Women and Men (180 page)

A profile as low as Mayn’s, who might long since have found himself far-sightedly gunning a hired late-model along the early, smokier stretch of the Jersey Turnpike rushing to unearth Marion Hugo’s diaries to put together some phenomenon in volume one with a known design drawn into the end of volume two, if he hadn’t had better grist for his attention whether it was his work or his unestranged but combative daughter, her welfare,
her
work, her voice now often machined from the nation’s capital yet in talk with her father taken more seriously than he let her know when, in the middle of reporting her and her boyfriend’s dioxin trace from Florida through Minnesota’s flumes into a west she entered after her father left, she demanded why he so coolly reported destructive strip mining and in a letter painted the great galleon of Ship Rock into the picture, including relations between women and men throwing in the Gemini astronauts and a taint of archaeology, when a few miles beyond the Rock on the other side Indian miners used by the government to mine uranium wheeze out their half life with lung fibrosis caused by radioactive particles which like asbestos in New Jersey and statistics which strive to outdo themselves will live on after their human sacrifices to the Great Spirit are gone.

Irrelevant to the Four Corners, the father said bluntly.

But, without time to check out Where and How that voice comes his way only What it says, O.K. if you describe a thing you are also responsible for it according to Indian common law by which the Hermit-Inventor was personally exiled from the site of the Navajo Prince’s departure, whereas now Mayn-pere learns you are responsible for it if you
don’t
describe it. Which is of course good Anglo law in the case of headless bicyclists (left their helmet at home with built-in head) or unidentified vehicle upside down on sidewalk (wheels won’t stop turning so you can’t get close), i.e., accidents you pass by or over and do not report. But the Four Corners energy problem (read
project,
read
diverge,
read
dig,
read
Lurgi transformation,
read
matter,
read
people)
is One Thing, New Mexico, while the expenditure of Indian miners at Red Rock is Another Horse, Arizona, and you take the making of history one buck at a time.

And he feels Spence’s long, intimate voice printing some irreversible code on his daughter’s remote voice though she would not give him the time of day or on her answering tape ask for it: until Mayn has found growing relations someone else likely has cached inside him overflowing from him or
into
him he may never put into words sticking with the trouble he’s already got while toying with what it would feel like to be his daughter Flick, who when he left the marriage said extreme words he shrugged off until Norma quoted them back to him from a woman in her workshop who asked her parents while they were arguing at dinner, "Why did you bother to have me?" whereupon the husband exclaimed, "We
didnt
‘bother’ ": Mayn felt more securely what it would be like to be getting over a concussion diagnosed a couple of days late but updated from the ripped self of an Indian halfback ploughed under Margaret’s topsoil to the skull of a modestly intelligent average-hard-working newsman who once vowed to his departing Pearl Myles he would never go into journalism it was too much in the family, and can now thirty years later feel the bones of his head after a rough night of running around from the Chilean’s foundation to Dina’s hotel to a couple of operatic apartments to a street corner near Penn Station connected by pay phone to a Puerto Rican corner far uptown coincidentally near the Museum of the American Indian dreaming through the City’s rebuff of larger quarters at the other end of the Island of Hills looking out at the harbor and its fixed and moving lights—coming together headache-wise so he suddenly dunno if his caring for his daughter and his son (but it’s Flick who’s been connected by the correspondent-carpenter Lincoln, whose voice he now knows he
has
heard before and on a machine, to Spence) totally shrouds three figureheads, the Mayga, the Sarah, and the Navajo Prince fixing on each other’s relative motion approaching each other if not him on rough-shod courses of disappearance, for the Navajo Prince still armed with the Colt revolver acquired from the late healer was last seen running up and down inside the great Statue in the aging harbor having seen him pass as he rose up the winding metal stairway only a sweet mist, a smoke of summer humidity escaped from the city, smelling though of those blue berries he had studied the uses of, for which he was also known by the Navajo name of the ceremonial plant they grow on, the Ironwood, or, in Navajo, the Ma’iidaa’ Prince—so Mayn dunno any more, because one thing’s sure: that sonofagun Spence doesn’t work on spec but if Mayn can be threatened into seeing how these three disappearances are relations of each other and report it, then by the old, well-kept wisdom, he’s responsible for their connection which might not be worth the collateral price of being himself responsible for each individually, though those responsibilities would range so wide you would need a solution happier than Spence and simpler than that counter-Masonic rite of mingled flesh among Indians and Anglos in northern New York and central Oklahoma investigated by a President who, upon finding that actual flesh was taken from the paired participants and joined in an aromatic fire, could not believe the reports of greater and greater regeneration, and so he did not participate, although he was not well, though well enough to trace through a man of many turns, an itinerant chronicler, another man accused of having given more and more of himself to these thermal rites, first an arm, then an arm and a leg, then the fingers he had once merely joined whorl to arch with his Indian counterpart neophyte but now for the ritual moment gave up thus risking his trade of master printer—then at last entrails and, it is said, brain or parts thereof, always to be joined with kindred sections of an Indian co-celebrant, each time regenerating at a lightning speed seemingly at odds with loving intricacies of regrowth and cellular resilience instituted in shortcut form by Grace Kimball at a special session promising rebirth without pain, which was less than it gave, which was help in the form of such ordinary tales as a young black aspiring actress’s, picked up in the park by an older man teaching his granddaughter to ride a bike, or, as Norma passed on to Mayn because she could not get very far with Gordon, her own husband, Grace’s own long story of a short marriage, once-a-month pocket billiards at a tavern, the booze softening the game until at a late stage anger and despair settled them down to shots they couldn’t believe they’d made in the morning (or remember); the jerking off under the covers after he was asleep; the creeping friendship possible in a brother-sister deal that rediscovers incest in order to taboo it, till suddenly it was At Last—alone at last, she hears the addict’s words to the romance of his bride but now adapted to being single in order to double and triple and multiply herself forever, alone at last for at last she left him, but in that curious modern manner of kicking him out so
he
seemed to have been the one to leave, someone was waiting for him some ten month-miles away, a tough, sexy mother not just for him but for his unborn children, who will get help themselves someday—not quite Grace’s help, that night of the bland, adapted, "quick" form of the old Anglo-Indian flesh merger rite, in the much better form late in the session of the interminable good stories with which Norma repays Mayn for his—his what? his guessed-at stories, but his plants, his attention, his face, his very male, gentleman freedom from (not violence but) bad language, dirty jokes which she couldn’t imagine him remembering even at the club (like Gordon’s how do you tell if your lover is gay? answer: his cock tastes like —), but Norma’s story that sounds so close to her it might be hers, of the man who found in Open Marriage (as opposed to
Closed
Marriage!) a sanction for outer sex but unlike his wife, who knew the difference between feeling and above-average sex, fell in love and, in addition to concealing night after night from a small beloved child what was going down, kept from himself the right to leave the marriage like the house until ... as Norma said, Mayn’s eyes seemed to have dried up into a stare so full of knowledge she found
Y&rself
crying, until Mayn said, "And one day the kid found out," and Norma, "Worse; the other woman became friends with the kid—it gets worse still," and Mayn, "I know," as if he were responsible—until Norma, knowing at the moment of loving him that she wasn’t going to have any affair and wasn’t going in for Open Marriage and not only because it wasn’t open while she simultaneously did not know if the "long-term" relation (read
-ship)
with Gordon was good enough, found words for what she felt before she knew the feeling, "You have that quality, Jim, of knowing, I mean without having to give advice and tell about yourself, and it’s strength and helpful strength, too, and don’t ever think it isn’t."

He had not known that he ever "thought it wasn’t"—and he was grateful to hear—in a way about power. And felt Norma had something more to say.

What had Mayga had to say at the end (this end)? Something he had felt almost not withheld. Her few notes about the future in a notebook in front of her on the bar. Random material last seen there, always with a surfacing capability, the mortal matter miscellaneous of Jim Mayn’s extended family so near-flung we could take responsibility for Larry and not go far wrong.

He was about to say to Norma, "You find yourself in other people," but it sounded stupid in advance though he knew Norma would have appreciated it. He said, "I gather my grandmother’s old yarns got into your workshop."

"I wasn’t there that time," said Norma; "but Grace said Clara, the wife you know of that exiled Chilean economist, came out of herself a little and got pissed off."

"What about?—the medicine man that dies and becomes a cloud for a time?"

"You must have been talking to Lincoln. No; calling a Navajo chief’s son a prince and having him follow a white girl like that and lose his pistol."

"They had quite original weather in those days," said Mayn.

During these few days of 1977 when all that had been started threatened to slide into action, Mayn did not ask his daughter her reported version of how the Navajo Prince had ended. (And
were
there princes among the Navajo? He had never been one of your know-it-all newspapermen.) Yet—perhaps because he hadn’t worked out lately on the Nautilus machines sitting back straining into the mirrored distance, strapped in next to a well-known left-fielder who visited the city in the off-season to buy art—Mayn felt in his actual bones a gap between invented events he was familiar with and some sterner presence shadowing him: a gap between on the one hand such acts once issuing from the Statue in the aging harbor as that unconvincing metamorphosis of the Navajo Prince into the easternmost Thunder Dreamer ever seen, though Thunder Dreamer in but one or two respects, at his critical juncture with the Princess’s faithful admirer Harflex, a metamorphosis due to the Prince’s having ingested a collossal dollop of the uniquely low noctilucent cloud somewhere between Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ford (or Fjord) of Choor, and on the other hand, some deflected intelligence that, possibly his own once, became now some sterner presence or surveillance—his daughter, who he had suddenly heard from his son had for all she said about operating by telephone, set out to be a
writer;
his wife, who he’d heard from Flick was getting married to the New Hampshire gent with the permanent tan; Mayn’s own girlfriend Jean, who (one) overnight switched from science journalism to science itself—nutritional biochemistry and global agriculture, a huge career decision at twenty-nine, that she said (and he couldn’t see it) had come to her four years ago in a motel near Cape Kennedy because of Jim, she laughed that it was while they were lying in bed digesting three dozen local oysters consumed at Captain Billy’s, a preparation for a disappointing press conference and a wonderful walk on the beach where there had been no shells but many stars; and beyond Flick, Joy, and Jean, and underneath every stone, that family less Spence, who, on the night Albuquerque’s Dina West called from a New York hotel, and the Chilean economist’s research aide Amy was absent without keys from her apartment, and Larry who had forgotten to press his button entering the elevator found on emerging at his floor at two in the morning that well-known opera singer famously dressed up like a Mexican and her auburn hair built upwards like a hunk of furniture kissing a tall dark man in a blue pinstripe suit and very expensive real-silver-tooled black western boots, goaded Mayn to get somewhere before Spence did: for Spence all activities so long as the dollar flag was up, or, if the mind is a taxi, down, were as equal as distances our bent head unleashes or compacts squaring change with the obstacles to grasping it: so Mayn, who thought he had never dreamed and had been told by Mayga that if he could only, well, recall his dreams, he would not have to lose any sleep over his life, seemed to find his way from his mother’s indispositions in the forties when she was steadily departing yet never seen to do more than be absent in another form: to Grace Kimball’s 1977 apartment at a time she convened the growing Body-Self: to 1965, when a frail, failing grandfather reported how mad Margie used to get at Jimmy and how they became friends again and Jim was the one who came up with the idea that because of shifting collaborations on, for example, territorial and shared weathers, the Hermit of New York and the six-hundred-year-old retired Anasazi healer might have been one and the same (but no): to 1950, when Margaret could not visit him in Pennsylvania where he was in college because she was sick, she had these lumps in her intestines or something, so he came to see her on an impulse on a weekday, she didn’t look so good, puffy along the cheekbone like his Boston aunt who drank only during the day, and Margaret was also a little weary in the focus of her eyes’ color, but able to love Jim and be irritated by him, both of them arrested and at rest, he, half-proud of stupidly jamming and badly spraining his wrist boxing, needed a day off ("What do you mean you needed a day off, for heaven sake?" his grandmother snorted) and so had cut a class where he’d just gotten a B-plus on the midterm,
and
angry and anxious at having left without telling his girlfriend, who had quite a temper, to put it mildly, as he told Margaret grimly, and he’d like to throttle her. His grandmother listened to him for a moment, so alone and established in her sunny bedroom that the rest of the house felt entirely contained in Jim’s grandfather, who had gone to the post office and come back and was downstairs somewhere, not here where the sun’s light polished the brass of the walnut highboy, and boughs with secret early buds on them swayed in the wind coasting a roof of dark shingles, and though she said she was tired having written a dozen letters in the last three, four days Margaret did not mention
his
not having written her a card in the hospital though it was a month ago now, the hated hospital, and she had never been in one as a patient before and felt that the purpose of New York was to go to Schumacher’s to buy material or to Rockefeller Center to sit in the ice-side restaurant and have clam chowder and grilled-cheese sandwiches and a glass of dry sherry, and so Jim had had to find out from his grandfather, whom he didn’t have to ask when Alexander phoned to say he wasn’t going to let Margie travel, that her operation had been exploratory, what they called "stretching," and he was more upset than she that she had to go back and have a second, because she absolutely wouldn’t.