Women and Men (175 page)

Answer: at least half a generation of falling forward toward the horizon—leaving town as his mother told him to, though then it was she who did the leaving, if only first. (And are the first to leave like the first to arrive?) He heard his little brother play a sad thing on the piano haltingly and realized he hated his mother for good reason, while loving her unknown thinking yes, in a piece she played of . . . "Schumann" (Braddie called, looking up and down from his music to the keys and back as if one or other would get away from him if they didn’t stay close), Braddie her love child played it with beginner’s skills—in an always somewhat energy-inefficient sound-escaping home, out of which Jim was often coming, often starting, hearing things, well little more than basic equipment sliding/shifting/rattling around in him, voices as unreal as Miss Myles’s "You’re a brave person, Jim; this has made you grow up fast; tragedy does that; we can’t always pick the pace at which" . . . or words to some effect when Jim wasn’t being brave at all, but dwelling upon Anne-Marie’s breasts which he had just the day before touched in
daylight
and for a time thinking there really had
been
a Hermit-Inventor, that is in the Anasazi sense, and so there had been an Anasazi healer give or take a few prescriptions immortal enough not to have expired after several centuries, though smart ideas can get passed on for a long time and still apply, even if saying the thing in French compelled the mother, then, to say to Braddie in Jim’s hearing that the piano was to the orchestra what the individual was to the mass except the orchestra was better than the mass. But, asks the interrogator so long quiet as to have been legally absent (though always in the wings, his own, and more than in the wings, indeed in the feelings of all these relations circulating like money but also like Grace Kimball so clear about history being written yea razored on the male’s ever-’vailable tabula the female doormat that her power has been to be known and used changing in the imitable warmth of her own that multiplies in lives of women and men where she might be as invisible and inaudible as a spirit that reduces surplus though vulnerable always if not quite ready—for she’s a monologuist—to the blunt male word working at its insidious, non-leaderly worst, in interrogation’s interrogatory, But) were you, about your maternal parent’s embarcation into the unknown not at least as curious as Pearl ("statuesque" but only "-esque") Myles who may have lost her job through inquiries about the abandoned rowboat and the lack of a traditional-type suicide note, i.e., about the How of Sarah’s exit? Or did you clandestinely check on the time-distance odds of her meeting the lofty waterspout reported nosing the ocean near the Barnegat seafront between Mantoloking and Point Pleasant that afternoon appearing so unusually free of its normal thundercloud source a mere-mile-high cumulo-nimbus from which it funneled down to vacuum the bright-foaming salt scallops of whitehorse whitecaps the afternoon she "went"? (Answer at once not only for yourself in the usual rousingly dubious way but up front for all of you—and oh yes are we as history-buffers expected to swallow as mere coincidence a modest interest in weather work in later life and those earlier self-embedding weather trips of the boy-man’s extended clan interracial, continental, ranging upwards and downwards thirteen decades or more?)

"You are pretty hard on that little shit," said Ted of Spence one evening in 1965 (probably), "and you don’t know much about him," Ted added, pushing some cigarette change toward the barkeep.

Mayn would grant this, but not that Spence carried especial violence or energy around with him except as an alertness for profit. What Mayn (and, to the amusement pretty much of both of them, Ted) did know about the worm Spence was at least three things: that through alerting the relevant parents— one pair split and remarried, though not to each other—Spence had sold to a New Hampshire newspaper for $4,300 a photo of two evidently male Americans blindfolded with bandannas and wearing major-university T-shirts facing very close-up an allegedly Cuban all-male firing squad (cheeks crushed against rifle stocks, berets tilted except for one potentially-female member wearing an identifiably Pittsburgh Pirates cap); second, that Spence had sold for a greater sum an underwater photo of a free-lance salvage diver on vacation embracing two luminously dark and universal daughters of a Bolivian general against priceless ceramic tiles of (at the diving-board end) the deepest privately owned swimming pool in our hemisphere; and for a bargain-low barely-five-figures unloaded a dossier (he had first ingeniously "rented" overnight to a foreign "buyer") documenting a blackmail-and-(party-)favors network extending through uranium options on Indian lands, embezzlement of tribal funds, sexual action by civil-rights coordinators ("red"
and
"black") with pictures involving entrapped foreign acting students and a safely incredible pilot "map" (read
project enterprise)
to recycle mystery wastes on scales of such "load" and "breadth" and "profit" that its susceptibility to seeming in general "good for America" plus its emergence less than six months after (and thus in competition with) the killing of a President (on the birthday of Spence!) not to mention a tragic twin-miscarriage suffered by a prominent microbiologist right in her lab, caused the whole dossier both with and without its powerful abstractions to fall back into a regularized dump of history to be of a significance as uncertain as were the views of this moral orphan Ray Spence sometimes confusable at will with a part-Sioux part-Ojibway entrepreneur whose name after it was given him by accident he deliberately adopted under stress as noted by clients who may never have bothered to find out about each other, assuming such basics, nonetheless, as that they had been mothered and fathered and come from real places, demonstrable places, whereas Mayn (who amused a woman friend who pointed out that, his humor notwithstanding, she personally had nothing to go on except his testimony) had inferred Spence’s origins as "something else," a message not certainly aimed at eventual re-constitution in human language (read
terms).

But if this was all Mayn troubled to actually know about the despised Spence, the rest of it could seem to know Mayn, or be borne by him unknowingly recalled like things he hadn’t understood but recalled and recalled, the dreamlike late night when he opened his mother’s music-room door till he could see her and he had a message for her sort of dumb-in-the-head ‘cause it could be gotten by her not given by him.

But what
was
this "something else" Spence was coming from? the long silently present young woman Jean (or to her parents
Barbara-]tan)
asks— who once four years ago in her half sleep heard her motel-mate Jim Mayn mention Ray Spence, a Chilean economist, some "choor" or other until she was awake and he, this mid-life athlete next to her, was the one half asleep —counts down through Spence, Chile, Choor (born into it?), and a long, white mountain that had thoughts if unable, at the drop of a fracture zone or the pivot of a scissor fault, to turn thought into dream: so maybe marry the two, yet she could have sworn they were born into each other.

Now it’s four years later. She doesn’t—he knows—know what their relation is, it’s as deep as friends for sure.

He backed off sheepishly: "Have to think Spence was a snake in a previous life and didn’t make it so they demoted him to a human snake— except there’s no ‘they,’ is there? I’ll say one thing for him: he has the stick-to-it-iveness of a good journalist: he listens and he goes looking."

"For what?"

He knew she didn’t get it, but in his own behalf he could at least claim not to have read the book though he’d had its meager theory digested for him by his friend Ted; but they went into the movie theater they had been slowly approaching, as it them, with its potential images at rest in the money in their pockets, then in the tickets rolled out onto metal by the box-office attendant, images including one at the start that made you think was it mist or was it fog the East Far Eastern Princess got turned to by her friend and adorer the Hermit-Inventor of New York? For mist—whatever its uses in the vigilance of precise umbrellists or poets or measurers in Oregon and Scotland who name it, as a hundred winds are named, for their place—is essentially distinct droplets; and fog is a cloud of condensed moisture as close to the ground as the Great Spirit’s Four-Cornered Ear, oft free enough of wind to hang, yet if wind-moved enough, apt to gather more air to be cooled by the cold, cold ground as if the Earth were the sea.

Spence persisted from talk he
had
heard, through hearsay he had
not,
as if infected by the future of jojoba as a fantastically superior dry-land reincarnation of the vanishing sperm whale’s oil, yielding from that plant’s durable bush such motor coolants, human foods, shampoos, commercial hopes for endless other transformations as might explain why
(per quoit)
an English furniture maker whom Margaret Mayne met on the slopes of Salt Lake City could excite her so with tales of the Japanese-speaking American inventor whose interior wound had been healed in the desert with jojoba balm only so that he might be murdered for having seen the connection between that bush bean’s pod-oil and the (in fact) mw-sperm whales with which a group of Californians tried to stock the Great Salt Lake: and altogether did explain why Spence’s nose for profit led beyond the venerable jojoba bush and its lucrative basic-research future of remedying the particular acne if not spleen damage or excess gravity in the lower limbs and spinoffs of the chemical from which is derived dioxin of Vietnam fame to the woman Manuel who had healed the ill-fated Japanese-speaking Mason in Utah, had herself shampooed with the jojoba oil for years, and had so applied it to the riven scalp of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the lovely sounds that came from her small cranial crater as well as her demon-hassled voice’s mouth foretold if they did not cause that legendary comeback from death usually attributed to her son’s hasty departure. Spence had heard some of this firsthand through Mayn, but some of what Mayn heard from at least two people, whom Spence now in 1977 insinuatingly contacted, seemed almost as far from Mayn as it had unquestionably
not
been overheard
spoken
by Mayn in a Washington bar in the old days in or not in the presence of Mayga, the beloved South American woman-friend, at Cape Kennedy before and soon after the liquidation of Dr. Allende’s government in Chile or at one or two other times when their professional paths crossed, Mayn’s and Spence’s. Yet indisputable it was that the Navajo matron upon revival had spoken in the voice of Owl Woman and Owl Woman’s name had been Manuel; indisputable that Spence had heard through Mayn of Marcus Jones, and anyone but Spence would have settled for this—not reached, instead, his fifty-foot extensible arm-hand out of the wiry plastique of his western-wear-clothed body to ferret out the fact that the American printing magnate Morgen, who had been strolling with Mayga when she fell to her death, no one else’s (the ultimate breather), from the breezy cliffs of Valparaiso harbor, was brother to a left-wing job-printer Morgen in Philadelphia—all intensely suggestive to Spence, who though Mayn figured Spence cared not even a fuck for the journalist Mayga noted that in the late fifties/early sixties her husband had helped run the national airline and that Mayga’s work in the States was covering copper mostly and talking up Frei’s next run for the Presidency of Chile—work just ended by her departure for home summoned by husband, now ended with her life.

Mayn had told this Spence years ago to shut up, which Spence did with such a lingering smile that he might in every other respect have been elsewhere.

Mayga was dead, and that was all that had mattered then in 1963, not the tilt at which we received the sun and the rain, nor any historic small talk that was all of it bigger than the death of Mayga—and welcome to its bigness. Yet recalling and recalling how friend Ted had told Jim the news not imagining it would upset him for he had met her maybe half a dozen times in ‘62-’63, he could get to another fact of Spence by the trivialest gnomon yet congenial because he and Ted had tossed this all-purpose gnomon back and forth, the
L
of the sundial or anything that tells time by the shadow it casts (though
what
does it tell time?); for one day at the beach Jim had stuck himself strangely into the earth of the Mantoloking sand just on the leaning point of pretty well murdering his little brother Brad:

and that "fact of Spence," conveyed on a gray day in New York in 1977 of the perishable century that aspires to be our civilization’s hour, he heard in the voice of a nice woman he had had steak and enchiladas with (or what
did
they have?) in a bedroom suburb of Albuquerque hard by Sandia Mount, calling to say she’s in New York, has to talk to him, she was supposed to be joined by Ray Vigil (remember?), she had to see Mayn, not talk on the phone—look it wasn’t possible to put down (put up?) a mountain overnight, was it?, whose mineral "bank" could make anyone near it think it had always been there, and listen, a man who disturbed her but maybe wasn’t crazy had told her that Jim Mayn’s mother had disappeared into the ocean but his grandmother had stood at the memorial marker in the family cemetery plot and said there was something real there and a person had phoned the cemetery from New York to ask if burial had taken place, and the woman from Albuquerque her voice quiet with chill not privacy thought it all might mean nothing against this Spence’s allegation that she and Mayn’s
daughter
whom she did not
know,
if not Mayn himself, could be involved in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something she heard Spence call National Technical Means Capability for verifying placements of missiles—but... she had come to New York to talk to Jim about partly this mountain perhaps though she had not heard about it till she got here and of course didn’t believe it but also a strange thing she had heard in Farmington, a west-east nightmare for environmentalists, this mountain minerally capable of making people believe it. They would talk tomorrow, she said, as if it wouldn’t be now. Her firmness brought them full circle but it wasn’t the same spot, and looking over the edge of the phone or the circle, recalling her curly, dark-blond hair and a quick smile in the midst of fact and dedication still hoping she could save part of a landscape from being darkly stripped by some epic modulus but to store that
landscape
no more than the windmill prior to the giant electronic pylons of Wyoming stored
wind
for current elsewhere, he remembers her given name Dina like it meant something and despite her having just said her surname he can’t hold it in his mind until he thinks of once itemizing for his daughter a bleached beer can next to a candy wrapper in the desert brush at his feet when he stood contemplating Ship Rock while the Four Corners plume and gasification of cheap surface coal escape him, and thinks of another person a bearded son of two opera stars who changed his name to West which amused his bearded sometime-earringed father and upset and haunted his mother, she told Mayn. Dina West. Dina West. Spence had phoned her. Which meant he had known she was here, and where. Which meant he knew o/her. Which in itself proved for some minutes of this year of 1977 to be so tiresomely credible that Mayn could go back and bury himself in some New Mexico town with one broad street, a desert’s exit and entrance, and drive a new pickup truck and wear dark glasses and pump gas obscurely for the rest of his life. Dina West.