Women and Men (192 page)

Locked silver Raleigh on green No-Parking-sign stanchion to save time providing back-up support for combined delivery-investigation-of-premises. We looked at green envelope and looked at each other and spoke at once, same words, no stutter: We got to change policy.

We knew what we meant. Gustave picked his big fur cap off the sidewalk. He looked at it like he didn’t recognize it. I said put it on. He didn’t.

Felt the IMU log on back in bag. Keeping records vital, but no table. Then no time, because door beside
LETIN
sign was open. Then no light, because entry way inside was dark and clear of persons. Passed up flight of stairs to wide hall with only light from bulb in open closet. We were moving toward sounds of voices talking, piano dancing, woman singing to piano, music stopping, voices talking, piano up-and-downing, woman singing ("It’s her," said Gustave, and we found double doors manually operated we were glad to find). Moving into what we saw and heard was like something but no time to remember what. Wanted to go back to school. Put hand on Gustave’s shoulder, he moved ahead of me and I saw some stuff on the back of his head but there was too much to look at. We was in the theater and nothing except seats seemed to be between us and the stage, but then a moment later that wasn’t true after all. The singing was beautiful and I forgot about Gustave’s head and the green envelope and who had attacked Gustave and how we was going to buy Santee/Spence’s phone-answering machine for ourselves. Because our client the Lady Luisa was right up there on the stage singing, and, because the seats went down at a slant, she seemed to be right near us, it was a smaller theater than a movie theater. There might be someone behind us but we didn’t look. The words were not foreign but, like, the music was; but the words didn’t come easy. But it didn’t matter. Like, "I’ll be revenged for my mother," and "Where is my father?" and "Our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them, / mermaid-like awhile they bore me up / incapable of my own distress" and so on, until this beautiful dark lady with more hair than Turnstein but coiled and like reddish black and wearing bluejeans and gold-and-silver-tooled western-type boots and black highneck sweater and man’s brown corduroy jacket sang a note so high that another client came out onstage singing to her, and it was Mr. North in a long yellowish sack-type outfit, and it wasn’t clear whether she had been singing about herself or someone else but he knew where he was coming from: "There sung those lips that often I have kissed," he sang, and he was crying at the same time as he sang of how in his sleep he fought his heart until he sleepwalked out of his bed and his chamber and found he was on board ship fingering a packet and could do no wrong but knew his hue was rough reflected in a goblin’s eyes steering the ship until he took the packet and—

q. Because of what he said, we knew we had to make a policy change.

1. Two women sitting in fifth row: one turned halfway round to see if anyone else was here, and she was the girl at the foundation with the big earrings who gave me and Gustave some jobs and had the new phone number, and her name was Amy; the other woman was older and turned halfway the other way to look, and she was looking like I was feeling, and she had come out of the bright, sunny office that Amy had gone into and then Amy came out after her and there was a man’s voice still in there talking Spanish so I didn’t know if it was to them or he’s on the phone. "We
know
these people," I whispered to Gustave, who had his fur earflaps down—he had put on his hat again. He stood like a tree, like once before in the street, but we’re inside now.

2. The singers broke off and were yakking like they’d been doing it all along, and then the piano stopped and Lady Luisa said, "I know this music from somewhere. It is imitation something -
di
." And Mr. North laughed like he was singing and said, "Are you accusing my young friend of—"

3. But then the very small woman who had consultation with Senora Wing who predicted she was going to take off her clothes came out onstage and wasn’t wearing the trenchcoat but had overalls and a red shirt like the red socks mother gave me, and had a big hammer. "Is that sheetrock you ordered really coming today? I’m all set to—" "I cannot allow the rehearsal to be interrupted by a piece of sheetrock!" cried Luisa ("My
dear/’
said big North), but the small woman with the hammer said, "You
stopped
singing. You were talking."

4. The man at the piano stood up with red hair and beard and we did not know him and he said, "Sheetrock be damned; we need the rest of the
score."
Gustave said to me, "I saw him before." Suddenly, the little one saw us.

5. A spotlight came on and moved around between Luisa and North, who argued how he was to carry a letter across the stage and whether he would open it on one note or on another note but he couldn’t wait too long. The older woman in the fifth row said why not hand it over and then take it
back
and open it, and North said, "Who am I to
hand
it to? The man isn’t here." Luisa started to cry and stopped and was mad and said, "He should open it before he comes onstage; he is saving his own life by reading it before someone else reads it." The woman next to Amy asked Luisa if she wanted a cup of tea, and Luisa said, "If we don’t drink it we get a terrible headache," and they both laughed, and the small woman acted mad and pointed at us.

6. They all looked toward us at the back, and Gustave turned to look back also, and I knew that what I had seen on his head before he put his big cap back on was blood, and I was not sure he understood that the policy change was that we would have to begin opening our envelopes when we deemed it necessary for IMU security.

7. I feared for my bike and remembered riding down Fifth Avenue with light behind me like making me a new person, and I turned to tell Gustave he better hand over the music, but there behind us was Santee/Spence smiling and in position nobody’s going to take away. We were going to have to build on more than outside known fact. Santee/Spence said, "Delivery? I’ll take it, Gustave." Behind me, I heard Luisa singing, "Oh speak no more, no more against me, O gentle son O how the wheel becomes me, O heart in twain, I have no breath to breathe my life out—" cut off but very beautiful and I was not thinking what my mother would think any more, only that I was scared and thinking.

Mike-Whipped Landscape Specially Flown In

He pulled away from his father’s house, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father, who had never after all died, might be closely related; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch here and there in the house at times so unmindful of a car, a dark blue car he could swear had followed him, that he hardly wondered what
was
on his mind but recognized that he was content and his father was curious, and he had never been content like this with his father that he could recall.

He pulled away from his father’s voice yet took it with him downcellar, and the still surprisingly crisp voice from the kitchen above him, a square-headed, heavy-headed voice, called down, "Jim, did you turn it right three full turns before you stopped at 12, because you have to do that before you turn right to 11."

He wasn’t going to get into an argument with his father, not on top of the rather happy stuff that had obtained since he’d arrived two hours ago. His father called down, "What did you say? You won’t find them in the closet I’m pretty sure, but look if you want."

The diary volumes weren’t anywhere, so maybe they had been taken by the bookseller who had come looking a week or so ago, but he would not argue with his father on that one either. Mayn dialed left to 28, pulled the lock open and turned it out of its latch loop; he looked into the long, so narrow closet made seemingly out of more space than there had later proved to be, and, by the hanging light bulb behind him, he saw nothing but beautiful bottles, shadowed by their very shapes, the raised imprints dimly deepening or lightening colors that closeted their dust in some widow-web-spread network rigged where time was no object and the blues and purples and browns and greens were subtly preserved beyond eyesight.

He had pulled away from his father’s question "What do you want with those old books?" for his father was bound to ask again, but his father wasn’t asking, Is that why you came for a visit?, because the son had answered, "I think they would be of interest to your granddaughter," and he remembered voicing once to a man in jail the considerable truism that the message bearer is never neutral.

It was just a visit to an elderly man who was his father and who appreciated the phone call from Washington; not that Jim wouldn’t call, but it gave Mel something to look forward to, that is, he said, besides the afternoon paper and the television with the news of a prison break (all the essential news of the world, Jim!), just a visit to an elderly man with a heavy, squarish head and magazines on the dining table and homemade cinnamon applesauce by the half-gallon in the refrigerator ("which people seem to call the ‘fridge’ now, Jim"); a slowly sagging, quite old man in a white-buttoned black cardigan sweater once much blacker when visible through the large street window of a modest weekly newspaper office years ago downtown; a man who lived above a dry, cool cellar full of objects including a thousand books that might never have been read even by his late father-in-law, the grandfather Alexander who, when he used to come uncomfortably into this house, would sit uncomfortably in the Windsor chair in the living room which had lately acquired a shiny white cushion advertising the race track.

He would always pull away from his father yet the truth was his father had been the least prying of parents; but this time he did not pull away. He said, "Oh, I miss my family, you know," and was as surprised to say it to this man as to say it at all.

"I know," said his father. "One way or another you miss them, but it’s only for a part of the day, as far as I’m concerned." His father didn’t seem to feel it odd that Jim had spoken so to him after all these years.

"I mean, I would have seen less of them anyway: Flick and Andrew growing up and going to college and Flick with a job and so forth—"

"But you hurried it up a bit by leaving yourself," said the father. "I happen to think it was a constructive thing you did, from what Flick told me—she said she was thinking of changing her name back—’course I never see Andrew—"

"You think
I
do?"

"He still serious about figure skating?"

"So I hear."

"How are you feeling generally?" his father asked, and Jim thought of the diaries downstairs and knew they weren’t why he was here, and could not help believing that his father thirty years not-too-late had asked him this warmhearted medical-sounding question like you’d ask a contemporary you felt easy with; his father admired his deep bronze tan acquired in six days and maintained by four hours’ talking to a businesswoman at a ski mountain cafe yesterday.

Mayn mentioned the apartment he had moved back into—base-of-operations sort of thing—and his father didn’t tell him it was unwise to go back to where he had lived with his wife and children once, investment or not; Mayn spoke of some nice people he had met, a woman named Norma, whose community volunteer job had suddenly been funded by a foundation so she was suddenly salaried at a crucial time in her life when she wanted a paying job anyhow, wanted more than needed; but want is need, and the outfit proved to be one Mayn knew of—

—coincidence, said his father—

—and Norma’s husband, who wasn’t a friend but he liked him and he bent Jim’s ear one night (so bright he’s scary) talking about changing the weather on Venus and economizing on illness by getting three diseases all at once so you got three immunities for the price of one and came in to have a drink one time and told Mayn all about how he skipped fifth grade but he worked into the story a whole year’s worth of Brooklyn Heights where he was brought up, and the Jews and the Nazis, and the daughter of one of his teachers who was playing on a roof and fell off and was killed, but what Mayn got out of it he wasn’t sure except that this Gordon had taken a voluntary leave of absence from his law firm, wanted to be unemployed for a while, think things through, told me I better get a Medeco lock installed, and I had a feeling through this lengthy story of his life that he kept wanting me as a newspaperman to be full of inside dope, but—

—usually, said his father, it was the other way around, the newspaper people stayed two jumps ahead in conversation.

. . . and a college kid named Larry lived in the building, too, and he came in and talked Mayn’s ear off and Mayn took him to a basketball game and once drove up to Connecticut for the jai-alai matches and Larry won fifty dollars. So it was like a new apartment building in some respects. Private life, you know.

His father nodded. Mayn asked if he was still considering the retirement place near Wilmington. His father said it was quite a wait, and he didn’t like the lump-sum entrance payment. But to the best of his knowledge, it was well run.

The Quakers ran it, didn’t they?

Mel nodded.

Perhaps he pulled away from why he was visiting his father; if so, his father seemed to encourage this. You don’t have to have a reason if you have this need. Getting back to New York from Washington, rent a car, stop in New Jersey and see Mel, who was generous enough to call it good sense to fit the one trip into the other. What happened to those windmills in Wyoming? he went out a
couple
of times, didn’t he? (Mayn discovered his father was proud of him.) Well, if a quarter million people can plug their toasters into a giant windmill—how do those contraptions work?—the horizon will be full of rotors and blades; remember the Hitchcock movie where you were inside one of those old Dutch drainage mills and you would feel you were about to get mangled by all those creaking cogs of the wooden gear-train.
(Was
it a drainage mill, Dad?) (They turned to each other in blank amusement.)