Women and Men (71 page)

Hanging up, Larry, tall within the booth whose roof he once hit his tender fontanel upon concluding oon call with Amy, understands that the blonde girl’s eyes are on him alone when
she
says, Well I almost gave up on you (though making no move for the booth)—when he doubly realized (having not till now guessed) that she is—but no, she is
not
a hooker, definitely not (she is wonderful, maybe) and much as (what with the gate swinging open, gate beep gate beep) he wants to get started at once exercising the dreaded Modulus upon matters shared through Mayn that are falling into place, still he toys with the idea that this girl and him met once, she’s a friend of a friend of his father’s, or of Grace Kimball’s, or she was seen doing water polo in an Olympic pool at Port Adams, Long Island, or she was profiled lovely against a sludgy oil on the second floor of New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art where the gross ornate gilt frames were once gifts to some potentate or are the sculpted coastlines of some old rich room’s ceiling Larry would like to lie down in at twilight. But no, the answer is easy: Larry and she Have Not Met; she is just plain here, plus it’s late afternoon of a day when Lar’s father’s been working at home at home at home, but will be going out presently to his group that he’s always on the verge of telling his son about (which suddenly now means to Larry that Marv
has
talked to the
group
about
Larry
—but that’s O.K., his father has lost love but not heart, but for
cool
feedback cum companionship you gotta go elsewhere).

So what’s Lar’ going to do? suspects he’s lucking out, for a second hallucinates Mayn kept him phonebound so long, exposed to your curbside traffic and to self-preoccupied yet happy homeward (but of course it’s quitting time, they have punched out) wage earners for as long as he did because Mayn was sending this girl.

But Lar’ has heard us, and (confirmed by the converging difference between the speech of a skimpily shorted jogger passing mid-Manhattan gridlock traffic-stall and behind and then ahead of him a high-stepping blackish sprinter in jeans who tears by and nearly runs down a bike that’s running a red light) Larry must cut out from the phone booth at once in defense of his own privacy, he’s got to make himself scarce from that booth, has heard us relations before we actually say in the voice of the Dreaded Modulus or we take the form of the resident child that reminds Lar’ of
his
youth, O.K., let R (for rotation) equal any number; having found that R may be positioned between two things in order to (through turning, looking, and merging through converging) make them equal, we suspect that R
means
"equals": hence we have the child’s R neatly inscribed between the two terms
PEOPLE
and
MATTER,
which together the child has heard from his immediate ancestors and seen in the culture so often as to mate the two terms and identify them: which the child therefore calls R (Lar’ recalls from a dream he had of working in a moving house): hence People R Matter, which might muddle itself slightly if the R be merely heard and not seen, since then it might come out as wr, or some like speech d’effect (not to be confused with "Drive-Ur-Self"), whereas sounding just like the
word
"are," the
letter
"R" works O.K. to mean "equals." But what bugs Larry is some half-received words themselves or emotion afoot in Mayn’s friendly chat, that the way Mayn’s diverse informations have been given is telling Lar’ two things at once on separate but equal machines-like, you cain’t luck into both at once ‘cept by a mode he has only dreamed of, and the two things are:
PEOPLE MATTER;
and
PEOPLE
equal
MATTER
.

Larry feels one of these people disintegrate around him, it’s his too-young-acting mom, while around him in the terminal that he doesn’t travel through much nowadays living not on the Island but here in Manhattan, people hasten to get their train, and Lar’s humming of course at the premise that beyond this gone-to-pieces capability they will put themselves back together later. If Lar’s mom Sue one-on-one with or without possession took the court now, she might find the classic one-on-one upped by all the don’t
know
about her son Larry (though Secretly Can Come To Love) who like all the rest sees Life, does Larry, as backpedaling, backpedaling, and couldn’t Larry be seen by Susan as a divided and conquering Ewe-man Be-in not one but
two
sons to babysit (to diaper, to lift, to look into, to hear yelling clearing yare iddle lung, haroong harangue, to suckle mebbe two on two but maybe not) when by contrast she had been all but certain the unknown kid she looked forward down her front to seeing shoulder its way out of her, slow-diving ‘thout benefit of arms (don’t worry, it’s got arms, don’t you worry, they’ll come, they’re there below the tiny shoulders I thought; they’ll come, they’re there), was the one baby that she wanted and the only one, she said.

***

Yet a Wide Load—to pick up Mayn’s words—a Wide Load coming out is what Larry believes
he
was: because, though no hysterect Sue (unlike her friend Lucille who, perhaps since she rec’d her hysterectomy right after an
abortion,
never blamed her hysterectomy on the size of her by then eleven-year-old red-haired son’s given head at birth), Lar’ sure got the idea somewhere along the line that the parameters of his own capital (though maybe all that was
inside
his head) split his mother sorely enough to sever a faith years later acquired by her through a book, to wit that the mother ape (read
baboon),
while readily losing interest in a babe of hers if it die, loves and tends ye a live one for all the world by instinct to not remember the pain of childbirth as soon as it’s over yet as if that pain through some semen of amnesia remembers to beget mother love like an opposite of the pain, and so the Earth grows more rational.

Yet did she feel mother love just in order to neglect (read
forget)
the kill of Larry tearing headstrong through her? (We can’t blot out a sex flick of the late century in question, and the star stud’s creamy baritone advancing his own original pleasure-pain theory to the featured lady above him slowly centering down around his disappearing X-erected membership also baritone-arm cartridge.) For then Susan, if we now are even still
with
Susan alone, might after all not have felt truly mother love but only that the obstacle-pain was a presence to get past until she was sheets to the wind yonder and knew oh that she still loved her husband after all: but then only if she was still really she, like the century in question, there within our accommodating
Us
where many women prove to be like her with her very same problems to her relief at Grace’s Body-Self Workshops—and they prove to
be
like, but prove as well to
like
—for it’s Important, it’s Important, she found out and cried out after years of needing mothering more than to be liked by men, which was what she had thought it was all about, namely what she fell out of bed into each tense, dream-rewired morning of her one-time life, namely that ‘twas men she must needs be liked by, she had thought. And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world until some sweeter obstacle dropped away leaving her in another female presence and her within ours among other women she felt herself among, who had not seen the porn film aforementioned except for—in this wall-to-wall Body Room—the room’s "owner," proprietor, and presiding spirit Grace Kimball, who
had,
with her young, delicate, stern friend Maureen, who went with Grace to the film with a small party of Grace’s friends so that later Maureen and Grace in unison in Grace’s Body Room during a session of the women’s Body-Self Workshop in unison like an octave had the same things to say about the film—the absence in it of authentic one-on-one masturbation but in all fairness the goodly stress or indication through close-shot focus on her requests that a woman might
Run
the Fuck, though granted directorial close-shot she-focus isn’t necessarily acknowledging the goddess nor is it any substitute for, though also no obstacle to, that adjacent ideal of directorial play, and when you come down to it sex was viewed as bounty kindly deigned by the male.

Viewed upon the permanent screen also of a Manhattan movie theater at differing times by such others among us as further universalize our Sue, who is Larry’s mother but has or had the abundant dark hair of more than one other of ours changing from angel to human and had the occasional though not so lyric or so satin ("onstage") inclination of a known singer to dress now and again in men’s clothes: viewed, as has been said, on one screen at differing times, the now syntactically (tapeworm-?) digested anatomical film above mentioned lived a little in the minds of some of the current women we have bothered to respectfully discern within us, as if we were each of them looking back and forth multiplied by unresolved dreams between let’s say the inner,
many-factd
screen and the moving color cinema screen in the dark movie house of afternoon couples equal we see in number exactly to (two for one) the slouched, sporadic single men (no female singles) and all like communicants with the light they’re shadowed by, which is also the woman on the screen, a Miss "Jones," making up for (we’re asked to believe) her long-lost time and multiplying it with the support of a small cast of players coupling or even trebling always into her one.

The diva saw it with her lone physician one afternoon long before the naval mufti put in; and she dressed up for her escort in longish gray silk, her giant supply of hair up, her mother’s lace mantilla drawn across a high comb like a veil chaperoning her girlhood, and her annually leased amber Porsche glowing in the garage waiting to be driven to Connecticut for dinner at an inn (by
her there,
by her
escort home).
She was having an afternoon off apparently from some articulate structure such as
Norma
or
Rosenddmmerung
able to accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale
acts
but comfortable in another such accommodating structure, her relation with the doctor. This relation she suddenly risked later in the self-same eighth decade of the century in question. For, having always, in and out of costume/role/voice, seen herself rather comfortably as many women—not excluding the patient who treats her doctor to a feast of stethoscopic auscultation, she came one day to risk all that and without a supporting cast: pinned herself down to two, all by herself—though she was in bed with her officer (i.e., pinned down now to
two
women): the one who casts a quiet hand upon the military man-in-question’s tough and interesting inner thigh whose mufti lies otherwise draped upon a chaise as fealty to this woman who would later contemplate sauteing him the slick, pink, gland-like sea roe left by her brunchen-hearted physician of the brioche chamber the medicine man where medicine
is
the man who, like the French physician Piorry whom the diva’s doctor’s own idol Oliver Wendell Holmes extolled as poet and percussionist expert alike in rhymes and in the chest-tapped "resonances of the thoracic cavity," unites the dual languages of his love (does the diva’s doctor) in listening ever and ever for the breath of his diva’s heart in all its grown chambers now reduced or maybe grown (half-beknownst to him her friend who really cares for her) to two chambers— which are threatening to be (equally): the One who casts her fingertips upon the sense of his chamois-soft sac easier to know than what floats so unknown within it while the self-same sac she will presently use her very sex to find lightly arriving and kissing regularly and softly the edge of her love, his against her, sealing each time the lip of her; yet also be the other woman of her new two, who turns interrogator as if only that way can she ask what on earth she means taking up with an officer of the motherland regime that casts her father as a danger man and does his grocery shopping for him once a week so he must miss that flower honey he loves.

But what good could her presence do her old father? She’s a Swiss citizen, imagine! If she flew home to Chile and they let her in, it would be on condition she sing:

sing near the harbor that her voice teacher’s piano once reflected through a high casement window and, facing it across the old room, a single round mirror which was the pivotal depth turning the coastal brilliance to a sound of sweetest history upon the grand piano’s shaped black top large as Brazil, as the whole continent, or inanimate as the future and firm as the Latin her teacher had her study.

She could imagine her shoulder blades where his hands gripped her coming up along her back and over the top for a while, and, dislodging the flow, thinking of him for a moment where he now was, down below the deep breaths of her breasts to which his one blind hand goes passing back and forth—and with a delicacy of blindness brushes across. She thinks of him at her mercy, too—or of him being asked questions he could not but answer though he had heard if not them,
something
already, listening in on her thigh (what? some political infidelity)—she would then entirely take in this crossed cadence and the flow which after all
hadn’t
lessened!, so that she knew she had it in her power to be made to come: until, having once again hugged this power of hers with all of her legs and a brain in her belly that clapped its high slick pillows, she lay rolled now on her side, happy, and heard herself monstrously try him with questions. Power she all but handled while she swept aside her ignorance of facts that whispered with dangerous constancy while she it was who now asked and he answered, and all the time she feared and proudly feared what he might hear of what she’s thinking coming from inside her thigh.