Women and Men (68 page)

Where was she? Where had metabolism left her? Beamed to this instant of her life, lowering her plate she found herself neither with the waiter, who’d seemed to be bearing down on her, nor
not
with him, for he had detoured to the table of five in the far corner and, except for a darting glance out of the corner of his eye, no one seemed to have seen her "getting it on" with her plate as Grace said to "get it on" with your fingers eating your salad greens, as in conversation, as in work (as in "-aholic") for Grace taught that work was addiction like past, like romance, like sugar, like love.

As down the wormhole’s wind-tunnel evolving we recede from correspondent-woman, too, as she has glimpsed relations looking at her the way life holds you if you let it care, though looking back at her at the last second we couldn’t help it between bodies, we just could not. And we see her looking right at us but she doesn’t know us from Mayn, whom she is really looking at but doesn’t know it’s him there in the restaurant with the party of five others, and we who can’t help being angels, strive though we do these days toward human, had best leave her for this tunnel opening not inward tubewise like being de-born or digested but opening out from an endless circumference of where we’ve been. We "can’t" say, because, looking back at her who helped us get where we are, we relations touch an independence there as if although we have seen her off going hopefully on terms of Mayn, why what group of angels striving to evolve toward human can surely know what that "gal" (as her mother in St. Louis called her own oldest woman friend) is thinking while waiting for the waiter to bring the check? newly wondering where she’s coming from; yet breathes, breathes, and calmly like the diva who saw Jim Mayn in the flesh in an orchestra seat at
Norma
but knew him no more than she knew his name or than she knew here the softly sinister, fluffy-haired tiny woman wearing, we already remember, one simple unsewn length of saffron (acetate), her sleeveless arms free to beckon the waiter, who in the course of appetizer and entree has looked at the cloth often to dema-terialize it but could not know that her name she has lately come to accept and even (instead of the mere
initial
L) use in a by-line is her first, or Christian, name provided her by her father who scarcely knew what he wanted for a daughter of his loins but in the void of this he had her christened Lincoln, hoping, we’re now in a position to say, that she would never wed, but intrigued by the prospect of her unfettered and professional independence so much that Dad’s void or concept became that of his daughter. She, though, went so far beyond him as to aid a Hindu lover in graduate school, her first on all scores, grow quickly out of what she didn’t know till later was called "prematurity." And now, to get beyond the three stars on the framed, enlarged restaurant review out front in the window beside the menu, in a joint where the refried beans are good at gluing the expansible corridors of our r’evolutionary intestine, she has got her own void in hand. And not a hell of a lot to do for the next few minutes, the no-man’s gap where she ensures herself, and the dear link she has divined between her and the man on whom she meditates even to the extent of asking the waiter not for the check which he’s about to give her anyhow but for a third Mexican coffee: thinking upon this man Jim Mayn she imagines she has never seen except in essence and now so close to her (can’t explain) so close she liplessly mouths syllables like digestive grace so they can seem kinda beautiful:
special, desert, creativity, reincarnation, relativity.
And the coffee comes—a new cup which before it lands is but a cup whose liquid weight a waiter mimes, bearing it ever toward us, an obstacle that contains openly our belief, and she knows in the back of her mouth and in a chill down one thigh that she doesn’t want it after all, it’s the obstacle she couldn’t help asking for but at least now she knows she don’t want it: and she opens her mouth, her whole face, to ask for the check, but the waiter makes it out then-and-there with a wrinkled forehead (though that’s all she can see), we don’t know any more than he and should not have looked back but she made us.

But no one can make you do anything, not even relate. But these words we thought had come from us came from the interrogator, a real learner, whom we in any event ignore in order to concentrate on the spurt of juice he has given the funny bone in our groin with his ‘lectric button ostensibly for having either answered a non-question or having said two things at once which make no sense over the short run but across the long curve of our possibilities prove absolutely exact.

This we already remember. As if we hadn’t been told. Listen, what we remember is important, it’s all there is.

Her presence has drawn things to converge upon her, as witness the threesome (for two of the starting five, two women, just got up and left) at the corner table (and now a young fellow leaves the table to make a phone call by the service bar), so we’ll return to her along some track less smooth than the levity of a tapeworm’s nostalgic footholds in the diva’s aborted weight-loss project. And through spiraled circumference spinning our wind-tunnel ‘tween histories, we’ll see the correspondent-woman now without looking back and share with her the state of being between Mayn, no sweat.

A sage said all troubles arise from trying to broadjump inside a telephone booth. Oh well, the multiple youth Larry, like the economist his godly madness turned him into, forgot that a great leap upwards within the booth, even of joy (that is, after hanging up after a call during which he received kind words from the older, four-or-five-year-older woman Amy) might shortly hit a ceiling. Which returned Larry to the floor of the booth or to his feet (whichever came first) and made him wonder again if old Mayn was his rival or his adopted friend, not to say back-up father function/media connection. He’s had this trouble before, the two-on-one he calls it for safekeeping cum portability, it’s where the Dreaded Modulus comes in and expresses one system in terms of another like he knows
chez
Brain that Mom/Sue didn’t literally
mean
"Larry should get laid," because mothers don’t talk like that even in the future and Sue’s expressing one shitload in terms of another, and yet even his oF Brain will tell him you got to sometimes give Modulus oon rest and feel that
both
given shitloads are your given life and it’s all the same ballgame. (Right on, Larry, right on, sweetie, he hears Grace once say to him in another context.) But should he pack a backpack and go to Europe for a few years? but where would Amy be when he came back? living with oF Jim? of course not, probably in Europe herself! but where will Jim be? Is this the two-on-one trouble again? It’s a shitload faster coming at him than an unresigned end-game with a bishop and a knight against just a knight (which Larry’s given up with chess itself at eighteen); is it more the lone guard against a forward and a sudden substitute you don’t recognize tearing-ass downcourt? Got to make your move because if he doesn’t the one with the ball will go all the way and up for the shot which for greed’s sake he may do anyway: but it’s all also inside Larry and he would talk to his father if his father didn’t have enough on his plate already and to his mother if she had not once recently reduced his life, telling a friend that Larry has to get laid: and while in the corners of his eyes the two enemy players divide their distances to the basket so he would prefer switching to instant-replay mode to put it mildly, he figures he’s divided his talk option between Father and Mother, next between yes-Mother and no-Mother (opting for the no-don 7-discuss-the-two-on-one-with-her), then between no-Mother-One (which is no discussion but no hard feelings) and no-Mother-Two (which is You’re so one-track-minded nowadays you’re a jammed terminal, Ma, it isn’t funny, we can’t get a decent discussion going about this two-on-one thing of mine until we get past the sex gate which can be jumped only with the correct Yes or No response, that is we have all first got to be sexed like little kittens and then our eyes can be looked into). Yet as the no-Mother-Two option gets branched, Larry can see his mother Susan gain perspective through distance but is it hers or his he’s pinning down? all he knows is she gets smaller with these divisions yet doesn’t bug him less.

That is, without the two-on-one being submitted feedback loop.

Larry says to Mayn, If I could be another person, she could be.

Mayn says, It doesn’t matter, pal. You’ll be another person someday;
she
might stay the
same.
You mean, asks Larry, she’ll go on as she is?

Probably go on, is Mayn’s reply.

Stay married, Jim? Larry laughed. Oh, said Mayn, you need more than one sometimes.

"I know what’s going on," an all-purpose child contemplating another nap who was apparently absorbed in educational television is heard by some resident adults adjacent to it to say. Adults getting equal with kids; seeking girlfriends and boyfriends. But not in response to Larry’s fine Either/And, which he would talk to Mayn about if Mayn weren’t already a motion within the reference frame of Larry’s life so how do you get an external fix?

Larry’s dad one night, turning away from his personal TV when Larry came into his room silently wanting to talk, gingerly identified changes in lifestyle they were being buffeted by, ‘cause Lar’s old enough to hear. But Open Marriage (which is more like the U.S. Open than open house, though it’s that, too) gives you permission to stick it out. But Larry doesn’t say this to his father. Even if it
is
‘76-’77—you’re never in a single year, it feels like, and he dunno if he wants his mom to come back—I mean, who the fuck cares?

But Larry’s life feels like escape. And someone else’s escape that Larry figures in and has been drawn if not sucked into.

Well, as for him, he works with the Modulus, Dreaded or not, that constant factor, it converts units from one system into another, which might be its own, so all potential partners in an extended marital system may observe laws of all divisions and games going on inside Me, making Me sometimes Us. Bumper stickers used to say Carlsbad Caverns, Howe Caverns, Pioneer Village. God, these married older people, they don’t have any standards any more, negotiating clean breaks and all that load of crap, and codifying power games like Who Called Who?—well Larry could pile right through a naked workshop recycling women and leave them scatter-cornered, multiply der limbs lying in his wake watching his stern lights fall back into the night with just enough glamor of wake to yield a bumper sticker that says, Have You Hugged Another Woman Today? and so also that, some nights, oddly when he’s on the phone with this older guy he really likes, he wants to be the one to say a whole lot of unrelated words, shit, fuck, cunt, asshole (asshole doesn’t mean anything any more although you wouldn’t want to
be
one), cocksucker, mother-fucking turd-master, chew-sampler, pimp-spread police-dog-screwer, you run out of those words.

Were they funny once? he asks Mayn.

Funny?
oh
yeah, sure, we used to call each other cunt lappers—what else?,
scumbags.

Hey you still hear that.

Muff diver. Scum bucket.

That’s pretty sweet.

And during the War, when we saw all those movies, what was it?, I’m afraid it was the syphilitic afterbirth of a Japanese gangfuck.

That’s not even sick: it’s not possible.

We probably didn’t know what an afterbirth was.

Well, it probably could be syphilitic.

It’s history.

Yeah.

Larry still wasn’t telling Mayn the two-on-one problem. Yet how could Mayn be a rival? Obviously between Mayn and the unique Amy who is old enough to be Jim’s daughter there can be nothing save professional researches and contact-expediting assistance—people she knows (?) through the place where she works, but Lar’s not asking. He doesn’t sense that Mayn’s into Amy’s interests, right-brain video-projection hardware used by handicapped to make themselves understood, plus reading-playing-manipulating a console-operated screen—and though anything might happen in the weeks since Amy phoned Larry to ask if he had Mayn’s number which she either could have discovered for herself
or
already had, in which latter case, she was letting Larry know, Mayn might be using her.

Oh Larry’s eyes hurt; they know how to turn into marbles; and his head hurts on one side—purely conceptually: he’s resisting a crowd inside him (well at least he
knows
and
acknowledges
—even
welcomes!)
that’s relations and all he can do is look back and forth between two eyes. And often now makes his phone calls from a pay booth, but rarely jumps as, booth-high, after the Amy call.

And he would not get into hating Grace Kimball, she’s friendly y’know—y’know?—y’know the multiple child’s next-room door is closed and among other emblems on the door is "Love Ya," and not
so
loud— whose sway has swung his mom Susan who wished she’d been named Sara, no
h
—into quite a new life which she thinks she’s asking him along on, which sets her apart from Jesus freaks and other groupies of the Ideal who want no part of their parents but he feels, he feels . . . (and, like using the Modulus, suddenly conceals his life) "this friend of mine he’s freaked out, Jim, his mother thinks she’s a Lesbian, what do you tell a guy like that? he doesn’t even want to think about it." ("Nothing, I guess. I would just say, Hang in there, you know?") ("Hang
in
there, Jim?") ("I mean
I
couldn’t handle it. There’s nothing you
can
say, if you like her—if your friend likes her—so hang in there—it’s like what your negotiators mean when they say, At least keep talking").

She
wants to teach
him
No Dependency: see, you don’t hang on to any particular person (so the theory goes—Grace’s theory yet in words identical to others uttered by a dark man with no shirt on as Larry switched TV channels and just before a commercial break to the effect that if the winds of attachment continue to blow, the light of true knowledge will never be kindled). Yet act, he had heard, so as to benefit others. Yet have, he had heard, no desire. Yet Larry was ready to believe the words; they were now his. Don’t anchor onto particular mother, spouse, or lover, you hang on to instead where they came from, not the person in question: keep the standing reserve from your miles-deep soft wear dream-lab, it’s your permanent credit cord to the ocean, keep that and let the actual persons come and go. Yet go for total sensate focus: what did that mean? Your toe massage might trip you up the common thigh: it’s the sources in thyself you want to glom onto, definitely not the particular persons who are thrown up like visitors to your real past and come and go, or so the rumor spreads, and Lar’ has this shitty feeling right in his (yes, actual shit in his) head that it all has assumed great weight and point, greater than in any rap: he hears oh what’s he hear?—workshop raps of Grace Kimball; fond talk and joking talk of Susan and her "friend" in a next room at mid-morning one weekend, really getting along; and so lest there appear ground for suspicion, he’ll go his ma one better and will not bust out to this guy Mayn who is now for a moment a total stranger but Lar’ would ask him what he thought it meant to say you withdraw hearing from sound, for God’s sake, was it to listen to other sound, or soundless things? well Larry would buy that, too, it sounds like at least an effort to shake things up a bit.