Women and Men (76 page)

Well, Grace strides away, turns and blows (like speech) a kiss, strides on and rounds the corner of the building. She never would have asked "how it
went"
because she knew last night, when Larry’s mother’s new housemate in Long Island who met Sue
through
Grace talked to her on the phone, that Sue, who’s anti-therapy, was upset and was all set to meet Larry outside that shrink’s building when Larry arrived at one or thereabouts for his appointment with Martha
{Martha, Martha),
who through Grace’s funny bone and the two screens of one channel and the gray, blank hermit-screen which in the first storefront the funny bone’s screen turned half-toward in some angular reflection before being rechanneled by hand to violence in another hemisphere yet revealed in the next storefront to be colored matter became a person so familiar Larry felt encouraged to drop therapy. But O.K.
let
Marv his real father pay thirty inflated dollars (invested in ‘77 think what they’ll be worth in five man-years) for the inspiration of a detour round an appointed space of time—Larry damn well earned it. And as the doorman inside the large glass door’s wind-pocketed differential gravity turns away to seem to call to someone somewhere deep within the lobby as Larry therefore himself shoves open the door and draws his Raleigh swiftly through, missing the returning door with his rear wheel by a whisker, he is bound upstairs to work out the details of this Obstacle Geometry he has arrived at—by Obstacle Geometry itself. And hoping to be for a time not thought of by others, he can gladly quote his mother Sue quoting her own dear Grace voicing doubtless some farther sage: "To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it"—so the thirty bucks is nothing!—hold on to that, Lar’, hold on to it, fella, for aren’t sometimes
people
the matter, people not letting a day alone, fucking up a sunny bike ride that might as well be spring, as Marv and Sue once distantly sang off key from their closed (from the closed geometry of their) bedroom in the good old days.

He’s already there, although the broad, large-eyed female face like a dream come round again that comes toward him at the elevator only waits for him to come to (more’n halfway to)
it,
if not to woo, and he addresses her smoothly by the name of his mother’s consort Evelyn and walks his bike along the lobby’s tiles telling her not to hold the elevator, he has to check the mail, being as cool as he dares, till she, his mother’s live-in friend in the ol’ fambley man-shun in Port Adams, tells him glowingly that he missed Grace on TV, and thence Lar’ sees that athletic Evelyn is getting
out
of elevator, not in, and knowing Evelyn’s been in Grace’s apartment if not his, and conceiving how many many new walks of life taken by such ladies as Sue converge in reverse upon Grace (the genius of that place you are coming from) he abruptly asks, "Is my mother upstairs?"—meaning in
Lar’s
and
Marv’s
place (dere all-purpose batch-pad)—and then, ignoring the mailroom beyond the elevator, he angles his bicycle in past Ev’s arm pressing the button, who smilingly with the richest, generousest smile, tanned mouth, tanned gums, tanned tennis forehead, allows as how she thought Sue was downtown purchasing theater tickets but a shadow passes into the health of her face, no doubt Lar’s ambiguous karma that redounds to him in solar plexus as he arranges his wheels comfortably in the elevator car hearing her say inanely, "You look great, Larry" (to which he mutters, "I’m changing my life"); and thinking he can’t be absolutely sure she has like married his mother and murdered him or his father, he mutters, "Go to hell," as the door slides shut and Evelyn’s "Add-in" voice is heard outside and then below him at about blowjob level saying, "Say that again?" but ye lift can’t be anchored or reopened—he’s off—and all he knows is that, mother, non-mother, or no mother, there is a massive body that draws him independently two-headed and agreeably monstrous at high noon to the laboratory of his thought lensing it toward new conclusion if he can only for a while Be Not Thought
Of
and by the time the car stops at his floor have his real, if potential, privacy for this Obstacle Geometry— which posits that bending around the massive object yields the object itself. Yet something’s wrong, he’s overearned his father’s thirty bucks.

The city’s dormant ground plan stirred and now, even if it’s moving in its massive, historic
sleep,
it has raised him up floor by layer through Mayn’s hermit’s ingot eye:
there
lives his grandmother and Larry-son’s Sue-mom where no one can reach them, not even the Mayn quasar idling on quite interestingly about his detour from Albuquerque following Ship Rock but prior to New York, no one’s going to reach them not even the Apache ladders which aren’t exactly eloping with those ancient Anasazi cliff dwellers but have become distracted not by canyon dogs barking but by the seeds of a two-hundred-year-old bush whose triglyceride oil eased in-depth Indian tumors and childbirth and may before the end of the present "in-question century" yield such many uses (lubricant additive, transformer oil, protein feed supplement, acne clarifier, sedative chung gum) that this desert plant may supplant the sperm oil of the great wet whale grazing like buffalo the endangered deeps.

which leaves—oh wow!—Larry in the instant before the elevator car attains his motherless floor, free to formulate, doubtless
prior
to Obstacle Geometry yet secretly embracing it perhaps, Margaret and Sue’s eastward kinship by way of his painful, painful, oh god isn’t there another word?, painful strength to
see
his strength, to know Sue wouldn’t have left—would she?—
did
she?
did
she leave?—unless she knew him to be grown and moderately safe in himself; and so, because the elevator divides quasar-slow the space twain him and his floor as if some kids had pressured all the buttons, Lar’ have the rest of his life to reflect, which is longer in absolute terms than Marv—and so concludes:

if she was why I moved here into the City, then am I why she’s out there? am 1 why she left? did I a free man give her the spur to wing it?

And thinking that it was he who left, Larry yielded the floor to Obstacle Geometry, yet flash instanter Amy’s work phone; then with his floor still unachieved he thanks God for Mayn whose grandmother and the East Far Eastern Princess have drawn him parallel to Mayn, and to what’s lowering now toward him (and his patient bike), the threshold matrix of a unified O.G. theory that will comprehend how motion toward (obstacle) is motion around (it) but first how one obstacle gets dreamed up in order to lead to another, yield upon yield: where "People R Matter" is a reciprocal for "People Matter": and since Redreaming a Way that two screens can be viewed at once has already become identified or paralleled to Descrambling, it must also (in its fulsome bending) be parallel to O.G.; but the work for this afternoon is the thing whereon he’ll latch his real self-home; and yet we, while honoring Lar’s prodigal wish (to be for a while Not Thought About), cannot go along with his Jeffersonian creed that the inventor develops his idea himself in the Open Market (O.M.) system: rather, we hold that the reality of American profit is such that to implement such idea we need our incorporated articulate structure capable (as we have been sworn) of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units—you can’t go it alone—and
"cant"
equals "mustn’t"—in other word,
don’t
—and instanter flashes inside us (but
outside Lar’
so he can about see it) a sharp green-water stretch or stripe made by a sandbar so that the surrounding sea becomes more blue—a vacation insight but slightly sad like the leaning of someone else’s long-time thought toward your own.

Until, at the moment that his floor arrives and Lar’ knows Mayn on a floor just passed won’t be home at this hour and, conceiving parallel impacts of Mayn and Grace on his life as a son, he knows or has heard those two lines of Mayn and Grace may converge all they want and still not
necessarily
meet, Larry hears music the new super rigged somewhere in the ceiling of the elevator for his grand opening as if Jefferson with his interest in enslaved women and pursuit of happiness had invented the elevator while playing on his violin, so our thought may turn to aria set to the catchy beat Lar’ only
now
is aware of as its absence filled like the ultimate
empty
obstacle instantly with a warmly rapid-fire Spanish-speaking voice machine-gunning a commercial which Lar’s brain pick up the musical flow (‘n that’s an order): and what’s the difference
what
phone Mayn’s at, if any?—he’s Mayn twenty-five hours a day.

But stepping onto his own floor and willing to be Not Thought Of for the time being, Lar’ looks down the astringent-smelling gleam of the hall past one apartment door with a brown airedale-bristly Welcome mat and further on across from it a second door with a
New York Times
in front of it and has to step back into the elevator and press Mayn’s floor, and upon being there he looks out to Mayn’s place at the end and there’s an envelope showing under the door.

Then back up on his own floor Lar’ looks to his right "close to home" at his own apartment door close to the elevator; and he is then so between histories (his parents’ and Mayn’s and Amy’s and others’—and his own— between his
own
history) that, unknowing, he passes himself and his bike through, into his and his father’s apartment and vanishes past his threshold unto himself like any practiced apartment dweller (even if with the slightest fore-flicker not coming
to
him but darting
from
him to find evolutionary evidences of his mother here in this free space where history is the story of
libertad,
but whose?)

Until, turning (his head) upon the axis of his bike he finds an envelope just inside the door with a diagonal postmark on it and, watching it, as he carefully props his bike, he isn’t angry at all and visualizes the handwriting inside the envelope and the handwriting outside on the other side, and reaching for it he identifies the postmark as his own bike-tire tread and, turning the envelope, he sees only his name, "Larry," in block caps, and feels inside the envelope a stiff oblong the size of a ticket and a slight complicand of paper doubtless doubled about the ticket, and he puts the past behind him and, with the envelope from Jim Mayn in hand, disappears once again.

We knew perfectly well that curiosity isn’t caring, and who’s home and who isn’t matters less than Shakespearean syllables rolling and trembling from the basso rotondo’s unmistakable voice not so far away accompanied by absent-minded music: or so it seems to us as a body and suddenly unplugs our ear to the unrhythm’d height of (is it?) "to your/ather (father father), But-you
must
know (you-must know, know-know) your father lost a feather (father father) and that father lost, lost his, and the survivor (the survivor)
BOUND
—" the title escapes because a door down the hall has opened the music to us at the instant the singer lapsed out of the words into the horn of his great cavity’s plenteous colorabuffa; and a young male spark backs out of that doorway hauling one end of what appears to be a loveseat but getting longer and longer, laughing and jibbering to someone who has the other end apparently not the pianist or the singer unless the singer served as his own pianist? Is anyway deeper back in the apartment since he has not cast off from the words and is tuning up, hence not moving furniture until now he breaks off his wordless melody to holler, "Roslein, dumb ducat, stubborn boy,
you
can’t get that thing through there like that"—for, be it exile or home-going, the choice ‘tween Wittenberg and L.A., Elsinore and Off-Broadway, isn’t easy; but has the basso rotondo given his power to be used by a very young man who bosses him? and who is called by him Roslein after the Schubert song if these details mesh.

And as through the peephole of Larry’s front door (which Lar’ himself is not the type to tiptoe to if he hears action in the hall especially now, when he would not see too well!) we see young Roslein amid laughter and many-tongued abuse stop backing and move forward now, ushering the both wise and unsuspecting loveseat (or what we have seen of it) back where it just came from—

Is it angels of sympathy in us or our community’s own mere power of relation that questions what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

And is the mere question here a power? For hearing Larry feel, it’s like
us
he feels, as if he could just up and leave his father’s house and live outside in the community he has heard peacefully at work inside him, witnessing meanwhile the aria tidbit (God it’s
Hamlet,
sort of!) sung by that large, unseen singer who does not know the man named Mayn (Lar’s new friend) who recently moved back into this building, bringing knowledge of sky-high windmills on electronic Wyoming pylons or of whirlwind-induced sickness brought on among the Navajo that only the singer with his ceremonial chemistry may cure, but was only half sure one morning in the apartment-house mailroom off the lobby (one man coming, the other going) that the bronzed bust-of-a-man beside him trying with a stammerer’s persistence to trick his relocktant(!) postbox open was the priest in that opera the other night—but he
was
(and a quick check of house-phone list, yah yah, that’s the man all right) the one in the first act draped in a robe-thing out there on the stage telling the assembled sacred and military arms that the great gong (well, Jim conceded to Lar’ he’s not much on opera, y’know) marks the rising of the moon and so his daughter, the star priestess, will come—to cut the missiletoe(!) Mayn’s young companion of the evening Amy had pointed out: while here in the apartment-house mail-room, Oroveso, the priest (right?) was decked out for the day like a native tycoon on his way to work, a portly ship-of-a-man in double-breasted camel’s-hair overcoat and wide-brimmed brown fedora (Lar’s seen him) plus to Mayn’s mind a corn-pollen sort of glaze upon his tan that (well Larry has gone back to his desk and could care less and is suddenly lost and envisions a Place of His Own out in the city so /mpatiently that relations otherwise proud of him feel more comfortable in the old humdrum company of the journalist Mayn, in whose helpless head is now being carried a cabaret tune locus’d from "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" to "I’ll Be Around" (by the man who gave us the instrumental "Sea Fugue Mama")—plus a scent Mayn couldn’t place except that its freedom, like an obstacle he skis to both sides of (ouch!) with his son or daughter or wife once upon a time behind him, takes him to the end of the world: