Night Soul and Other Stories (25 page)

“You’re silent,” said his partner when they were back in the main building where one of the silk lattices, slow as these things are, was degrading faster than the bone could grow and they had wanted him to look at something close up. “Thinking of a horror film we could go to,” he said. “Oh, the old one about the ants?” Yes, that was the one. “This weekend?” Not this weekend, but he thought he would take that bike woman up on her offer, though why him? “She’s dying,” said his partner.

“How would you know that for god’s sake, how do you people know any such thing?” He calmed down. “Science is beautiful now, she says; it lets you go so far.”

It was two days later, a Friday. It was the waitress who came to answer the door of the drab little townhouse near the river drive. She looked worn out. She indicated the bike in the hall. He made a sign with his hands. “She’s gone,” the woman said. He shook his head, “Where?” “She’s gone to join her husband. She’s sick.”

He had the green bike on the step outside. The woman touched the rear rack. “She said you were like family. I don’t know anything about it,” the woman said. “She said you were uncanny. You said something. That you probably knew her. She said you knew where she was coming from.” “Where?” “The doctor’s?” The woman seemed to come into focus. “We say things. People are affected by them.”

“Who knows why?”

“They’re true? I was the best friend she ever had,” said the woman, stepping back into the doorway. It was what she thought. A dark mole lingered about the corner of her expressive mouth. She’d drunk a lot of coffee. Close up, she did not look worn out, she looked English or French. They wanted to talk but were not going to, a risk rising in her breath and in her interested eyes drawn from her limitlessly, he thought.

“Will you return your old bike?” the Dutch woman asked him. Who would he return it to? The owner, only an acquaintance, had died that stormy New Year’s early morning coming home through the sleet in a cab.

A lab had transferred spider silk genes into the mammary glands of a goat, and his partner asked him to go with her one long weekend to Montana, paid for by the company. It took six hundred gallons of goat’s milk to produce the silk for one bullet-proof vest, so far. He decided to let her go alone; she would be back the Monday night. The following weekend he would be visiting her in Garrison.

“Then why did you bother to have me?” my daughter asks, and I think of funny answers, which she deserves. Her question isn’t a question. Her words aren’t to be taken seriously. But they stick, they linger and malinger, in the dreamwork that gets us from this day to the next.

She came rushing through the house, her friend Val close behind. What a rush, fast forward, pursuit of friendship.

So was that an emergency dance that just went by? An advance guard of a tribe to whom I am unknown? What a racket of final things between them: forget it, friendship’s off, finished! don’t you ever call me up again—rage rushing, falling headlong.

But into what? Discomfitingly into that gap which is an absence of anything remotely like not caring. I might say it better. I am back from three business trips in a row—tired, lagging, coming down. I mean, their fight will break up in an enchanted awkwardness. This I predict, having witnessed it and witnessed other absences between them. Half of July and all of August they didn’t see each other, and when they met in September they stood in front of each other, facing head on with a great deal to choose from, hands for the moment not busy doing things like the hands of inexperienced actors, but at rest at their sides: till they laughed and laughed again, like idiots.

But today at the age of eleven, rushing through the house—the apartment—they are on the move and if I try to keep up, there’s hardly time to tell about what’s happening.

“Liz!” her friend Val remonstrates—screams, they’d say nowadays—“Liz, I didn’t do anything!” Val is older by a few months, yet younger.

They trade skirts, mingle laundry, think like old lovers alike. A. A. Milne’s been on the shelf for years. They sit drawing for an hour—turn the box on, turn it off—then at one selfsame instant they get the idea to dress up out of a closet, dress up, dress up.

Used to be me who put the record on, not now. But who did? Because here they come high-kneeing past like the hoofers they are and the orchestra’s conducted not by quick fingers on a tone arm but by the real world which they take for granted will accompany them.

High-knee it, Folies Bergère, no less; and the music that no casual intruder at this moment could hear unless the girls pant it out half under their breath—for I’m wrong, the record’s not on, not really—is Offenbach’s stately hysteria and it’s in their mind because I have sometimes put it on for them, a record scratched and replaceable. They slide to my right, out of sight arm-in-arm, and I stare straight ahead at all this (which isn’t so interesting to an outsider as to me, home from a business trip, three business trips), and yet divorced as I am from everything but this moment, interesting’s not altogether what it is to me. (Is that so? Well, if you’re not interested, “then why did you bother to have me?”) They’re sliding back into my seat; they’ve used the entire room, the walls, the ceiling—so why don’t I, too?

Their grins giggle. But their silences—don’t their unspeaking tracks run on like mine? Like me?—for all that I know one day to overtake by surprise my own voice amid those inside conversations mouthless and runaway.

Tracked in circles like those of a marriage. And all at once we hear them talking above the undoubted uproar inside us, drawing together, threateningly selfsame, adults, children.

Hey great! (There’s a lot of greatness in the air these days.) Great idea! Let’s do it. Let’s.

(Yet who was this speaking? Do people speak like this? Surely, Liz’s mother and I do. Nine of an evening, say.)

Let’s have a drink around the corner; let’s do some backgammon, where’s the board? Call the Martins; what time is it out there? What day is it? The week, where has it gone? The court’s reserved anyway, and if the Darbins can’t make it, we’ll play singles.

Let’s bike up to the boat basin, it’s not so far, we’ll hear the subway underneath us. Norm rents his two-and-a-half-room houseboat from a traveling paper products salesman; Norm, our somewhat junior friend, loves the older lady Lucille (older by a little less than a decade—which has been inflated into fashion like racially-mixed love); and she loves him too much not to move onto his houseboat, while Norm for his part loves her too much to ask her to put up with the wear and tear of him and the houseboat he comes with, and so Norm may have to cast off and drift, if he can, downriver.

But with her, he sometimes means.

Why not decide?

Because he doesn’t have to.

New Jersey to starboard, historic cliffs and cooperatives. Those great New York towers to port: riding into that unknown harbor that laps the canyons of Manhattan’s gross memory—but is the river capable anymore of moving itself?

The question’s academic when Lucille’s on all fours. If leaks and plaster dropping constitute weather-as-usual for your apartment, consider a leak in a houseboat. Lucille would go down on her hands and knees to find that leak. Lucille we are probably going to hear more about here and in the next life, which is close and no longer beyond the grave unless we had incorrect information and, in fact, the grave never did stand between us and the next life. So Lucille, a bright singer with a heart-shaped face, sings on the boat-basin dock at twilight, waiting below the West Side Highway drones of fossil-fuel accelerators for Norm to make his weekday way uptown on the underground.

What do you know about women? a voice was heard in the gap of last month’s next thing—last decade’s (for by now, women and men, we’ve heard here if not out on our business junkets in the hinter-lands, are beyond all that unconscious exploitation and find themselves at the barricades together before the future that is no longer to come). Still, what do you know about women? a voice is heard. By which is meant, to know is to please.

Or let’s drop over to Tanto Bene, have a cappuccino; the froth will have to suffice—resist the crumbly Napoleons, you who can—imagine we’re already there; and a foursome waits smoking at the glass-cased banks of free-floating forms with names packed with stiff, sweetest cream, specks of citron jewelling the glue of our floured sugar.

But if we didn’t go, we did something else simultaneously. Meanwhile, the fact that I didn’t dance at the party in the mammoth loft last night hints to my wife that when tonight I say let’s bike over to the Unitarian church to catch Charles for a drink at the end of his organ practice (powerfully muscled, thick-necked, uproarious also-tenor Charles), I’m making up for last night standing around in the light of a furnace and not dancing.

The Unitarians believe in more than they need to or used to; they are said to practice Plains Indian dances. They see gods everywhere—on the hoof, in the weather, along the equal arms of the famous Cross or in the hot, rich subterranean rocks that make it shake with drama—plus, equidistant from that old sin thought to be primal and surrounded by global wisdom, a peace that passeth understanding so fast one’s not sure if it’s eastward or westward, though Charles in his music holds to the known March of Christianity.

Industrial screening in last night’s loft showered us with rivulets of darkness, and I did not know why (speaking for both of us) we were here. World falling away on all sides constant, if that’s the way you like it. Sieved through sheets of dry light—Welcomes Anonymous a high, no less—but young for me in my present form. I like to know someone at a party.

And thinking that by proposing this little jaunt the night after my danceless marathon to surprise Charles whom she loves, I might be taking up the slack of not having offered my body to society at last night’s dance, I discover her saying most quietly, No…she will listen to TV and sew patches on the knees of Liz’s jeans. They’re luminous, funny patches, and “we” are no longer four or five going off to work in the morning in overalls.

Last night’s industrial screening shredded a tape of noise—ignition, concussion, coalition. Rained fish and insect stuff out of the thundering shifts so that the long, long ceiling of the mammoth loft furnished by the unknown lessee of that blast area got sifted; rained bombs, fir, rotation, geometry, dreams, and (if you looked at how the moving, for-a-moment-apparently-counter-clockwise-spinning fold swung around) rained ants.

Moved, though, not with that aim and life when Liz and Val blow by and leave behind them a wake—only to pause stock-still, together thinking of what?—stranded navy looking for its whale-boats. Val older physically a little than Liz, but younger in the mettle of maturity’s magic. Could I say it better?

Maturity beyond question. I’ll always give her that. A rhetorical answer if there’s such a thing, coming home off a business trip. But no answer to the dreamwork’s rhetorical question, “Then why did you bother to have me?”

What she has had to put up with I’ve had bad dreams about. Daydreams that are the despairing, would-be insanity of my class. And when it builds and hurries between her mother and me, Liz stays the same. That’s strength.

So strong I might forget she’s eleven. So strong I can’t ever get over it, or won’t for years.

Glad and able to be left alone (in this city) should we go out. And able to see more than she needs or wants. A story of real life, a dose of her parents sometimes not seeing straight to launch salvos at each other’s doubled blurs, you might think it the middle of the night, and just as well, no one gets hurt if a few healthy salvos heard round the apartment aren’t just on target.

I’ve found too many words, I’ve found too few. For this kid has had an unknown (not hard to guess, these days) amount of wake to vector through. But is it love, then, that lets her see her parents as they are, or strange maturity? So let the light shine in, shine upon her mother’s short, dark curls. The light comes in one end of a bedroom, passes through to be augmented by diagonally opposing mirrors that at first divide the morning influx of sun which then pours itself together again when it fills the bathroom threshold and reaches these two largely naked people approaching each other in height, if not always in looks, having an impromptu hip-to-hip analysis in the bathroom mirror, me fixed some paces behind them across the threshold over their shoulders.

They’re talking hair, the long and the short. I’ve heard the subject in a song sung at twilight at the boat basin on the West River, yet here it’s braids and parts, oily and dry, washed (the one) and to-be-washed (the other). And one’s belongings, the care of. And skin. But then, beyond skin and teeth—homework. What do you expect if you never do any? (That’s a lie, a complete lie.)

But homework, as if I never existed to discuss it myself with my daughter twelve short hours ago. In front of another sink, a steel kitchen sink where I divided our shares (among dinner plates slipperily layered in the detergent dark, and three smaller cake plates that could have served for salad dressed and undressed, if we in our household when at home together served salad separately, now tonight whisked before washing, having been pressured by the frictional, sugar-spun essence of pound cake and quick-crumbed at supper’s end, plates so little smudged they could have been dry-wiped instead of wiped-dry)—so now I have divided and turned our attention between my soap-sponging and hot-rinsing, and urging (her) my glowing-haired (as advertised) daughter not to dry anything but the glasses while I question her on her current math—topology, topology. Only then twelve hours later to hear her mother’s homework question at another sink, while ten feet behind I look her mom in the eye in the mirror as Liz also looks her doubting mom in the eye in the bathroom mirror in order to shout (not unhappily), “Then why did you bother to have me!”

“We didn’t,” observes my wife, examining her face in the mirror with a glance my way. I am a madman with a pair of shapes at bay, snug contours of female approaching each other so I can’t see my ancient relations straight—the waists, the shoulders, the spines I’ve touched. And so I stop feeling her my wife over my reflected shoulder who’s in front of the mirror and me; and if my somewhat retired brain had hands or sharpened elbows, I’d type onto a keyboard a right-brain projection of a shot of this bedroom sunbeam in whose flow I approach with my eyes the mirror that is not denied me above the sacred basin that is—and above which echoes Mom’s dry “We didn’t bother.”

“Well here I am,” Liz says, as her mother starts to say, “I mean we didn’t go to any—” and shakes her head and falls apart out of the mirror, hugs Liz, who shouts, “I asked you a question,” and giggles, being virtually tickled. The collective style is Family Throwaway.

Well, one spring night when I heard, against a far verse of Stephen Foster sung three miles away by Lucille dockside, the language of the low-splaying copters reach toward the receptors on our high-rising apartment house and the language of all the dogs in the street below hounding some being in their midst, and I could hear the silence of a known displaced owl-hawk walking our terrace walls and parapets eyeing the city and eyeing the tiles for long-ago-eaten pet rodents while hardly twitching in response to the crying, through the horizon of the twilight time and through glass and brick, of a large-ish jungle cat belonging to our neighbor who is a one-handed actor who’s been enjoying a long run at the other edge of the continent (and has farmed out his flat rent-free in the meantime to an electronically oriented shadow of a college girl who’s seldom in), I found the opportunity upon me going by instinct from strength to strength to capitalize on a blinding point of energy that came between my wife and me as we, from above, watched our daughter on the carpet watch television and were substantially ignored by her.

Wasn’t there a strength in her, separating her from me?

Lengths of light brown hair grew to cascades in the light from the screen. America comes into your living room, your TV room, what have you.

You have Indians. I remember Indians. Real ones, because on the screen it wasn’t a western but a commercial. A serious, corporate progress-report commercial for a firm that makes digging machines. The biggest in the world and in the history of the world. Monumental earth-moving engines bright-painted and fine, that dig, lift, let go, tilt, turn, all in one curving act, and are, I was set up to think at a glance, run by Indians. Indians represented by the unknown personable one in a red shirt with sun-ray design like false eyelashes on the upper part of the sleeve, and the unknown personable one was right here concentrated in the screen with a grin of white teeth and strong wrinkles carved by heritage and fed by all the plump bloods of youth—a heritage of lines.