Women and Men (153 page)

No one asked her what "cant" was; and so she asked us. Quite a person. I said there was no such word, and that got a laugh out of her.

"Sounds like a Communist," my sister says, getting ready to come out of her room. "She speaks the King’s English, I’ll give her that," says my mother in her rapid way that wasn’t only her relief at finding something sensible to say but also her secret protection against being found out to be a bright woman who didn’t want to be especially noticed—bearing a tall can of grated Parmesan cheese out of the kitchen. "What do you mean she speaks the King’s English," says my father, "you never met her. They all come over here. You can’t even be sure of the English immigrants any more. This is where the money is." He has enjoyed all four of his statements, each strong and taken together better than he could have even guessed from his chair, and they earn him the right to go on being clear of the rest of us as he hauls himself out of the easy chair and stumbles yawning and stretching to the head of the table. "Who knows why she’s here," I say; "but it ain’t the money and it isn’t the job." "Make up your mind, Georgie," says my father. "Yeah," says my sister, but I’m not looking back and forth between them. "She can speak Spanish," I reveal. "Well, that’ll help her in this fuckin’ city," says my father. I’m not looking back and forth between whatever and whatever, I can tell you; I’m seeing my mother’s plump knuckles mix up the shells and the meatball sauce in the big bowl she mixes her cake mixes in, and I say, before I know I knew it, "She talks about factory workers never being alone."

"Sounds like a Communist," retorts a voice yet why do I not recall whose? high or low, light or glum.

I know I go round and round, Jim, but not so fast. You see I could get through to her father, I decided. Miriam didn’t know what to say to me any more, for sure not a report of that colloidal message that came sliding out of her while she looked the other way even more beautiful at twenty, twenty-two, than at sixteen when we took over secret control of a temporarily vacant "flat" as Ruth Heard put it.

These garbage cans—I mean her father had a respect for them. They were vehicles he kept hosed down and he hammered out the dents more than once. He knew that if the ironing board lever sticks and you can’t fold the thing up, you don’t throw it like Miriam so it hits the TV and scares her aunt who blames it on Miriam’s old man for putting the screws to Miriam—when he himself saw mechanical devices as life we have brought into being to be treated kindly, kept in working trim, not mechanical brains to suck all the bones out of our heads like that mountain that’s making the rounds.

Who are we then, Jim, you to come here like you had something to tell or had something you wanted to get out of me—and who am I to be there with you now or be a man you’ve told your friends about who think they will never see me? But by colloidal action they may find, out of their minds, me on their doorstep a substitute for another trip, escaped from outside to inside, like my always waiting for Ruth Heard, escaped from England to America, to tell us what?

In our very early twenties—to answer your question that, admit it, Jim (though you’re a pro) was a substitute for further query re: the Chilean’s wife’s plans to get back at the journalist who sought information concerning the Chilean’s continuing activities on behalf of interests undermining the military state-capitalist regime in Chile that had killed his friend and leader Dr. Allende—Miriam left me over a considerable period of time for an older man (smile). I guess I mean her father, too, but the part-Jewish part-Hungarian guy who had a share of a foreign bicycle shop was three years older than she and she had gone out with him once in a while, long (a) before her message to me in the tax office but long (b) after the Sunday morning she slept late in order to keep from her conscious mind that she had told her father I was going to be saying some controversial stuff about Jewish homeland Sunday at the schoolyard fence and if a good discussion ensued it would not be surprising.

And when at the end I saw him down the block across the Sunday street at the German Mrs. Erhard’s newspaper store and we knew each other in the message he received from me but which we, the boyfriend and the widowed father, together created, I follpwed his sudden absence the seven and a half blocks to the well-tended tenement and the string of bright garbage cans because I had to be on the scene in case he burst in to tell his daughter her boyfriend was planning to concentrate all Jews in the limitless Australian desert at whose edges according to Ruth M. Heard Cockney long ago became audible because the settlers were cons shipped there out of sight out of mind and low class low speech. But what could I say to Iris who opened the door all dressed up, her beloved, the printer Eddie, her size, in his blue suit, a tattoo on one hand, ready to take her out after Sunday dinner (which I smelled through Iris’s perfume and her hesitation between asking me in and wishing I’d go away, it would be so much easier) and who when I tilted or cocked my head to say to Eddie, "How’s it goin’, Ed?" was replaced by Miriam’s father as if he was all face, vdice raised not to shouting proportions only to the violence of one who didn’t know, poor bastard, that he had communications to make to me only by colloid suspension express (smile) and was in no mood to be told especially by one who did not have a name then for this power to which our lives and spirit are to be raised, not an anger voicing what was false, namely that Miriam was sleeping late and she didn’t want to spend her time with no bum who ought to be out of school and working, whereupon I shushed him if Mir’ was sleeping, and he slammed the door, and I could hear steps coming out of an apartment two, three floors up, and as I heard the old man’s stupid sound going on—"At least she’s not with him"—and seeming to calm down, I found myself admitted—half admitted—again to Mir’s home, or facing the door magically ajar again and heard the old man’s voice go on and saw that he hadn’t calmed down at all but only faded into the next room as if there was something there, too, and Iris, I see her holding her apron bunched in her hand, saying to me softly,
Miriam went to the movies already, her father thought she went with you.

I know I could have killed the old man except he was Miriam’s father —I admit it, Jim. You learn to go for what is inside you like no stigma at all. You go round and round it till you see it, then you don’t need to say it except in these particle facings between you and your self, or you and me, which the Whole Turning Factor turns thank God into the Two Screen never fully known till I came here to prove it in my body, my touch, the presence of others whatever their race or social class—and thanks be to the Giant Colloid Swirl we share whose galactic disk we can see, or flat Earth, or on end a gibbous bike-wheel, or the full mass to live within by letting it find itself an infinite neighborhood, such as this, and between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it—as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.

Iris made Sunday dinner in that house mainly for her sister’s husband, my Miriam’s father; he burst out the front door muttering like a super whose building’s suddenly getting bigger over his head behind his back and passed me standing there in the first-floor hallway seeing cast of thousands featuring in the three or four movies I knew she wanted to go to, and on the other side instant and constant a void for whoever she was with, a void I couldn’t fill except with the feeling of myself and couldn’t see but as the dark reflection of her friendly face, Jim, turning after several seconds of my watching her enjoying the movie in the seat next to me, turning like a wife, I guess, Jim —you have had a wife because you have a daughter, so much I know like a wife I say, so beautiful, her glasses on because she wore them at the movies starting around age fifteen; garbage lids crashing outside, I in the hallway standing back to let a rent-paying tenant-couple pass and knowing that turning the hidden, living-room switch for the garbage-can circuit the day Mir’ and I had occupied all too briefly the vacant apartment, hadn’t been much of a joke and I had hated him for being the reason why Mir’ said up there that it was too risky, and minutes later when her old man came storming in and blamed Iris for flipping the juice hoping he’d go up to one of the upper floors so I could get out of the building—

—I thought she loved me enough to have followed me the day of the rain-check walk-home with Miss Heard to her apartment which was no longer the "flat" she had when I was in junior high, for she had been in and out of New York several times since then, though that earlier "flat" I one day heard described by another English voice.

That is, one of the three similar-looking van-driver friends of R. M. Heard but not the one who said so unforgettably in 1959 that you could see flour caking blood in the street, a monopolist was the sole seller of a commodity that has no substitutes, to which definition I could apply the Whole Turning Factor to connect the van driver’s definition with that Law of Substitution I learned from the Chilean gentleman between us when I proposed burial in space as a substitute for cemeteries or our precious oceans—a Utopia dissolving interface between outside and in

—instituting an elite brother- and sisterhood working together with the inmates to make the Inside a center of self-supporting craft and industry, not license plates but clothes and furniture, and exported therapeutic services, all maintaining a balance of payments with the Outside and always a center too of communal thought directly engaged in like democracy in your inter-lunar space settlements while enriched unpredictably by individual thought alone in contemplation, call it subsistence thought whose surplus can be saved by being shared by the men and women in communion here or stored like my own lone swirls of colloid light forever and a day—from, as I say, these Foleynomic projects for a great articulated structure where an infinity of whatever you called small-scale units may find their being—all the way to changing the concrete itself they wall this retired compound round with—so that someday each new vacancy here would be an opening for a new and different freedom, it would be a resource vied for with an elan that someday in future could dissolve guard and con not into one non-individuated mass, but—

that is, Jim, if you’re there still, Miriam would not receive all this because Miriam did not reach that swirl that Juan by fits and starts leans into, then loses, working deeper into Surplus Contradiction alternating by fits with his attempt to see where in the building site his very small brother has disappeared; and Mir’ paid off (if I had let her finish the job) with her once precious self, the shadow I’d hopefully thought she’d engaged to follow me the day Ruth Heard and I met at Mrs. Erharjl’s, each waiting for another, each waiting for the other I do believe, and while Miriam did not come to meet this temporarily but structurally unemployed old friend of hers George, her bike-shop Hungarian not at that point in time identified by me as who he was pedaled past upstream and downstream several times, along Third Avenue truck’d, bus’d, taxi’d, brimming, jammed, but with one sinister space for him, while Ruth, my elder by nine years, and I walked her home, seen by not only the bike-capitalist Hungarian on his wheel and by my mother so that she walked right by the gleaming meat market, but seen also by Gonzalez who must by then have been age fifteen or sixteen easing into his father’s business, profiting by each new day—

—that is, the Hungarian bike-peddler (smile), as you have guessed, recognized not me alone but Ruth M. Heard as well, her heavy head of wild hair atilt, her eyes everywhere, her voice risen richly, telling me she was afraid they would pull her Green Card, telling me she would return to the South one day soon, telling me how her father had taken her on the rollercoaster which has another name in England—but asking me what I was doing (she cared, you see), asking if I had graduated, asking so much that was unanswerable that to my stammering interest in what she said I could not add that I had for a time made a regular thing of current-events discussions at the schoolyard fence—until I envisioned a time when bands of bicylists would break traffic laws so commonly they would go to jail for five years—

—that is, her hair was not heavy but light, her head not heavy but aglow, her recent history so full how did I pause and wait for what would come to me to change my life?—having tendered my resignation to the management of a garage where my part-time job had left me more than part-time free, until at Mrs. Erhard’s, both Ruth and I watching diagonally up the block toward the schoolyard fence, we turned to know each other, and she: We never had that walk, and I (feeling ahead of myself but a retard working on being a retread): I said I’d take a raincheck, and she: A raincheck? (coughing through her laughter at the American word, coughing with bronchitis, TB, cancer, trying to get free of whatever it was as if it was what made her laugh); and before we knew it we were in a narrow elevator and getting out of it and finding ourselves in a one-room pad with no curtains with to my surprise not one-tenth the books I have in my cell today, a canvas chair beside the couch-bed, a photograph on the wall of a very intellectual-looking elderly man with a bushy beard and eyes staring at you half-impatiently, half as if you needed to be treated (you know?) so that, half-tongued as I was, I couldn’t tell if time crawled or ran wild and this was the first thing I thought when I phoned Miriam to say, "Hey what’s happening?" when I meant how come she stood me up yesterday at Erhard’s—and Mir’ said would I like to explain how come I spent so long inside Ruth Heard’s apartment house yesterday, what was going on, and as I say I thought about how slow and fast time went, up there, listening to her describe like a witness Medgar Evers’s children on the fatal night pleading with him to get up where he lay face down just beyond the doorway, arm outstretched—I couldn’t help thinking, "Like a drunk"—and beyond him a bunch of new sweatshirts and in his hand the key to the open door and on the sweatshirts "Jim Crow Must Go" and, I recall remembering irrelevantly my mother the year before crying for days over our wonderful young Catholic President Jack—so I know Kennedy came before Evers—while Ruth had no tears in her eyes telling me how Medgar’s wife packing his toothbrush for the hospital was distractedly asking nobody in particular how many pairs of pyjamas he would need, and I sat down where she told me on the couch-bed and she sat down in the canvas chair and put her feet up on a suitcase and asked me what I would like, she thought they hadn’t turned the gas off yet or the electricity so the beer in the icebox was cold or she could make a cup of instant—you’ve got to get out of here, she said, which I kept stupidly remembering as if I couldn’t remember anything else for years, two, three years, Jim, and that I’d said, "I know, I know," thinking at the time, "I need a dry climate for my asthma" but also New York is too big even to get through; but thinking of her wise advice, for three years up to and beyond when Miriam let slip the message in the tax office, binding those years together so they were gone, Jim, like the road of hairpin curves up the mountain and all that was ahead and is then behind—