Women and Men (92 page)

He has seen the gray-haired man before.

So? a voice shrugs. This is New York, the long run. He does not want to hear himself think any more. He would fight, now.

Efrain—he knew an Ef
rem
once—Efrain is not at the agreed corner. Even minus the tweed cap he may be recognized by Efrain. Isn’t this so by law of streetwise survival?

By another law, Efrain has got to be getting something tonight in return for delivering the message from Foley. Why meet like this?

It serves both sides, maybe. For what if Efrain had said he would meet him at the apartment? Clara saw in her husband’s face that he might shift to Spanish speaking to Efrain. Jobless parolee hanging out.

The Japanese clock with its yellow markers makes time itself an advertisement, and it’s not always there—do they take it away?—it’s so big!— cover it up? (he would know if so) . . . the long hand is past the bottom yellow now. But wasn’t the clock digital the last time he looked? If the tight-fitting tweed cap goes on now, something will happen to him. Where would Efrain scalp tickets? Back there by the entrance to the arena? The slow or endless poetry of being aware, of being conscious, will come after decades to some random rapid moment of active void of police melodrama violently making the life of awareness seem like slow suicide.

Exposed, one stays where one is. His hand—his pistol hand—is in his jacket pocket as if to keep the cap from working its way out. He is afraid. The point of the meeting tonight was him, he senses, he guesses, but how? Not the message, but him. So he is to get the message from prison (this time unposted) and in exchange gives up what?

Himself.

But this is why he is here. He is the one whose life Foley’s letters intimate. "Life" so final and indecisive-sounding a word in English. Faster than saying "Efrain." Life is what Foley could be doing. "Natural life" means no parole, does it? and once he wanted to ask what Foley had done to almost get it, but you don’t ask, and if an inmate feels inclined to tell, he will—which Foley did not, except to write once about "a guy who has a score to settle with me who stands watch, week in week out, over a row of garbage cans."

Life, then. Less than natural life. Foley got eight to twenty. Imagine not knowing.

When what he wants to know is real. What he must know is how can he be in danger and in a vacuum at the same time? It is a life, says Clara. For how long? Old New York from other years they have dinner in, but this trip reinvents their whereabouts though they are in the phone book: just in from Stockholm for a week, consultant in San Diego, semi-retired in the Carinthian Mountains of Austria an hour from Italy an hour from Yugoslavia (at your age? and the "children"?): to meet the children in Mexico City (one lie compounded to) or New Orleans, we met on neutral ground in a New Orleans garden (and the regime? asks the friend or his wife; where do your children stand?—don’t ask—a subtle lie, for he doesn’t know).

They see a play, a movie, an opera with a friend in it, two operas. He has heard tell of a
Hamlet
opera—a
Hamlet
of the Garment District with roles altered. Where does he know the gray-haired man from? They’ve turned left at the far corner where he was to have met Efrain. From England? from Chile? from Rome? from gatherings where he sits and listens and does not ask questions and feels like a Jew in a Cracow suburb? The old Nobel scientist from Florida—Switzerland by way of Florida where he lives now—stood in front of a blackboard and said there
are
no vacuums, and later was interrupted by a student bearing socialist manifestos, issuing garbled challenges by which the old man’s beautifully economical physics was not touched, for students here don’t cut through so—so fiercely, with cool passion—the way students back home used to—to the salient contradiction, the contradiction, the suddenly grasped contradiction!—though it is true, too, that the old man was good, very good. Better than a Nobel economist who comes to one’s mind at this crowded, empty moment who is of course right about money but about nothing else. And when Clara said on his return, "If there are no vacuums, what have we instead? What takes their place?" And he laughed until, like swimming in his employer’s pool in winter so in the long run he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop swimming, but then dizzily did, he
was
stopped by the famous physicist’s answer which he passed to his wife Clara: "There are only areas of low energy."

A scene he’s absent from is what he gathers across Seventh Avenue. A theater set, the cast for a moment parting like a curtain, like the space between the great charges of steam wasting up out of a hole in the street, and the fatherly broad man with the greenish tweed jacket and Amy, her bright pale hair in a single brain, and the boy, gaining the far sidewalk, swing off left, so the eye moves ahead of them to the open-front fast-food Greek eatery to a dark-olive-faced young man in a khaki jacket, trousers, beret, all khaki but for one detail and he’s standing at the counter watching the sidewalk as much of it as he can see and Seventh Avenue and theoretically the unsuspected far corner on the west side where the eye watches him, seeing what he cannot see because it’s around the corner of the restaurant’s open front on the sidewalk; so the eye unclouded by a dangerous tweed cap that’s been pocketed, and uncluttered by the aching dozen of all different simultaneous thought clustering about the half-known name of the fatherly man with the two young companions, feels this group who now on the far sidewalk approach the open front of the fast-food place where Efrain, for it is and must be Efrain, waits with the one non-khaki detail visible upon his person, and the cars build up between the eye of the immigrant beholder who ought to be building something now himself but has
left
it in his native land destroyed and is touring some place that turns into scenes of his own absence, a scene across the avenue: the three reach the souvlaki place Giro II (!)—someone’s head chattering away against the vertical barbecue,
la par ilia,
which in Chile they may even toast
you
with—and are visibly hailed by Efrain who eases over to shake hands with Mayn—yes—and be presented to the two young people; yes, Mayn was the name, Mayn it is, the name as sure as his coincidental second materialization walking up the Upper West Side block five floors below the window of Clara and her husband’s flat and as certain as Mayn’s first appearance in Florida days after Allende’s speech to the UN months and months ago at a point on the planet’s surface free of visual interruption so one felt oneself standing
on
the planet, until late, late at night long after this friendly newspaperman named Mayn (who made you think the big events were not so big nor necessarily elsewhere) had—yes—asked if he thought people were interchangeable: while an old friend sat behind them at the Voice of America table beaming Apollo 17 information to, among other targets down the long continent below this one, a large room or a next room where an old good friend at last and still for a moment in power might turn from debt rescheduling which will always be with us to copper and back again but only to substitute one for the other and never admit a tie-in no matter what a CIA economist might urge, an old old friend a medical doctor with an inflated government staff who did not himself know how soon life would replace him.

The one visual interruption high, white, steaming on the face of Florida’s eastward-empty beach-coast lifted off above the fires that it and its voyage were based in and turned away toward that horizon that only instruments made manifold; and he had felt not at the outer top of the turning Earth as earlier that warm December evening but at a deepening bottom urged further by the presence by then beside him, on the infield at the Press Site (like a dig) looking off over the silhouetted heads of photographers and, across the inlet-river, of a man so unlike Mayn when it came he knew, he had predicted this other man, this journalist-operator Spence (who would be more threat than help before they finished because his proposition was important as well as an intrigue, and yet he seemed paired further with
Mayn,
this Spence: were they brothers in arms? for one didn’t know or want to, but Spence had concluded he a mere marginal economist with Allende’s precarious regime was knowingly in the employ of a foundation marginally central to the ongoing American war effort hence must know much more about a certain Santiago junta’s life-support system, spring-loaded to—upon re-entry—course-correct for target arrival, but Spence would find out even what one did not
know
one knew), would warn him against the agreeable, inquiring Mayn whom Spence had seen him in conversation with by the Voice of America table, for the old microphone was a finer power than all incendiary ignitions banging and cracking each other into a disappearing century’s nucleus. But that finer power of wave and vocal cord dissolves too in all the words using it, and many mouths mouth People Power but Clara laughs and he grazes her hand, and they talk, they have always talked.

Efrain looks across Seventh Avenue and with his shoulders and hands is telling Mayn and Mayn’s friends that a person was not here who was supposed to be here, but Amy won’t recognize Efrain’s name for him (if sounded), because it’s another alias, the name Foley knows. Her eyes were bright once—it was this week surely—when she took a messenger’s manila envelope, brought it to his office, and explained basketball to him. Setting a pick, charging, traveling, occupying a position before an opposing player charged into you, all most logical. He himself was once a footballer, he found himself discussing with her his assistant the fine art of centering the white ball from the corner so far away it was almost not on the field or in the game, curving the ball softly back into the heads and legs in the goal mouth, the whole mind of the goal mouth. An old woman on this new corner of his touches the immigrant elbow, a striking person, white-haired with a mole on her jaw, hand in hand with a tall, thin, glowering elderly man not as old as she but lined and stretched by the long haul and preserved in vinegar and by some long, possibly original, preoccupation, who steps away from her as she says, "What is
your
name?" A random man, asked what his name is, a verbal promontory who reads books from cover to cover all week in the midst of a life that feels like an interruption, he has Some answer or other for her, while her escort stands away, irritated, and the answer seems to please her: "Alias . . . Alias is my name." She sidles off amused, saying, "Alias, Alias"—a well-known and interesting name (not "Mayn," which he had almost said in the night light) and she’s nodding in recognition, and then the elderly man, compelled by community or by love’s hermitage, explains,
"
Her concentration span isn’t much now, you know."

As if he would know—and she goes off, taking away with her some message or glancing light from him, this random man. There are no random events, which could be as sad as our ideas of them. In New Jersey a group of Cubans stand in unison and snap into flame their thunderbolt-emblem cigarette lighters in honor of Pinochet.

While over there across the street, Efrain is charming those three. He’s recently released. Maybe
he
is the
Hamlet
of the Penn Station district.

The wait has upped the noise, the noise level’s a hood coming down over the skull and lowering over forehead and eyes to the bridge of the nose and tickling the rims of the nostrils until dizziness can be relieved only with something to eat or drink or some talk, but the four people across in the fast-souvlakia are not eating, and the boy is looking at Amy, who glances more cool than calm at her watch, she wants to go, but is this because she’s figured out who Efrain was meeting and planning to introduce to Mayn and has thought fit to miss the meeting? Mayn is the trouble, but how about Efrain, you don’t need talk to tell you that Efrain made the arrangement to meet Mayn. Efrain takes in all three, while the boy looks at Amy and she keeps looking at Mayn but not wanting anything. Efrain’s eyes see the street too, the far sidewalk far as the corner where a bald man with a distinguished mustache pushes his right hand into a bunched-up cloth cap in his pocket.

A man who now moves toward Efrain but out of his sight, moving east toward Efrain’s side of the avenue, moving across Seventh in a mob of basketball fans jostling each other quite dangerously, perhaps thirty percent returning to New Jersey. Amy and Mayn and the boy have come out of the restaurant. They have turned away toward Thirty-fourth Street, and the unknown or unseen fifth person moves without having decided what to do, moving with a crowd of shouting fans, young, strong, drunk, elbowing each other so that the tweed cap somehow comes half out of the pocket as they all make the corner where half an hour and more ago he was to have met Efrain.

Efrain now has turned left out of the restaurant toward him, toward this corner of Thirty-third; and what seemed in the mineral glare of the souvlaki place the one detail not khaki is right there in the pocket of his loose military jacket. But, perhaps under Amy’s backward gaze, a decision has been taken as five fans veer up the block and he with them as Efrain has to stop to let them pass and is so close that Efrain as they pass does not feel the long white business envelope lifted from his pocket nor begin (as yet) to imagine what the tall blonde girl he’s just met with Mayn and this highly alert youth deduces as she looks back again to see a man she knows in confidence to be a distinguished foreign economist pick a pocket—or worse—while the potential light of her sharp gaze is followed, even after she turns again and sees Mayn flag a crosstown cab, by the eyes of the boy, slight of limb though tall enough, eighteen or twenty with a load of cared-for, wavy dark hair, who thinks he knows what her cool eyes have seen and seems then to absorb her light and forget her in contemplation of a visiting tall, bald man with a known mustache, who meets his eyes reflectively—which is the most signal thing that has emerged in these glancing turns of event—and bends into a downtown taxi that materialized at the curb, the avenue is downtown, all taxis therefore.