Women and Men (59 page)

Well!

One might have answered,’ ‘They are a convenient method of representing the difference between income
property
and income from
work."
But one found oneself thinking that though of course Rail could not know that according to one’s mother Susan one is "too fucking smart," somehow Rail knew one’s name—wow!—and thinking that by some new math to divide C plus I plus G by C plus I plus A might yield G over A, one actually said, "I think these curves are a way to get from one point to another point and back again," to mild titters male
and
female, while then one shot from life to Eco and back as between Adam Smith the father of the Invisible Hand and Adam Smith who retired to take care of his mother knowing as well as the capitalists he left to their own devices that to fleece the future of its true unknowns the employers clipped the present to make it come true. But, following the normal bell-shaped curve of error, one’s concentration turned so
repente
through the horseshoe buckle edged by plump puffs of stress that one reached Lorenz through an unprecedented equals sign between the elastic modulus for Volume-Receiving-Stress and the form of Rail’s Velocity of Circulation. But Lorenz!—the name—it rang a silent bell in oneself. And whatever Rail said now of pure economics in this class this time or next time or several-times-this-class, or whatever he said of the apparently neutral theory that reducing income inequality won’t increase saving among poor people—one could not help contracting (if not shrinking) toward one’s home or homes where, being their product, one then felt the talk of one’s parents touch one so that like a snail’s raw lip one sucked back out of sight, or like a turtle, spider, or person of one’s acquaintance retracted liable limbs and contracted in or out of the harsh light that was invisible to parents debating the marriage contract that one sensed must be so late—"God, Sue, next thing we’ll be on a regular budget"—that when one’s female parent said a year or more ago, "Every
other
week, condoms," one must question what they would be for—the condoms. For even if, as Mom said, "we spend the same whether we budget or not," Susan and Marv who once were supposed to have been one seemed now two, as if a template had got warped between the first and second print —do you see, Amy? Yet these two people, Susan and Marv, one’s parents, were so contracted into one oneself they seemed to be oneself until, by a heretofore unheard-of trick of substitution
without
trade-off, one economized on action, put Amy in a class by herself where no longer employed by a foundation on research into right-brain projection for the handicapped she spent her days finely, subtly, warmly outlining one’s name in the palm of her hand like a model of something in the invisible and intimate void separating one from her only for the duration of the entertainment, which turned heartfelt stress into such storyteller’s speed, sweep, and volume that all one spent one saved, and a beautiful hand, a girl’s strong hand, a father’s empty hand to grip at a distance, a mother’s rule of thumb were one that put together such amazing tales by wielding a modulus, an elastic modulus of common ground between the change that stress gives a body’s volume and the velocity of circulating money which Rail could make circulate—blood money—circulate through all the curving continents of a globe that is believed but not seen except by the unseeing totals of that blood which one has paid and might again to unclench one’s parents from what’s bigger than the both of them, the ruling junta of their Open Marriage.

"Larry ought to get laid"—the word issues from the junta like a bulletin, like the ring of a bell telephone, like a parent, like a digital stat. A breach of their own open
laissez-faire,
for justice sake! But who said it? The
junta en conjunto?
Or one’s own congruence waiting elsewhere like an Unknown Soldier? Or a Buenos Aires cab’s exhaust pipe? an exhaust pipe which James Mayn was once invited to screw, having asked a man on the street where he could
coger
(catch) a cab when Argentine
coger
means something else also. Or did those words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the right or creative side of Amy’s beautiful mind dropped out of college and learning her living in the air force of the employed? Or did the words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the grin and nod on the far side of the eighteenth green of an IBM golf course—not exactly one’s favorite game—after one has said, "No,
you
go ahead, Dad," who might smile at home after the aforementioned words "Larry ought to get laid" and almost but not quite bring himself to say, "Leave him alone—he’s not indifferent to sex." Or (yes?) did the words "Larry ought to get laid" originate somewhere in the anger (yes?) jumping from an unexpected level of what proves to be the next room in spring twilight in what used to be one’s only home when one (one then tends to forget what it was that one) said, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?"—a question, a query, a fair question (yes?), a fairly clear question, not a queer query, not a demand, but oh an error, a dumb error that multiplies the more one thinks, for she wants us to let her be, for at the moment that one asks, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?" she is standing on her head doing the sunset naked and looking just as young as some of her seems more upside down than the rest of her, for "Look, Larry" she has had (O.K., O.K.) and out of a ("Larry, you’re living in a—") vacuum she has been addressed by her son as not-Susan, an address she has changed in her head and will soon change in fact so the future can come true, though for these uneconomical months she’s living at the old address, and Dad’s the one in Manhattan though as he has said (when a third party asks), "I come and go and so does Sue"—which is what in this future night at a Manhattan roll-top desk open to
laissez-faire
one hears her doing, coming and going, speaking on the phone to the Unknown Date whom Dad has answered the phone call from though one oneself, twisting or rising or shaking free of this domestic freakdom (yet not free), still hears with mixed feeling above the fractions and equalities of Rail’s extra-credit problem, in which hunting for the investment multiplier that makes a drop in the nation’s bucket expand like liquid oxygen in the vacuum of space one kept backsliding down the more than forty-five-degree slope of the Marginal Propensity to Consume because one could not get hold of why Rail called MPC and Marginal Propensity to Save "mirror twins" when they were so unlike each other, the female voice of Amy now doubtless home from the foundation asking whatever she likes to ask—anything, Amy, anything, my constant heart,
mi corazon,
my hot Hispanic hand—the name and address of the man (Mayn) you saw me with who—genius that Mayn is beyond that inkling one has that he has been here before and has seen it all happen that’s now happening to one— has
two
extra tickets for the game, not just one extra, and so Mayn will be going with one and
Amy.

Or ask what a modulus is, Amy—a constant, expressing like a steady fraction of itself how much a certain property is possessed of something, or a constant factor—a multiplier! for the conversion of units from one system to another (yes?). Or Amy ask to be made to laugh because the last time Amy came—the last time
you
came, Amy—one felt in the hand a mixed feeling, a tender chill and in the gray-green eyes something put in place of something else, and she wished to know how well one knew Jim Mayn, politely anxious, not just trouble-at-work but, in the line between what showed and what didn’t, a void or nerve (of fear?) which one could not figure, just as, to be frank with oneself, one hesitated to broach the question of sex.

And so between the propensity to save what has happened to one yet to spend it, one found oneself so close to one’s blonde twenty-three-year-old potential girlfriend far from the harsh junta’s bulletin of progress toward independence, found oneself telling her a tale of the long day—
como le va el dia?
how goes it?—dreaming for Amy’s entertainment that one memorable long day—when the new network of the mixed market mechanism seemed to go haywire or beyond itself joining what, among random appointed curves, had not been seen to be connected. For the Chief himself on some royal and ancient green with just the shadow of satisfaction in his frown that somewhere his advisers are handling the economy as a strict father balances his family budget—purses his lips and bends over his makable putt. He has, he thinks, stepped secretly inside his own production-possibility frontier to let the world slide on without him while he takes a bit of recreation. But he does not know what lies baleful between the putter’s ridged-steel face, the dimpled ball, and the cup no Secret Service could have thought to check out beforehand.

And so the Chief starts the ball rolling along a curve he has foreseen for the ball should break left; yet some presence is missing, he must ask his advisers, some gravity—for long before he can send the ball on its way, a "big board" (they nostalgically call it—a big board down Wall Street way) has so previewed this event through sequences that can yield it that the Chief
and
this event have been pre-established as actual. Now, this "big board" (which actually has almost nothing in common with the old Stock Exchange) is neither one board nor
a
board. Instead it is a new global network constantly creating itself in numbers, template curves, possible consequences, and desirable equilibriums, as the locus of all Congruences filling the mixed-market mechanism. That one-time mystery which Smith had said to leave alone and Keynes had said to intervene in now by its mutual Mind constantly projects its own destined Congruence which at each "big board" center is all plugged in but actually more conceptual to the touch; do you see, Amy? Each misnamed "big board," then, is not at all two-dimensional except in samples momentarily abstracted for experiment—say, the effect of womanpower relocation-and-job-training plans on the stubborn Phillips curve that ties decreasing unemployment to wage hikes—not two-d but a system that predicts and that is known by those who know it best as a field of all possible curves whose constant changes occupy like a position that roughly resembles a headless, torso-less human form, armed and legged, a four-d field of intersections always but secretly mindful both of the crossings of such old slopes as the Demand and Supply, and the absolute refusal to cross one or another of the curves (or schedules) that compose an Indifference Map—

an Indifference Curve showing one’s inability to choose between, say, dinner with one’s mother at a feminist restaurant and six holes of golf with one’s father, or two such meals and eighteen holes, and so on; or, along another Indifference Curve, one’s inability to choose between one pro basketball game at the Garden and the promise of one phone call from Amy, or two games and an actual call, or four games and a call in which one consistently interests Amy even in the name and address of someone else, an older man, a journalist whose relative substitution value may be greater because since he may travel to any point on the globe at an hour’s notice he tends to be scarcer than oneself. On this future day, then, the "big board" constantly reconstituting itself all over the globe, simultaneously reaching every direction with mutations potentially infinite yet hugging the Earth’s globe of flat horizons, outdoes itself, transactivates its parts to plot a collaborative global act by which both Gravity and Government are divided by both Agency and Anarchy.

One’s father peers through the wall of the next room and through the back or crack of one’s head trying to shine the hint that one take a two-hour break—an economic pause—from all this homeboundwork to "take in" (one predicts he will say) "a flick." He cannot envision much less see the dark-eyed blonde who hears only one, not him.

Now normally these electronic models plugged in to one another across the nuclear family of nations rule the mixed markets by foreseeing the multiple effects upon, say, Velocity of Money or upon the Global Consumption curves, of any event such as a drop if not a plunge in steel or water production or a local change of Mind. Amy, where is your heart, your hand?—this system devised by forethought beside itself, which controls, say, the arms while seeming to leave free the hands and digits, has so impressed the multinational oligopolists with themselves that they think to transcend those wise Quakers who are said to have gone to the New World to do good and ended up doing well, and they have ceded to the new system a strange measure of what would otherwise have been the Business-as-Usual Profit, fifty-five percent on a new transcontinental Third-World Sewer, one hundred percent on turning surplus soy into air, five hundred on a compact laundropod for nuclear waste. All such foregone! foregone! Forget the Phillips curve—the period’s competitive but transcapitalist. This global grapevine and decision system forestalls the old demand-pull inflation in which a certain curve goes too far and spending exceeds what the economy can come up with; and at the same time the parallel concept is available in the economatriculating templates of the system’s constant Future—namely, it forestalls any ghastly increase of Money, hence of MV in the exchange equation Money times Velocity of Circulation equals Average Price Level times real GNP—for as Rail says to a class suddenly still but for the mixed whisper of pencils and ballpoints chasing him along blue notebook lines, in
this
type of old-fashioned inflation too much money chases too few goods.