Women and Men (134 page)

"Prince? Prince? would that be the Nava/0 (not
-choor)
Prince who one night along a river dolloped into his lungs a festoon of glowing cloud above him?, that rarest of radiances a pseudonoctilucent which looks like your true noctilucent cloud fifty and more miles above Earth that in summer twilights in the better latitudes may become visible with the stars—"

—"You’re—what
are
you?" interjected Gordon. "You never—"

"Oh sure," said Mayn, "and that pseudonoctilucent in question was really a late-departed medicine man, old story, got it from my grandmother, passed it on to my daughter Flick who’s an honest half-breed like the rest of us and wouldn’t swallow it and as I recall embroidered upon it—and my estranged son Andrew, who seemed to believe the stuff but always went to sleep."

"—but when you all interrupted me," said Norma, "I wanted to finish that Grace perceived what she says this woman Lincoln didn’t understand: that this is a new
type
of reincarnation, sort of parallel—"

"What egocentric garbage," said Gordon.

"She heard it from someone who heard it from someone else," said Norma looking into Mayn’s face intensely curious.

"It’s more likely than the usual kind of reincarnation," he hears himself saying, thinking he likes these people because they have children; knowing as if he were in Norma’s mind that she’s thinking, "You speak of these others, your daughter and son, but what about your wife?—What is her name? is she a
former
wife?"

—and he gets away with answering Norma in the same way—in his head and here, "I love her more now than ever" (picking her out among the corps of undivorced but separated wives or is she, illegally speaking, divorced yet wttseparated?)—

—wondering if Flick can believe such returning history (Well why didn’t you
do
something about it?) who cares for both her father
and
current history, whichever is obstacle for the other (as Mayn wonders if this kid Larry with his split family and his Obstacle Geometry system he claim him got from
Jim
of all people knows, who goes in for fact not formulas, that’s Jim, and, when not on the job,
scenes
of fact, which make a hell of a family history not to be told easily—the scientist whose baby died while she was at work in her lab
{the
lab); the black model studying to be an actress taking her son to the park and telling him go on and ride that bike if he’s going to learn; these people he instantly knows as other people are known to their locksmiths, supers, former and future girlfriends and boyfriends, and he wonders now, against the presence of Norma’s loving voice still in his head after she and her husband exit at last, who the long-despised man Spence is—
who he is
— aside from a deal about transcontinental trucking here, a deal for information regarding the future of obscure federal-agency handling of the trucking of transcontinental waste, a sequence of surely expensive, unauthorized, and uncredited stills of a multilingually intelligent young chief-of-state who’s cleaned up most of the foreign-run casinos where he lives dealing Russian roulette click by click to a political opponent—how come you got it in for Spence? he never got caught, did he?—a presence, Spence, attentive and sleazy in a bar as far back as Mayga, and as recently and malleably close as some history in his grandfather Alexander’s inner ear or fiction this new friend-son Larry makes into an irritating geometry—
who Spence is,
to have phoned a new friend of Flick’s to ask out of nowhere if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter, her friend, had lived in the very apartment house where Flick’s friend (who’s calling her, having
been
called by this Spence) had been attending a woman’s workshop attended also by (oh gee) a (whew) woman momentarily involved in springing from a New York State prison a supposed anti-Castro nationalist who, it is planned, will find sanctuary in a narrow but lengthy nation run on an economy imported from the shores of a Great Lake of which school of economics much actual knowledge in that Hispanic nationalist inspires not love but its tactical facsimile to cloak his real mission to kill a high officer and abduct a charismatic old Masonic socialist now under house arrest.

It is already too late, a terminally optimistic sometime-interrogee offers, to speak of women and men; for aren’t they at the barricades working out together, watching together (between amplified aerobics) the old organic plume mushroom? So from weekly formula to current form one’s last name turns to ash in the heat of some race to inflate currency by finding the unsplittable seam to make it from?—while Larry’s Modulus will get one from here to there if one wants it to, and the new marriage contracts just out and not to be confused with the earlier, mutual dowers of the very beginning of the decade seem already a thing of the quantum, though some casualties of that Open Marriage cruelly less easy than its Masonic abbreviation O.M. in wanton rooms of rising rent and energy levels devise new home weddings and new faiths painfully reviewed.

Yet no power from the next century’s L5 libration settlements to imagine into life the mid-twentieth (hardly the first to see itself the last) can deny to Jim

who knows at times himself to be in that awful two-to-one population-limited civilization where nothing too much has changed to be honest except the swimming pools where you dive upward into water as well as outward into margins of sufficient wetness, and the wide loads and looseness of structure that from the outset failed to be designed and accommodated into the secure torus whose doughnut shape no more shows itself to our everyday attention than the whole porch of the weatherless sky with its spectrum of sound now only visible in the deep screens we have internalized two to each hopefully stereoid customer-soul, do not bobsled their way through, and marriages account for new peace as being paired
of
pairs, since each partner came out to L5 transmuted from an original
two
half-suspecting the emigration wasn’t only on the up and up but locused of willingness contained by, yet containing too, some thrust of inner wilderness

a lost dream such as Jim’s one rainy night when he woke and exited from bed sweating to open his door and saw his mother in her nightgown of course heading downstairs so slowly she seemed sleepwalking until she turned to look back up at him, her hair across one side of her face and he saw she was "readwalking"—a book in her hand, no common word of "It’s late" in her eyes that seemed protective for a change but he didn’t know of what—and he asked her what it was, and didn’t mean to though the act produced an effect, which was that as she told him he forgot his lost nightmare:
"The Marble Faun,"
she said, "and I’ve almost put my eyes out staying up reading—and what have
you
been up to, my darling?"

He didn’t know, and could only say, "What are you doing?" to which she softly replied as if her heart were in it, turning away and proceeding downstairs, "Just reading." But he remembered going back to bed and later starting up awake convinced he was plunged into a future where people had been at once combined and sent away to settle another world.

Larry didn’t ask Jim to elaborate on that combining of people. Did he know it without asking? He said that a succession of obstacles had been reciprocally substituted for the vision and he advanced his system which Jim passed on to Gordon once in a moment when he could think of nothing to say yet was disagreeably surprised to be able to report Larry’s recently hatched system which Larry we know ascribed to Mayn’s inspiring.

What need had Mayn of formulae? Larry was passing through a difficult time. How could Mayn live in his old, now quietly
owned
apartment. (Owned
secretly.)
Weren’t old scenes moving in and out—oh, the children of his former wife! Each time he felt it coming, he had substitutes? Why was he
in
this apartment? Wasn’t he really someplace else? He was no speculator waiting to jump when they discovered which way gravity was really moving, that is, in general. Mayga took away to her death that alarming willingness not to doubt his delusion that he was in the future specifically traveling to and from a libration settlement between here and the Moon imagining what was else the only
apparently
actual
present
time—

—if you’ll buy
that
—

(—she didn’t have to, she’d been given it: and had she, then, taken it away with her to or from that ledge near Valparaiso bay from which she had vanished into death which was a kind of ignorance?)

—he wouldn’t try it on Larry, lest Larry believe it, too, and now Mayn had to admit delusion in 1977, he had the firm scenes of the many people he had met in crisis, their own minor dangers and opportunities, their awful "we" voice on occasion exploding about him like the one that is the sum of two; and he didn’t need Larry’s Obstacle Geometry formulae to get from one chamber of tensions and human warmth to another, though he would grant Larry’s Modulus a humoring power to get you from one isolated incident to another without undue connection—

What
was
the point we missed about the Moon?—

until the coincidences between what he had witnessed of women and men at home and in the park and in their mutual media coming with such self-containing accuracy from Norma who reported to Jim what Gordon could not listen to of the women’s stories many told to Norma not in Grace’s workshop but in pretty private midnight raps with Grace alone, caused Jim regularly in the world who would always hold the door for a woman but a bit too semi-retired from combat to seem
(he
thought) male supremacist (having been, it seemed to him, caught carrying the membership card of every targeted power minority of the past twenty years—white, male, middle-aged, lapsed agnostic, middle-class routinely-married-then-sleazily-single newsman-oid) to want so much (on a gray day when Red Smith’s column had failed to appear in the sport pages) to tell Mayga his fresh suspicions that he nearly phoned (as he sometimes did at times of sentimental panic, or even horror at his life, or love for her) his quondam wife, but instead found his young friend Larry, Larry in a sad mood, his mother largely unmentioned gone to live "temporarily" with a "chum" (not a word of Larry’s generation but he was able to do that) but not launching a stratosphere of theory as he often did with Jim but complaining about his neighbor that Jim had dimly known of, having seen him, yet understood that the fairly famous singer-man was moving house—yet more notable than Larry’s news of strife in the hallway

between the singer North who was wringing his hands like he was singing a scene and the two in truth
costumed
creatures (male or female, who knew?) whom the older man tried madly to separate (oh shit, they were guys I guess) whom he was fantastically upset about just at the instant when the elevator flung open and this woman Larry didn’t know in a large white fur coat burst out and started bitching Ford North the opera singer (I know who he is, said Mayn) who was wringing his hands like he was on stage and
she
sweeps
him
angrily into his apartment leaving the flower boys to work each other over in the hall at which point they disappeared . . .

was his unsurprised acceptance of
Jim’s
theory so mildly slipped into talk that Jim thought maybe Larry hadn’t understood, except Larry did say with equal gentleness almost inaudibly a thing remarkable enough to show he
had
heard—that these little life stories Jim was hearing through Norma from the Paying World of Grace Kimball, mainly Grace herself, were quite congruent with only the slightest blurring at the borders with scenes
Mayn
knew of, that Mayn joked that he’d decided while playing squash no less, in that white theater-in-the-round of the boxed-in ultimate barrage-escape or court, that this Grace Kimball person and he were some same person perhaps in life right now as an ant community he’d heard was one organism in effect but he and she probably
not
larger than the sum of themselves and since both right now alive to tenant some same articulate structure that accommodates a multiplicity of small-scale units (Larry nodding rapidly recalling the lingo of "your" red-haired economist whom Mayn had listened to in an auditorium press conference) why Mayn conceives (perhaps through Larry) of reincarnation that’s somehow all here and now, with no past (recalling also someone asking him in the midst of a four-way rap what
was
the point we had missed about the Moon).

‘The haunting of America," said casually the younger sage though troubled in a yellow sweater purchased for him by his father, "reincarnation that is simultaneous, the haunting of the world maybe since there is where America came from, all the uglypipedreams tradewinded over here from Europe at the founding that later they pretended they didn’t want back.

Having said the syllables—Simultaneous Reincarnation—Mayn found them generally applicable like a lot of fairly equal units in an articulate structure and—on his way to dinner with his old friend Ted who, full circle, though not looking well, was with AP again though glad not to be packing one of their computerettes to file his stories into, whence at twelve hundred words a minute one of the new high-speeds prints "out" far and wide your likely less than twelve hundred words, hence less than minute waltz—Mayn had no one but his same old self (if entertained) to tell that at the thought plus the thought that Larry’s Modulus was maybe bigger than the both of them and getting Jim now if not to the Century, where Ted kept his dues up because he admired the famed Drew (but-twice-perhaps-a-year-encountered) Middleton even beyond his gifts as a raconteur—getting Jim at least from this alarming Simultaneous Reincarnation with Grace to those more innocent heartfelt ancient times with Mayga barside, when Brad became Jim’s brother by losing half his brotherhood to a scandalous secret, and the wind his poor mother carved, damn her, damn damn damn her, curved by whim of some swerved splinter in the groove of her unwed brain, took him no less
straight
away from home as she had either ordered or predicted—a home so real it got nicknamed secretly by Jim and his grandmother—yes, and Margaret at that moving moment of Brad’s Day became, if temporarily, only his grandmother by losing her credibility as a historian "reporting in" with odds and ends coming terribly maybe true within the old tales, for what
about
that Navajo Prince’s mother coming out of death to life when the son
left
her?—and had he ever returned home? (for we did not absolutely leave him camped by a river ‘neath the threatening protection of that unprecedented cloud), the stories didn’t get finished by Margaret (Jimmy, if not Margaret, cut them off in ‘45), nor by him, Mayn, in later days with his drab and other modern amendments such as trying to figure what the "plant growth"
was
that Margaret once said Marcus Jones thought he had to use (we mean, botanical process) to explain the development of (pistol-related) Mena’s unprecedented moon-white mouth—but losing something of her credibility at the cemetery and on the porch, for she’d said, "My heart"—
my heart
—when
she
would never speak of her
daughter
like that, would she?—she wasn’t tender with her, though with Jim’s aunt in Boston she wasn’t either, yet was she tender with Alexander?—for she had
him, and
she had, to confess the truth,
Jim
(did Indians really say "How"?)—but the porch, the porch, a muddled not quite nice riddle came across those kid stories for a time, for what was Margaret crying about on the porch that night?—’cause
she
didn’t
ever
cry, and hadn’t there often been "a mumbling of the eyes" (as Mena that other night on the desert floor with Marcus translated a fugitive insight of Sequoya’s), a looking unclearly each at each between Jim’s grandmother Margaret and her daughter Sarah?, but you might have thought that that night when Jim secretly observed Margaret and Alexander on the back porch Sarah was still dying, strangling in waters so deep and cold they
preserved
you (also
you,
from ever putting her out of mind, though by the direct route from Windrow or the circuitous, no doubt, inertially sideways-slipping flight route round the world that you must have pretty well taken a few times on business you never stood again on that beach, that sand, from where those older green deeps of water were harder to believe in than a black, icy plummet from the brink of a mountain quarry in the Berkshires)—and not only the night porch but the cemetery: what had
that
meant? He had sometimes made conversation with his father whom he had to admit he felt sheltered by, and while We many of us seldom in later years felt moved to visit Mel, once when with the children Flick and Andrew Jim let his father take them down to the shore while he Jim looked up his Indian classmate backfield rival Ira Lee, who no doubt like other Indians worked at the Fire Department; and once upon a time
asked
the author of that obituary so brief it flirted with the unspeakable, all that amazing grief was Brad’s
own,
so Jim could better fall forward into the obstacle of all space round Windrow leaving that full-blood behind him in that house mingling with time while Jim the other brother who’d been told to go away where he belonged presently did so—well, that is, upon graduation and after helping his half-brother carpenter a high-school Shakespeare set of different levels and a couple of trapdoors, and other formalities such as announcing he would stay clear of the newspaper racket (Wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole? added Alexander and wondered where the expression had come from)—as far as—as far as— oh think of something—as far as your old Navajo Prince from (he joked) . . . but didn’t finish, for his grandmother didn’t appreciate his distaste for what had been a family concern even though her daughter, Jim’s mother, Sarah, would never have scribbled for the paper had Heifetz played in Windrow or Einstein at the ‘39-’40 World’s Fair or had she had a mother who in 1920 would have let her go gallivanting off—