Women and Men (66 page)

—that’s the name, that’s it! exclaims the interrogator in torture country looking up from the bare ankles next to the floor-anchored chair legs, to the bloodshot eyes and ringing ears swaying above the bound arms and wrists they have grown out of, that’s the name! exclaims the interrogator, forgetting that his job is that of questioner tapped by those above who have the real responsibility for, say, adjusting import duties and exporting good old-fashioned surveillance, while this anonymous interrogator who represents a system the mufti admiral is higher up in has the job of taxing the bloodshot subject’s trick of ambiguous speech: for example, that the East Far Eastern Princess, when the Navajo Prince one day told her his cosmos, knew then (we quote) that that was what she had come to understand—

—Wham! comes the sneak hand on the subject’s soul which is everywhere and nowhere, and the bruises don’t show unless we peel off a layer of soul fat or fat-oriented
Fleisch,
or, to the music (if you call that music real noise) dimly heard in the next room where a child does its Rotation homework (so it stays done!), the torturer’s bruise-cruise leaves so little evidence that all we have to go on—

—Wham! Kthunk but we have to go on
because
—

—all we have to go on is the subject’s tic-like tendency to stammer forth nought
but
D.T.’s whose ambiguity now seems to welcome more and more of punishment’s teaching—

—Wham! we did it that time to ourself, we stick indiscriminately to the same rules as we do others, here to have our delirium tremens and in same breath render from Romance language "double tenders." But if we’re doing it to ourself does that mean we have within us that delegated interrogator who takes responsibility for taxing our after all human not angel trick of saying two things at once but only in order to get out of the subject information he the interrogator and his system are, well, already in possession of?—

—as Jim Mayn (journalist known to have met the exile economist) knew was one odd evolution, that is the future capacity to communicate things
outward
through the ear as, in the century in question and other surrounding centuries, we spoke through our eyes even more than down our noses. Evolution? Or mutilation?

Yet to the demufti’d officer, his eyes so nearly touching the length of the thigh his ear’s against that he’s apt to be not seeing what he’s hearing, which on these strong currents is pretty much the music of the hemispheres he has often applauded without really telling his left hand what his right was up to. That is, it isn’t the tapeworm’s track he is able to hear or, if he could, to guess that its
track
in all its now two-way flow is all that’s left of the tapeworm, as the diva last week flushed it out, to the nostalgic dismay of her fond physician, at the risk of putting on some more poundage at a Hispanic restaurant the same evening where she and her mufti lover sat near a small, once-dusty correspondent-woman who by some near rule of highly metabolized convergence was half-oblivious of them.

This woman Lincoln was chewing the mussels, shrimps, squid, and other fruits of the sea in a rich, peppery and suspiciously inexpensive
mariscada
that upstaged the sweet salt of her cactus appetizer, while she pictured deserts of New Mexico.

Is this true—what’s just been said? We promise so. For she had gone a long way in her own right, right into now a veritable granary of shared information that she was finding in a women’s Body-Self Workshop she had attended out of (for her) the strangest despairs. These she had woken up to one morning long ago. Or might we mean "recently"?—and save the "long ago" for her sense of time passed since her Asian assignments and her sense of South Vietnam lost ploughshared into what (unlike a native American desert) you couldn’t at last even give away—a war lost. Still, the records of her dusty work remained, even to voice tapes of children unwrapping candy bars and speaking English, and of a monk burning while she herself spoke into a tiny, bad-tasting mike as softly as a golf broadcaster talking through the tube to her father. She now found that the women of the workshop sitting naked on a great expanse of brown carpet told their despairs in the language of hers, her despairs. As if she had never been away across the world, so had she been performing actions in her sleep, the way she had heard a monk say? (If you want to cross over the world, whatever that meant, perform actions as if you were asleep.) Yet now it had happened without her willing it: never been away across the world but on a parallel track—
very
parallel, if she could round it off like that, because the other track was her job which she had always been good at. Still, sitting among those women on a New York carpet, no problem: she had always liked this imperfect female body, quite apart from quite good orgasm that she seldom let herself miss wherever she was, though didn’t bring it exactly
with
her, it had to be white men, some were co-workers, correspondents like her. She always lived in this painless cramp of knowing she of
course
would have a child but aware that her ability not to have one was fairly great; and now she was talking about it amid such shared facts of women who needed a second car and didn’t always have one, and women who even if the kids left the silver in the sink felt that added time spent evened out the lonely difference between how long dinner and how long eating it—which got multiplied and at once weirdly divided by difference between time spent by husband earning money not withheld and his eager indifference to how fast the expensive food they ate at night disappeared—and so Lincoln could see also how lucky she had been to have her work. But also, so what.

Which, like her contemplation of those New Mexico deserts that she’d never checked out in person, went a long way and beyond the truth that that was what she was thinking about while sopping her sharp-crusted bread in the juice of the garlic and peppery red-sauce of her sea stew in this small, cheap place a pass-along recommendation by the woman Clara in her workshop who had ultimately though pleasantly shown little interest in seeing her socially after the workshop ended.

The correspondent-woman could take rejection (T.R.) she thought. In fact it seemed to yield a historical clarity as, among necks and shoulders that seemed to belong to foreign bodies that had nothing in common with the cellulite-dimpled inner thighs of the same person (as if a given woman’s body gazed two ways at the same time), she recalled the very woman who’d told her about this Hispanic eatery who in the naked rap sessions said little about her own life, speaking later while they were getting dressed of the Vietnamese philosopher from another century who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers, and she spoke with such rehearsed calm that the very wind in the grasses of the country’s narrow midland spine and the once future wastelands in the upper-west sector of the Mekong-Bassac Delta that that woman had never seen but her listener had came out as visibly as her account of the Hoa Hao sect the correspondent-woman herself knew all about but couldn’t talk like that about: except that if she had it right the Hoa Hao’s Buddhism with its practical, no-frills privacy and its sort of you know eclectic turning toward educating the little people that high rents were not the inevitable condition of what she nonetheless understood to be an unavoidably conditional existence, and its eclectic (she threw the word around like others did "additive") turning toward some old village solidarity connecting the large sky of timeless time and the constant soil—all this, without the other movement’s, the Cao Dai’s, Masonic eye of God enlisting as amnesties or saints everyone from Moses to Joan of Arc and for all she knew if they had looked far enough west (or was it east from there?) Sequoya himself, all this now (though she didn’t mind eating alone, consuming her food alone) strangely kept if not her eyes which were on the vivid couple at the nearby table (the man never smiling yet ever adoringly humorous—how did he do that?—the woman with her auburn hair piled all over the place in marvelous, hurried flair, ringing that bell again in the normally infallible memory of the correspondent-woman), certainly her
mind’s
eye upon the deserts of New Mexico, but more than those places (because she’s never quite, in all her jaunts, been there, though she’s told Clara, last name unknown, who recommended this restaurant, to visit those same high deserts), her mind is in the word
Navahu
(hear the music but she’s no poet she prefers the noise of its original meaning)
great planted fields,
dreamt by the all but deserted dryness "reserved," as the
man
who’s in her mind more than
Navahu,
said, for the Indians alone converging upon this of all reservations so vast we in advance of the correspondent-woman, who’s just been stared at by the diva, can’t suddenly tell if maybe it’s the reservation that’s converged upon the nomad Navajo (read
Navahu,
"great planted fields" ye gods of baby cacti grown for shipment to eastern restaurants—but wait, not in
New
Mexico), so she, spooning up her juice
mariscada
because she’s almost out of bread and inadvertently blindly watching the dark very glam woman who’s just been asked by her escort (along whose forearm as if to erase its dark gray flannel sleeve she’s just run her hand) who it was that recommended this place so the woman catching her eye stares back as if the
correspondent-woman
is waiting for her answer, when really her thoughts have converged upon the letter a nice man—he must be—named Mayn sent from the West to—and read from to the correspondent-woman by—his daughter Flick on a cold eve in Washington, only read
from,
as if the daughter Flick was herself an obstacle to his current of meaning, which was perhaps that he missed her while he was writing to tell her he’d been to the Rock that Flick, from her own travels with her boyfriend had forgotten to tell him of, his work had taken him to a plant nearby and anyway you couldn’t miss that Rock (unless you wanted to), that Rock the Indians called a ship, though he was not really to his daughter in
his words
but—aloud to the other woman, in the
daughter’s
ironic
voice
—awfully hard-boiled, Daddy is, you know, but if you know him he’s a big faker: he was not a landscape man.

He was not really a landscape man.

The correspondent-woman heard the daughter read it: he was not a landscape man, never set out to be, he went on, but he’d stopped before this fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot old Tooth waiting for the sky and had felt just how long he’d been going—like the highly metabolized correspondent-woman herself, who reached the thing in that letter she (excuse the crass practicality) could
use
but in some other track went on beyond it which was as bad as being on really a separate track, so much slower that she also had
not
reached the thing in question; and, moving more and more slowly toward what anyway she was also beyond, she heard the daughter Flick’s three or four passages piling obstacles sought out of all our life and obstacles also necessary to the thing she thought she had heard Flick read at the very outset so that the subsequent stuff (which told you more than a little about this divorced Jim Mayn, the father) tried to shed a load of daylight like a cover covering up and half-forgetting that first dream thing, whatever it was—

—I know what’s going on, a child supposed to be negotiating its homework in an adjacent room says distinctly—

—he would, he’d said, like nothing to witness any more, that’s what he felt standing a couple three miles off taking in the mountain-like Rock but m^m-made
ship,
Ship Rock, whose history he’d heard bits of from an economist (Anglo), a filling-station attendant (Indian), a nice ash blonde (environmentalist), Flick’s dad gave its specifications, on balance he’d about decided to give it back to the Indians but was it too late? and probably some common ground could be reached.

The daughter, the young woman, the girl Flick, read from the letter very well but tilting her head like at any moment she’ll put it aside, sail it onto her desk, float it floorward, but read on as if amused: "Well, Daddy’s awfully hard-boiled, you know, not at all religious, my
God,
‘geologists call it,’ " she read, ‘"a plug, a neck—a plug neck—of"’ (the letter sort of rambled on) hardened lava without benefit of volcano any more while some Indians talk about monsters from inside Mother Earth and see those four-five-mile tentacles of connected rocks as the congealed blood of Hero-Twins who put the monsters in their place; and from strip mines and the Four Corners Power Plant the Rock is a touring hallucination especially after the clowns I had a few with last night, and oh yes the Rock’s a ship and I tripped-out on it for a few minutes figuring how the geologists are right and the Indians are too, and I’m right, it’s not a ship at all if you look at it but it got me here, and there’s a secret here that your great-grandmother Margaret whom you never knew got hold of when she was out here in the nineties and a secret I think I had but I left it somewhere, dear Flick, and, all kidding aside (smile), it’s that the gods are or were here and that they are a little helpless too, the more the merrier, but it’s about time (see how I write through the ring of the cold beer can on the motel stationery) about time I went back and caught up with them, I have further to go because of where I’m coming from. (Words to that effect.)

"Well, Daddy’s gentle enough, but
really
—I mean he’s not at all religious."

"It’s getting to him," the correspondent-woman Lincoln had said; "sometimes it does at that age."

"I don’t know," said the daughter, "I think he doesn’t know why he got divorced from my mother."

"No, that’s you," said Lincoln.

"Oh is
that
all," Flick had said, but the correspondent-woman, who had wondered if Flick’s father was available, had read the mind of the letter and held it to her mind’s eye as, now, days and nights later, the glamorous couple got up from the table across from Lincoln, arose grandly, and from one look into each other’s eyes turned as one to look at the irrelevant correspondent-woman, whose lips puckered with the remembered words "The Future," which was how the letter from Jim Mayn, transient in Farmington, New Mexico, to his daughter Flick in Washington, D.C., was headed, which meant maybe the strip mining and the process of turning coal into natural gas to be piped to California and which meant the Four Corners plant, O.K.