Women and Men (179 page)

Mayn’s phone rang and he discovered brilliant tears of laughter sticking to his face and thought how Flick asked him about his
work
for God’s sake, but that was what she wanted to talk about at present, certainly in lieu of her mother, so let her, though she got flip. He hadn’t made to Flick in this astonishing letter some address he felt in the back of his demonstrably shallow brain pan, and as the phone stopped, he reached and dialed her again in Washington, and reached again the machine, to which he said, "I’m writing you a letter that’s cracking me up except I think some things in it are true; also I need reading glasses." She preferred the telephone to writing.

He felt at his elbow the typewriter, unused tonight, and at rest, ready for overdue copy on the Second Women’s Bank of Connecticut and Pennsylvania. At hand his pen, mightier than phone or
machine à écrire
or the liquor closet which was just four or five bottles standing on the old painted counter in the kitchen, an appropriate destination for a sentimentalist: yet this material spurred now by its own noxious threatener Spence came out so unsentimental that Mayn could get depressed, came out of the wrong orifice which must be a future designed to handle medium or low not high temperatures out between Earth and Moon in controlled environments colonized by individuals who had once each been two.

Not even supposed to be here in New York tonight, he told the Albuquerque woman; supposed to be someplace else. The Women’s Bank waits patiently for him. Had to tell his boss he’s going after all to World Meteorological Orgy’s spring congress, more talks about global weather network, what to do about drought in the Sahel, go to a new weather make clean break, flood-warning coordination, regional aqua pollution tied in with NASA’s long Johnson Space Center project in conjunction with federal agencies to get automated (i.e., "no human intervention") water-qual monit-system with sensors sensing bacteria and one gas chromatograph thanks to NASA Ames Research (as always) Center (let’s get potable!) while EPA’s dreaming total waste use for pilot apartment complex (or small city), will recycle people glass/metal, turn paper waste to hot water, so let’s economize as if people— let’s economize on our matter—while Mayn in person’s pouring a small four-D "mirror" exactly a third full of bourbon, draining the unfrozen water from under the surface ice of two trays of apparently permanently semi-defrosting fridge (fix-it? second-hand? new?): and sip-launching his body back to the large, humbly furnished living room whose floors could be scraped and twice polyurethaned, thinking, turning, turning, falling forward forward with sufficient inertia to carry an atmo or two with him, sharing information (witness the white 8/2 by 11 paper long-handed daughter-bound under the lamp beside the old black portable), divorced and all, yet summoned, summoned, and from this apartment that was "theirs" and’s now "his"—"his" and "theirs," a room full of so much
tiempo
it compacts into an empty obstacle to get through.

He drank off his bourbon, one and only one tonight or he’d get corned enough to mail this angelfood shit to his daughter who by instead
not
receiving it will achieve equality with her brother, his son, whom he knows only in imagination constantly split by Andrew’s blinding-binding disappointment at his dad’s calling it a day, he did not want to look at his son’s face. He buzzed the lobby, did not speak Spanish, learned that a man had asked for Mayn and rung the apartment and hung up saying nobody home and Manuel told him he’s surprised, but—What’d he look like?—Good-looking suit, good boots, dark blue pinstripe with red flower in buttonhole—you get the picture.

"But I was here. I picked up."

"Said he catch you the next time. He sound Spanish."

"Thanks, Manuel."

Mayn dialed the Albuquerque woman’s hotel and dropped the handwritten pages into the wicker wastebasket where they came together as a unit, and when asked if he had left a message before, he said, "Yes . . . Spence."

"Oh yes."

"I want her to meet me for breakfast, I forget what I said the first time."

"You said . . . you recall, I’m sure, sir."

"And did a well-dressed gentleman, blue pinstripe, slight Spanish accent, leave a message at the desk for her?"

"No, she had another phone call but he didn’t leave a message; we’re really not supposed to tell you that."

We’re not s’posed to tell you what we already told you. A memory misfires during orbit, o fires as i, i as o, a "bit-flip." Jot it down, then you can forget. But what if
it
don’t forget
you?
Mayn will turn into a phoneman like Spence, funds transferred by electric diaphragm—puts the receiver back down where it belongs. But dialed Amy’s number, eyes fired, with a faintly loaded sense in his hands of someone possibly dialing
him
direct to potential clot in bloodstream. But got a busy: but then, in the innovation-operative midst of busy signal, got Larry, but not to say Hello or to give what Mayn remembers he has half been waiting for from the founder of Obstacle Geometry, expounder of the Modulus, and determined non-victim of Open Marriage or the hoots and hollers of the opera basso’s weeks’ delayed departure and ("Off-off-4Center’ ")
Hamletin
negotiations down Larry’s hall of this multiple dwelling from which Larry is this evening absent—for he is at Amy’s of course in order to report that while briefly out purchasing (as Mayn thinks, the most rudimentary obstacle for them to get through) a pizza for the two of them, Larry suffered her loss; for upon reentering her unlocked home (after all even at her
and
his age), he found her trenchcoat gone from the kitchen, her wallet from the bedroom, her address book from the upright piano, her beret from a bowl molded into the back section and rear feathers of a large china goose leaving there her doubtless second set of housekeys glittering, valuable, seeming to invite Larry to leave. He was not too upset by thinking he had been forcing the pepperoni and sausage pizza baked by this Korean pizzeria at the corner
upon
Amy, to add that he was through chasing an older female when it was probably Mayn or her boss that she—no, no, Larry corrected himself, no, Jim, it’s jtist that I’ve had it, my dad now hates my mother, she’s really not coming back and she let us think she was (didn’t she?), and she phoned me from the Island to say she wanted me to live with her and her heavy-duty friend and hated herself for leaving for God’s sake.

Does the front door lock automatically or do you have to lock it yourself?

It locks automatically.

"It" was not the time to find out what Lar’ had come up with.

Nor was there time
to find
time—or, more,
not
to find time—to locate the simplest answer why "all this now," the answer that answers the most starts, or Why we—who often have to not understand Who, What, When, we are—are slowed coming to the illumination that should giddy us up. Because these many starts ain’t mysteriously endless; there comes a day (as we optimistically say when we must mean "an afternoon" when all clefts align to open our danger and opportunity e’en if but to a zen golfer conceived by a lone green golf course visited by the speed of sun’s light, yet we
better
mean a borrowed
hour,
a minute borrowed from a theory we might have heard had we been deaf to the violin or piano whose solo ye theory proved concerto to, for we found when we tested the Earth earlier that we grow abstract in inverse ratio to some relative loss of power we had not decided we wanted or not upon last acquaintance with our best selves, for we were so busy knowing the truth of a new, more limited theory of reincarnation, say, that nonetheless answered the most questions of all the competing theories, that we many of us missed the quiet power we were experiencing
being
thus reincarnate) so
THERE COMES A DAY WHEN WE’Z
done with starts and R been found by what we thought
to
find, which Mn’t all bad, for as one used to say re: Moon exploring, You find it, you got it: whereas in later days of the Locus 5, many of these privileged settlers who’ve been compacted each one out of two original Earth persons (in most cases acquainted to start with) reported an unsettled sense of lasting content on arrival, later thought by the thinkers of those plexi-axial sun-tuned torus-states to have been due to the mythically rich feeling due in turn to the indubitable
source
of each individual in this and other space-positive settlements of nothing
but
individuals, i.e., originally a pair of persons, mostly female-male, often female-female, occasionally male-male, depending on long-term needs though all (literally) united by a Locus T platform plate celled by a milliard electro-magmatic chip-templates jointed to form an ovaline elevator-like capsule so clear that as the templates throng two expecting bodies (but we already remember learning this but without remembering that if you describe what happens, you are responsible for it) as the Hermit learned, describing these and more usual atmospheric, if violent, lumen phenomena that signaled the Princess to take her leave, as they did the girl’s nesting bird-vehicle that rose to the challenge of a mountain-jawed cat when neither cat nor giant bird knew bait from hunter and the cat ate one egg and either disappeared into the future which was the egg’s scent picked up hours later by the hind-gland of a javelina thrown off its eating routine by a between-meals snack given it by the botanist Jones, or disappeared into the form of a sudden timber wolf so great in the shoulder, muzzle, and loins it transcended Pueblo lore that called it devil and was taken to be a real wolf, after all butchered in mid-air by the bird, an event for which the Hermit the day of these departures in his responsibility as Describer of the How and Reporter of the What was punished, but only with exile from that territory. But he returned as his own nephew years later to describe experimentally to the Navajo a gauge on the roof of a multiple urban dwelling to predict, through coastline configuration differences between light and heavy air masses as well as to describe to the underemployed Navajo a future Two-for-One process—in those days a pilot project—whereby the two expecting bodies who are presently to be one elsewhere are thronged with more radiance than their God-given cells know what to do with in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin straining to see a future, while an old-style woman or man now and then sent out like Mayn to report feels extra mortal next to these
colons
compacted by an economy so simple it’s more question than solution, such as what should be the minimum daily allowances of negotiated or unnegotiated love-merger for these new beings who
are
the tacit annunciation of what they’ve been compacted to and
are
experiment they are
making
with their lives and for which they may be said to be answerable in the sense that a "respons-" is an "answer" and if the Two-for-One origin holds vivid its internalized dialectic should comprehend both question
and
answer (e.g., in issues of the reality of property out there, or the legal obligation to repay capital borrowed from Earth when, for example, the
Moon
ore from which so much of the torus’s oxygen is farmed does
not
create a "debt situation" though it comes from an organic Earth satellite, and the near-panic demand for the soccer-ball-scale tomatoes grown rapidly in high humidity in the frothy soil whipped from lunar earth revalues the interspatial basic-barter objects) in these great wheel settlements with their gravity-inducing rotations that make at some hours and angles the giant spokes seem to turn backwards or bend their shimmering into fixity like the outer radiation-shield rim which seems to rotate with us we already recall and keeps down stresses on its light, vast structure paved with Moon mineral which communicates by reflected light as below through the ingested beans of its new soil a sense of secrets waiting in the otherwise open-and-shut "Given": so that as the boy Joseph Smith consuming and consumed by a pre-Mormon fungi-mold strangely empowering the rye loaves his mother baked him one harsh winter in the New York frontier village of Palmyra near Seneca Falls a stone’s throw from Lake Ontario conceived of secret documents and later hallucinated where to find them (though he was not responsible for their being gold or for plural-marriage doctrines implicit in the tablets), so did some Two-into-One econocolons eat beans and know in their hearts there had been built into the torus structure, like a color and promise of which the artist is but half aware, a point of cleft-potential at which the torus may be enlarged and enlarged again, boosting lengthward acreage for sorghum, potatoes, tomatoes, and, yes, the very beans that yield the secret of the growth point so that production will far exceed the mean projection of Earth planners.

Which doesn’t begin to explain why James Mayn would go so far as to really feel his periodic conviction so uncharacteristically broached to the woman Mayga that he is in the future, the largely humdrum if optically violent future, and presents himself to the less economical present like a shade cast back upon a past not yet distinct, though give the man credit he is at one with the diva Luisa quoted in
Celebrity Aura
as wanting to change her shadow,
quiero mudar de sombra,
minus her footnote that the words are not hers.

There is, we admit, one discrete break in that shadow of Mayn’s, a gap shaped sometimes like a gnomon parallelogram, ofttimes like a cleft that later Mayn might wonder if the Hermit-Inventor had ever tried to explain in responsible scientific terms; a gap, though, in this shadow as if light or some body of it cast its counter- or non-shadow across the shadow’s effort of warning or survival or understanding emanating we thought from Mayn but possibly a vision he a mere one among others gladly enters into. But that gap is for one thing our amazement at how we could get here without grasping the concrete sources in our collective childhood as if we had had to forget them to get ahead—in order, say, to figure how to inject weather into a "weath-erless" place without ruining everything, balance of payments, bonfires in our souls, constant climate. The Hermit-Inventor could not always believe that lava from a volcano to the west was fundamentally blood of the great giant killed by the Hero Twins a very long time ago. But the inference he had made between volcanic ash up-ploded into cloud layers and cloud piles and high-altitude half-invisible colloids and, on the far hand, wind transport gave him pause on his way home, exiled upon the Prince’s disastrous seduction by the Princess away from his people, which coincided with the Anasazi’s death, which had very little impact on the Navajo—not because of ancient resentments against the people they had displaced or even wronged by the inevitable momenta of progress or accident of irrigational habits, but because of the Anasazi’s low, low profile so low that when Mena the Fuegian zoologist had doubled the Moon upon the pistol that Alexander took off the mantel that spring of ‘46 when Margaret was in New York for the death of the Hermit her friend (not because Alexander expected Ira Lee to avenge his "massacre" in the flower bed by simple theft but because he had derived from the two distinct diary volumes one new idea of where the pistol had been before Chapultepec) Mena who brushed her southern teeth with juniper at first experienced nothing peering into the ancient healer’s high cell sixty to a hundred feet up a laddered cliff (her forehead bound with yucca thongs) except a smell of feathers and untreated ammonia and Sonora bread sculpture, the goodness of the ancient baked dough sealed in with shellac so that shapes of weather goddess or of mandala, of painted house or animal seem to hold the hand-ground grain of the bread’s potential.