Women and Men (80 page)

Mayn had liked her fineness from the time he had known her and didn’t know how she did it, he was a male snob not to take how she was for granted, she did not overdo the power in her eyes and was quiet without seeming to be an Intelligent Woman Listening or a patient debater waiting to pounce when it came her turn. They had mad coincidences, too.

When you have your day, what will you do with it? said Ted, like an observation, and before long, having paused one moment over the nonetheless quiet lady’s gentle attack on the sentimental violence of which the nationalist imagination was capable as witness the poppycock voiced a few minutes ago by the man who has disappeared from the end of the bar to the effect that the altitude of that slender U-2 plane they were going to hear about tomorrow gave to the plane’s eye a multiple of extra destructive energy in the form of a light too potent to see with the naked eye unpeeled—the three of them here in the bar of a Washington hotel Ted, Jim, and the round-faced pretty woman Mayga slanting toward one another somewhat open-endedly as if the departure of the Scavenger Spence in his fringed deerskin from bar’s end had given them leave, drifted into song.

Such as?

"I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby," and "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and, in honor of the velvet-cheeked guest from the Southern Hemisphere, 4tAy, Ay, Ay, Ay! Canta y no llores, / Porque cantando se alegran cielito Undo los corazones," a border song known even to a young aunt of the Ojibway healer of the Mille Lacs region not far from Lake Superior (whose grandfather, the diva had told Clara at lunch who had mentioned it in Lincoln the correspondent’s presence at a workshop, had sewn with a needle fashioned from a marten’s penis-bone, and with thread that once helped make the back tendon of a moose)—for songs are audible over the greatest distances even like the greater abstractions, but songs especially, as James Mayn, asleep in a friend’s vacant apartment off Connecticut Avenue, may have sensed: but if from the distances of the resolute non-dream that he thought there’s therefore nothing to remember of (except for the challenging voice that asked
what
was this "double Moon" by which the Anasazi medicine man in possession of the family-pistol-to-be could be made out by the Navajo Prince?) or from the distances of the next day’s prospects opening out before Jim—beneath him, if we will, like the Pole below Admiral Byrd’s mysterious plane caught by a painter hovering glider-like with the American flag painted on the middle of its wing—why then he recalled what he had not witnessed his grandfather Alexander discussing, first, crab chowder (its prospect) with his unexpected visitor down at the bay side cottage, the wonderful red-faced blonde, Jane Yard (Mrs. Bob), and the quantities of softshell required for such a chowder should the three who had dropped in from Windrow elect to stay for supper, assuming, second, that his fair daughter Sarah and her old friend Bob the esteemed electrician husband of Alexander’s visitor made up their difference of yesterday whatever it was—

Oh dry up, Alexander, that’s blarney and you’re not Irish, said Jane mildly—

—were now speaking to each other, that is—having had words yesterday that must have spoilt her day and spoilt his if he was half as downhearted afterward as she—

—Oh come off it, Alexander, you and Margie always spoiled hell out of Sarah—

But the bald, white-haired, tall, paunchy man laughed abruptly as if after all he did know a little something more than the obvious, and he said he thought Margaret had been pretty strict with both girls and asked what had brought Jane and Bob down to the shore today.

Then she told him who they’d brought, feeling like relations.

Meanwhile, beyond the resumed Bases game where Braddie soon got tagged out only to become the middle of a Keep Away game that Sarah ignored, cupping her hand over her eyes to stare at the khaki-trousered ancient whom her mother Margaret had (at last) introduced her to, a new noise succeeded the disappearance of Bob Yard over the dune: "Did you see his face!" said both Yards in concert, for she had come up from the cottage toward the beach and met Bob—it was the childless Yards in concert—a childless couple either makes up for it with a lot of noise or talent or has trouble with other people’s noise—voices lifted somewhere between the beach and the path to the bayfront cottages with their stilt-supported little dock, Alexander making ready to commence to begin organizing a crab chowder for six or seven, not nine, a decision precipitated by Jane Yard when she heard of the recent to-do between Sarah and Bob and said she and Bob at least would not be staying.

Which like a historian of the early forties Jim’s daughter Flick put together like two and two with an evening in New York the next winter when Sarah had tickets for herself and Brad to go up to New York with Margaret to see
Carmen,
Brad’s first opera; and when Margaret got a cold and would not be seen in public, the unheard-of happened and Sarah’s unmusical husband announced he would tear himself away from the paper and make a third: then Bob Yard said he would drive them all, because he and his erstwhile wife Jane were going in to New York for dinner at Rockefeller Center ice rink and then were going dancing at the Hotel Taft, although Jane called it off at the last minute after speaking with Sarah, then changed her mind again as if in 399 order to have a hilarious argument in the front seat with her husband en route to New York with three Mayns in back.

Jim told Flick as little as she wanted to know, then left her to put it together; and once in the midst of these matters he wanted to ask if she planned to have a family—none of his business,
but
. . . but didn’t ask her. But then she knew of a philosopher who had said our way of being civilized individuals is to want children rather than ourselves, the future rather than life now: so she had, like her mother, rendered his question unnecessary. Then she had said, But what about
you?

Like her mother?—the question poses itself apart from any interrogator. Well, her mother answered questions that way, too, that hadn’t been voiced. Flick his daughter stayed close to him for a time after the unraveling of the marriage, by being combative; unlike her brother Andrew, who was gentle and decent yet absent. Flick took her father up on two-thirds of what he said, though mostly over the phone. The marriage was fractured on a long-term basis, till death us do join: Well, are you joking or aren’t you, Daddy?

And when he told how the U-2 press conferences years ago in May of ‘60 had turned him on to weather but at the press conference was the lie to cover the prime issue which was illicit surveillance of Russia, there came Flick’s loved, sometimes husky voice on the phone, "Whaddaya
mean?
— meteorology? or that it was the lie? and I thought the newspaperman sticks to the subject."

He wanted to tell her he was half-kidding, that the weather reconnaissance was solid information, you knew where you were, it was history. He said, 4’No gray areas there—you don’t have to speculate if the man’s giving you a half-truth."

And when he was driving with Ted and Ted’s fifty-year-old girlfriend; or checking the street number of a house on a breezy corner of Brooklyn Heights within shooting distance of the harbor and the lighted Statue that turned its back on New Jersey when you drove in over the Jersey flats though the Statue was
in
New Jersey if in a separate United States of elegant debris; or when he just missed the bank one thirsty afternoon and thought he would cash a check at the athletic club (and it was the wrong time to phone Flick), he would so much want to phone her that it was all he could do to stop feeling a dumbbell more than a father-man, and might phone anyway although he knew he didn’t need to heal the pains of his and her mother’s separation (growth pains, our ass); he found he didn’t talk to her like that but made fairly good conversation into a credit-card pay phone to the intimate point of Flick then complaining (now from Washington) that sure she was interested in his routine work on the dioxin scandal, but less that it caused acne than what happened when we sprayed it in the sixties in Florida and dumped dioxin-contaminated waste oil to keep dust down at those Missouri horse farms, and this dioxin’s the cleverest poison ever synthesized and so unearthly good at what it does it’s more poisonous than the most poisonous person and has the brains to fool itself into waiting several weeks to kill you—than she was interested in his emergency bulletins about Thomas Jefferson (who might have been a casual relative as Mayn dropped the information) writing with his left hand to the Frenchman Le Roy accounting for why the east wind off the ocean having
no
obstacle penetrates the settled deforested Virginia coast more than does the inland wind from the hilly wooded west which, like the landward ocean wind, rushes into the heated coastal zone after the air there rises—and (he didn’t mind Flick’s rather exercised criticism confusing his conversation with his "priorities," he was proud enough of her!) she was—O.K.—well —
very
interested in how dioxin traveled freely through the food chains in the Vietnam ecosystem through to catfish and carp, but mobile as it is dioxin really settles into the cells and twelve years after spraying in northwest Florida where you get rain even during vacation time, it’s still as good as new in birds and insects (and your favorite eating-lizard) her father added—but she was less interested, she had to say, in Jefferson’s left-handed speculation on the chain reaction of the Gulf Stream to the east wind as a result of which— though "we know too little of the operations of nature in the physical world to assign causes with any degree of confidence"—let’s let the Gulf Stream, said T.J., finish biting its way through the continent and let’s just open a token cut in the Isthmus of Panama and let the Gulf Stream current do the work for us which would lessen pressure elsewhere from the once-dangerous Gulf Stream because calm and safe it would no longer throw vapors, as Franklin argued, northward to be turned by cold air into the fogs on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland which harass mariners from as far away no doubt as Russia. But, come to think of it, long ago in i960 on April Fool’s Day, a month before the U-2 press conference, Mayn had followed the first orbiting of a weather satellite, and for a time forgot he remembered the cloud photos, for where the clouds were was where you’d find the weather front—why, listen, the sky changed just while they drove down to the shore on a summer day—

Is it true a ring around the Moon means rain?

True in the forty to eighty percent range.

What, then, of our double Moon illuminating the Anasazi healer who passed the pistol on to the ill-fated Navajo Prince? asks an interrogator so familiar that if we know the magic words we may already have "internalized" him together with his ideal clarity never mind the healing effect of information.

We can reply that the double Moon was a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties visible in the Four Corners region where an unobstacled view of the sunset horizon was had during the brief years that housed nomad demons in and out of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head-hole which a visiting Anglo hermit advised the med’ciners not to cover with the government-issue muslin there seemed to be considerable supplies of, and at sunset the demons were visible if you knew how to look mto her head, demons dark-earth-colored, mobile-brown and glittering gray, but colorful, even creamy, as much as muscularly material, whereas she who could not stretch her eyes to see into the hole knew them to be most tumid blue and the sharp orange of those ancient volcanic apricots still visible every fourth August—except, on the nights of double-moon-rise, when the demons were another color—that is, when for a long stop like the original sunset that may last for years after a volcanic eruption one multiple demon flashed pale green to erase all others and their colors:

and on such nights when the green flash was seen at twi-set between "the history of the day and the history of the night," the Moon would double or twin in some regions of Sky or Earth or both. And so the ancient Anasazi healer whose real medicines had taken him for years away from his faithful wife and children so that he threatened to become a witchdoctor who parts, say, the husband from the wife if in luck so not even snake root helps the man, or instead of giving soapweed mixed with a special cactus to help the mother in labor when the baby won’t come, administers it much earlier and differently so the gal aborts and afterward is unable to know if she wanted to or not—the Anasazi healer felt the Moon double him with its light or be seen by each of his eyes individually.

Nevertheless, the white-lipped female zoologist Mena, studying the fierce javelina all the way up from the southern hemisphere, had met the botanist Marcus Jones (of whom no visual record remains within us) pedaling down through and beyond the monumental debris of Colorado seeking yet one more new type of locoweed—and
she
claimed that the doubled shadow he cast upon her when he got off his bike to greet her where the light of night brought the desert closer about them had before Jones was gone become hers to convey until her next human. This was the ancient Anasazi who, because her appearance at the top of his ladder caused the pistol in question to throw two shadows, had seen two Moons and thereupon had admitted he was not sure if the pistol had come from the mestizo spy years after the Mexican War or alternatively from a half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer (one of that clown elite who must act out their least-appealing dreams in public even to the point of turning themselves literally inside out) who claimed
he
had been given the pistol by a dying white settler prone among the wind grasses of southern Dakota as a charm to tame that religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance with which the Indians in despair hoped against hope to stop the increasing pain of invading bullets though in particular it was each individual’s transcendent guardian richly painted on the Ghost Dance shields on government-issue muslin that must memorably refract these currents of detonated daylight from their course, while the community on good days intuited through custom—long before law got round to firming it up—the difference between bullets and light, the sign that detours you off onto yet another course and the true way of the explorer that bends if need be to circumnavigate a route that may in the end prove more direct.