Women and Men (197 page)

He pulled away up the trough of the tunnel exit and woke his passenger with thanks in his humorous heart for all the lore that had not so much stood
in
their way from Windrow to New York as
been
it. He asked the gaunt, weathered man if on this professional occasion the contract was not just the graves in Windrow but the driver-host coincidentally met; and the man assured him that O.K. the universe ran on cause-effect but, through some frame of curve he didn’t really understand, it held to a convergence law that he grasped no better than he grasped his Trace-Windowhood, the margin was always turning us to it like a perfectly serviceable center.

"You haven’t foreseen everything that’s going to happen now, have you?" said the man with respectful intimacy as he reached back for his pack.

"I keep getting hit on the cheekbone," said Mayn. "I’ve got to do something about it."

The hitch-hiker told him a phone number. Mayn said he thought he knew it; the hitch-hiker smiled: "Live long enough," he said, and Mayn feared for his daughter while haunted by unknown pages written by her for his eyes, waiting for him when he got home he felt sure, promising him some responsibility he had missed somewhere.

It caught him under the eye before he could pull away bang on the cheekbone, and the imprint rang right into next week and the days ahead, until he thought others had always been able to hear this sound in his body. This sound in your body like thought control, though whose thought? For one day waking up in an apartment you hadn’t lived in in years, the thing that was going to hit you came like a day dreamt memory. Her hand. Your cheekbone.

But wait. The hand that struck didn’t touch the cheekbone.

The microphone came in between and had no business being in that place.

Men and women cops in and out of uniform have been coming and going in the official hallway, a broad-shouldered blonde in jeans sitting on a desk so she’s distinct in every way from the black women laughing at their typewriters, smoking on the phone. Efrain, whose absence from his sister’s when Mayn phoned seemed filled by the address of the stationhouse the sister was willing to give Mayn, isn’t here either. Mayn’s met one of the detectives at a law-school dinner he got invited to by a tennis partner and later Mayn gave the detective two tickets to a hockey game, no a basketball game, no reason to expect to run into him here tonight, which both of them take for granted, the man with a beard now, classier glasses, the same measured manner of a much bigger man than he physically is, lighting a pipe and talking to no one.

Then the woman, Puerto Rican, no, Cuban, rushes in from the street and all the cops and the two women cops, the blonde and a Hispanic who’s in uniform, seem stopped and you feel the width of the hall, the check-in table before you get to the high counter, the width of the place more than its length, and the noise widening as the man with the video unit turns and turns and targets. The woman, the mother of the lost boy, has a young red-haired cop with her, a step behind her, a young, mustachioed, happy-type-of-fellow. And a step behind him and a head shorter comes another Hispanic who’s with her—square-browed, stubble-jawed, slender, tired relative, her brother, brother-in-law, cousin, friend in the night.

So here’s the TV newsman next to you with that nose and skin—Indian? Eskimo?—pushing a mike at her and nobody stopping him, and she’s trying to get through the hallway to the end. To what’s the end on the other side of the glass-paneled door. Blindly you recall your own children climated by the places you used to provide for them, your son the day you lost him on the subway, he was five—you shake hands with the detective, as he comes by, but you don’t mention your son. And here’s the TV newsman—man made of news—pushing a mike at the Cuban woman and her wide eyes are fixed on the far end of this official hallway but jump to this mike with a speed like the speed of—landscape. Which is what flies into mind as a shadow flies at you, at Mayn. But you brought the landscape with you and you didn’t fly, you came by hired car, hardly stopping to phone, and you didn’t go home first, you drove here so it felt like coming past traffic lights and more traffic lights on foot, not flying.

This dark, round-ended thing under her nose is prodding at her.

She opens her mouth to it, the TV reporter is not being stopped, he has cheeks that talk as fast as his dark lips, he’s got on a muscular T-shirt with the date on it, 1977, not today’s exact date but good enough, he’s asking about her kids, does she have other kids at home. The mouth opens wider to cry and Mayn might feel nearer and nearer while not moving, and will she take a bite out of the mike, the eyes in agony. But then she doesn’t care what this thing thrust under her nose can do to her. And before the cop can say, "Let her through," why you get hit.

Bludgeon against the cheekbone, it hits you under the eye, the left.

It’s the mike, not her hand. Her hand was what swiped the mike, swept it to one side because it occupied a position already taken up by her intent. Knocked the mike practically out of the Eskimo, no, Indian newsman’s hand.

But before she could do this you’d leaned to catch her muttered words, and you got jostled, and you asked, "Is he headed for Santiago?"

Got jostled from behind. Which tipped you into the mike’s path. And you were taking up position already occupied by the mike when it slammed your cheekbone. It struck so hard you felt the metal mesh stick in you for an instant as short as the ending of a life—as short as your life. And you remember a phone number, only the numbers a man vouchsafed to you half an hour ago, and the landscape flown in bulges up off its grid so that for the moment of the mother’s frightened, angry words, you know that the bulge was always there and the grid as snug as abstract can be upon the sphere, the sphere, where that landscape lies.

"He ain’t going to come here," the woman said, but in the split-flash before she batted the mike out of the park, her eye knew Mayn.

She is rushed away by the space in front of her toward the glass-paneled area and she doesn’t toss her head at Mayn: but him she was answering, and not the man asking, "Do you know where your husband is? Did you have any advance warning that he would escape? Is he involved in a plot against Castro, is he headed for Florida? Has anyone contacted you about your little boy? When were you told that your daughters were being brought here for safety?" Your hand’s on your cheekbone, a smile on the rest of your face asking Harry—that’s the detective’s name—if a guy name of Ray Spence has been around, looks like a fairly well-dressed drifter, sometimes a fringe jacket, boots, pretty good clothes but he’ll never make it as a person, pony tail and maybe some suspicion of beard. No one like that in evidence here to Harry’s knowledge. What’s Mayn doing here? Couple of cons, one outside, one inside, both knew the Cuban. What’s the chance he’s not anti-Castro at all? Good chance, Harry answers, as if it doesn’t matter. Routine break maybe—but they’re all political nowadays to hear these guys tell it. But when did the kid disappear—before the break, like they said? Light from a ceiling lamp crash-lands onto Harry’s large, muscle-boned face lifted up in fatigue and some not convincing profession of exasperated who-the-hell-knows, and for a reason Mayn wouldn’t claim to know but it seems to be drawn from the man by Mayn, drawn in trust or as if into a fine, irresistible gap of unknown shared experience, Harry takes his light, bright-checked sport jacket off a chair and tells Mayn with the most direct quietness in the midst of the noise that’s out of place at eight in the evening when nothing’s ordinarily happening, "They didn’t give out the news of the break for eight, ten hours; the kid was taken right about the time of the break, it couldn’t have been the father and what would he want with the kid anyway?"

Mayn thanked Harry, and the landscape moved in again, rented or priceless who cared, it was not just arriving, it was on the move, steady, and Mayn knew this as surely as he knew he was on the move, no stopping, and—no sweat—a way’s been found for rest to come between him and the landscape, which is composite anyhow, though American all the way—wide as hell but with that lengthwise aim, and it arrived and could not get round him and was slowed by him. Harry came back and told him the blonde policewoman Mary had had a call for James Mayn a while back, they didn’t take calls for newspapermen, she’d said, but the name lingered. A woman calling, was all she knew.

"You got something for us?" Harry asked, looking like he was leaving.

"Nothing together."

"So shovel it over to me, I’ll take it as is."

"Any clandestine movements of nuclear waste into the Northeast?"

"Sure, sure, I can see it in my mind’s eye," said Harry, and they emerged from the stationhouse under the arc of a football thrown from streetlight to streetlight.

"What’s one more anti-Castro exile?" Mayn said, and the phone number in his head came back with landscape.

"Do you ever hear from an inmate named Foley?"

"George and his economic plan for creativity in the prison of the future."

"He mentioned you in a letter."

"He’s
written
me one or two."

"He mentioned our Cuban fugitive and a visitor he had."

"In a letter to me?"

"Maybe you’re not opening all your mail."

"Maybe I have help."

"You met the visitor in question in Florida, where
some
Cubans are
not
anti-Castro."

"But only seem so," said Mayn. "Foley is a dreamer and a scientist, not political."

"He expressed an opinion about the unconscious of our fugitive after a heated discussion in which they switched opinions several times on the subject of worker control of factories and prisoner control of prisons."

Mayn said he didn’t recall receiving that letter, and Harry laughed. Harry asked him where he was headed, but did not ask for a ride. Mayn pulled away from the curb wondering why he had not looked Harry up, and why, too, he had left the Chilean economist unencountered for so long except through the information received from Amy. Though from Norma, too—about the wife, Clara. He had liked the man, been put off by his knowing Spence, kept him in mind, in reserve—potential.

The city went with him down below the entrance to FDR Drive, which he did not take, down Second Avenue into richer lights of East Side restaurant territory where under sidewalk awning, hard by latest enriched newsstand, fruit-and-vegetable immigrants raise right out of sidewalk plots of blue broccoli and well-priced green grapes, mealy tomatoes and hydroponic watercress plus those spongy basketed ivory-colored squares lurking in water which some future between here and Moon he used to be stuck in is racing against time to create more cheaply, and he had decided not to tell Harry to check his Chilean connections in Manhattan and Washington because Spence had already been advertising rumors into facts.

The mike had been bare, the mesh’s grid still with him, the way it stayed with him in the stationhouse. "Tough mother," the blonde had said, her hair drawn back against her temples by two steel combs. The bruise on Mayn’s face, isn’t there a law saying she had to get equal treatment? Dark warps of hair, tight-slanted down her forehead, made her eyes look closer together. Rican rouge, dark sunsets. Behind the gleaming lips of her mouth, white teeth, gaps of silver; gold, too, from eating the surplus carrots from your old wives’ tale that carrots give you gold teeth (even if you didn’t want them). Her kids were on the other side of a milk-glass-paneled door at the end of that muddled hallway. Who knows what she sees? Them dead, sprawled. Left arm, right leg, put back together the wrong way, like a lake of sand, a mountain of fluid, a household inadvertently launched by Congress. She lives half her life for others. Which half is surplus and to whom does her value belong, maybe her husband, two or three times visited by the Chilean economist, whom Spence, as if inspired by Mayn’s absences, will draw further in, until the cultured, austere, somewhat exiled, somewhat tragic economist won’t be jogging in the park any more.

The woman’s face is seen and not heard. It is with Mayn, as it was before he saw her. The flesh and bones have got fixed inside his own face. The opposite of his own son’s flesh and bones the day they got fixed outside his; it scared Mayn more than a bomb or that deep vapor of a dying man’s breath. The day this boy named Andrew was five. The subway platform between the Brooklyn-bound and Manhattan-bound tracks, the curved white walls of tile inlaid with green and brown and blue tiles for the name of the station, the curve making the tunnel a tube that you—Mayn—once as a child imagined was a tunnel endlessly of these glimmering white tiles like the Holland Tunnel between New York and Holland—the vending machines—for a second your five-year-old son wasn’t there, and then for more than a second. People pushed past to board the train. For the train had come in. He had had some money in his hand, his father looked around for him there on the IRT platform, and then the door began to slide—the two doors in the days when both doors functioned—and the father turned from the mirror of the vending machine— for where was Andy?—and the doors weren’t in motion any more, except in the car where they were fixed. And Andy’s face was on the other side of the streaked glass in another city that seemed the only city moving. Children no hedge against inflation: for look at the figures: a private foundation where the young woman Amy works with the Chilean economist in order to survive in a manner that cannot but allure Larry toward the experience of loving her too much for her to give it back makes public that in one year sixty-eight New York children under sixteen were murdered, and of these thirty-six were under seven, half were black, a third more were Puerto Rican. The Cuban mother’s hedge against inflation is knowing what comes next now. You have your bruise, and she is far away, surging down the hallway through Spanish and English. She knows what comes next. She’s got to get to her kids. To get her kids. They are not overhead in the laboratory of an orbiting kitchen, nor in a tin ashtray beside a Press Pool telephone shouldered to your ear while a known child, who is in the mind before it gets transformed to frequency and wired home to form a report, is sweeping up a mine in the next field before they plant. So his mother searches elsewhere as if she isn’t looking for unexploded devices but just lacks the eyesight to see her son off to one side here, whom she’s really looking for, that is if he’s not under the soil like a coin you run your metal finder over in the dark while the friendly dogs chase each other back and forth between you and others. Stare out the moving window at the landscape that gets flown in from assignment to assignment, and you be fixed. Stare out a window at a steep green and white and brown valleyscape of shacks brightly rising from the edge of a city full of foreign sun. Caracas. Brazil. South.