Something will get settled by the game. Four or five clean shots shape up ahead, dangerously possible, you see a clean run composite, a spread of objects, the land, history, get it over with. The girl speaks suddenly of New York, while Mayn’s playing, a woman she met at a swimming pool who played billiards with her husband every other week at a tavern and one night looked down her stick and beyond the ball to that chalk thing on the rim of the table and her husband’s hand picking it up to do the end of his cue and she knew she would leave him. (Bet it was pool they was playing, said the man in the T-shirt. Secret of concentration, Mayn adds, taking a shot. What’s that? the girl asks. Doing two things at the same time, he comes back at her.) No words for his belief that he knows the New York woman already; or is it that he will know her, through this girl? (I feel like I know her, he mutters, and recklessly cocks to line up his following shot and she doesn’t name the woman but, You probably know people she knows, she adds with some soft meaninglessness that fully excludes Mayn’s opponent—though she’s getting to be a celebrity in feminist circles.) He’s pounced recklessly but takes his time lining up, the green baize swells in an uncanny middle unless he is half-drunk, and the balls are going to just follow the slope to the pocket and lucky for you you don’t claim you personally caused all these dead shots—you are sensing a downright flesh closeness to the girl but it’s talking to you like a happy plural toxin monstrously claiming strange stakes yet not yet the wonderful girl here but some payoff for being able not to dream, is it he’s in a couple of places at once, embodied in that woman the girl has mentioned? though not sexwise exactly, he doesn’t know but damn! some heart and ears and hands and loss lie between them, and this discovery sends a charge of used euphoria, no drunk dizzy spiel, up your brain later recollected as the right side which means love or work, you forget which.
The man with the void in his eye stands close behind him like the joker in a friend’s basement one year who would bump the base of your cue at the moment of execution. One day Mayn rammed him back, a heavy volt to the chest. Kid sat down and started crying, breathless, he was fifteen or sixteen, stopped crying and started gasping. The man in the T-shirt is pushing more than joking.
Now I look at the trash out by the garbage can and I think what am I missing if I don’t see the paper tomorrow, day after, don’t see one for a week? What am I missing? The dog charts? Not a suckin’ thing.
But you’d like to be quoted, Mayn goes for the man’s sharpening edge.
But forget the man’s solar plexus, make the shot. But what does the girl think of the man’s saying a word he wouldn’t use with some other women who are in the tavern? She’s in a chair with her legs crossed, having a really good time somewhere in her head. The man is pushing a little more, but where?
Mayn’s weight rides on the left side of his left hand, four fingers fanned like a tripod on the green baize, the cue slowly sliding forth again, again, probing or pushing, the distance between the chalk-blue sky-blue button and the white ball, then resting in the fork between forefinger and the tight-arched thumb.
Tell me what am I missing: news today, history tomorrow. You could spend your life reading the newspaper, said the man.
Mayn grins down target but for the benefit of his girl. Her speech, family more than college, and the way she carries herself unmarried and making good money (and to the man maybe smoother and older-looking than she is to Mayn) lets him with his void in eye say (with only the first letter changed), "fucking" where if she were a regular here he might not.
The cue strikes through the steady sounds; tip jabs the white ball low for a stop backspin; the blue jumps for the corner, smacks the back of the pocket, rolls up into the air and, rising, falls out of sight rattling back down the alley to clack the wood of the tray at shin level. Before making the next shot, speak. (The green baize has developed a slight hill in the middle.)
You have to know what not to read, man.
The man laughs. Mayn speeds up; he looks into a distance and is where he looks. Where was he? He can see only back. He’s falling but the bills in his shirt pocket are stuck to his cigarettes and his shirt.
Before they left he asked the man if they usually played for five bucks.
Mayn said they were going; the man wanted another game; Mayn asked if she wanted to drive. No.
They drove back over to Cocoa Beach past fewer lights now, and she was beside him asking if he’d seen the hole in the other man’s throat who had given up his seat. He’s so near to her, keeping his eye on the road.
Fewer lights. Most selling something. She agrees quietly. The woman upside down with dried blood all over her but the wheel spinning was impossible. Like different time schemes. But the girl didn’t hear, did she? Yes, with one ear. She got beaten up, said the girl. But she was driving him, said Mayn. Quite a while before the accident, she said.
Mayn parked between two motels. Or so he later thinks he recalls. In a public area where some giant local kids, four of them, powerful-looking if you cared (and more than four of them, the males, plus a couple of girls, blonde like the boys), stood around two big bikes watching Mayn and the young woman.
Put all six or seven of those kids along with their machines into a compressor, come out with not a new race but—Jean’s name, voiced on the beach as if he hadn’t been told: she thought she had said Barbara-Jean, which her mother still held out for. She doesn’t smoke, she points out. Forgot to leave her shoes in the car, which equals Mayn forgetting to take the ignition key. Beach so long that (sure, she agrees with him) they’re walking the coast of Florida.
Has he ever been down to the Everglades?
Only thought about it. (She made it sound like ‘‘Tomorrow.")
What is he doing here, she wants to know, if he’s not covering the launch? Nostalgia for the last one, he smiles. Worried or irritated, she is thinking and he feels it right up into her words: Well, what was his overall . . . aim? (she doesn’t really finish). Not to make too much of what I find out, he tells her: maybe leave things as they are.
You have power, though, she replies, but the precision and forthrightness of her voice spread her meaning so all he knows is she feels something for him.
He told his kids a story about the Big Dipper but they couldn’t—(How old are they? she asks calmly, womanly)—they couldn’t see the Bear; and to tell the truth sometimes neither could he; or believe it. Let’s see: it’s 1973 tonight. He ages his son this side of twenty, his daughter never see twenty again. (You’re joking with me, she says unamused.) American Indian story updated so the Great Bear unknown to the Great Spirit learns how to use the Big Dipper in order to drink more, faster, and when the Bear invents a way to tip a jug of honey so it pours into the Dipper, the heavens instead of coming apart wait and wait for the space-cold syrup to flow so that as the parts of the sky reach rest, a cleft appears like an inverted spigot.
Pulling out his cigarettes he dropped some bills on the sand and she shifted one shoe so she had both on the fingers of her right hand on the far side of him. He put his hand on her shoulder, she was about twenty-five, and he guessed he was comfortable to her, journeyman that he was; and when she said, "Can we go back and make love," her name and him with it fell far back into the whirr of the air-conditioner clamped down into a distance of window sills and parked cars and an unknown Chilean man of middle age not so "active" as elegant. And in the whirr, which brings the sea so close, as if Florida is all shore, is heard the bellow of some creature out of Mayn, a wrinkled sea lion on the point of a drowned mountain Darwin never saw. The stage sets down the horizon, the maverick meteorologist defined horizon, raising in question form how retreating from an object or what’s called a perturbation may balance out the emergence of mountains behind the initially observed eminence with their disappearance down Earth’s angle, arguing that from the properties of the horizon you or some alternate right person might divine a round Earth, but did this help explain recent weather fronts whose shapes Mayn had just barely ga
thered during his allotted struggle for existence.
The vessel sets down the horizon, and if you are on it, you’re also James Mayn sitting up straight on a bench burning fermented chicha down your gullet here in Temuco numbing your historic gums, fermented quinoa grain once divinely amino-rich. A black Indian beside you who has little to say except his uncle went away to the nitrate mines years ago and they are still waiting for him to come home, you are waiting here in Temuco to talk to a German beekeeper who has made some other way a fortune in Chile (partly in brewing but partly in lumber apparently) and has a Boy Scout (emeritus) son happily in military school close friends with the son of someone who runs the national airline. Four days three nights was what Mayn could spare for the entire country, look through that skin and see aboriginal mapuches, dark people of the tierra who hold right in their eyes memories of such ancient mapuches as wiped out a few waves of conquistadores and got their own back before it was taken away from them, so Mayn donates a thin bottle of Peruvian brandy, feeling after all some digestion kin to this strange man’s next to him in lieu of any whit of history to be grasped between them, as, then, it is necessary to cut to the German materializing near the village-square bench Mayn and the Indian are leaning back in: cut to the German, surprisingly youngish for mid-forties at least and slender and brown and with the darkest yet faintest dried-blood-red crescents incising sills under his wary eyes, for he turns to you often walking down the road to his land—it’s called the Alliance for Progress, still winding down late in the decade, 1969 it was, and you ask him What will happen?
Son a former Boy Sprout (old New Jersey witticism) in military school, daughter desiring to study animal husbandry and buy a ranch and raise Chilean beef (Does it make sense? the father with some odd German indirectness, asks you, and answers, The haciendas have always tied up the land, not used it, but we will see what happens). Did Mr. Mayn know that forty-six percent of university students here are women?
The man and his wife? Bees, now, and a boat. (Does it make sense that the people in this country don’t eat fish? he asks.) And string duets almost every day, the children never played. (Strings? Two guitars in fact.)
The Alliance, though? Well, everyone even the Indians know that Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon spent a billion to keep us from going Communist, but to protect the projects of the left which never got off the ground anyhow, they spent huge sums on counter-insurgency police.
Any predictions?
The man in his pressed khakis shakes his head slowly, subtly. Your father came here at the end of the War? you ask. He was Alsatian, the man says precisely; started an automobile repair shop, just the engines, not here, north of here; there were not engines enough and he fell into something else. Your mother? you ask, was she Chilean? No no, she was Bavarian: the man stared into Mayn’s face, they’ve reached a long wooden fence, detoured where Mayn had had no wish to wander, it’s so long ago: Your father is dead?
What is it you are looking into? the man goes on, not desiring to end the conversation. The Alliance for Progress or old German soldiers who were in the lumber business? That man, though, in December ‘68 knew the answer, as the girl four years and five months later in Florida does not yet quite. But tonight in Florida we are not even there, on the German’s land, a sixteen-minute walk from the village bench where Mayn left the mapuche and the Peruvian brandy. We are in Darwin country in reality, south Chile, the real baja that Mayn never got to, had to get back—it’s south of Puerto Montt (a name only, but what a name!), way down near the Cordillera, where he is a fashionable Patagonadal sea-male yellowish brown, and his nose in the sun sighting the Darwin range ashore sniffs sweet coastal coves where cows birthing young are now to be mounted again on that annual basis. Put that on the wire back to the boss but you’ll be home again soon enough with the industrial profiles pre-election/overall-hemispheric prognosis. Bellow it back, having grown a mane. Bellow back into the present what the German said when he put down his guitar that was unusually deep and fat and had another name. Do away with Nixon and with his right-hand man and prove it was a lunatic who did it and not a Cuban, and Chile might make it, next time around. But this was not news, not even that a German with money thought a Socialist government could feed the brains of children with milk and nationalize mines that represent four-fifths of Chile’s foreign credit and bring the absentee landowners home from Rome, London, Buenos Aires, Paris not to be shot but to help think it through from month to month, the future.
But Mayn doesn’t rid himself of that future whose shadow he carries, having been cast from it as if he could not stand what they were doing there. Where two become one. Twosomes reduced to frequency in order to be transmitted to Lj or L2 and so on, when they were expecting to be two also at the other end when they came out of frequency into their own reconstituted flesh arriving in the libration space settlement, though all of them had been told what was really going to happen even if in a message system announcing— that it bears in it—its own drug—and the effect on these emigrants when, on arrival, each one transformed from two discovers what has happened and turns and turns and turns looking for some other while seeing only the apparently straight expanse of vast libration-point torus, one’s new vast-doughnut home, cannot be estimated except in special instances by, strangely, geiger sifter; can’t be estimated because, because—he is an economist besides his credentials as sea lion or more generalized monster, or at a great distance a worm digesting Earth, his laughter leaks like madness and he alone can return to Earth to try to do something only to find that all he can do is try to know what happened—because, because there will not be two to contemplate one another, but one alone, which doesn’t preclude the new one meeting someone, which anyway must happen where the curve of destiny sloped out to Earth-Moon space steepens subtly with law unprecedentedly honed.
One alone? But with what characteristics? Did he get that far? He is not there, he is deluded, isn’t he? Is he a guy grown more familyless than less as two or three years became six or seven and his family apart from him grew? He missed being naked in that woman’s presence whom he loved. No, that is not the first story; he is in a Florida roadhouse on Skylab night but he can’t get loose from that future he has come from, how old must he have been? he can’t reconstruct it, and fails the more he tries until he recalls he isn’t in the roadhouse now but in bed with a friendly person. Mayn recalls his own name, Mayn smiles (or thinks he smiles) in his sleep. He smiles on her sleep. Her generation grew up on noise, turning that wild wire of juice whorling down the ear into a mountain of life to look into the map of poison or radiation and imagine taking nothing from it but what can be used, except that this is Mayn’s own generational lie, not theirs. Her name gets dismantled in the air-conditioner, but her elbow’s all there. He smells the girl in her sleep: soap fading somewhere on her still holds: it makes clearer the last breaths of his Gauloises as rich and cutting making a home in the throat, as noise down the worming gullet of an ear. Bed sentiments from here to Walt Disney’s piece of Florida’s own Orlando the coast Chileanizes his intestine but make no mistake, Chile’s as long as America is across, so thank God the strip is stabilized by the Andes. Yet narrow as a mere layer: file that, file it along some southern continent’s Pacific flank. She doesn’t smoke, he sees along the cold rocket flanks steams like leaks of day into night, the Saturn V night-white waiting to fire stands upright fixed by the weight of searchlight beams. So it’s not yet May, but December: the night launch. Five months gone, and he not a stupid person but he came looking for the tall, tailored, bald Chilean not knowing what he would say when he found him. Slow-motion interview: would you mind saying that again, sir? History is the cover story. Why tell the girl? Will Mayn love her? He’s talking to her, which is important.
"What is it?" she says rather softly when he gets her name right and she moves her elbow off him; but her face doesn’t turn toward him but a couple three angels have hung around near the modular chests of drawers long and low or are checking
out the towels and the clickless light switch.
Well, "it" threatens to grow by blurring into insignificance: is it a story? "How I played winter ball and was approached by anti-Castro elements," or "How I declassified a CIA director’s secret play to have himself abducted by his own men," or "How I became a message from here to there implanted in me and recoverable but not by me"—or "How as a P.O.W. in Vietnam I had to whisper for five years and what this did to my hearing," or "How I kept to myself a conversation with the pilot who helped stage the plane crash that faked the death of a right-wing Chilean revolutionary in January."
"Yes," she says.
No, said the Chilean that night in December, have we?
But I looked the same; he was the different one: was I drunk? No. He was taller and a shade less thin: mustache dark and drooping but he’s less bald close up if possible than five hours earlier in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center—
I don’t think you usually talk like this, she says to Mayn, the most intimate thing so far.
Anyway I saw him meeting this moderately disreputable guy I know named Spence, and now I’m meeting him again and he looks different and seems to be saying he doesn’t think we have met (I mean, who really cares, but) . . . and he’s murmuring, half-politely, I dont . . .
While I stared, and—
I don’t think so, he said. Unless, New York? he suddenly added like he would give something to get something, although there was fear. The accent on "York" Slavic, Italian, Spanish. But then hands were clapping hollowly in the early evening, hands that were not pressing pictures into cameras.
Jim, she’s saying close to his mouth, I can’t be bringing all this out of you.
No. You can’t.
Women and Men Page 12
