Women and Men (183 page)

He was telling his brother that he had spent all of Thursday afternoon and evening with their grandmother, but Brad knew this because Jim had spent Thursday night in his own bedroom down the street. He had gone away to Pennsylvania and everything had happened in his absence. He had gone away into the horizon of many years and standing in a city apartment hearing his buzzer go he blinked away the feeling that nothing had happened. "We talked about you, Brad." "You did?" "We talked about reincarnation." "You did?" "Hey, when you getting married?"

Joke or no joke, his brother took it serious and smiled sheepishly. "Grampa didn’t have her cremated. He couldn’t do it. Grampa’s writing the obituary for the
Transcript."
"That’ll be like an obituary for the
Democrat."
"Dad says Grampa made it ten times too long." "He’s already written it?" "You know him." "Where were
you
Thursday night?" "You were asleep when I got in. Where were you Friday night? We were trying to call you."

He forgot what he had answered—something like Asleep under the Allegheny stars, or had there been night clouds?—after supper he and his girlfriend got inside their tent. Which indeed was partly what Margaret meant once, twice, three or four times, by saying—

But it was reincarnation she meant, "Better get it now because you don’t after you’re gone," and yet he did not remember in so many words how she meant it, for what he recalled, like some sought-after obstacle, was all the reincarnation he and she
didn’t
mean: so that he knew then and now as if by an intuition which meant no one would have to tell him, for they could assume he would know: his hand was on the doorknob, eight-thirty
A.M.,
Larry’s urgent voice on the other side: the door was open, the boy stood there alive with the attention and city urgency that covered all the other stuff: he was talking fast like they were standing in Mayn’s living room already: and in the gap of not knowing where his mother was and not wanting to know (any more than he would want to look at the cold face of his grandmother on this her burial day), and not wanting to think about an unthinkable (a record!) two suicides (in less than five years) which kept becoming one in his always grab-bag, humdrum head, in the gap of what you could talk about and what not, what report for sure and what not at all, for this was no politic time to speak to Larry about reincarnation or let into the open void the fact that his place had been entered and his letter to his daughter removed; in the gap of knowing his mother and grandmother were in both him and his fairly dull, illegitimate, love-child half-brother Brad clothed fitly in a suit inevitably from his girl’s widowed mother’s store, and in the gap between a long (read
historic)
obituary for your wife of fifty-odd years (read
uxorquy;
read
obsequoias)
and on the other hand an obit as brief as a weather report, he realized he had decided what he was going to do, as if decision were disappearing for a moment that might be years depending on your time of view, and surfacing like the very same person, yet with his grandfather advancing toward him to ask him if he was going to have anything to eat, the old man’s calm doubtless dragged out of him by the nearness of others’ very bodies, he absorbed the impulse to tell him what work he had just decided to go into and he grasped his grandfather’s arm, who said, "She loved you," and, in a better mood, remembered the slip of paper in the breast (or cigar) pocket of his jacket, for Pearl Myles had left two phone numbers for Jim to call her and he crumpled up the paper and, inhibited from trying a six-foot set shot at the square wicker wastebasket at a funeral luncheon, he went and dropped the ball of paper in, upon which his grandfather said, "My sentiments exactly," and, man to man, they shook hands again, and when Jim came out of the dining room later with a roast-beef sandwich on a gold-bordered plate, a few people had gone, though Brad and his girl were still standing together, now alone, enjoying themselves.

But hearing Larry now so upset about Amy because he now thought those keys were her only keys, and knowing as if from inside Lar’s skin that Larry was unhappy at having to suspect that Mayn, even in a friendly way, knew things about Amy or her work that Larry did not, Larry was tired because of anxiety—his father had gone out to the Island last night to see Sue, and hadn’t returned; and the people down the hall had been coming and going all night and Larry had twice looked through the peephole to see the opera singer and the guy in the pinstripe suit come back and later the guy in the pinstripe suit leave and come back in a matter of minutes—so that Mayn did not trouble Larry with any self-occupied speculations that someone had gotten into this apartment.

Larry’s repeating that he feels in his bones Amy’s in danger but maybe she was fed up with him and with being but a potential girlfriend, a chill though tender in the hand, a gray color at rest in the green of the eyes and then the green scaring the gray away as if he is the gray and according to her too much in his own head (and don’t say "one" the way you do even as a gag, One feels at times, One has forgotten, One remembers why one’s folks split but then one forgets)—but that’s a dumb way to walk out (and of her own pad); she could have felt they’re getting too close, y’know, she on the rug leaning back on her hands staring and talking, sure y’know you can get pulled away from yourself by another person in fact Amy herself had been saying that, and
he
felt it too so he agreed but couldn’t tell her it was her the light of his life that did that to him—

—all bent out of shape, Mayn murmured in the midst of the kid’s frank language, he didn’t know what Lar’ had asked of Amy; and Mayn took and shook Larry’s hand and Larry started across the threshold but had to get back upstairs in case of a phone call, he had his father’s new Phone-Mate turned on.

He was at the elevator. "I got the reincarnation thing all worked out. I’ll tell you when we have time, O.K.?"

The wind behind Mayn rattled the windows. "I think
I
had it figured out once, old man."

"We can compare notes." Larry’s real ready for the elevator.

"It’s lost. The field is yours, sir." Mayn had a breakfast meeting at a hotel uptown. Forget the whole shebang and go for a workout, take some steam and a massage at the mercy-killing hands of Manolo.

The elevator window lit up its diamond shape, and a lone rider might be inside. The door slid back. "It’s never totally lost, in my opinion. It comes back because it’s ... oh probably worthless, Jim." Larry shrugged and the elevator door might have been taking him away forever as he stepped in and was shut from view.

So that James Mayn, not half so sure of everything as this celebrated neighbor, Grace Kimball, well-known warm humorous influence on downcast and even suicidal women (Norma said) cum glad theories re goddess dispersing own flesh to heal patriarchal poison—all preached in an apartment in Mayn’s building that Grace had once shared with her (ne ex-) husband—James Mayn found himself left again where he’d about chosen to be: on consignment facing down the four corners of his one-time permanent shelter, unsure which was margin, which center—Women’s Interstate Bank,
or
a disappearing if potentially plural, non-curseproof pistol that came to roost bearing on it somewhere a worn emblem possibly miniaturizing a plan of sunspot economic cycles with a lot of 5s in it; droughts in the American West every twenty-two years,
or
the Great Spirit’s reportedly Four-Cornered Ear grounded somewhat as was the radiation fog of the coast-like Plains-and-Rocky-Mountain upslope challenging the Thunder Dreamer’s progress westward to give up the dancing pistol to an ancient survivor.

But margin and center turned out to be fact or lunacy, too: total-waste-use apartment-complex project,
or
some movable mountain’s mineral "bank" capable of, upon installation wherever it surfaced, literally brainwashing all those dwelling within its range so as to pan, like gold it could become, the illusion that it had stood there for centuries. Margin or center?—the hopelessly rigged, hawsered, shrouded, and convincing stories where that Hermit-Inventor figured, and the (well) real man, skinny old geezer who really died fifty miles away in New York City and whom Jim had asked Margaret about, and, after her death, did
not
ask Alexander about any more than Jim had even, over the years, had to struggle to keep from linking these old matters with his sudden interest in the U-2 fiasco and, from then on, during the sixties, its cover story’s subject, which was real weather reconnaissance, a fictional cover story made out of actual meteorology.

Margin or center?—Margaret’s Hermit-Inventor’s reputedly incarnate nephew carrying on original weather work; and some elder maverick in this later routine life surfacing twenty years later in the seventies, sometime employed in Texas and in a Colorado "center" then later as expert consultant on a New Jersey pirate TV station where he first voiced his "coastal" theories till he lost that job, released to custody of self (and social security), there visited by Mayn—but, if disemployed, now at his free work and with barely enough from a forgotten patent to support an old unrelated woman babbling someplace in that railroad flat with shit-eating old walls—

No problem, this original man unwilling to spend time (and living space) telling workaday newsman (covering he’s not quite sure yet what) differential equations for minute variables in evolution of atmosphere—for a weather conceived as scene for or product of a unified field locking together the four great forces: a
new
weather (according to this lone, unfrocked weather thinker) in that not only precipitation and cloud formation but the apparently
local precipitation
of
wind
might be indirectly radioactive in origin: you begin to get a reading on the overhead dynamics in the vicinity of some eastern coastlines—to be specific, vertically stacked interfaces, these possibly due to an oscillating radiance you infer from graphs of upper-air heat-swings and of shifts of cloud cover . . .

(which Mayn checked against the "pictures" done in black and red on opened-out brown-paper supermarket bags on the battered walls of the hermitlike maverick’s apartment; and heard the old lady’s continuing, rather musical talk in some next room; and found in an awful unframed window of understanding become his whole torso and head, that his elder host’s science-on-spec ("Oh, ‘guess science gets the halo nowadays—or am I out of date?") is tracing an old daydream seed of Mayn’s too long ago digested: so unthinkably far away from (apropos of future lasers penetrating storms and reflecting information perfectly back
through
turbulence) the old maverick’s humble mention of Lewis Fry Richardson (good English Quaker who resigned from the Meteorological Office when it was swallowed by the Air Ministry and who died—just three years after Margaret—having taken the study of wind distinct from its velocity so far as to have formulated a law of turbulent mutual dispersion of particles): and oscillating radiant (O.K., he’s hearing this succinct and separate man) energy product of relations between some near and stationary magnetism and some far and moving magnetism: these due to radioactive parcels or process, associated in some quirk-phenomena of the last decade, with coastline configurations themselves changing in some radical way measurable by image; meanwhile this radiance builds in intensity, mounts because of some mountain-like approach from the West.

Margin or center, or fact or term Mayn won’t yet make up. Two screens of material you don’t quite look at at the same time: old nephew of the Hermit-Inventor of New York who died and whose obsequies Margaret attended; and then this new, newsworthy actual person in an apartment with a face that looks broken and rebroken and complete, demoted to such contemplations as made Mayn contemplate some extra homework; and he had long since told his daughter of this maverick’s speculations, which made her nod moodily and say, O.K. but that word "mounting" made her think about the chance of radioactively
produced
weather threatening changes maybe due to some tide of slowly heaping government-sponsored wastes.

Margin or center? Mayn went on and on, angelic waste like education passing through him so he mattered so little he would just go on living contaminated to a ripe old age, the "rhyme" to Spence’s "reason"—think how, in quickly boning up what weather he could to at least grasp what the i960 U-2 plane was
supposed
to be watching while keeping the Soviet Union under surveillance, he could have discovered for himself why wind seems to us on Earth to curve like a bullet or anyway to the Anasazi Healer who could see whatever he felt was out there, but in fact blows straight as a latitude to any observer outside our rotation-obsessed Earth’s (God knows) inertial system— while failing to connect this after all fictitious (after some French mathematician) Coriolis effect with the Brad’s Day wrangle about curved winds—as if in condensing a news release out of California one weary day that, to wit, even forgetting our manned capacity to change the weather we might look forward to Canada and the U.S.S.R. turning hot and dry while some Third World disaster areas might turn into moist green savannahs, soft mountains, hectares of orange soil, black soil, we never connected this future with the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and its itinerant clouds of acid droplets that caused the Little Ice Age by stratospheric blocking of the sun, not to mention the Hermit-Inventor’s symmetrical tornado of ‘83 which seems, within his inertial frame to have been the model for the monster of late ‘93 early ‘94 not reliably chronicled by the Navajo (though woven by Earth and sky) that coincided by convergence flow not strict causality with the afternoon of the long sunset when great forces came out—instead of "going home" and that one-in-a-lifetime alignment of clefts and the new post-mortem career launched all but weightlessly by the Anasazi healer’s will so much at rest among the disintegral dust remaining of him that he became a cloud whose name he had never known and, in his only shrug in honor of the reincarnation he eschewed (long, long before a woman named Grace Kimball was saying she disappeared into her workshop members like fragments of the goddess and then would resurface having swum through their circulations for days on end, and know that simultaneously she had never been away), he passed over Landbridge America aiming, if not before he died, so soon after as to be practically the same thing, to see what he had always been curious to see.