Women and Men (78 page)

"You mean," said a late-night colleague—"there was an Indian in your grandmother’s life?"

but Mayn himself, recalling his grandfather at least on this score less than what that gentle, well-shod browser actually said, had figured that in the larger sense—

"What
sense?" came a neutral warrant of a voice (Spence’s) from the end of the bar like your own unnecessarily self-critical afterthought.

History (which also might turn fundamentally upon whether, at any crux in question, small talk had been possible) was accident pretty much—a bunch of haphazard collisions, and if you’ve got fortuitous stuff like that and little more than fortuitous, how can history be worthwhile?

"—Wait a minute?" came the same voice of a man Mayn didn’t like, who then and later, with his thin, curly sideburns, figured in the current ongoing (though questionable) century—"What’s this oil you’re talking about?"

"What’s it to you—a bean, a seed—going to be good for lubricating high-temperature high-speed machinery, anti-viral penicillin stabilizer, shampoo, sun screens, face oils, you name it, solvents for producing polyethylene—"

But not unhappy exactly in the multiracial structure is the very Ojibway, diamond-squinter, whose grandmother stored oil in a sturgeon bladder—but not the oil in question—nor is necessarily one all-purpose angel-unit asking,
But whafs this seed?
—a peek of a voice at the tip end of the bar (read time’s tilt) which Mayn seemed to ignore. As did his late-night old-friend journalist colleague Ted, who smoked unheard-of cigarettes and lived in a five-room half-furnished Washington apartment when he was not less solitary traveling; who did not tell stories, and who now said, "Cleopatra’s Nose."

"Which Cleopatra?" chimed in the itinerant photo-journalist Spence, hopeful of company.

Mayn did not acknowledge this leather-fringed man Spence, reared doubtless hydroponically or unconsciously out of the oil he was inquiring about like a scavenger, a Spence at the end of the bar and not even
pleasantly
unlikable. Mayn answered Spence that the bean had been named in the Lower California desert a century and a half ago by a naturalist named Link after a colleague botanist who had died eighteen years before—"but the breakthrough came in 1933 in Arizona."

"Which Cleopatra?" said Ted. "The one whose nose would have changed history if it had been a hair longer but wasn’t—anyone called Cleo in your
family,
Mayn?—
that’s
what your granddad must have meant!"

—while along a bond of humor joining the two colleagues in the same bar in Washington in the early seventies flashed a vacation-beach insight of green-water stripe made by sandbar so the surrounding sea mo’ blue thereby, which equals
sad
but
we
can’t tell why, we find only a collection of sunny bodies on a beach and add on two more bodies that are non-present but implicit—one the best man of (then, in 1944 or -5) thirteen or fourteen years ago (Jim’s father, Mel) who is at work back in town at the family newspaper which is soon to pass into history, for he doesn’t like the beach; the other, the grandfather Alexander, who is back across the road beyond the beachfront row of cottages and on the bay side peering (if he’s not snoozing) down into the water off the dock for crabs, for the slow, rich, helpless softies you eat it all.

What had
been
happening? For what did happen when she got sick later made him wonder what had been happening but all he could come up with was
her
and his
father
—people, what he felt they were like—but not events that proved so. Nor had this event that was scattered across the sand at still-unsullied Mantoloking on the Jersey shore maybe a forty-minute drive from Windrow shown itself so he could follow its start to its finish, which was elsewhere; and he hadn’t felt even it until long after: so that he couldn’t be sure, and so he felt dumb, and then, in this order, he thought maybe there’s nothing
to
understand; or if there is, it’ll come to him as time goes by, the way grandfather Alexander slowly travels the five-minute walk from the beach to the bayside cottage thinking for a time alone about a very fresh chowder for supper with unavoidably a couple three guests thrown in, the Bob Yards, and this old, coughing, until today unbelievable and basically non-existent sonofagun-figure of Margaret’s past weirdly materialized from New York— it’s ‘44 or ‘45—so ancient history has been only fifty miles away all these years.

and one of these, Bob’s wife, is suddenly in the bayside cottage with Alexander saying hello with quickness, familiarity, and anger not directed toward him but doubtless toward the beach, so that he turns his shoulder in order not to deflect it because he knows Bob Yard’s wife well, and their childless marriage filled by their good talk. And feels more than he can put intuition to, and thinks there is something going on on the beach and is told by Bob’s wife it is the old acquaintance of Margaret from the western days who has arrived in the Yards’ car, but Alexander has his chowder to consider, the boys will eat two bowls, Sarah none.

But the double Moon? What meant the double Moon upon the old medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince got his pistol? comes a voice or a unison of voices from the next room as a divider partition explodes lightly in the laughter unseen onlookers give either the reappearance of half a couch moving back into its apartment or Larry reflecting after a long, deflected bike ride.

Mayn recalled more than he told Ted his steady-eyed elder colleague, though the info-dealer-hunter Spence (who came to mind with some sheen of mold on his face) was not present and would not have heard; and besides, Jim liked Ted, yet before he got through telling what little he told, and remembering the larger thing of which the telling was a part while being told
by
a part of himself out ahead, not telling the larger matter affected the memory of it in a way quite different from a fact that he had withheld that night in 1969 just because the Spence character-sleazy-watchman-photo-journalist was present and he didn’t like the guy: to wit that in ‘33 a couple of researchers discovered that that desert seed oil bore amazing similarities to the legendary oil of the sperm whale whose sea-acres of flow could never have been thought expendable until now sperm whale oil twenty-five years afterward had been slapped with an import ban.

Call it an uncaused event, he heard himself say into his old-fashioned-glass low-ball to deep-jawed Ted smoking quietly beside him who had praised surprisingly (for humdrum work) his series of three articles on the Delaware River engineering, and from there they had digressed to family pistol which Ted said could seem like more than one, the way Jim outlined its provenances—and digressed to the State of New Jersey and what could and couldn’t be done taxwise, and to whales that were still to be seen from the Jersey shore, which had gotten ugly since his own late childhood much less since his grandmother Margaret’s day when they had a cottage in Mantoloking long since sold which brought them to the beach where you let yourself go, with your fishing pier and the long breakwater all on the sea side and a bright hilly beach where took place the phenomenon that belongs maybe not to the history of junior pickup baseball but of sand or angular gravity; and, come to think, it was several figures in the bright day walking, running, standing literally (we think) rooted, and one lying eyes closed though not silently. And the non-causal event—

—You mean "miracle"? the friend said, whose voice was sometimes in recall what Mayn got but not the face, with its deep jaw and its cigarette.

Yes, like Cleopatra’s Nose—arose from the well-known primarily beach game called "Bases" where two basemen throw the ball back and forth trying to tag the base runner who runs back and forth keeping away from the ball —and in which Jim was engaged with his friend Sammy who’d come with them that day from Windrow—and another guy who wore a green sateen racing-type bathing suit—Sammy and Jim thirteen, Sammy a bit tiltingly taller with a longer reach which he wouldn’t use on Jim because Jim would outshove him but could sometimes kick Sammy in sideways preview of the import of eastern modes of violent aggression a generation later, which made our western combat almost overnight more meditated—while Jim saved for the wintertime when they had their parkas on a punishing hook to the ribs which he had thrown maybe three or four times—and the guy in the sateen jockstrap-type bathing suit was running back and forth low to the ground between the "bases" and Jim, who could run, and Sammy, who could take a throw and run, were trying to get the kid out but he would skip sideways between them, and the ball would wing past his head and Sammy get it right back to Jim who’d run up to within a few feet of the guy and toss it to Sammy before the guy was safe and the guy would slide under Sammy’s tag or jump and go the other way and be past Jim before Jim got the ball back in his hand—a tennis ball, an old one, long before the yellows, and so napless and smooth you couldn’t tell if it had been the Pennsylvania ball belonging to a girlfriend of Jim’s who played tennis, and you could curve it.

But in the middle of all this, with Jim’s grandma Margaret walking down the beach and Jim’s half-pint brother over digging near their mother, who lay face up on a black towel with her arms exactly at her sides (ready to be launched elsewhere) and her very dark but sometimes very faintly (in memory) auburn hair still up and wearing a flowered but very dark bathing suit with a skirt—the guy in the middle stopped and walked away, didn’t seem to hear Sammy, who said, "You’re out, you went outside the baselines." And Brad, with the deep-socketed eyes as if he were digesting a great deal that he had recently learned, turned suddenly, small-shouldered, from what he had seriously been doing and yelled, ‘There
are
no baselines on the beach," and Jim said, "For Christ’s sake," as the guy in the green sateen suit walked obliviously up the beach—had someone summoned him?

So they had to use Brad, who had been trickling sand over his mother’s instep and had been piling sand in earnest over her shins.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice but for that moment not Sarah his mother’s, for she was as she had been, rigidly receiving the sun (if non-looks could kill) no doubt thinking her way through a sonata until a few notes of it came humming out of her, but how did you hear the sound with her mouth closed?—answer: through the nose (try humming, mouth closed, and just stop up your nostrils—then it’s out your ears or through your eyes)—

What are you looking at? came a voice again but now like little brother Brad’s but Jim was looking now off a hundred yards downbeach at his grandmother Margaret in conversation with a sort of old geezer, not decrepit but an oldster, who had materialized in beachcomber’s khakis and a white shirt, dark, dark glasses, and a white sailor hat opened out like an inverted bowl; but a familiar bawling greeting came from nearer by and, beyond his mother, who was now leaning back on her elbows and staring at Jim, Jim saw the fully clothed figure of Bob Yard the electrical contractor—evidently having driven over to the shore from Windrow—and then Brad came running over to run the bases, and Jim and Sammy lobbed the ball back and forth high enough so Brad scampered all the way to the other base, sliding in, though he didn’t have to, Jim told him.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice which we know Jim was correct to believe he heard as if down the road a future comment on Brad’s preliminary
trans-mater
excavation concepts were not being given grounds for utterance: ‘stead of digging down, youse cover the thing up; then level off and keep at it a few ages and my goodness you’ve d/seroded th’ Earth surface as much as several inches all around, which renews resources if anything.

What are you staring at? distinctly came Jim’s voice the eve of the U-2 press conference. But the strong hand on his arm counseling him not to bother about the Spence character who’s as good as lost at the end of the bar silenced him—or his voice—while his long-time colleague-friend Ted’s actual voice went armlessly on quoting the famed pilot of the Yankees in response to
his
interrogator right here in Washington a couple of years back:

... I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days. In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D. Class C ball, Class A ball.

How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?

But, what are you staring at?, said an all-purpose voice, a few short years later when Mayn and Ted (agreeing they needed a vacation) found themselves in the same hotel bar moderately amused by their light, disintegrating discussion of what was technically known as "hardening" a land-based missile by sinking it into an underground silo: lo, a process which (who knew?) the next century might extend to what the well-tanked thinkers down the street called "soft" targets such as cities, if there were such by then (i.e., either distinct from a densification along the seaboard,
or
after a "greenhouse effect" due to pollution-rich atmosphere above, lidding the healthy glow of our Earth breath below, till our destined glacier melted down and the ocean went up and swamped Philadelphia and its boating clubs along the river there and Venice-ized New York)—for the now western-wear photographer and infor-mation-transacter Spence had answered (for him pretty point-blank) Mayn’s this-time light query What are you staring at?, with the same words with the
you
stressed, and Mayn shrugged it off this time without the actually more irascible Ted’s help, Spence was
so
sleazy, well there was something about him that just wasn’t
worth
putting your finger on: but who cares if the Devil’s up-to-date barter-economics drew the line at making unrefusable offers here, because Spence was in another room downstairs making his own deals.