saw here in the Visitors Room who irritated this calm South American gentleman so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see violence on the far side of the Visitors Counter no doubt related to this husband’s fears for his lovely wife whom I have not met, while her fears are for her husband, as it should be no doubt, so it’s back and forth and round but you must know all you need to know in that quarter and still you communicate with me one way or another while the journalism rap session which is really what it’s gotten to be threatens to die out so you with your correspondent’s eye for a story—for history in the making though you said you take no view of history—ask, So how did the white T-shirt of a certain father who shall be nameless needing no further free advertising in this space react to a catapulted payload of lumpy real spuds right where there should have been decal’d a raunchy friendly joke or a picture of a President or a slogan to add a little life to this retirement compound and any other multiple dwelling you have in mind as a multi-center of commercially viable meditation, and now they’re putting under surveillance what has gone on too long though what key will ever open their hatred of themselves which is all part of an orbital merry-go-round opening to a numerous few a vacant center of peaceful communication known perhaps only to those who have found the Colloidal Unconscious but know that into its center, from that all but endless round touched for energy’s sake by the back-and-forth dual-screen speed, may come at any time a wild shot in the dark and I or you or, and he knows it, by chance a bigger man than you or I may be assassinated.