Women and Men (96 page)

Senora Wing’s words hold: "You know somebody who is going to Chile under cover of darkness, the land of Chile in South America, someone who has been a prisoner." Spoken to tiny woman with yellow light.

Desk drawer open showing manila envelope. What’s wrong is not something missing but something present in the way. Place belongs to Santee, but business belongs not to Santee, but he thinks so.

The business belonged to me. I found a double-lock on door and turned it. I opened desk drawer further and took out manila envelope. It was addressed to "Ray Spence" and inside it was two photographs: one was of two guys in green shirts and pants standing with a tall, bald man in a white suit, and they were all smiling; the other was an old picture of a young woman in a big hat standing beside an African pigmy, the picture was all yellow.

Santee was really Spence. Something was going on at the theater, and the opera singer Luisa was involved. I was afraid to use the phone. I had said to the old lady, "Yes, I am." I pushed the desk drawer back to what it was. I went over and touched the bicycle. Some people remove their fenders. I turned and fell down. If I had a few teeth out, my jaw would get permanently smaller. The sound of Spence’s voice was unknown, like. The need to think things through.

Instead of using the phone, I left the office and took the subway home. I met my mother at the supermarket. She called to me across the street. I crossed. She give me a kiss and a hug. Georgie there handing a joint to a white girl. "Where’s you bike, man?" Georgie asks. Mother says, "He can’t ride no bike." "Where you keepin’ it, Jimmy?" Georgie asks. I opened my mouth and tried to speak, and light was in my mouth and I saw I could speak if I wanted but I decided not to. I kind of stammered. The girl laughed friendly. "He’s ridin’ up and down Park Avenue on his bike," said Georgie. Mother laughed and took my hand.

CHARITY

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future. A thought that she was not dependent. The City, which generated its own noise and change, would not give her this. This thought. She must give it herself. Slowly, if need be. Did she think? Her feet weren’t so sure.

The pretzel man was standing between the push handles of his silver bin with its umbrella. He spoke to her and she smiled. The gap of some brief charge in herself she had no clear feeling for was the shape of a toasty, salt-roughened pretzel. But who would knead her lower back and rub her head where two aches kept their distance from each other unrolling straight ahead like motions? Funny, really funny, this emptiness or gap between the two pains would not change direction if she did, but had its own way and, like her other life that she would not want to live, would go on downtown without her—that is, if she and her upper and lower back pains turned west into Thirty-fourth Street as she almost always did.

So instead, feeling a smile in her cheeks and her teeth pinning gently her lower lip, her tongue at the corner, she kept on and heard the pretzel man say behind her, "No hungry today."

Couldn’t anyone read her thought? Her face could be pretty, but, she thought, pretty dumb, no secret. But whatever this year’s tax form said, whatever she read in the face that she was going home to now whether or not he was home in person, she was not dependent. Here she was on Park Avenue going home, a New Yorker, a person moving down these bricks of a beige sidewalk. People talked to each other on their way to the subway;
she
worked ten blocks from her
home.

She was being leaned on, she didn’t look up above to her left at what her downward slope was taking her past; it would stop in a moment—the new office high-rise. Now here came a black man in a beige suit, and as he passed her he smiled, and she looked away from his neat nose to the green-and-brown handkerchief puffed out of his breast pocket. It matched the wide green-and-brown tie tied in a large, loose knot.

But she was supposed to be in a hurry, and she wasn’t getting anywhere. Her body had a name which made it foreign and unknown to all the things on her way that had not been told it. The traffic got louder when she tried to think. Would she buy a bottle of wine? The store with "House" in its name diagonally across the two-way pull of the avenue was not the store she had had in mind. She was relieved to be alone. She didn’t exist. Yet she had heard her name, heard it called through the now-turned-up glare of rush-hour engine fumes. So she’d looked back, back up the slope of this block, feeling its slope. She’d halted, awkward, to turn and see a bald man run across in front of a cab to make the curb on this side to reach a girl in a long, fine, brown poplin trenchcoat whom he hugged and patted on the small of her back so her behind was visible below and he curved his hand slowly down over her behind and the girl let go the handle of her shopping bag with a stick of French bread leaning out of the top and the bag dropped to the pavement and stood and then fell over. And the man’s harsh, husky voice seemed to say, "Hi," while he pressed his nose and teeth into her hair, and it was the voice even in all this grind of day that had called, "Norma," and though she wasn’t sure and was looking at the girl whose face was hidden because they might share this name Norma that she’d never "felt," she turned away as two oranges rolled out of the girl’s bag. The man smelled of shoes, slightly burnt food, acrid cloth—and celery, didn’t he?—he might have been under her nose.

Blocks ago she had passed a long skirt in a window on Third Avenue, and she wanted it; but she could not reach for the door handle, she could not get herself to go in and try on the skirt, no price tag, and she had to wash her hair so it would dry in time.

An orange rolled past her, and sidestepping it was a model in denim shirt and khaki culottes who threatened not to see Norma or the orange—what
did
she see? Whatever the model saw up ahead in the direction of the pretzel man, in the direction Norma had come from, seemed to help her see nothing; the girl was round-shouldered, it looked good on her, maybe it was not that she was tall, taller than she wanted to be, but that it was late in the day, and the forward curve of the thin shoulders looked so good Norma felt a palm brush back and forth across her own front, her own palm or Gordon’s palm that had once done it and stopped for some reason though not he but the rich boy in school in the desk next to hers called nipples clam tails. The model swung by with a little smile on her wide mouth, her touched-up eye shadow very dark, her portfolio skimming the sidewalk, she was operating moment to moment and didn’t have to think if she was going in a straight line to wherever she was going. Two men with newspapers under their arms parted to let the orange run between them, but a Puerto Rican delivery boy from Norma’s supermarket on Third Avenue went down for it and underhanded it to his friend who got it in one hand and with the other bowled it uphill right at Norma, who turned to see the man beyond her who was kissing the girl stop to bend down and snatch the orange just before it would have rolled into the bag alongside the bread. Then he righted the bag, dropping the orange in, and Norma passed the two men with their papers and then passed two older women in tiny hats and red wool coats who held, each of them, a folded evening paper, and the Puerto Rican boys broke off what they were saying and the one Norma knew nodded fast and said Hi, and his eyes dropped, she thought, to her mouth, where she was forced to recall lines deeper and longer than dimples.

Going down this downhill block was so slow, what was reversed? One night she had found fresh bricks under her sandals and the bricks tilted, so the ground had moved while the construction men with helmets and king-tall cans of beer were laying them, laying these cheap, brittle-looking surface bricks in ignorance of the vanished armory with its Palazzo Vecchio tower. Now the bricks were smooth. She thought she didn’t like going downhill. She rode a bicycle in the country. Was it the steep curve uphill after the low gradual run down from her parents’ cottage? She was thirty-five with a family, what was she doing riding a bike at her parents’ cottage? If she were going uphill past the new office high-rise and not downhill, she would still be ignored by everyone, but she wouldn’t stick out.

A person of consequence—the words were on the tongue—she sought them but they didn’t come. They were going home, and she had one for each, a word for each person, they were going home, and she wasn’t—or this was what she felt. Because she lived here in the middle of Manhattan and they lived in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, many of them, if they were truly going home. She didn’t have fat that shook; it wasn’t as if it was blubber, though she called it that to Gordon and the girls, and was glad the top half didn’t not belong to the bottom half like the woman who’d come into the office in pants today. She would have worn a beautiful dress, full and un-gathered. No, she stuck out because she was trying to think, and she had a headache in her lower back and a backache in her head, with nothing in between except a puffiness in her stomach as if she’d eaten salami—or, no, nothing in between the head and the lower back but this thought that should make her better, the thought that she was not dependent.

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future, but not like the thought of a son, the event never to come. Instead, it was the future, which meant that it itself was what it was coming from. The Neighborhood Council—which her peers and others were always saying Oh yes, they thought they’d heard of it—was turning her job into a paying job; she’d done a good job and she had to take the consequences: it was going to be real, and she hadn’t asked for this to happen—which, then, was how good things happened, when, here, she’d been trying to feel a neighborhood up and down these midtown largely business streets around Murray Hill for years. She wanted to say to herself the number of years, it was the age of one daughter Annie, two less than the other daughter Nancy’s, whose periods were the same as her own to the day, so maybe if she could say to herself what her weekly pay would be she could say to herself these other numbers, they were holding her back, the loud voice and calm body of Annie, and the silence and fidgetiness of Nancy were not holding her back.

But putting her feet one then the other down along the new squares and intersecting diagonal areas of brick sidewalk laid to extend the plaza-like pavement around the huge sandstone-colored building that she was escaping to her left, she knew in her back and her hips that the salary she was to deserve was no more why the thought of not being dependent had come to her than the bottle of wine was a sign of it taken home to Gordon—to Gordon’s knowledgeable face and voice.

The high-rise was bigger and bigger, she got down to the next corner. The height of the building broke into depth along this block’s downward slope, and if she looked up, this office tower pivoted eater-cornered, like the insane thought of the architect who doubtless was a man who knew what he was doing, she would see it sliding like an elevator into the ground but driving down before it even further down and away than she felt it now, the Renaissance stronghold it replaced.

National Guard armory. Regiment temporarily unknown. Renaissance Italy.

Where Gordon had taken her to the antiques show and to the cat show and to see Rod Laver play tennis. The Rocket was what Gordon called him, just like the retired hockey player from Montreal, he said. Yet to the antiques show had not Gordon been taken by her? A Frenchwoman that night of the tennis asked haltingly where at that hour her husband could find—what was the name?—razor blades, Norma had translated—and Gordon gripped her arm and said, "Speak to them."

But she didn’t have to now. The armory was gone. The quick grip on her arm, the command to perform—it was like Let’s go to bed, the way he sometimes said it.

But she didn’t have to.

It had come to her, like the new zest of stomach hunger she could live upon. And she didn’t have to give it back. Not at 11:25
P.M.
after the News and Weather with Gordon getting up out of his chair. And not at rush hour going home, other people’s rush hour.

At the corner she saw across the street by a green newsstand three angry people pointing at an invisible monster on the sidewalk. She made herself look left at the base of the new building, for she had known what she would see. A woman in sneakers. This woman was often four, five blocks down from here walking right up the middle of Park Avenue traffic, or up on the island curb yelling to make them not pay attention to her but to the direction they were walking in. She yelled at air, sometimes at Norma. The woman was doing something at the bronze plaque. She was lining the raised letters one by one with lipstick—Seventy-first Regiment. Had Norma ever seen any color in her face. She had stolen the lipstick—no, found; for these women didn’t steal (why did Norma know that?). No color but the warm wash of grime and exposure-tan which smeared up into the woman’s scalp where the thin hair sprouted like new-grown fuzz; but on her legs it was different, it wasn’t this anointing color, it was dirt on white, her bagged stockings looked as if they had once been rolled below the knee; they had fallen around her ankles so that against the dark veins darting through her calves the skin was pallid and sooty. And Norma turned right to look away west across Park into the wild cavern of sun filling the far end of this Manhattan cross-street so that above the Jersey cliffs the Hudson River overflowed into the sky, and she saw a nice-looking boy from her building, late teenager, nice-looking, dark, standing next to a phone booth, she didn’t know his name, he had young, friendly-looking parents.

She had to think. She had to go from here to there. She had to get out of her clothes, the backache made her not fit here, crossing the street; but no one around her saw the backache—she was a gray pants suit, a woman of maybe thirty-five, making her way flat-footed across Park at Thirty-third Street or whatever the street had now become, into the sunset far off above Penn Station and New Jersey, with good news and a new thought. But drawn home so she didn’t have to make the motions herself. But she damn well did have to. And thinking and not thinking what she was going to do tonight that she had never done before in her life. Such a small, real thing but she wanted not to think about it, or only about Consciousness, not the other part that was a rule of the workshops which were held after all in a warm, carpeted room without furniture, and now she felt as unfitting as the cop on horseback (a huge-haunched horse whose haunches were the cop’s too, who) near a hydrant below the drugstore looked calm observing the people going home like a parade. But the people in front—check the two bicyclists cutting through them—could see her puffed tummy, she was thinking. Before I go there I better do something about it. But she had to think, since if she didn’t, the thoughts would find her. She felt Gordon was home, and he might have been home all day after what he had said in the dark. So she didn’t know how she would find him.