Women and Men (88 page)

"
that on the coast scattered with wild rocks

the sea the fields come together, the waves and the pines,

petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,

watching how they fly? They seem

to be carrying the letters of the world
. . .

. . .
something something . .
.

. . .
pelicans . . . like ships of the wind,

other birds . . . like arrows, carrying

messages from dead kings, viceroys,

buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,

.
. .
something something
. . .

and seagulls, so magnificently white,

they are constantly forgetting what their messages are."

She weeps, and she hears a man’s voice near Clara, who says, "I don’t
know
what is going on. There is
nothing
between ‘las costas andinas’ and ‘las gaviotas,’ ‘made of whiteness,’ ‘of purity’—but what comes before all that?"—she asks her husband for the book that’s on a table in the room across Central Park from where Luisa sits on the kitchen stool, one hand warmly snugged between her thighs—"but I
remember . . .

‘Tu me preguntas donde estoy? Te contaré

—dando solo detalles
utiles
al Gobierno—’

por supuesto, Luisa, el no quiere decir eso ..."

No indeed, details useful to the state are not the sea and the fields, petrel and the meadow or even the sun’s atrocity upon the nitrate miners, but why an (albeit officially Swiss) opera donna should permit—why, is there a Swiss opera, as there is a Swiss fleet high and cold upon an angelic peak at the upper end of the world looking for a flood to float a lone whale to give their navy sperm power? The answer, my friend, lies in some Protestant comedy night that asks the question what nationality is the Pope’s gahd?—why, that is, a Chilean opera star (to continue) with a father under house arrest in the land of her birth, the land the earth the ground, permits an agent of that Chicago-model balanced-budget economy to take from her gently her clothes (read
gently tug,
read
peel away from the very skin of her,
life within life without end, slide down the grand pout of one buttock or up the soft give of her back while a thumb along the groove of her pretty spine keeps, with the operative fingers, love’s parallel compassed and gratuitous), the Druid folds of her priestess, the spangled shirtwaist of her barmaid’s Golden West, the silver rose from the auburn abundant hair of one who took off the satin breeches long ago and the white wig and doesn’t really like her lover to undress her anyway—oh what’s doing? she has to get out of all this—but would rather find her own way to the bathroom and come back smiling partly at him, partly at Clara reporting a new archaeological massage that you don’t have to wish would go on and on because
it
makes
you
longer(!), her robe of bright toweling open to her stomach for her not him, and yet for the first time she thought in her life wanted this man half lying half sitting by her bed table, his plain, uninteresting black shoes flashing, his necktie lowered almost like some more significant garment, opening the pages of a book she rereads at night that lies upon her tiny gilt address book
{libretto!),
to sort of follow her toward the bathroom having removed his shoes, his socks, and, leaning on the doorway or sitting on the edge of the bathtub watch her pee, her back thoughtfully arched, her eyes in his—but he lets her go her way though stares at what he’s reading with a close attention that to her feels affectionate as she recedes— follows herself—across her bedroom to the John, all but too absorbed in him to think (except she does) that she has the great silly Ford North’s unlisted number under
M
for Momo (her great bell of basso rotondo, her dear stammerer who finds his tongue in song, canto bell songo, and must phone to tell him of course she will not play Horatio to his unprecedented non-tenor Hamlet in his boyfriend’s three-night-stand opera (with-some-talk) (mysterious of origin, by repute)
(J ... I
Just
want
to
die . . . I Sometimes
you are so pitee-ous and pro-found) at the one-time warehouse owned by a ritual friend of course not,
por supuesto,
he asked her about it at the very moment when she was considering her naval officer on bended knee backstage finding a place to impress his Japanese now ballpoint upon her satin thigh, but
Amleto, Amleto,
what a lousy opera the real one had often made, Boito, Hignard, ho hum—in the absence oh what an absence of the only one for the job kicked by his priest as a no doubt cute young acolyte down the altar steps into unconsciousness (during which he might have imagined the whole nineteenth-century opera of American life if he had chosen), kicked into such near-immortality that if, long past his
Requiem
for a novelist, he wrote
Otello
at seventy-three and Falstaff at eighty, why not at ninety
La Mestizia del Danese
if those windy young waters ‘tween Elsinore and Sweden didn’t rush too wetly neither to be nor not to be for the old field marshal’s baton (for we know in all our keen relations that death don’t either want or not want us) . . . if in fact some text of
Hamlet
was not written years before and scrapped, dispatched, appropriated. . . Hamlet’s mixed-blood upon the stale promontory an angel swiftly interprets, but no—
mestizia
means just "sadness," or, if we will, "melancholy.") So that—so that, lengthened like malleable shadow, this moment when Diva Luisa fears again her lover’s absence more than anything else (for she can’t hear except in imagination and memory the breaths she knows are calmly being taken and absorbed by his naked chest in the darkness just beyond the dark of her duplex kitchen) comes to contain the presence of another man so briefly in Clara’s closing words that when a click occurs along the line all that is left is the man’s name.

So that for us, collecting in and around such organism, what young Jim was in fact put through, that summer night of interrupted wartime sleep, can converge upon Mayn’s naming by an exile-economist’s
mujer,
yielding blindly a new brief obstacle to the three who heard the name, the lithe man who had gently uncradled the bedroom phone, and the two women who felt the intervention in their very hearts and therewith said, not in the
Gluten Nacht
or
Buonappe-notte
tongues of gran’opera but in good, honest Anglo, "Goodnight," yet not by a long shot American "G’night," or, literally—with the additives restored—"Have a nice day, tonight."

So that while Mayn in ‘63 or ‘64 (no problem) insisted that Roy Sievers had batted in 114 runs for the Washington Senators in 1957 (well before Washington was, lock, stock, and barrel, moved to Minn.—which means, observes the dictatorial interrogator with an accent of the sea shadowily awash in his syntax, that Sievers subsequently did not equal that personal best because with Washington in Minnesota he was himself to his own distraction permanently within shooting distance of the famed antler’d pike-whale of Lake Superior which our own nationals matriculating in the aeronautical program near that thousandfold
lac,
have been warned of by an Indian with a squint valuable enough to be worth preserving who exchanges such warnings for such information as our nationals have to offer, such as relocation techniques or disappearing acts used for certain anti-Castro Cubans now variously resident in our blessed coastal economy, its sovereignty cast like a shadow by the overlapping sea, a subject Mayn had to be interested in until the involvement of another whom he could not respect returned him to those routines by which he had made his living. He preferred to judge as waste-coincidence the convergence of his own route and that of an exiled Allende economist house-ticketed to an opera one of whose principals had a long-term relation with a simple, cuff-trousered Park Avenue G.P. who had fished with a Lake Superior Ojibway Indian with the same given name
Santee
as a diamond-squinting aeronautical trainee who relayed information about Cubans being relocated in Chile via an underground North American route more direct than if they’d traveled overland or underground from Cuba right
to
Chile. If not purely coincidental, at least impurely: which however hastily inhumed in lurid likelihood Mayn would leave to others to bring to light which when it came wriggling forth might have an ageless Spence coiling and coiling around it as if it were money in the pocket more than history on the make with or without that moral "eye" or epicenter Mayn quietly eschewed to own was his.

Leave to others? Like one misled.

By what? By what had stopped his mother singing? A ringing that surrounded her voice? But then
him
—well—her son with the reddish hair that in one month, like overnight, a year and more later began to go very dark like dye or through that gravity between colors that bled the red away.

But misled more by
words
of his mother Sarah, that threatened to forget themselves but he didn’t let them as he took himself and his in-spite-of-what-that-strange-woman-said not
very
foxy thick shock of exploding strong-springing hair that she told him had been having a dream so he ought to go away, she said, and find out if he was fox or bear, well he hated that kind of talk, he wondered if when his father gave her a little kiss on the cheek he kissed the mole near her jaw, all Jim wanted was a bit of information because that would have been just unintense and friendly, but little Brad whom she talked music to and had a tenderness toward (out of all proportion to that little begatten nothing’s deserving) she didn’t have a respect for (that Jim did get but didn’t know what to do with) so he took it out of the music room, her strange respect, at past one in the morning and left, ten stairs at a time, to leave her where she was downstairs—that woman, his mother—and he dived into his T-shirt and kicked into his chinos with a few stiff paint stains of glossy gray porch paint on them, he touched them, and he bent to finger his moccasins back onto his bare heels, and went into the frame of his window unhooking the lower end of the screen to bank it out just far enough so it didn’t come off at the top when he slid out onto that side of the sloping shingle roof and was on the ground smelling the leaves of summer and fresh-turned earth of a flower bed that had a smothering dampness of rock about it and a sweetness of hands, of hide, of the milk of humus; and he could recall being on the roof and being on the ground, but nothing in between, except the words of his unsatisfactory mother that tried to forget themselves, like forgetting her, their utterer.

So that he was out of the house and on Throckmorton Street’s broad sidewalk of great natural slabs of slate washed and rubbed free of the blood they had attracted in falls and minor kid fights. And he ran fast through the quiet night, joying in the extent of his speed, the length of his bounding stride.

So that he was at his grandmother Margaret’s house too fast ever to have seen what he later found had seen him—his father coming home under the maples and elms and serried streetlamps of that moonless night of Throckmorton Street past the steep little cement ramps leading up to each house’s gravel or blacktop driveway, that is, had seen him come loping round the side of the house and out across the grass as if toward a football field’s sideline which is the sidewalk in tonight’s fresh opportunity to forget our life if we will because you want to run and like crazy sometimes.

And he is on his grandmother’s porch near the swing couch and the white-painted woven-wood chairs remembering that his granddad Alexander’s snore could be heard only at a distance of twenty-five or so miles because he was still at Mantoloking, he hadn’t come home with them that afternoon. Jim felt the wooden pillars supporting the porch roof luminously personal with the streetlight beyond, and his right hand was on the ornate front doorknob before he thought to raise his left to the doorbell for he didn’t call on Margaret at this hour, when he heard an angry—wasn’t it angry?—surge of words garbled from inside the house like the only sound within half a mile and he didn’t ring. He took two soft steps to the broad window where the dim light came from the little sitting room beyond the front parlor with all the furniture and the mantelpiece with Alexander’s cigars and two long bookshelves and wonderful long tubular sort of velvet cushions in the corners of the couch, he could smell it all through the window but what was going on was beyond this in the little sitting room, through the door of which Jim saw his grandmother and the wiry, shaky old man from New York who’d come to see her at Mantoloking beach that afternoon, and they were not at each other’s throats but holding each other at arm’s length laughing like before or after hugging as Jim had seen her do with her husband.

And Jim had a good look at his grandmother’s face changing, and then she seemed to turn her back to him, it was to the window. She wore a light-colored summer dress, there were beads across the back of her neck—which was the way Jim remembered.

Her legs were pale as he had never before seen them, and she seemed dimly to have said, "... may need you . . . time comes"—or words to that effect, whatever it was—words with a murmured vagueness at this distance and the window between, that betokened great clarity at close range, that is for the Hermit-Inventor of New York to whom she spoke and who didn’t have his dark glasses on now but the old man’s eyes or one of them, the one that was visible, seemed to be looking at Jim and her at the same time so he felt something not terrible about what parents don’t feel they have to tell children.