Women and Men (218 page)

Will it be here? said Talca. What has it to do with these ... are they people, these initials?—S.R.s up-and-down and across, and O.G., L.S., P.M. (maybe
afternoon?),
and other abbreviations or initials. Who is O.G., who is D.M.? if they go backward, too, it is a whole new ballgame. M.R.M. may be M.
H.
Mayne. And S.R. abuts upon O. at one point.

I don’t know any S.R.O., said Spence. What did they mean by
desde Mena?

Oh Spence, you don’t know Fedora on a bike from Louise with
a pot au feu
on the stove and her father dying. S.R.O. is Standing Room Only.

Talca turned contemptuously toward the aisle to return to his seat and Spence said, And is it the pot you’re waiting for or is Luisa’s Masonic father dead already?

Talca paused a split second and showed his profile, and Spence heard the word
insect
and said, The Cuban who escaped, does Luisa know who’s got the missing kid?

Again Talca paused to show his profile and the turn carried Spence away on the sounds of lyrics he had partly heard while not paying attention; and again, after another call from Luisa to her lover, the words Spence had understood before but now in another voice harder to understand not because of accent or lower register but because of some meaning given to them by the strung-out composer-boyfriend of North’s took a moment all to themselves,
Este opera perdida chilena!
and, looking back once more, Spence caught Talca’s angry eye; and a red-haired, red-bearded man was suddenly standing near the piano, and North at the back of the stage by a black curtain ran his sword back into the scabbard only to haul it out again like doubling its shape and stab the curtain, stab it again, half singing, half saying as he stabbed it yet again and again, "For a ducat, for a ducat, for a ducat, dear ducat, dear ducat, dear ducat," but Spence was through the door into the corridor choking on the word
insect
while hearing fall away from him his own familyless name.

An accelerating sanitation truck ran a light with a racing yellow cab on either side, as Spence and a good-looking woman in a fur coat were about to step off the curb, and the phone started ringing in the booth at t)iis corner and they turned to look and watch. After several rings Spence smiled and slid back the door and picked up. He shrugged and the woman turned away and stepped off the curb. "Drew a blank," he called out through the glass, and she turned to frown and smile with an intensity that seemed to surprise them both.

"He’s supposed to be here," the older woman’s voice said from the foundation office; "he has an appointment."

"Oh my God of
course!"
said Spence expressing cheerful surprise. "He’s meeting an old friend of mine. It’s a small world. It slipped my mind completely. An old
old
friend. Have you tried his apartment?"

"If he’s there he’s not answering," said the woman uncertainly.

"Well, it’s urgent," said Spence, "maybe I can track him down. Thank you so much for the information—oh, and give her my best."

In the pause, during which the woman did not ask who Spence meant, Spence said (and sounded it), "I’m breathless and I don’t have another nickel, my number here is . . ." (he read it off fast as if the dial were an interruption)"—oh
you
don’t need to know that . . ." (he laughed genuinely).

"You don’t want to
speak
to Mrs. Myles?"

Spence said, "It must be not having any more change. I’m saying things, you know what I mean? I mean I’m looking out the glass into the street, and there’s nothing much there and I’m saying things I didn’t really think of so there’s something there by the time you get to it, do you know what I mean? I’m sorry."

The woman said, "Strangely I think I do."

"You’re a pearl," said Spence, laughing excitedly.

The woman laughed back with affection as if it were
her
name instead of the person waiting to see the Chilean economist.

"Who shall I tell her said hello? I have a call on another line."

"Oh, my brother," said Spence, and laughed as if he were surprised. "God I must be in a rush. I mean Jim Mayn."

"Don’t I know your voice?" said the woman. "I don’t know
him."

Spence hung up. Coming back across the street was the fine woman in the fur coat; she looked haggard as she caught Spence’s eye, a dark cut curved down her cheek like a shadowy parallel to her nose and nostril and so dark that the blood looked like it had never been bright. He went out toward her and found himself extending his arms in comfort and she did not shy away at first but stepped over so the wire trash basket was between them, yet smiled at him, but this might be because the phone started ringing somewhere at a compressed distance from the mass of traffic emerging then around them. She looked at him puzzled and leaned on the trash basket and vomited onto her hands.

Spence went and answered the phone and it was the low, resonant voice he had heard before with the definite, almost audible Mexican capability though the voice was not a Mexican’s: "Mayn, is that you?" And in his hesitation, Spence heard, "No! It’s Santee,
hello,
Santee. Dina West knows your twin brother named Spence (joke, eh?). So whatever happened to the technical specialist I was supposed to pick up in New Jersey that Mayn picked up, did you run across him again?"

Spence laughed and asked how Ray Vigil had found him here, though he knew.

"Or should
I
say Spence?" said Vigil. "Because it turns out I knew of you before we first met. So
you
are the Spence I heard about. Listen, I heard Santee knew where the child is."

"What are you doing there, Vigil?"

"Watching the cars go by standing in a pay booth with an empty can of grape soda on the floor and a non-reusable straw coming up out of it. Sounds pretty noisy at your end, too."

"I keep the windows open," said Spence. "Did you know this is an unlisted number?"

"The lady at the foundation gave it to me," said Vigil.

"I don’t know where the Cuban’s child is, and I don’t even know where the mother is," said Spence, and the sick woman watched him hang up the receiver.

It came to them together that they each were coming full circle, if that was ever possible, and she was in a new line of work and interested in life all over again almost, although he had never known her but he could see this was true. How had she known enough to find him? This hardly mattered. He had found her and she found him to be not the person—there on the street outside the foundation—that she had thought, from his intro, and then he told her he had heard of her through Mayn. Which was indirectly why she was in New York now from Minnesota. Hearing about her was, he said, like actually hearing one-time words of hers. What did he mean by "through Mayn"? they both wondered. Listening from the far end of a bar for years, he said. Which bar? More than one: D.C., Houston, Colorado Territory; and, right here, an Argentine joint near a saxophone store. And listening with much better ears than the guy Mayn would sometimes be talking to.

Heard
so
keenly that once Mayn had been heard to say he had
not
heard something—the last of a sentence—of hers—of Pearl Myles’s.

Which one?

Something said to Mayn’s father in a cemetery. How begun? Beginning, said Spence responding happily, that she had been "shocked to hear ..."

When
was
that? she asked.

You were getting out of a pickup truck.

She laughed, then, as if at everything, at having thought him Brad Mayn because he mentioned learning of her presence at the far end of a phone call an hour ago and had known her instinctively when she came out of that old foundation and looked at the sky—a woman strong and inquiring, maybe five feet eleven or six feet, in a red tailored suit and a black cloth coat with collar that looked like a sexy cross between a marmalade angora cat and a fox that had outwitted all but the smartest team of Minnesota hunters (part Indian, part Anglo!), she was funny on the subject of clothes. She kept her coat on in the coffeeshop on the corner across from the mainland-Chinese clothing place— they had a window booth, she and Spence—and she told Spence what, he told her, he half-thought he had already envisioned, the camping trips she had taken near the greatest of inland seas though she had never felt the warmth of a trigger in the crease of her index finger’s second joint, while naturally she had her ups and downs though living more and more practically in the same house out there for thirty years.

Jim’s grandmother got mad as hops at her once, and Pearl felt reduced to a primal mass of jelly, the woman had this firm, Victorian charm and would sit you right down and bring out a tea tray with the biggest cozy in the world stitched with blue patterns and ask you what your pet hates were and whether your people had traveled. But in the middle of all this act of hers she had some painful trouble—maybe it was just all that character she possessed— and she would get short with you. Pearl had said once that she shared the lady’s sorrow for the death of her daughter Sarah, and she didn’t like Pearl’s saying that. Those people kept the lid on their feelings really by seeming to show them but so confidently so elegantly you know that the job didn’t get done. But the morning of that earlier day when they eventually went to the cemetery, Margaret looked like she would kiss Pearl, this relatively unknown teacher from the high school who had come uninvited to the house at a time of crisis and saw a strange light in that hall mirror coming from upstairs but from
within
the mirror too, and suddenly there was Margaret out of the kitchen, and Pearl Myles remembered grease on her fingers and a real leaning of the lady toward her as if to embrace her and kiss her without having met her. Pearl Myles in redecorating her home years later—in fact two years ago— had gotten so confused and fascinated by lighting that she likely had "redone" that entire time of her life, mirror and all (she laughed again). She was in Minneapolis when Margaret got sick and committed suicide some years later.

She knew the family, Spence said. Oh she remembered a low-pressure zone in her orange juice now that he mentioned it—("it?" murmured Spence)—that day of the cemetery.

Not the funeral, said Spence.

No, it was when the younger boy had a fit of grief. And Pearl Myles heard from a local lady who had it from the father that the boys were having a crisis at home that morning and when she got there and stood by that mirror the grandmother Margaret came out with grease on her fingers and like to have kissed Pearl, the teacher, and then didn’t kiss her. Was Spence close to Jim?—but hadn’t he said he was his—? —no, she was fuddled by the city the last twenty-four hours but maybe by why she had come here, which could have been business but wasn’t, for she had not found what she needed for her home in New York
or
Minneapolis and so she had done the next best thing, which—she laughed—and so did Spence, funnily enough—which must sound like . . .

She paused, and Spence, delightedly, said, Words, words, words!

Oh, you are a scholar, Pearl sighed ludicrously and then lifted her cup for the "Greek devil" in the white shirt and black pants to raise his eyebrows and nod to both of them.

As a matter of fact, no. Spence knew where his bread was buttered but was no scholar though if he had it to do over again he would—but
did
Pearl Myles know that New Jersey family well enough to know . . .

Well, she had dreamt of that mirror and then put in a phone call to
Mel
Mayn the following morning, but . . . "know"
what?

If there were other . . . surviving children, Spence said.

She had to wait a second and look at him . . . someone had been
with
Spence on that phone call, and that person knew
her,
she had thought: but
he
knew her, through Jim—but who knew that she had had an appointment?— or was she imagining that? What was it, in some fatigue she did not actually experience that was in her, that screened what she was picking up? Spence knew time, and it was wonderfully slow, here. Slow enough for him to stare in a friendly way at this quite young woman of about sixty and trace a day that began in a pay booth near Mayn’s home calling the Chilean economist at his, turned away to Turnstein & Wing’s where there was no Wing, sloped upward to the office rejected by Jimmy Banks where Dina West had tried to give a little hell over the phone, and wound up variously here, north of Mayn’s but suddenly closer to that New Jersey town with the code name than to the Chinese shop across the street. He told Pearl Myles that he understood time now, and she put the back of her hand on the cold glass of the window and said that now she understood what she had been feeling a moment or two before. And that he had changed jobs, too. He said he wouldn’t say that. But they watched each other and turned, as one, to see an Asiatic woman come out of the Chinese shop, change her mind, and go back in, and they had a quick, quiet laugh about that. Pearl Myles inquired how he knew the Chilean economist and Spence replied that they had a mutual interest in an American company’s actions in Chile.

But it was this family he was into.

Oh yes.

And as to surviving children, he knew of course, didn’t he, that the brother Brad was an illegitimate love-babe by another, but had grown up as Mel’s beloved son; they got along. Spence knew this. But she hadn’t thought about them for years, but something rubs off. Oh yes, said Spence, he himself had been insulted earlier today by a man who—
another
Chilean—

Oh yes, she had heard of him (as if there were only two in New York!).

—who Spence thought had called him an insect though the word might have been "insult" (Spence an "insult"), but we ask for these things, hit our head up against a stone wall in order to get somewhere and find that we thought we were only observing but were much more than that. Pearl knew what he meant and asked him if he had been to the Statue of Liberty but he hadn’t. He asked if she knew Spanish, and she said New York really was like this, with people running into each other and then talking without any actual reason to begin with. Spence thought there was real value in it, he had found a part-Sioux businessman in the Utah desert and they had discussed the commercial possibilities of a nondescript bush only to learn in the course of what turned into a whole night that they were brothers in knowledge if not in blood, that each knew of a woman named Manuel who had healed with the balm of this desert bush’s pod a Salt Lake City Mason who spoke Japanese so synergetically (Pearl smiled and smiled and nodded rapidly) that he had grown to sometimes
look
Japanese though very brief-spoken. And before the night was done, Spence had forgotten both the "bush" business and a legendary pistol that had been his original reason for meeting this part-Sioux-part-Mormon carpenter-businessman Santee. However,
Santee
then found that Spence knew both that the Japanese-speaking Mason had been killed for guessing in his own very medication and recuperation the link between that dry bush and the oil of whales,
and
that the famed botanist with rock-oriented corrugations on his bike wheels, who had been modestly mutilated by a father-son team of saguaro-cactus exploiters very likely responsible as well for the Jap Mason’s death, was loving colleague to an itinerant Chilean zoologist-woman who at the top end of a ladder once cast the famed double Moon, like a destiny, on a handgun that later could not stay in one place and that Santee-Sioux’s grandfather who somewhat earlier had almost certainly carried it across the Plains to the Rockies had always said there was a thing in that pistol strangely hard to find, so precious in
value
as to be, like what the South Africans call "future platinum" or the southern Indians of Argen-Chile "wise silver,"
the
true
unit
of value.