Women and Men (73 page)

And the diva experiences a fixed shiver at these words of the man dreaming practically inside her. Well, her interrogation of him has brought them to a connection unforeseen, and saying, Amy? She is really feeling she may have endangered her friends—when all she wanted was to arrive at her father about whom she therefore now asks, What are you doing to him? tell me, what are you really doing to him?

She hears herself say not "they," which would mean the regime in general, but "you"; she might as well be proud she’s charged this naked man as part of it; she might as well, though all she will get from him is charm perhaps.

She rides the gentle shrug of his shoulders now in partial answer. She smells the vanilla smoke from his hair and she is nearly dispersed by some future feeding inside her but she smells dry, sharp unsmoked cigars, more acrid than their smoke, above the paternal hearth upon the mantel as many years ago as she once walked kilometres up a thorny, gravelly mountain behind a famous father who gave her a pair of black heavy hiking boots higher than the high shoes her anxious mother kept her in through the beginning years of her piano lessons though not a Sunday-afternoon song recital when she was no more than a child and her father nodded and smiled fifty feet away by a tall, ornate door, and later unseen by her disappeared leaving only a blank in her mind, disappeared with three tall men all about six inches taller than he, and handsome—one (it came back to her) a sewer architect and another a fiery-eyed, auburn-haired scientist, a Popular Front man of course who had been in the South when fifty thousand souls had perished in the earthquake, their heads emptied of the Front’s election slogan
Bread, Roof, and Overcoat,
so that, years later, though at this moment she, a goddess on a king-dolphin, can’t help seeing the great door ajar to the hallway that led to her father’s study, and finding an aroma of sweet cigar, and a door ajar where three men of her polite audience had been a moment ago—smoke rises from the vanilla of her present lover’s scalp and, in the midst of him with the violet of her own roof overhead meeting her vague, breathing eyes, she finds that whatever that unknown man in the orchestra at
Norma
(with the girl—Amy?—who works at Clara’s husband’s foundation sanctuary) means to the diva’s spiraling heart, she arrived at her hard-to-talk-about father only to see he was not the end of all her languidly irritable interrogation (no he was another obstacle sought, in the midst of these words of her naked admiral’s
Your father is under house arrest and only he can hurt himself; he is fairly safe, he is a great man in his own way and he is, of course, old).

So she sees what she was about—though it too will change as she reaches it weightlessly, daughter, spy, counter-spy, counter-daughter, so totally at ease with her skin-and-bone-gripping arms and scrambling fingers and her neck and shoulder slopes as to prove the ease with which she does what she does so as to absorb the chambers of herself into one amorous whore just in time then to feel this role pass away with who but the broad-faced, broad-shouldered, unknown man in the orchestra who impressed her only upon his absence so that she thereupon became another woman whom the prostitute exploring some secret sign of her own celebrity inch by inch could never buy: and she suspected she might never tell this military man who was all over her like a boy overwhelming her in their joined breathing almost to the last, he was her other body known only for a couple of weeks growing two limbs onto her (his calves, she thinks, amused and clear) for her to plant the soles and heels of her bare feet on—of course they’re bare but what about that long-ago-felt "little swipe"? we remember we wanted to know and to
be
—never tell, never tell, never tell him that after their dementedly affectionate clasp ten days ago as naked inside as out, she was bound by bodily vow to miss her period and why the devil not?

Or telling him (for she has a reputation after all—and a trousseau beyond all need of a husband to go with it, yes telling) would be a thing she would think about when (and if!) she got to it among remembered phrases of his love—remembered, the way to a man’s stomach is through his heart rerouted via such doctored slick sea eggs as brunch is made for—for she doesn’t see him clearly in her future (not certainly as that We the young wife speaks for herself and her husband that takes on a wholeness sure enough to invade their dual humanity to appropriate it, is that it?, have we approached the fact?)— no, she sees him only as "a blank that will be in the way if we could but find it," some reasonable invading voices, mysterious We, angel perhaps if there were angels anyplace but inside us, saying the words she hears.

And now the diva, swaying generously toward a duplex kitchen and the light in order to rustle up a dish of roe, can be again less than a story in herself and once more part of a greater Breather capable of accommodating implicitly not just her mind but her body with its memorial maps where at least one tapeworm left its narrowing track converging unknown to it or its bearer upon a future point of self removed as soon as reached, flushed atabriney from the scene to show a possessive, solicitous, though friendly physician a thing or two (yet give a
body
a chance, as even this knowledgeable auscultocrat of the brunch board believes) with all his pharmacopoeiac chemistry floating in his head for his old Boston idol to walk on or—for such is the power of the great American doctor Holmes—to
ride
across in his wonderful one-horse shay discoursing on Ricord, "the Voltaire of pelvic literature" and (not to be mixed up with Tussaud, who was a madame) Rousseau the therapeutist who professed medicine as an art (read
experience)
as much like making or like love as history’s obstacle quest where an American Indian tapeworm (or Indian-
processed
tapeworm) gives way to another blind appetite or two beyond being "with" tapeworm or with father along an always narrowing future which— like the thing or two told her by Clara that hung back in her friend the diva’s mind about what’s going on with them (all these people illuminated by us quite possibly and perchance engendered
by
them, which includes Clara and her economist husband), their stranded, witty life—was not at the forefront of Jim Mayn’s, on an afternoon in New York when (for he was always thrown back shadow-like by the future he’d been in and so he’d actually witnessed and felt its narrowing) he tried to interview an old loner maverick with a beat-up face who talked about everything almost except what Mayn had been drawn to visit him for. This was a new coastline meteorology this man had made up which had unfrocked or unemployed him, hermit that he almost is, here in a quiet, multi-room "railroad" in a pretty high-rent neighborhood in the lower Village. How could Mayn, e’en with his non-position on history, not wonder that a maverick pressure-front analyst across Mayn’s path could prove also a hermit of New York who had done his share of invention? Was it that we were always thinking—we have to help each other out—of the next thing, not this?—like what is in the next room or apartment? And so because Mayn kept losing the skinny beat-up polymath’s name in favor of adjacent data, substitute epithets, and because this loner with the inventive mind don’t like to be interrupted—distinctly not!—Mayn can’t shift gears and backpedal but is aware of being after not just the elements of, well not just a new meteorology but a new weather new enough to have unfrocked this hermit crab when, as a weather specialist with a national service, he began introducing his own thing into reports and surprisingly was not picked up by the wire services, but stays busy and alive among the red-and-black diagrams drawn on areas of brown paper, split-open supermarket bags taped together on the wall of the final room of the railroad flat, diagrams of weather levels like coastlines and he’s talking about what came out (or went in) as, Mayn later told himself, "obstacle"(!) geometry but Mayn didn’t register it until hours later, having groped for a name he was renaming this old man as mottled and chipped as the fortified walls of his railroad flat until, with another word coming in his mind instead of "obstacle," he nonetheless voiced the term "obstacle geometry" to his phone mate this good crazy overintellectual kid Larry who is coping, he really is, at this transitional juncture of his life (though Jim Mayn hasn’t got the full story) coping with the busted-up marriage of his parents which he really as he says feels won’t last—that is, the bust-up—though he didn’t say where his mother was up to whatever she is up to, and Larry (all ten of him) was on the point of telling what felt like "all" (though Mayn isn’t receiving dossiers of that luridly commonplace sort because he knows enough about contemporary marriage to forget a great deal and still have a rich backlog and standing reserve), and so Larry at once picked up (before Mayn could find the word to replace "obstacle") the term "obstacle geometry." And Larry said he’d never heard of "obstacle geometry." "Oh well if
you
haven’t heard of it—" "I mean I can
figure
what it is, Jim, I can figure what it is—" "—//that’s what the man
said"
said Jim. "Who?" said Larry. "The old genius." "What’s his name?" "Is it the Hermit-Inventor of New York?" Mayn asks, but of whom?

But he hardly had time to be startled at that old monicker from grandma Margaret’s talk, it isn’t as if Mayn don’t know from his grandmother Margaret the Hermit-Inventor’s name—that is, the H.I. of N.Y.—still he
is
a hermit and he is an inventor, and "of New York," no getting around it,
plus
Mayn hardly thinks about his instinctive nickname for the frugal meteorologist whose unified-field weather got him tossed out of the government-funded concern that had put up with him for just so long, and when next Larry spoke to Mayn, Mayn found that
obstacle
geometry—"optical geometry?" Mayn hesitantly asked his young friend— "—well it would
include
optical," said Lar\ "which I
have
heard of, but it’s ‘obstacle’—" "Well, did you make it up since I last talked to you?"—"No
sir,
it was there in what you said," said Larry.

The kid’s in his own world, hermit of the pay phone booth, private even from his apartment when his folks aren’t
there
—but Obstacle Geometry, misheard from optical geometry, can find its own way from day to day and call to call. And it warn’t why Lar’ exited laterally rather than through the roof of the booth, gently taking and shaking the surprised hand of the amused young blonde woman, while she feels that his gentleness seems overconfident though all Lar’ can get through is the words "You were waiting for me?" to her "You want to come home with me? I live four blocks down—" to which he, still one line from what his offered hand had meant, replied, "You probably live in my building . . . four blocks?" But she laughs, shakes her head with very friendly authority; has a shopping bag in which he can see a bottle of wine with a red cap (of vino, his father would say) and a bunch of celery, leaves greener at the top, and the darker shoulder of an avocado—so she is not a prostitute; her clothes are a little mussed, she’s been working; she’s not a prostitute, he repeats to himself waiting for something to happen, for Larry then regretfully smiles friendly to the blonde whose bra shoulder strap under the loose knit of her dark sweater passes palely on its way—sweater or blouse or whatever it is, and says, "Really, thanks—I’ve got a girl and"—he shrugs with aeons of masculine understanding in his sensitive mouth but she says, "Oh," so softly, "whaddayameaj??" as if she uncannily knew that that other "older woman" (Amy) isn’t his girl but only
would-bz.

As she surely won’t be if she hears Mayn mention that Larry cut short his call because of a ladyfriend, though, once more home at his desk amid the empty apartment because his father’s at a men’s group tonight over at Hudson Guild where they get info on loving their bodies and (Marv smiles) brushing their teeth, Larry thinks of the loaf of French bread sticking out of that girl-who-tried-to-pick-him-up’s shopping bag and he should laugh at this but all he can do is leave his mother-bought roll-top desk that he rolls down roughly every other night to cover up the neatness with which he leaves his books, pads, and a diary he hardly keeps and his father would never think of getting into—and wander to the phone to ring Amy’s ringing ringing ringing phone thinking Grace Kimball is entitled to her views and Larry is the last person to damn her new Open Marriage law that has had such consequences in his life, whether or not he would point out that she herself having first closed out her marriage never got engaged in Open Marriage except as extended sexual partner (ESP) no longer called Other Woman. But as for Larry, it’s the whole works or nothing, and, listening to not even a provocative busy signal off there at Amy’s number, he visualizes the blonde girl smoothly two-handing a record down onto her turntable and then removing from her shopping bag with those friendly hands of hers one avocado, one crisp loaf of bread, one long bunch of celery, one dark bottle with red cap, and he can’t think what except he is convinced with a rising mist of intense interest that there was a chicken in there, yah he is so clairvoyantly certain a roaster was waiting down in ye bottom of ye bag that he dials for a moment his mother’s new number on the Island and hangs up in mid-ring and dials Mayn’s and a woman answers with something heavy in her hand, he’s sure, and Lar’ presses his finger down on the cradle-bar rather than let her hear.

That is, what’s going on at his end. Which is not only but also marital bust-up (read
single parents’ divided homes,
read Susan’s got a [read] friend [read] going through a stage, take a book any book,
book
equals
read,
but
equals
equals
means,
and since
read
means
means,
clearly son-Larry
means
—hence,
equals,
hence
reads .
. .
matter
—
read Mayn
because Mayn is "good people" (his phrase that Larry now uses) and People R Matter.) And what Lar’ reads is something he’s got to settle, and before he knows it Lar’s over there only a six-minute walk at the apartment of the girl who, yes,
woke
him from the longish magic of his call with Mayn, and to Lar’s mind she has now changed out of her loco weed purple into what he can’t see because he in his mind is animatedly telling her this dream he had of waking in a moving house rumbling down a highway in the middle of somewhere almost definite but it’s March and everyone out here is asleep as he passes, although when he lets the shade up to see the moon there’s also a helicopter silvering in on this wide load of Larry’s house that he’s woken up to
moving
(for crying out tears, as his dad says) and Lar’ can’t object or even speak, which makes the blonde girl in her bathrobe (but you can’t
make
anyone do something) feel something and at her open fridge door nod to Larry happily. Yes, she agrees, that’s what happens, you want to cry out or something but you cain’t even request directions, like what state you’re in or where it’s going, because the house isn’t only your house now. Except what comes next’s too private ‘n crazy to tell the girl, and he loves her, but beyond her waist in the lighted inside of her fridgerator he sees a whole familiar two-part thing/amenity that fades the second he identifies it as a telephone, well you don’t know what other people like girls keep in their refrigerator (read
icebox,
as Lar’s dad calls it) but this fridge phone naturally isn’t a pay-type but a "home phone" and thinking to reach and call whoever it is that will come to him when he gets hold of the phone and is ready to poke out the number adding up to get a result at t’other end, he feels the phone lose mass, let it by modulus be a piece of angel cake fading through mouth water, into the night-white of the refrigerator’s
ambience,
for hasn’t the blonde closed the door? and how’s he going to make sense much less have her like him for telling her how, when randomly turning away from the parlor window of the moving house in his true dream whose wide load he has woken into in the middle of the night, he finds framed on the wall a digital sampler stitched with tracks of chickens crocheted from real fingers if not from the heart, and framed on the wall behind the davenport—all of which keeps constant (as our wide load like yr mob’l unit rumbles through any continental region) bedded upon the great wide-load (house) hitch trailer (itself a long ways from the slanting Indian travois dragging the horse)—the sampler says not
HOME SWEET FOLKROOM HOME
much less
SHOULD MUSIC PROVE THE FUEL OF LOVE LAY ON OR IN GOD ‘A WE TRUST BUT PEOPLE R MATTER
(hence ticklable! it comes to us): and the girl in purple and her home phone are gone just like that; and Lar’ is at least left with the current obstacle to their union, and he doesn’t want to tell about either the Two-on-One Quantum Regress, or the Dread Modulus by which one system can be turned like the tables to another, or about the individualized screens that tell Lar’ two things relatively at once; trouble is you can luck into them only by a mode he’s on’y dreamt, which, try as he will, he must know through refiguring it, while anyway what matters is that the two-thing-at-once is what Larry feels he’s been told in Mayn’s informations vouchsafed to Larry in a stream of talk.