Women and Men (31 page)

So, being less a philosopher than economizing on effort, and still hanging on to this "nothing" he would testify to that was almost here, he corrected his course slightly as he was hauled by sheer dizziness half out of his chair and instead of hanging on to it or the prison inmate’s ruled letter fell tall-ly out of it, out of this chair by the bright windy window and onto all fours for then she would not think he was dizzy or sick and only hear him on all fours growl GRRRRAAAWWHHHH! at that touch upon his hide. But expecting his wife’s approach, heralded a moment before by her silent hand upon his bald head, he could hardly anticipate it for she was here already on top of him.

And as he received her laugh and her slender arms elbow-crook’d around his ribs down where he existed on all fours on the rug and felt again her hand upon his head, for his head was what she wanted (and would
have,
but could not hold the drowning discharge inside his brain which was part fun because she’s here), he found that well before this he had known that he was not alone, and this was half what he would not testify to if anyone offered to torture him, say in a beret such as the beret she had bought him for his eminent dome. And now this inkling (roused moments before to some unlatching or a lonesome draft of air trying to get at his eardrum or the rustle of a thing coming to rest or a moist cluck—from her mouth opening, as she saw him and thought, His earplugs are in) plus that other inkling that was nothing he wished to identify was clotheslined by the opera long forgotten on the bedroom radio that’s nearing its violent end. What else was it that they had planned for this afternoon?

He rose way down in himself to the cheerful hand on his head, it had taken off its glove. He read every little part of that hand no matter where it came down on him—shin, chest, his ankle, his neck hair. The palm familiar, her palm tenderer than fingers, more delicious than her squarish downright fingers on the skin close to the osso spooko of his dome. Satisfaction with a minimum of means—a head, a hand. "Oh my sweet," she said, and he still had not seen her. She was related to angels, he knew in the warm liquid spread outward in the radiator of his body so he was very wide and inside himself sort of peeing slowly or bleeding not so slow. Not telling her about reading her hand no matter where it came down on him was like reaching out to her (and he thought, Where-wer^-you?-I-was-glad-to-be-alone). What else did they need but each other? He reached out to her without moving a muscle, amused musclewards to feel his face’s calm fixed until he grinned. He was pleased with her that a few seconds ago the shine across his bald eminence must itself have seen the light of his life coming across the carpeted room and not related the message downstairs. Thus interfered he not in her secret progress across the room, her nature. A room that, with the next, was like beginning again—did not these people say such things—in this immigrant city, this city in therapy (when it was the
nation
that needed it). Taking control of one’s life. Growing. Starting over. Making a clean break. Yet if Relationship was Bone, did not the strange people of this city mean "Amputate"? Then there was A Clean Breast. Yet here were he and she not in that way beginning again but in secret plenty where no one knew you. Though their name was not unknown, nor their whereabouts.

The letter from the convict lay half folded against the radiator as if sitting casually like the skeleton of a ghost.

He sat on the rug, eying the letter and digging out a soft earplug of wax (squashing, then filling out again but not like sponge or flesh), pink wax, rather disgustingly soiled by a short hair from his temple sticking into it; dug it out, squeezed it but not in two lest he leave a bit stuck down the burrow against his eardrum, and she couldn’t stop giggling as if she had been holding back, or would cry, which she never never did.

It was nothing he would testify to under oath or torture, this force he had more felt than said (to himself) before he had known she was even in the apartment with him, and now it was less known than a minute ago so maybe it was not just private life in all its power. (Smile.) The inmate’s letter was punctuated with those parentheses. (Smile.)

And then she murmured (because she could say it to him—because it had been said before and so was O.K. or at least code): "With your brains you could make a million in business," murmured less wickedly than before, when she had felt like an artist working on him, her fingertips and then her breath and throat on his heel—"all that you know." To which he still did not know how to give in: "You mean forget exposing the Americans and create our own mineral cartel?"

"Design your own life," she murmured modestly; but living here she and he were often ironic.

"They do have a way of speaking here, don’t they," he said.

"Oh my sweet ..."

"We
have that relationship of which they are always speaking."

She smiled touchingly, and he let jealousy shift from his betraying eyes up into some dumb wrinkles in his forehead. It was nothing he wished to identify. He would kiss her foot in a moment. The letter lay near (or, on the rug and up against the lower edge of the radiator,
sat
near) the two books that had been in his lap. It was nothing he wished to identify, this force he had detected before the second phone call, the one he had let ring, which had been confused with the also regular ringing in his inner ear, if that was what it was—his doctor was the doctor of a famous singer after all.

His wife reached to caress his skull. She blessed him and he foresaw that when she took her hand off she would find again the creamy shinings making faces off his carved pate so maybe she would skip the nothing to be found upon his forehead, his brow. He stared with obedient doting a trifle fraudulent except in the love.

She, who was less a foreigner than he, had been so much to him Through Thick and Thin that he would sometimes subdue all that in endearments of style like calling her "Madam." Been so unbearably much that he thought he should not be accepting sanctuary here like some earlier immigrant. He thought of all the children of the prisoners in the prison that his letter came from, free children of imprisoned parents, brothers, uncles, relations. Also friends of friends. This one of the letter he had not gone to visit; he had visited the other, who would never call himself a political prisoner though he was one of the New Jersey Cubans, except he might call himself a political prisoner in the black way—a good cover for him. Happening to be spoken to by this other inmate in the visiting room, the visitor had responded once, twice, and, to the disapproving amusement of the man he had gone to visit, he exchanged with this other man, whose letter now sat against the radiator, names and addresses. ("You Irish? You don’t sound Irish." ‘The name is originally Scots." "But ..." "No, I am not from Scotland.")

"Have you been hearing things again?" she asked, and her hand came down his sleeve to his wrist.

"Earplugs are disgusting," he said, and she might have laughed again, she had a right to. He turned his unpredictable ear toward her and named the opera playing in the bedroom. Roman soldiers. Priestess mother. Her
niñitos
smack in the middle of their mother’s official life.

But she had noticed the letter, if not the light in his eye. "Have you been up there again?" "No." "What is this Cuban planning?" "What
does
one plan in prison?" "I think I have always liked Cubans. Your letter is from the other man."

The inmate said in his letter it was more dangerous in New York City. You wondered what all those children thought about their grownups off in a castle in the wooded hills (where you didn’t address them with the name of the prison but at a post-office drawer—like an unknown box holder’s discrete freedom: Number 2020 skis in with skis for feet like flippered South Pole gulls, terns, birds, not even God knew their name: no, the unknown box holder mysterious Number 2020 flies in, a small cross moving against the slopes of the sky, Cessnas in from the Arctic Circle once a fortnight to check his mail; canters in from the shimmering middle of a multinational mirage upon a camel whose time scheme is different from his; no, swings in along a hundred forest trees from lush safety to see what’s waiting for him in Drawer B drawn all the way out, and found not the grownup inmate—his fingernail clippings, his unmistakable hand, lock or lack of hair, thumbnail sketch—but his kids instead). Do you know where your children are? The man he had really gone to see "behind bars" said he worried about his little boy, and the visitor knew what he meant without his elaborating and so perhaps it is as well for this beautiful, still young woman on the rug to notice the letter from prison because it is so innocuous, and think this is the man my darling lord and master is mainly interested in at the prison. Did the children write the cons letters?— miniature offspring lying in Drawer B with dolls’ stiffness and calm; space savers seen but not heard (clippings or parings to be restored to fingernails after execution before burial): this, this was where his letter from prison had brought him and it was a substitute too close to his own nothing-he-wished-to-identify to be worth following until you got to the source.

"I said have you been hearing things again?" she could speak from her motionless hands. This time he indicated the opera with a slide of his head.

‘‘What pretty music, but what a lurid story," she said.

Druid priestesses being fed, bel canto, to Roman soldiers, you know.

"Well, two to one, my love," she said, "if we are counting."

He told her she seemed sometimes so much less a foreigner because of being part English; but then he didn’t know. It was
his hemisphere.
She spoke to him from other points in the apartment. He would turn to his window as he did more often now to see what he would probably never see again from this sixth-floor window, a man he recognized—but had actually met—at Cape Kennedy, a journalist—and liked—but then had been told was dangerous— yet told
by
a man who
himself seemed
dangerous but was a business contact (a photo-journalist) whom now upon better thought he could not manage to make go away.

And when fear touched home, he identified it as being on behalf of his children, who were not here. And were not children. Or on his side.

He liked everything about her. Her blue Peruvian shawl fallen on the couch.

He stayed out of trouble, produced his exorbitantly paid statistical overviews at the foundation, sometimes wondering who else was on the payroll. He had been named an exile in the newspaper once.

She was on her knees in the kitchen, he saw one stockinged toe upside down poking out beyond the doorway, and the power hit the right side of his head again in a discharge that fused cells—celled him for one two three expanding seconds expanded into one indivisible one.

She came dancing across the room, detoured to kiss his lips lightly, swept away to retrieve an oblong white parcel from a large red shopping bag standing on the small table in the dark foyer. With all of her sadness she used the city better.

"Martin Marpe has had Hector put to sleep," she said from the next room.

His beagle.

"You have a charming memory."

This Martin, was he more real because they did not really know each other? Something of a chameleon in her reports.

"A chameleon!"

Seemed to fit in wherever he turned up.

"I don’t see that at all, and look here—I’ve met him only—"

When he’s talking with a young policeman studying law, he’s against lady cops; when he’s talking to a young woman who’s making a career for herself in a well-known laboratory as a biochemist, he’s saying that we need women in many of the old sex-dominated—

"Hoyo-to-ho! la la la!"

—because their fresh slants are destined to make the great breakthroughs in the next quarter century; when he is talking to a Buddhist he’s against tailors; when he’s talking to a famous swimmer—

"You have not heard him talking to any Buddhist. The dog was old and Martin’s free-lance work is taking him upstate and sometimes he’s away for two weeks. Are you seeing him as a Roman soldier this afternoon?"

Let’s have Brünnhilde in the
Valkyrie
again riding her horse.

She sang with such heartbreaking softness "Hoyo-to-ho! Hoyo-to-ho!" he guffawed, but the softness was fresh distance down his inner ear due to these turns he was lately subject to or equaling a new measure of her unwillingness to ask him to see the doctor again who would shrink his labyrinth but in so doing amplify what might better stay dim or soft. On the other side, though, the inner-ear disease which this very Martin who put his ears under pressure beyond subway decibels had menacingly suggested to her as an explanation of her husband’s occasional ringing quasi-deafness plus dizzy discharge was supposed to feature a vertigo that spun your vision, rotated
it,
while leaving
you
behind—and this he did
not
"do," nor wished to investigate it, and he didn’t like this Martin knowing other people’s ears.

"Do you remember the beautiful woman with paint on her jeans who was teaching her little boy to ride a bike in the park?"

Weren’t they supposed to be going to rent bikes today?

"She was so elegant running along beside him and gave him that push that sent him racing off and he went round and round, do you remember, and couldn’t stop, and ran into a pram that was empty, do you remember?"

Of course he remembered. But why?

"It’s too late to go rent bikes now, isn’t it?"

He looked down into the street. He did not see the friendly journalist once met apparently by chance at a minor historic occasion (American) who was supposed to be dangerous to him, nor did he expect to see him down there, for once had been enough, one day in passing; but he saw now a small bald spot on the head of a passing bicyclist and the head clamp bridging those ear muffs which could be tuned in also to the climactic voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera where everything came unstuck at the end if you knew the story, and he wound up not mentioning that his own girl-researcher at the foundation had seen his wife entering an apartment building where two friends of hers lived, and he looked at his wife whose children on their own feet thousands of miles away were his, too, and—the late light drew faint curves beautiful between them and, because it was an old favorite no doubt, he could for one phrase hear in Bellini’s music "False-Hearted Lover," and felt room-wide trees falling toward him from thousands of miles south, felt boxcars disappearing over magnetic mountains operated by scale-efficient interhemispheric cartels otherwise known as American Involvement—"A.I."!—and lived again one of his rare social appearances nowadays with her (not that she, poor thing, because of their low-profile situation, had—or anyway took—many opportunities like the one in question) where he could feel even more incognito than at home hearing and overhearing fellow New Yorkers telling all the good news about themselves (so he would at the time have welcomed another encounter with the man supposed to be dangerous to his security, to his low-profile existence high among the river winds of the Upper West Side of Manhattan island, dangerous to his wife). And she, he recalled, had turned away from that youngish man Marpé who was not political in the least but was a free-lance diver—who looked like a lewd fish.