Women and Men (122 page)

—which Jim and we unconsciously fast-track (O.K.) inward, past a not quite totally unloving remark by Sarah that Mel was the only man she could conceive waterproofing his carpet slippers; inward to Dr. Range’s
ex post acto
word that Sarah at the time of her vanishing into our coastal waters hadn’t had anything incapacitating or incurable, just anemia plus periodic blues which he for one (with a gentle shrug) could not track down but did associate somewhat with the fluctuation of her musical activity, for things might take a downturn right after a chamber recital at the church, for instance, but there was—or
had been
—little organically the matter (in those days when antibiotics had not yet priced house calls out of the market)

—inward to little Brad’s dream—no nightmare—of Sarah standing in his room making her
own
dark moonlight waving her pale fingers through the air like the conductor of the Philharmonic in New York and told him she would wait for him till he came back but where she was he could not remember, though she had less burn than tan for once and the black towel draped over her until she swung it off her to reveal grandly, like terribly peeled areas, skin that did not have the beautiful tan, and he wanted to give her some clothes —woke up (for a dream of Sarah would never be long-winded) and went back to sleep but told the dream at breakfast, and started crying, and when Mel said she was in heaven, Jim reached and touched his half-brother’s shoulder: "You thought she was cold and needed her clothes; she’s O.K., Brad, no kidding, she’s O.K."

—so swiftly inward to that time "done" under the porch, inward through the dull clank of a trowel against the upended iron teeth of a dark rake under a front porch (the
dark
side of the porch), and Mel’s unwillingness to say, "for the record," whether his visitor was right that Lincoln was married to an impossible woman; upon which the other voice, which was Bob Yard’s, swiftly and softly observed, "Lost the battle, but won the war," only to hear Mel react with a violently amplified scraping on the porch boards above: "
What
war?" and moments afterward he came after the boy who, just happening to be there in the course of a day, seemed to be eavesdropping upward from underneath

—so swiftly inward through cloud and clear, through moons that stretched from a dismembered Statue of Liberty past reflections in Pennsylvania’s Juniata River where the Navajo Prince camped on his way east, to great plains and basins not even an Eiffel could cantilever out to view beyond, and through dawning hailstorms to the wake of a very large bird, too large to have gotten clean away inward so swiftly through such fact as that when Margaret was in New York a couple months after Sarah embarked upon her ultimately boatless voyage Eukie Yard told Jim a phone call had come to the cemetery inquiring if interment had taken place, and when Eukie, with the receiver up against his ear on that day, four or five days at least after "your mom was drowned," wanted to know who he was talking to, the fellow in New York instead said he knew the mother and had seen the daughter Sarah but once, and when Eukie said the lady had drowned off the Jersey shore and they had not recovered her so of course there hadn’t been no interment, the loud voice at the far end of the phone line said, Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, and hung up "‘z if he’d told me something I didn’t know"

—inward swiftly and (like orbits th’t git smaller but faster) with a speed capable of accommodating inversely a multiplicity of small-scale units kept in mind by the wind whose convenient passive/cheap fuel though we don’t actually see it we’re glad to use as a means to an end though bypassing the question that—as he lived his own life in years to come—Jim couldn’t have cared less about namely our need of him, his largely unacknowledged use of us to whom he has certainly been a good and loyal part, like Grace Kimball but also countless others who’ll always be less here than she, whether in that multiple dwelling in New York or moved-out—

—inward in short so fast Jim conks out cum schlafing off the d’effects of a (neither war nor battle) heartfelt marriage that he abandoned (since institutions can take rejection easier than folk—or federal agencies) to leave us, actually in his vicinity, within the controlled weather of the tapeworm track which sans loop takes We to pauses where we have always been before: to hear a woman help a man hear what he heard before but didn’t know; to have a woman being helped recall love by hearing but despite hearing her lover joke about having shared freely her labor, her agony, her joy (almost for free); to hear a wife with the education of a specialist guess or mind-read what happened at a distance to her husband for whatever it was worth; to listen while two women, one still very young though, paired, of convergent ages, review men as if it’s all for one and talk so intimately in a large window as to transcend the chances of female friendship as if some male Fate sets us back three decades to early post-War rent control before vacancy became by law the lode the landlord waited patiently to strike, while the tapeworm track literally lets us hear a fashionable physician originally from Boston now secretly in therapy remind his famous childless patient (who varies her delightful English foreignly and with elan) that "using" a tapeworm to effect dramatic weight loss might shift the . . . onus, and be a form of avoidance—through which no doubt she would
learn,
but . . . but learn what? she asks in sync exactly with her medic’s same thought sensing the tapeworm track still there a semi-permanent trail or scar through the very thought of American peanut butter, while she half-knows she doesn’t need to lose weight no matter what a friend of an acquaintance has done to herself through some old or new regime, there’s so many ways by 1977 that if you don’t feel
you’re
in the worming tape tunnel ‘stead of
it
in
you,
you got to feel that it opens outward like a lip growing and rolling from every moist glim of its circum, and you are it and might’s well look back down the narrowing wind-tunnel as when you could—we all could—indulge in the uncontrolled controllability of nostalgia’s splicing and slimming of events to recombine or reconstitute them, as in "constitution" at some later libration point which Jim, addressing gentle Mayga in a Washington bar early in the 1960s describes as a balance point of pulls, hence a good spot to settle down or out ‘tween Earth and her-or-its primary Moon, that is for an in-space settlement, so they contemplate each other with affection giving diplomatic recognition to that great area of gap between their socially stooled thighs, which is a gap of experience, if we will but let it in: and the diva Luisa years later finds in her a track left by some grace of the divine, like experience to be traveled, again if she will, and again she can’t tell her loving physician of hands upon her thigh (two hands belonging to the same person) or of how she let herself learn to love him even in the dark of night in her duplex balconied kitchen for hearing her lover’s bare foot near the threshold, she had resumed her phone recital in the
English
in case he may not know that the poetry’s Neruda but at least prior to her covering explanation when she hangs up (which his surveillance has decided her against lest it seem guilty), he can kiss her skin, on his knees on the linoleum, one of those thigh listeners but listening with his lips for any clue from the subtle anatomy of her experience—a clue to whoo shee’s talkin’ to—at a moment when, for very love as well as ultimate hygiene, she considers flushing him out of her "life" and off the planet as simply as some gently acting bacteria suggested by your family G.P. much less our intrahemispheric tapeworm and teach the ecstasy of middle-class hunger excruciatingly prolonged for a future of weight loss and healing—until Luisa, hearing from Clara how surprising and warm(yes)-hearted are the Kimball workshops, Luisa now beyond danger which is fear abruptly concludes "Momo, it’s late" into the phone to her friend Clara, who, knowing whose nickname "Momo" is, intuits by the magic of near-disaster who Luisa’s with ("Momo" being Ford North, basso profundo and gourmand silly genius with stammer in his wings), "Momo, for the last time please I would love to oblige you but—" (she has to pause to hear Clara’s own real conclusion as if Clara on her own imagines Luisa’s lover padding back to the bedroom extension phone to hear no basso but the voice of the well-known Allende economist’s wife)—"Momo, that warehouse isn’t the—" (she breaks off as if Momo at the other end has interrupted her)—"isn’t the place for either of us, and I am no Bernhardt and anyway she wouldn’t have doubled as Horatio, and there has never been a good
Hamlet
opera or we would have heard of it (I don’t care if there have been
two
dozen), the only chance was Verdi and he abandoned—"

—but Clara is talking some more and telling her
she
could use a Kimball workshop but where
are
her loyalties and who is she planning to get herself killed
by
or risking her neck
for

(how’s the weather down there? we hear ourselves ask, having long since given up the idea we’re single)—

—and Clara’s not so friendly now and hangs up on that name again, that man’s name again with Luisa speaking it stupidly into the receiver (why? why?—so her lover can hear the name?)—

—oh we said it close to her neck, her thigh, her volcanic eyes, though to our erstwhile Interrogator, who knew it at once—the name Mayn . . .

—while the diva, alone with her great self and her undeniable lover kneeling on maroon and white diamonds of linoleum that are black and white in the dark (ready naked for any type of attention) knows she never thought seriously of killing this man: how was it done? (Yet,
easily,
she sees!) She’s hurt by how Clara rang off. But it’s her own fault for phoning like this with this one lover, but a man who may have done nothing but pass through naval school. To murder him now—that asks too much of him! The soul goes elsewhere, the body stays. She would like him here with what she cannot swallow left out. But that is asking so much of him that he will have to die, but how has she gone this far, to fuck with a man who whatever he is in that regime knows too well what’s happened with her father—responsible as she for her career—

"I
came in here, I couldn’t sleep, and—" she’s explaining too much . . .

"I was thinking of Momo and this
Hamlet
musical, opera, whatever it is and like mind reading the phone goes and I caught it in mid-ring so you wouldn’t wake up—"

And as she moves reluctantly her thigh from his lips thinking she better get to the John—but wondering then what she would destroy him
with
—pour bleach down his ear, his nose—all one—the thought whets her for a simple kiss in bed. She hears him rise from the linoleum, asking if Momo sings any
Spanish
roles: to which she answers swiftly, too swiftly, that the city is bilingual: everyone knows some Spanish even if Ford North never rides the subway in his double-breasted camel’s-hair and his basso’s bowler—it’s more than she can handle—yet she
will
handle it and whether she kills him curtained behind a shower bath of blood or swallows him with a brand-new tapeworm, she cannot but be ready when, behind her, he wonders why that basso is getting Neruda from her in the middle of the night in English
and
Spanish when she said he only called to persuade her to participate in his degenerate send-up of a great though decadent work of Shakespeare: to which she rises in angry acceleration, turns upon the naked person who she can’t help knowing is about to love her even more:
"Neruda
was why—why I cannot get mixed up in that claptrap
Hamlet,
whatever it is—Neruda, ‘the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines’ "—" ‘petrels,’ " her bilingual companion continues, " ‘petrels and eagles,’ " comes back his voice equally in English, while—" ‘meadows and foam,’ " she says, and ". . . Tu me pre-guntas donde estoy?’ " (remembering the lines
Clara
has given her) and her naval officer with relentless complexity or culture replies, " ‘Te contare’— ‘I will tell you,’ ‘ but stops short of the next line he has heard Luisa quote to the friend she phoned—which is: "giving only
(solo detalles)
information useful to the authorities"—stops short, and she wouldn’t know why except maybe he’d rather not give away any threats; so many people she never met and never had to since she’s who she is, a dutiful daughter only in anxiety, in mind—while, fixed as he is, her dead or alive father (no longer with the telephone he so used, the many rooms of people he sat and talked with through the everlasting political moment,
les urgences
an ambulance entry sign reads upon a dark building near the Seine) would still have paper to type with, though type what?, a man in history no less arrested in a house she has never seen—

—but she can’t control her thought which goes to the man who was sitting right there in one of Clara’s orchestra seats—

—and left her (though he stayed at "home")
before
she left
him,
which matters only if she turns toward it, which she will do if she turns back to her lover; yet doing so now means only the male bone and blood he turns into, over her shoulder, and more important is get to the John, save a friendship, find out why Clara feels her husband is in curious peril apart from his allegiance or his voice (though in his businesslike scholarly way he never was a speaker, a sound, like her father), as if his antagonists were making up their collective mind whether he knew about a certain thing or not, besides all the other things he knows; and she hears her now treasured friend Clara with her unfailing large dark blue eyes, wide pale mouth, deep heart waiting out all the trouble of grown children in danger beyond precise reach, husband in danger, nation beyond reach, a West Side apartment where she won’t let herself miss her interhemispherically abandoned belongings (while he with silent humor jogs thrice around the neighborhood)—an apartment where she and he still move each other—hears, Luisa hears, her treasured friend laugh and tell what these women in the workshop, these American women
say
to each other such as that wars and houses are made by men and understood by women. The women expecting Luisa’s life story. Free with the cost of the workshop. Complete with revelations as if the women there were from the newspapers. Turning the corner into her bedroom she wants a boy, a little son against her, and on the current of her own feet on the carpet can hear him in pyjamas someplace and can hear him, hear the fridge—watchfully watch him take his chances, just her and him, and the name on which Clara rang off abruptly comes back, with nothing now in front of Luisa and with a man behind: to whom she turns but not to him, he isn’t there, or she’s lookin’ through him in the dark; and by the way she looks good, too, and when the check came at her Mexican restaurant her fascist escort stared down at the total and murmured, "Una jovena al izquierda de mi y on your starboard quarter has been contemplating you for the last half hour"—aficionada doubtless; alone and small, with a box of foreign cigarettes beside her glass, big thin gold circles hanging down out of her hair on either side, no rings on her hands—who seemed to have eaten alone often.