Women and Men (239 page)
Authors: Joseph McElroy
But Spence, his ringed hands flashing wildly, his voice deeper, his need immense, was telling and asking, and could not say enough except this was not what he was really about; and Mayn, who tolerated him in the damp aura of faint danger here that would pass, recognized that de Talca had been convinced of Mayn’s involvement with Chilean interests from way back though it had been de Talca’s own family that had been responsible for the death of Mayga Rodriguez upon the discovery that her intimate liaison with Mayn around the time the U-2 cover got blown extended to pages of a music score known by certain Masonic elders to have circulated its never-performed opus plotting the demise of patriarchy in the haciendas, the business of the mines, the male-decreed alliances of marriage, the public power of the arts, and education in the sciences and techne even to the organization of Chilean shipping and the redesign of the railroad system.
The other two figures came more slowly, but, but for one, all the speeds equaled out—Jean’s intensely attentive silence and her soft touch upon Mayn’s neck and ear and ribs; Mayn’s strange easing of Spence, calming him, reassuring him; the man and woman hand in hand approaching close enough to be now the diva, her hair not piled high but over her shoulders, and her friend the physician who was talking to her steadily; and always Spence’s final, frantic summaries of what he understood to have been de Talca’s deal through an ultimately warm-hearted and tactically unreliable Chinese woman to get hold of a child and thus lure the Cuban escapee in return for the risky freeing in Santiago of that renowned old
logia lauterina
liberal the diva’s father at a precise moment when de Talca’s superior had found tampered-with a messenger’s large envelope containing coded music and a fortuneteller’s witness that Mayn and Spence were brothers and in cahoots with the woman Kimball who had arranged a secret retreat to some supposedly spiritual center in Colorado near the national meteorological research center for the Chileans her intimate the wife Clara and Clara’s exile-economist husband who had openly criticized the American government for clandestinely supporting the operation of DINA right in his own adopted backyard of New York—
all speeds equal to ours so unincorporated if still accommodated to a multiplicity of—but ours until we felt again light that did not have to reach us nor anywhere, light at last at rest, not gong nowhurs no matter how real the people who claimed to brang it to us cheap, split, fused, shredded, exploded like possibilities, imploded like an uncertain East Far Eastern erotic praxis— until, arriving to ask what was happening, what was happening, and full of such should-haves and should-haves as would have driven a less dramatic person into chaos, the distraught woman Luisa was, she said with a smile, now calmed by the anguish of Swiss citizenship, and her doctor, a polite man of perhaps Mayn’s age though less healthy though less used, suddenly said, "I believe my mother knows your aunt ... in Boston?" while his beloved diva looked into all the faces there as if to know them and one day become them, and Spence and Mayn communicated agreeably by Colloidal Unconscious to say they were sure what they would find on this old site if they should pursue it, but—
what had long belonged to us was the nothing that thus was strange in his heart if he could only leave his child here in the ground with its surely mountainous heart where it would rest its own light even in this New Jersey territory. He rose, wondering if he would return to his people or go elsewhere. He imagined a foam volcano risen as some hollow cylinder when bubbles formed in the unexpectedly overnight thawed water and froth oozed from its holes and froze—or so they had heard from the nine-fingered botanist Marcus, or perhaps from the traveler who had been in Chapultepec and in California and in Utah and northeast among the Iroquois and alone.
And seeing the figure of his rival Alexander slow his steps, he found the other figure clear across the burial ground, rushing toward them with that girl-mother’s imperious and loving swing of her wonderful hips, her dark hair now loose and thick, a person with the most beautiful large eyes in both worlds put together, eyes in which he would see his own country again when she came nearer, yes she was finished with even the fears that she had seldom admitted to him when they had smelled the ponderosa bark and seen the sunrise out of the mountain and laughed at a big-pawed wild cat halfway down a tree, and he had said, Nothing lasts for too long, and she had said, No . . . no— this brave person who scoffed like him at magic.
He wanted to throw away the pistol and the man near him was angry and was going to speak to him, and the Navajo Prince took out the pistol to give it away perhaps as a present, but to give it away as the Anasazi had said, which now seemed wrong and unknown but here it was in his hand, loosely, not gripped, and as if the trigger were two thousand miles away, he understood the man before him as if he became him at the same time that he was himself.
He extended his hand with the pistol, and Margaret called, and he saw into Alexander’s hand and saw that Alexander was going to shoot him.
The northern sun spread through the overcast, which hung like no noctilucent cloud if such had ever existed at the height at which the young Indian had claimed their reincarnate friend the Anasazi traveled. The Hermit-Inventor had reached a place where indubitably three foam volcanoes rose evanescent out of the ice-bound April stream. But the Anasazi and his cloud were not here, unless precipitated in some happy form here during some recent night. Nor was the young Navajo, who might be anywhere, on his way home, on his way here, or speaking curiously to some resident of the land.
And then, for seeing was believing, the foam cylinders risen from the stream or descended from these brief waterfalls drew his attention upward to what he had not seen before. A double sun replying to itself through the overcast. An optical illusion. Hard to explain. The Hermit gazed at it until it became the one sun, though it was still clearly two. He heard a motion along the surface of things. He thought he would stand here awhile.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph McElroy was born in 1930. He has received numerous awards for his fiction. He lives in New York City. This is his sixth novel.
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