Women and Men (34 page)

And while she’s for a second strung between overlapping views not to be confused with a whole history assembled and announced overnight in her heart at the whorled circuits of instinct interrogation, Genesis, Egypt, the brides of Christ whose soul was also in the fundamental American reincarnation reservoir—and she wasn’t sure if she wanted even a jigger of that, the bare mask of eyes in the all but covered face of woman—really beautiful woman—of girl grandmothers like her own who cared deeply for the poverty farmers and out-of-work marchers on Washington in ‘94 who’re men while still the women were equal to anything if not some Wide Load Grace feels in her shifting flesh reputed headed continentally our way, a pair of rooms (this and a next prob’ly not our style), maybe a mountain of stuff doubtless in a fair cubic shape not to wonder at because the girl grandmothers haven’t time though equal to their time itself but with all those kids, the creak of covered wagons instead of bed and prayer, their way west, their way east, into a kitchen that will collapse into history (let alone his-and-her history, indeed
leave
alone oh "What a view!" he’d often said, with a sky, an earth, a valley, a morning mountain, a car, a held hand what
else
canst give me: "Incredible," she agreed and wanted a story, then, anything so long as it’s a story)—she’s in a near future which she foresaw ten woman-and-man minutes from the kitchen, the man in the white robe now packing like an assembly line alternately two suitcases laid back neatly paneled on the undone bed, seeing the man put first in one case shirts in their soft-glass bags from the laundry, then in the other case two cashmere sweaters, pair of corduroys, an ex’s dozen sock balls; then seeing the man vomit into the first case, all this all at once for she sees all this from the kitchen stove ten minutes away thinking will he vomit into the second case too (not to be confused with the special hang-up case for suits that she doesn’t see yet) and when, entering the, yes, cluttered bedroom then in the future that she sees while still heart-throbbing, in the kitchen, she sees his white-robed back, bending away from her over the bad cough before again vomiting, she knows anxiously it was nothing he ate this morning or he "got" from her—
she’s
not the mother of his stomach—because he won’t eat a thing here in the kitchen as the interaction opens with Grace answering Lou before she turns, with words that she doesn’t feel she’s reduced to—and words that this time he won’t say (like, "Oh, skip it"): because although he didn’t know he knew that he too wanted out (and Grace by successfully
not
saying all that "needed saying" the fateful morning in the kitchen but creating a package statement delivered at once and yet again, their four bare calves insidiously communicating, will sometimes in future days go sit beside the phone because, with a pang as long as the space-time she’s gained from him by not saying all she might have,
knows
that he knew)—he too wanted out, for (!) she was now at last
not
all things to him and hey partly because she never was!—he couldn’t this time of all the times till now let near-silence speak as in the sound of the wide steel sink softly receiving the load of one egg; and he had his own hungover spunk to say, "What was
that
for? Why’d you do
that?"

But he’s not alone in saying it, as don’t we many testify all here at this point? Future workshop women said it of themselves and of their spouses. And were urged to speak this language by Grace as she became.

The South American expatriate diva’s New York physician said it too, we already remember, arriving for a brunch he’d dreamed of after being demoted to it backstage the night before. He’s said it now on the threshold of her faintly disturbed living room, said it meaning last night’s backstage dismissal, seeing last night’s silver roses long dry of that drop of Persian rose-attar secreted by the silver rose of Act Two, for they’re strewn now all over the place, one by one along the blue and brown Andean rugs and as far as a corner of a kitchen counter dark and dim through a distant doorway, then back across the diva’s silver velvet divan (where once the doctor had been invited to bed down) which he sees over her shoulder to her left; then across to the grand piano’s music stand, where another silver, rose-bloom bends toward him as he sees it over her other shoulder to his right, where he stands on the threshold with a white paper bag—"Here"—that she with her other hand upon the sleeve of his camel’s-hair blazer takes from him oil-damped, so we see through almost to the brioches fresh from that miraculous bakery, and his eye zeroes in on one silver rose its stem cut short at the neck of the pale dressing gown that covers, he knows, three Chilean freckles.

"What was
that
for?" she echoes softly, noting his new jacket as if her own deep life could take its wool back to the source . . . "why for my father, for my family," she goes on, "for my country, for my sex," she laughs like there isn’t quite room for laughter, for she’s referring to the South American officer she went out with—Judith, he thinks, Judith, is she Judith?—and she adds, "For professional reasons—public relations"—and, irritated—"danger, curiosity; danger, comfort, fun," ignoring what her doctor-friend took as a snub last night backstage when she went off with the other man (as a stagehand-poet passed with a black-edged prop, a newspaper, only to return to interrogate the doctor as an afterthought), and she’s now referring, in all these unstable nothings—"my father took me to see a blast furnace once: where they make the copper?"—(then turning away with the bag of brioches in her hands) to what he with all his knowledge of her insides cannot know.

This is that the (as he senses infamously gifted) officer in mufti with a Romance name, introduced to him (a panting physician with a cone of silver roses) backstage last night by the diva may well have been asked by
her
(the doctor can guess) if the council will please ignore her frail father thousands of miles away along a South American coast, let him speak his mind louder and yet louder the older he gets (the doctor can guess this) but not that the officer asked the
diva
(at dawn in their walled duplex during some interval of (murmured) confidence or when she returned like a sleeping queen, a tranced priestess, from the kitchen her fine unstockinged flesh set off by the tumbler of imported seltzer she bore for them both)
where
in the world had he her night’s lover seen (did she have any idea?) the tall bald man seriously applauding near him in the orchestra and the fair-haired woman with the bald man
"risueno"
(smiling) but not clapping, not clapping, smiling but not clapping (was it at the embassy, a concert, a reception?).

Yet what the diva’s doctor does know—recalling the gap in which he fell as toward some unwanted horizon only to hear himself asked by a hungry-looking stagehand if the right brain works the same in a left-handed person —following her now beyond the piano past the stereo cabinet featuring on its top the record jacket of the Schwartzkopf eve-of-the-war
Rosenkavalier
(those wonderful Nazi singers, her father said with an empty laugh giving it to his daughter one Christmas hearing children caroling outside in the summer air), the libretto booklet containing a bald man with a flowered bow-tie, the composer, big ears, Strauss himself a smile over his face)—what the diva’s doctor does know, hearing her say she’ll put off the atabrine (if he remembered to bring it) she’s grown overnight so fond again of the food she was raised on that she abhors the very thought of that hunger diet she’ll be back on if she gets rid of this angelic worm: not to mention that she is going out for dinner tonight. But what the doctor, her doctor, does know (following her across a blue and brown Andean rug) is that the canal he dreamed last night in anger (getting a cold) or this morning before or
upon
waking, the canal with him in it, would recede so long as he must seek its end: for he was it, and he would like to tell her. And this canal boasted a queer force keeping just open the planned original hairline fracture of its bed. And along its length he is taking in, like a tapeworm, menus of nutriment but keeping his identity secret from all but his partner with whom he hangs out sinkerless lines with such still worms for hooks they’re then just baitless hooks bare as a sleeping fisherman’s but this partner (who?) alone knows his identity in the umber dawn of a nightmare spread with cashew
beurre
and local anchovies, turns on him, and it’s a waist narrowing to a silver rose below, yet it’s a squint— the diva and the Indian guide ogling the friendly doctor as if he is prescribed tapeworm so that, like the messenger who is the message, prescriber turns prescription, the tapeworm eats at length unmindful of the noise of waters, one thousand Minnesota lakes, since Minnesota’s only a map now, and this doctor-dreamer’s a live-in tapeworm fixed in a dear friend’s system free of Manhattan’s sea and of a cough crashing around him and taking in menus of nutriment and in return watering the dry earth, taking in from head to tail desert pike swimming terribly ahead; banks of rice goldenly upholding persimmon-freckled muscles stewed pear-soft, their skin basted to an Ojibway gloss; and a la carte a great vegetable deformed by peasant gourdists who give it two, three waists, just as divinity blows us hot and cold in alternate gravities to lopside our stomachs, coil our gut, thicken the neural tube of cousin fish a thousand sea-bottoms removed from our own tube-to-come that fattened all along its length, grew and grew until it grew its own bone around its growth to hold it, so we had nowhere to grow but where this mercurial but cramping spinal column left off at the top and our will’s way blew and swelled, doubling widthwise laying about itself right and left to take the sheathless end of the neural tube gourdward treble-bulbed to light the world to who knows what refracted recipes for mind and face, here craniums balloon at anchor, there chins retire before such seasonings of evolution that no double-sexed tapeworm shoveling it in, shoveling it out, evacuating week upon week can know the whole of it, nor Manhattan medicine man tracking a loved patient across her national rugs dream that on the noise of that nightmare he’d cruelly think maybe his diva is to find out that her father in Chile (having long since been moved from hacienda to apartment) has been or is to be tortured for speaking out or for the Masonic secrets of
logia,
famed liberation lodge—tortured, pray, how? melted down? first things first—deafened by the telephone treatment, juiced by the testicle generator, paddled on his formerly long-john-sheathed puckered behind with the olde wooden thing with the little holes, and, as if
that
were not already weird, is to be stood barefoot on open sardine tins holding a weight greater even than the weight of the world (which is called in the political branch of Chilean S. and M. torture circles "the Statue of Liberty") till either he drops or he succeeds in bleeding two exact half-tins-full of his own fish-scented blood pudding—then maybe the diva (read
daughter)
will so condemn her night’s companion this instrument of a murderous regime that she breaks her date with the mufti’d officer who plans to take her to a restaurant serving national food if the officer is not already here, hidden, muffled, coughing, snoring in some unit of this majestic flat established in what was farmland in Washington Irving’s day. But that coughing: who hears it? can we tell? is it some patience developing? It’s not the doctor, and he for one is alone here with the diva, who has tossed over her shoulder, "You’re taking yourself a bit seriously, darling," which he knows is right but only for
him
to really understand.

And for the second before she crosses into the duplex kitchen, flicking a wall switch like a priestess signaling angels, he all but voids this cruel plan for her father he’s imagined. For he who is much more than her doctor has followed his friend with his nose as well; and as the trail sandwiches now the toasty dough of brioche in the scented air she bears, he skirts his dream and finds the end of it: that other breakfast of his Boston childhood, his Boston adolescence; his Cambridge studies, when he crossed the Charles River for weekends home, his "Hiawatha studies" his no-nonsense mother cursed his passion for archaeology—he now a distinguished tapeworm, distinguished means to the mere end of his diva’s weight reduction, being dreamed out of another’s systemic din, double-ended means not now useful to its slim host, oh right then a gypsy fortune teller out of a book he never actually read told him, "Fair lady cast a spell on thee—Fair lady’s hand shall set thee free."

But seeing the kitchen light and the glass trapdoor in the duplex ceiling and the swirling skirt of the lady’s lone garment, he finds in the pocket of his new soft cashmere blazer the medicine he mans and with it a thought still dumber than his "What was
that
for?" a minute ago—he’ll slip it to her this atabrine evacuator in her juice, there’s a bug going round, delayed dysentery from our last international adventure kept alive in the guts of the veteran unemployed, in unemployment itself in the widening abstract.

Slip it to her in her juice? That’s how
men
make their dreams come true! says a voice preferably female
and
male. You might slip her a visitor at least! Because, that’s atabrine for God’s sake! But of course the physician’s not that dumb, with
his
income. He of course was a dream tapeworm being got rid of by her, since whoever it was who provided the atabrine, she’s the one who took it, if we look ahead. But now, with appetite stirred up, she changed her mind which means that even if one reason was to eat a poignantly garnished national dinner with her new South American mufti (former compatriot only in the narrow sense that her passport is now Swiss), the other reason must be to avoid detaching from her old intimate the doctor (so he thinks); but what’s a tapeworm after all, it’s what Jim Mayn’s grandmother Margaret said he had, passing through her kitchen appropriating a fresh cruller on his way to the chill New Jersey winesap apples in a bushel basket on the back porch only to halt at the threshold of the porch and backpedal, like thinking, like football practice, to the table where the large glass jar of crullers is as full before and after he hooked another toasty twisted cruller as it was a moment ago, when, on the way through from the dining room, he lifted the glass top by its knob and took his first as if he never once stopped moving toward the back-porch door, but this second cruller that he backed up for—"Jimmy, you must have a tapeworm"—he examined for a pure instant to see which soft, sugar-sanded end to bite—’Tor a boy with a sore throat . . ."—only to turn to the tall lady at the deep white sink with her back to him, and put a hand on her shoulder and whistle like a bird into her prehistoric ear half covered by her hair she’s combed brightly back tight, near wispless, into a bun, the ear that has a nose for a kid’s occasional cigarette.