Not birth of relations, comes the answer but from where? from us or others conceivably not angel but likewise evolving toward human, though if an angel is trying to change, it must have a long way to go—light years, some informed soul says.
Yet as the auburn-haired woman and the wonderful Latin man moved around their table and rejoined on the far side and touched arms, he speaking into her ear, she raising her shoulder and snuggling her head to it like he’s tickling her, the correspondent-woman on the point of salvaging the thing she needed in the selection read her from Jim Mayn’s letter found one more intervention in the person of two or more scope-size stories sliding slow toward each other and toward her, unless one was the waiter coming to rescue her oval mariscada dish before this highly metabolized and busy customer bread-polished it "licking-clean" enough to fool the waiter into lightly laying down upon its white mirror a jiggly dessert, but not before she knew more than she was able to know: that the father Jim’s letter had drawled its way into taking the Ship Rock literally, so it’s sliding through the Earth, masts breaking the horizon; so the Earth—this man reasoned like telling a story to his little girl now grown to irony—was softer, kind of fluid in those days—make sense? —so that when he told of lovers going up the Rock together and coming down separately at accelerated velocity, and reported the volume of American new-lyweds visiting the actual Four Corners twenty miles or so from Ship Rock to stand on an ugly metal plate that she did not like one bit where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico met, he seemed to have an easy grip holding that earlier, fluid Earth together for such newlyweds as held on to each other standing on the plate to be in four states at once but were by some design of theirs in collusion with their future and with the literalness of this man who seemed not the type to think himself "between histories." Was the joke some new mixed-blood religion? For was he preaching layer by geofirm layer down to each seashell in its thousand-mile-deep coast where the current of the sea of the gods listens to itself in the dry fires of the plateau? This man will take legend and geologic report, and, as she understands it, it’s history as common in the invisibly slow violence of the land’s change as in the cities of the sky invented upon high mesas by the four-dimensional grid of mind with which the People lived their respect for the forces that made the Encircled Mountain a four-petaled flower or told a singer when he was strong enough to sing a healing and when he’d better not. Well, she had put aside what she hardly knew, to find there were many paths all in her from one uninterrupted breath to the next and many even the face of the Earth was consuming. This all came to her, as the woman with the abundant auburn hair leaning into the embracing form of the Latin man she was with, cast back upon the correspondent-woman such a look of tension it darkened the prospect of dessert, but the waiter came between them. And as she ordered her dessert and saw her shiny mariscada dish pass away, the correspondent-woman heard her own frank voice questioning her profession. Didn’t newspeople just multiply wants? The preceding week, looking across the semicircle of naked women at the woman Clara who had not really rebuffed her but seemed to prefer not to carry "it" beyond the (naked) workshop, her voice was saying right out as if her whole body-self made her understand, that she had stayed single because she did not want that trip, it was stubborn of her, she knew, it was uncooperative and over-metabolized, it was unwilling: but two people boring into each other? slipping closer into unmentioned disaster she couldn’t put her finger on, her fault no doubt—
No, said one woman; and, not at all, said the woman named Clara; and stick to your own body feelings, Line, said Grace.
—but the point was that now as a new contingent of five diners rather silent came into the restaurant, her unwillingness brought on a fellow feeling, but who was it with, who was it with? and she knew it was with the father who wrote to his beloved daughter (hoping incidentally that she wasn’t going to find herself high and dry when the funding for her job ran out, and could he do anything? he knew any number of people in Washington), wrote of the rock ship barreling through the once permeable (fluid) Earth and also of the numerically real couples, newly wed two by two but maybe really experiencing four states hand in hand become one for the future.
Until she half-loathed her life alone while sliding forth to meet not the waiter who approached and whom she momentarily slid through, but what lay well beyond, and it was as if the unwilling landscape man Mayn had actually told her this was what would happen: that two persons perhaps without even a vein of bias as to religious or sexual origin might one day disappear literally into one: but the point was not that this need happen each to each in their frequent troth but that under some latest utility dome two persons stood Indian file content because awaiting transport to another section of their future: there, having here been reduced to frequency and thus transmitted hence, they would reconstitute and see each other at once in their new home which would be an Earth-Moon-space colony with native-silica drapes, a lawn on top of the living room, altogether a new consumable life, running, say, a waterless fish-farm where beyond gravity gills won’t collapse, she understands (space spouse).
When in reality through the matter-scrambler utility dome the union of these forward-looking couples was to be sealed literally in a one-for-two eco-switch dreamed up by population-consolidation programmers who cover with the old romance of loved union a new unknown singlehood: that is, the Earthling couples demattered domeside turn out, when reconstituted thousands of miles forth in space in one of the colonies, to be one person now, no longer two.
O where was this coming from? Mariscada chemicals? Glamorous couple? (just exited—awesome; dangerous; partial, she had to feel). But more coming from herself, like wind within, drawing her out in all directions, she thinks grandly. To where? Away from that place in her that fired off messages home to friends beginning "I’m sitting on Al and Ginny Kaulilua’s balcony on Statehood Day overlooking the Pacific and somehow at peace listening to a Society Island canary sing in its swaying cage." Or toward the gist of two persons transpondered to an elsewhere of one, like shadow cast back from future. She didn’t carry it further; but she almost did (recalling her reply to a man she momentarily didn’t, because she couldn’t, name, when they were lying in bed in a hotel contemplating shadow shapes on the ceiling made by a sunset among nearby trees—which was "Bliss"—which he then called the highest compliment any gal had ever paid him but she didn’t tell him it wasn’t just that—and she didn’t because she was still touched by his question, which was, "What are you feeling right now?"). And as she did almost carry it further now, she heard the line in the letter Flick had read where the man, Flick’s dad, whom the correspondent-woman Lincoln decided she loved, had said, Look I’m no landscape man (she heard his voice coming down in his knowing who he was) and she asked how could she ever have taped the self-burning Buddhist monk whose peeling colors—dervish flames drying out the personal pockets of life in the still being of that after all non-renewable person who had had no fat on him, much less cellulite—who was news: and so she scraped onto her spoon’s oval blade all but a trace of smoky caramel dark from the flan whose mold stood once trembling upon her dessert plate; and, wanting that last trace, she might through that girl Flick have felt, through near-relations leaning toward her or toward becoming as human as she or toward becoming her, or her and Flick, have figured out that her play-by-play taped Statesward many months ago in Vietnam for a pool of reporters had included in its stored radius the very man Mayn, of whom had been said (by his grandmother) what had been said of the correspondent-woman Lincoln (by her late mother) from field-hockey days when the grass kept growing under her furious feet, to her last visits home from further and further away—that she must have a tapeworm inside her. But thinking her new mystery-beloved’s disclaimer when really he was a landscape man meant that he might want to become the landscape—spread, disperse himself into it, which was kind of threatening, especially to someone wanting to locate him and meet him; and contemplating the last dark
molasses swipe from her creme caramel; and reminding herself that a good Buddhist stays put and plants a tree like her father who planted on the other hand thirty postwar Jap red pines all at once the year after he had given her her Christian name over her ma’s dead body —she had to see that after a given two people were reduced to frequency, matter-scrambled, and sent on like a message to a better way of doing things in that hibiscus-flavored diaphragmatically breathing space colony with timeless sunbaths that might make her impatient ("No one can make you impatient," came a voice seductive if you love being taught things)—and there was only just the one of you when you materialized again in the Earth-Moon-space colony, and you found your head half pillowed by inner gravity or aware of some god in you or an angel or the memory of one with a permanent reservation in some of your newly compounded gray matter if it was really gray—well, which one of you was it that wound up on your feet? (as your parents predicted, in spite of their anxiety, which was for themselves?)—and which sex (to get down to shared thighs)? and would you be meeting a new, well, lover soon who had been done likewise?
Fair questions. Did he want to be done that to? Did it mean our feelings would wind up even more mixed, our memories fuller, our sex still less plain (and what about the women-women pairs, and the men-men)? What happened to chromosomes when turned into frequency? Just another male idea, she heard a female group-consciousness verbalize. Yet Lincoln had some lightness or light in her—was it non-serious? So she imagined again these couples compacted and transmitted as a frequency and recreated in the promised land as one person not two, and thought, Did it mean each new person would be even more the song of its parts, but where would Jim Mayn be? would he be internalized in her and she would have to live with that fo’ th’ rest of her days in space? But what if ... ? But, seeing the waiter approach and seeing just why this hypothetical man Jim Mayn could be right here—look out!—is also anywhere but here, for she is thinking him—oh God she didn’t know the man and never would, unless Flick his dear daughter mentioned Lincoln by name, which could stick in Jim’s mind, a woman with such a name: she took hold of her dessert plate, it had a thin dark blue circle painted round its rim, and brought it up to her face like a comfortable mirror, and, protecting her handsome nose by the length of her tongue, she saved the last curve of caramel from a final meaninglessness of trace, from the dishwasher or the swift fingertip of the waiter, whom for a second of bliss she blotted out with this mirror too close for anything but taste.
Where was she? Where had metabolism left her? Beamed to this instant of her life, lowering her plate she found herself neither with the waiter, who’d seemed to be bearing down on her, nor not with him, for he had detoured to the table of five in the far corner and, except for a darting glance out of the corner of his eye, no one seemed to have seen her "getting it on" with her plate as Grace said to "get it on" with your fingers eating your salad greens, as in conversation, as in work (as in "-aholic") for Grace taught that work was addiction like past, like romance, like sugar, like love.
As down the wormhole’s wind-tunnel evolving we recede from correspondent-woman, too, as she has glimpsed relations looking at her the way life holds you if you let it care, though looking back at her at the last second we couldn’t help it between bodies, we just could not. And we see her looking right at us but she doesn’t know us from Mayn, whom she is really looking at but doesn’t know it’s him there in the restaurant with the party of five others, and we who can’t help being angels, strive though we do these days toward human, had best leave her for this tunnel opening not inward tubewise like being de-born or digested but opening out from an endless circumference of where we’ve been. We "can’t" say, because, looking back at her who helped us get where we are, we relations touch an independence there as if although we have seen her off going hopefully on terms of Mayn, why what group of angels striving to evolve toward human can surely know what that "gal" (as her mother in St. Louis called her own oldest woman friend) is thinking while waiting for the waiter to bring the check? newly wondering where she’s coming from; yet breathes, breathes, and calmly like the diva who saw Jim Mayn in the flesh in an orchestra seat at Norma but knew him no more than she knew his name or than she knew here the softly sinister, fluffy-haired tiny woman wearing, we already remember, one simple unsewn length of saffron (acetate), her sleeveless arms free to beckon the waiter, who in the course of appetizer and entree has looked at the cloth often to dema-terialize it but could not know that her name she has lately come to accept and even (instead of the mere initial L) use in a by-line is her first, or Christian, name provided her by her father who scarcely knew what he wanted for a daughter of his loins but in the void of this he had her christened Lincoln, hoping, we’re now in a position to say, that she would never wed, but intrigued by the prospect of her unfettered and professional independence so much that Dad’s void or concept became that of his daughter. She, though, went so far beyond him as to aid a Hindu lover in graduate school, her first on all scores, grow quickly out of what she didn’t know till later was called "prematurity." And now, to get beyond the three stars on the framed, enlarged restaurant review out front in the window beside the menu, in a joint where the refried beans are good at gluing the expansible corridors of our r’evolutionary intestine, she has got her own void in hand. And not a hell of a lot to do for the next few minutes, the no-man’s gap where she ensures herself, and the dear link she has divined between her and the man on whom she meditates even to the extent of asking the waiter not for the check which he’s about to give her anyhow but for a third Mexican coffee: thinking upon this man Jim Mayn she imagines she has never seen except in essence and now so close to her (can’t explain) so close she liplessly mouths syllables like digestive grace so they can seem kinda beautiful: special, desert, creativity, reincarnation, relativity. And the coffee comes—a new cup which before it lands is but a cup whose liquid weight a waiter mimes, bearing it ever toward us, an obstacle that contains openly our belief, and she knows in the back of her mouth and in a chill down one thigh that she doesn’t want it after all, it’s the obstacle she couldn’t help asking for but at least now she knows she don’t want it: and she opens her mouth, her whole face, to ask for the check, but the waiter makes it out then-and-there with a wrinkled forehead (though that’s all she can see), we don’t know any more than he and should not have looked back but she made us.
But no one can make you do anything, not even relate. But these words we thought had come from us came from the interrogator, a real learner, whom we in any event ignore in order to concentrate on the spurt of juice he has given the funny bone in our groin with his ‘lectric button ostensibly for having either answered a non-question or having said two things at once which make no sense over the short run but across the long curve of our possibilities prove absolutely exact.
This we already remember. As if we hadn’t been told. Listen, what we remember is important, it’s all there is.
Her presence has drawn things to converge upon her, as witness the threesome (for two of the starting five, two women, just got up and left) at the corner table (and now a young fellow leaves the table to make a phone call by the service bar), so we’ll return to her along some track less smooth than the levity of a tapeworm’s nostalgic footholds in the diva’s aborted weight-loss project. And through spiraled circumference spinning our wind-tunnel ‘tween histories, we’ll see the correspondent-woman now without looking back and share with her the state of being between Mayn, no sweat.
A sage said all troubles arise from trying to broadjump inside a telephone booth. Oh well, the multiple youth Larry, like the economist his godly madness turned him into, forgot that a great leap upwards within the booth, even of joy (that is, after hanging up after a call during which he received kind words from the older, four-or-five-year-older woman Amy) might shortly hit a ceiling. Which returned Larry to the floor of the booth or to his feet (whichever came first) and made him wonder again if old Mayn was his riv
al or his adopted friend, not to say back-up father function/media connection. He’s had this trouble before, the two-on-one he calls it for safekeeping cum portability, it’s where the Dreaded Modulus comes in and expresses one system in terms of another like he knows chez Brain that Mom/Sue didn’t literally mean "Larry should get laid," because mothers don’t talk like that even in the future and Sue’s expressing one shitload in terms of another, and yet even his oF Brain will tell him you got to sometimes give Modulus oon rest and feel that both given shitloads are your given life and it’s all the same ballgame. (Right on, Larry, right on, sweetie, he hears Grace once say to him in another context.) But should he pack a backpack and go to Europe for a few years? but where would Amy be when he came back? living with oF Jim? of course not, probably in Europe herself! but where will Jim be? Is this the two-on-one trouble again? It’s a shitload faster coming at him than an unresigned end-game with a bishop and a knight against just a knight (which Larry’s given up with chess itself at eighteen); is it more the lone guard against a forward and a sudden substitute you don’t recognize tearing-ass downcourt? Got to make your move because if he doesn’t the one with the ball will go all the way and up for the shot which for greed’s sake he may do anyway: but it’s all also inside Larry and he would talk to his father if his father didn’t have enough on his plate already and to his mother if she had not once recently reduced his life, telling a friend that Larry has to get laid: and while in the corners of his eyes the two enemy players divide their distances to the basket so he would prefer switching to instant-replay mode to put it mildly, he figures he’s divided his talk option between Father and Mother, next between yes-Mother and no-Mother (opting for the no-don 7-discuss-the-two-on-one-with-her), then between no-Mother-One (which is no discussion but no hard feelings) and no-Mother-Two (which is You’re so one-track-minded nowadays you’re a jammed terminal, Ma, it isn’t funny, we can’t get a decent discussion going about this two-on-one thing of mine until we get past the sex gate which can be jumped only with the correct Yes or No response, that is we have all first got to be sexed like little kittens and then our eyes can be looked into). Yet as the no-Mother-Two option gets branched, Larry can see his mother Susan gain perspective through distance but is it hers or his he’s pinning down? all he knows is she gets smaller with these divisions yet doesn’t bug him less.
Women and Men Page 53
