Nor is this simulated Florida vacation of breakfast yesterday and today among the postcards of spacecraft and armadillos, the souvenirs and sunglasses and short sleeves and elusive mind of the media people, like having a drink of pisco with a Chilean-naturalized German beekeeper who wants not to be identified, watching the brandied December sun come up out of some Andean peak two days after fifty thousand middle-class Chilean ladies have banged their empty cookware marching against the Doctor President’s two hundred percent inflation and his alleged hundred pairs of shoes; and Mayn, upon finding some far window all but sinisterly traced inside him from valve to unseen valve of his inner organs by that rich burn lifting the sun out of catastrophe-knew-what mine of mineral information, Mayn, yes, caught himself trying to inject, lend, lard, connect into the loving picture of the simplicity of this rural beekeeping business (presented by his Chil-Kraut host who declined to discuss money he—paper-montyl—lost to some Santiago salesman for Investors Overseas Services) inquiries he had made into Du Pont’s preservation of the Delaware coastline from industrial development and his inquiries into an inquiry as to a Delaware canal’s potential water supply for two firms other than Du Pont, because the beekeeper has made a lot of money in nitrates and has a bank account in Wilmington like "American Switzerland" and corresponds about bees with a CIA bee-freak scholar in Washington, though such connections have never been Mayn’s yen: his business is get in get out. Of the subject, that is. Which isn’t the same as getting out of your mind, for you don’t want to wind up in that elusive media mind, though doesn’t he find when he gets out of his own there’s the next he’s right in? Where daydreams can’t be all his—some ancient trivia, yes—like what happened in Choor after the East Far Eastern Princess left on her mission to find New World and/or monsters—why some started up right in Choor—and did that fact come from Margaret or from her grandson listening?
The Apollo souvenirs—them you can smash. No sweat. Shrapnel facsimiles of themselves mined up a shaft of the future’s shape. Mayn would like to use them while he doesn’t know his multi-spectral scanners, isn’t up this time (nor any time) on peaceful uses of space to be tried out in that house kept orbiting the Earth. What souvenirs? Hard enamel keyrings; hard-baked enamel tie tacks commemorating the three of Apollo 1 which—who—burned together on the ground; Apollo 11 money clip; Lunar Module cufflinks; Apollo trivet, Apollo lighter keyring, Apollo bumper stickers, sterling rocket charms, Sky lab tankards, a Skylab spoon.
Is this simulated-vacation feeling what you get for a free ticket to one of the final spectator sports? He came—he will tell the young woman—here on the dumbest of hunches to find a Chilean gentleman he no doubt could have located if he had used his contacts to put out a trace on the man, whose chance words were a lead into nowhere. Mayn’s stuck in some future stadium lately where lions and gila monsters are being fed to high-strung, professionally itinerant tennis players bronzed into being near-Indianized. Would he cover sports? he was asked by a free-lance diver who did a lot of police department work and was looking for a couple of hard-to-get tickets to a rock concert, ignorant doting father. Mayn gets tickets—"ducats"—when he wants—for sports—sometimes. Never sports assignments; wouldn’t want them. The diver said that that was just what he would love to do—cover a great pitcher thinking his way through the late innings, a great outfielder diving to steal a Texas Leaguer, a great third baseman snuffing out a suicide squeeze. Had he ever visited one of those five-thousand-capacity Texas League fields and seen a young centerfielder pass the helmet after knocking the ball over the fence? Yet Mayn would rather do it: it’s the trick elbow in his brain that swings free to take him back to a tumble in a gym echoing like a pool under lights on the late afternoon of a dark winter weekday, or to a wild, hard squash-court wall. Or play at wrestling—being covered by two children who jump on him and get a lock on his neck. He could play less easily at being what is wanted of him elsewhere: at being Bureau Chief. He’s been pressured in his time even by a wife who loved him to amount to more, but can’t say this to this young woman he has met here. Let Bureau Chief vanish into a high building where Bureau Chief can wait for Mayn’s utilities pieces from New Mexico, for the follow-up from Iowa on drought prediction, short crops, to cut, (go ahead) edit, totally compress, compound it, turn it into space/money. Pressured once steadily to be Bureau Chief in the inevitable place, did its old-time inventor feel this in him like inspiration?—the Inventor of New York, the phrase finds him, he doesn’t much recall those old things—like, though, it’s now, and Jim still married, with a couple of domiciles to contemplate supporting (and a fine and subtle wife with six thousand a year from a charitable great-aunt), and a pair of dependent kids (the words come), kids (all but grown-up) whose games got more grown-up and less visible like relations at close range year by year. So what does he support now with the money he sends? A sounding down his gullet here in Florida regales the sweet fume of oyster flesh. Oysters that winked between him and his companion—Jean—Barbara-Jean, she prefers not to be called but doesn’t make an issue of it—at a table this night, hearing (the two of them) nearby a Spanish sentence about Castro’s Golden Falcon Skydiving Club in the Everglades (not Fidel because the club is for Cuban Liberation people), oysters reflecting what’s going to happen next, and the dinner companion looks away out the window, Jean, her hand around her glass, watching for a sign that tomorrow’s rocket for the crew of that already launched Skylab is being readied. The light of a jet swings red over the Cape, one-way trapeze. You wait into tomorrow, you have done it so many times you’re looking back at yourself now from irresistible future, a vacuum you fell for; you wait to watch. To watch the shot, the hit, tee-off, coin flip, puff from the starter’s gun, national anthem. And who of those curious folk with press badges got a clue what hands guide the rocket or swing the spent, absent Saturn’s payload at an orbit’s bargain rates around the sky? A plane, a bus, ship, windmill, paid-up home, basic expense: these routine orbits might have been devised by the same men who have measured out to the function of sleep a 12.3 percent wedge of the daily man-hour pie up there in orbit as American as ampule pie, we’ve got a monster-type in our head just saying things like a guardian angel. Dead vacation? His whereabouts are poised to come at him again while elsewhere so is his idea that this dead vacation is a second chance. Here before him at the bar, here it is again in the vacancy in front. Slow down, put on some speed. Is the mind dying? He’s got no business dismissing technical whattage he’s not up on and he wouldn’t hesitate to tell this young woman with him—she’s on assignment, she’s eager, she interviewed the high-school prize winners at the Press Site yesterday, she knows a third stage from a second, she is in her kind but oh so damned intelligent he’s half-stumped. O.K., he’s not on assignment this trip, nor was when down here in December for Apollo.
"The final Moon launch," the girl said, nodding fast.
"The first night Moon launch," he said, not owlishly but maybe as if there was more where that came from than this love he’s feeling.
This girl with a hand on his arm, this girl he sat down next to today in the grandstand at the Press Site three miles from the launch pad—Mayn has told her only that he was twice with the Associated Press but got into something better. Spaced his words for some funny effect of more point than his thought claimed, not that AP was ever bad; the old UP was worse before UPI, but that was before even his time and they had such skinflints at UP that their newsmen were said to belong to the Downhold Expenses Club (she smiled). He didn’t know why he told her that, it was like someone else’s divorce story. He did have credentials in pocket and he was a fair listener when it came to Skylab housekeeping, but this trip was a hunch-gamble on the Chilean economist, no more to do with space green stamps than with—he heard it speak in him—a much-chewed place name—say Choor—some incomplete place out of those accounts of Margaret’s that proved his as well—for instance, when she allowed as how monsters had been there all the time (Where? in the m
ountains? At least) she was appropriating his idea, he reminded her. Why, so it was, she said and laughed a little hoot of hers (brief as a thought more than a piece of a laugh; but, in a family way, the counterpart of the grandfather’s Haw). But then Jim heard her say a thing he learned from, though he stored the learning away (and resolutely could not use it when a time soon came for it when he had a falling out with his grandmother), and what she said was that maybe the monsters couldn’t appear until the Princess of those stories had left Choor. Well, that killed him! It was some surprise freedom of mind.
What will he tell the person here in the tavern whose fingers he feels on his arm? It’s a question. Why? What has she come in on? She spoke first today, she noted four youngsters, three boys and a very flaxen girl who was doing all the talking down in front of the grandstand: high-school award winners, designers of experiments to be carried out in Skylab’s orbiting blender, and one of these smart kids who didn’t win came down anyway. Here at night in the tavern he feels the fingers let go of him there above his trick elbow. The two owners of the arms before him that narrowed the space but now widen it are turning. Today Mayn and the girl sat in the Press Site grandstand watching the white rocket three miles away at the edge of the sea as if it would go at last when they were ready, its sides steaming and the red gantry holding it at arm’s length; and the flat sea was as flat as the land. A blonde girl down in front of the grandstand suddenly looked away from the three in glasses and short-sleeved shirts with their laminated cards pinned to the pocket and searched the grandstand so intently that Mayn felt he missed a point; the blonde girl opened a giant sketch pad and showed the boys, looking at each of them, and made marks on her pad like writing, not drawing; and Mayn kept looking around for the man who was in his mind all the time from December—the South American gentleman—man from Chile whose words telescoped with some unformulable acceleration less to connect Mayn with Chile than, later, to mean he had to catch up irrationally with the Chilean (that’s not right) before his own life changed unrecognizably: so the Chilean was why Mayn came down for another launch, having already tried in vain to get in touch with a Hispanic Voice of America reporter to find out who, what, and where the Chilean was.
Mayn looked behind the young artist along the grandstand and she was leaning forward, her arms across her knees, and where at the small of her back the beltless top of her jeans stuck stiffly out he saw down to the parting and there a sheen of downy shadow, not a stitch.
A dark swim is what’s called for, the water close, the grand night missing on both burners thus far, so that with his monstrous immunity to dreaming he will bring in the night himself; as in great hollow daylight Mayn had tried to bring on that night with that maverick’s new meteorology that he didn’t understand because he needed to check out coastline-atmosphere-chance theory professionally catastrophic for the old maverick meteorologist who did not care (nor gave written handouts because it’s only human interest to a newsman if that; and the chain of papers Mayn’s with has him do really important dull stuff, and yet the novel weather back there in that railroad apartment in the city holds his mind at bay and he will say it’s unique, no more)—so he could leave his San Antonio trousers and his Boston sport jacket on the wide beach and mysteriously ease his way out a hundred, two hundred yards and lie on his back looking up through the two or three constellations he will identify if given the chance, looking through them at imponderable speed.
For a long time he has been marked to die quite soon unless the event in whatever space it came to got shifted to one other person. How do you know a thing like that? But how do you feel? Little, apparently.
Alone, sunny side down in your motel Breakfast World, he got the speeding up and slowing down like a compact future-pill in the snowy grain of hominy slid in an inertial mass before him by maple-sugar high-school arms and legs.
A slow slow drawl either male or female is heard saying, "If I knew for sure, I’d take every penny out of the bank and bet it on the nose." The speeding and slowing, the rubber soul falling, he’s tried to step outside it. But this evening all he did, after a first course that turned out to be his dinner of a glutton’s dozen (= 2 dozen) slick, cloudy-cupped oysters, was do what he didn’t much want to do—leave a good fish place on a quiet, breezy pier when he needed another orbit of oysters—open and swimming at him. Yet, after a meal leisurely as a swim, though bothered by a skydiving FLNC Cuban bragging in Spanish at a nearby table, Mayn was racing in a rented car to get himself and the young woman to the ominous briefing at Canaveral, laughing with her at the grandmotherly waitress’s words (in a little apron), "Have a nice day tonight"—and now, after the smoke, the surprising letdown of a briefing where he looked again for the Chilean, he walks into a tavern over in Cocoa to feel, in those separated arms and the broad back on the right, that a position has been taken up in advance of his coming. Here first. The light is infra-reddish and the neck here first could be Native American.
He and the young woman have still only just come into the roadhouse. In less than a second a lot can happen, not his fault. Why does he know that she wants to ask for more about his son and daughter? He has already said he doesn’t know much about his son right now. Newspaper people who act as if they have seen it all. Is whatever you say a cover for something else? He could ask this girl. Why is she more a young girl tonight for having stepped out of her jeans and slipped down over her a sleeveless black dress? So light or smooth she seems to have nothing under. Which is halfway to the truth. He looks for anyone he knows. The stodgy gypsies of the press are not here, he thinks.
In this light only the girl. She’s taken off the badge that told him who she was with when they picked each other up this afternoon, going easy on each other, letting the National Geographic guy with the cardboard tub of fried chicken behind them explore women-in-space, a month is a long time, she’s a token woman but she doesn’t get just a token orbit. "Token of what?" the girl turned around and said, and while she had a mole under her ear like a magically hung trinket, she was her hair, as she turned: "There’s a lot of interesting non-sex feasible if you know about it," she said awkwardly—and in the short dark curls he found a quick silk of rusty orange that was only light maybe. So Mayn saw all the different hair around in the grandstand and saw that he appreciated his own gray hair, never wear anything on your head, give the follicles a chance to see—see what? what’s left out—of a chunk of information reported like a taxable sum in the submitted copy, dispatch from Geneva (New York?), Delaware Water Gap development, history’s parts of a mechanical being conceived but not yet invented by us all, so given a chance at the light, the hair follicles see both ways, curling outways yet double-ended to tickle used brain cells so the brain can dream they’re growing friendly through skull and dura mater to touch the void. So the National Geographic photographer didn’t handle the girl’s challenge, and he said, "I don’t want to know what they do up there." Mayn was touched by the girl and heard her words before they were spoken: "Soon, in a few years, people won’t be into sex so much, it’s getting toward the end of this kind of dopy thing." When the National Geo man said low and fast, "Let’s have a little eye contact when you say that," Mayn declined to deal with the guy.
Tonight all changed. At the press conference tonight the new problem called forth the old challenge. An official who at another point through the smoke introduced a voice from Texas said on the contrary the damage sustained by Skylab during launch into orbit today is exactly the kind of thing an unmanned operation is insufficiently adaptable to counteract. Heat shield torn off. One wing of solar cells undeployed, maybe torn off. Have to guess what’s gone. Tomorrow’s launch scrubbed. Before they launch the crew, they need to work out how to erect an improvised heat shield to replace the one ripped off today, time to think up a parasol.
Ballpoints through the smoke adapt to a director’s language picking up that it is a canned answer. Like an exec’s at a chemical-waste-disposal conference Mayn covered. Or sportin
g goods, all-weather, good-down-to-sixteen-degrees sleeping bags—gauge the impact on sleeping bags of NASA’s Mylar insulation (light, cheap)—don’t flirt with business, either get into it, make your million and get out—or stay out to begin with. Which isn’t the same thing as spending on insulation now so you’ll have it even if you theoretically haven’t got the money, it’s worth spending to install, say, that "cap" of insulation in the attic. The girl casts her eyes restlessly so that she radiates some subtle trouble. He’s not bright; he’s just looking. He couldn’t place her until their eyes crossed going opposite ways and she was the one with the sketch pad who had been taken by Mayn’s companion for one of the students, and there’s still a point about her he missed.
Hours later now he is touched by the rented car outside the tavern like a familiar object from elsewhere. All because of talking to this smart young woman he likes—who objected to the word girl even when he said that he would be glad to be called a boy, hell; and she added, You’re white.
Women and Men Page 10
