Yet why, then, does the little knowledge he has of Mayn get in the way of all that Lar’s, well, "got" on his mother Susan who has left her normal bigamouse-spous playing with Larry-son and Marv-el-housbond to live in the house on the Island?—so while she’s the one who went, Larry-son feels he is the one who is now successfully out of the way; he’s got no name for this except that in his active sadness that ("If I could be another person, she could be") his mother has split, no kidding his real sorrow, his black-with-brown-letter-and-trim Raleigh ten-speed bike’s sweetest (though deceptive) swiftest uphill gear catches—good, he’d been concerned about it—or the chain catches it, and, even against the wind, frees him of that transitional threatening clank (like some hideous thing wrong with your car) to vector between the united product of gravity raining invisibly down through his shoulders and the steep incline at the point of Tenth Avenue. But he’s not looking for locoweed in Utah, he’s just out on his bike thinking his way between double-parked trucks with potential open doors and sour pedestrians crossing ‘gainst the light until they run out of sotto-voce names for him gearing himself seventy blocks uptown, eighty blocks down like a hired messenger, then forty blocks uptown and several east to wind through the other dimensions of our Central Park with its labeled trees and so on, and nothing will stay still. For although your Mississippi catfish nine foot long with God knows what all in it contains, they say, the word we are waiting for of whether the fault from New York to Tokyo will divide and crack and bring the Earth to its knees and skyscrapers will scrape the ground and fire our well-rehearsed salute to the Sun, the two screens twain can’t bring a future Tokyo earthquake here to New York and Larry knows he’s pretty free and could be relieved if he would let himself be even if things won’t stay still: for he thinks for a moment of the woman his mother is staying with whom he likes and how she rides a bike bent way forward and now his mother Susan does—God, he can’t keep up with them any more; and he might like to think further upon this stumbling block in the way of his life but, on the contrary, here comes the gearless two-wheeler of the botanist Marcus Jones in 1883 bumping, jarring, careering, cutting his way through the living locoweed of all the names he could think of for new varieties, ten years before a Victorian-American girl Margaret of nineteen or twenty (secretly and premaritally at war from herself) exceeded her mandate to cover the 1893 Chicago Fair for her father’s Windrow Democrat, particularly the (as we remember it a century later, "low-key") New Jersey exhibition (plus twenty-seven nations and remcarnation a la Carl Browne the populist spellbinder who could not spell but peddled a breathtaking theory of our—as we might say it a century later—soul "bank" drawn upon by each newborn according to its incoming and ongoing needs), yet Margaret upon completion of her Chicago stint in summer ‘93 kept going as if she could not turn and return home to (her parents, her brothers, her implicitly betrothed) Alexander who, one score and one year later, went with his wife Margaret through the last dull glow of October trees in Englishtown, Red Bank, and Rah way to Carnegie Hall, New York, to hear the Pankhurst woman shock American suffragettes crying that Britain was fighting Germany partly "for you," and Germany "hacking her way through Belgium" was as much in the wrong as "we" were when "you fought us" on what proved to be the good suffragette claim of no taxation without representation, and Alexander carried the report of Christabel Pankhurst’s anti-neutrality speech back to Windrow where his father-in-law was even more reluctant to run it than Alexander to leave Margaret in New York to "cover" Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s pacifist pleas to America at Carnegie Hall five days later splitting the suffragettes and precipitating the Women’s Peace Party of New York and splitting, as Mayn hardly knew and his grandfather Alexander never would accept, a female wing of his own family, though Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s eventual mother, subtle in her own mild, needling jokes and pleasingly soft ‘n sweet upon the violin at the age of ten(-and-up) must have had deeper reasons for turning pacifist and vegetarian against her mother Margaret, who was a minor New Jersey celebrity-militant. Later, Sarah actually amused Mayn’s father her putative husband (who really and truly dreamed at night of owning a white Hispano-Suiza touring motorcar) by observing that the Vote was the least of the complaints of her sex and while votes for women might matter even to the point of electing women one day, suffrage was suffered to be a substitute for a lot of other things. Witness her own once-militant mother Margaret’s relief at not being returned state senator in one run that she had been coerced by a bunch of men into making in the days of Coolidge. Who’s Coolidge? Larry asked. Mayn said that without knowing the French or the English for the proverb Emmeline Pankhurst quoted in honor of her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in hopes of joining younger women with older, Calvin Coolidge would have approved and would have said, "If youth could know; if age could do." And Larry, feeling he is not alone in this individualized history and doesn’t mind passing it on to other minds if it’s there already because he intends to squeak to a stop at, economically, a Tenth Avenue red light where there’s a transparent phone booth and phone the young woman of his dreams at her office in an area so different from the Tenth Avenue small Spanish shops and garages and a public school and a bar—weaves through a decade of Krakatoa’s debris dodging forward and backward in time to find Mayn’s grandma Margaret in her fifties in Windrow-town, not hitting the ceiling but waxing, if not quite flummoxed at least so fiercely angry at some electrical contractor Bob that Larry couldn’t help recalling that it was this Bob’s view that government without newspapers had much more to be said for it than the other way around because where would newspapers be without gov’ment to go on about, which Larry coupled with a wrong notion voiced by Mayn that if there had been newspapers the news of the 1815 peace would have saved hundreds of British soldiers in New Orleans from becoming mere material to be shaped into a mountainous monument to War as Fun by the sword of the very Jackson, Andrew, whom the Windrow Democrat was later founded to support—where what was lacking warn’t newspapers but rapid communication. Which in modern times we have but always had, as Larry thinks (shifting into a heavy-pedal gear) breasting a hill headed north through real-estate values inhabited by an active if not ever-prosperous Hispanic working class who are getting in his way thinking yes rapid communication we always had in order to take such assembled data as Mayn’s news of Fort Nightmare that you can pass through like a shadow or like a machine-gun spray shot and never feel that fort you’re passing through.
And such assembled data as the Navajo Prince’s mother for whom a ceremonial sing was being held in order to find a way into her head through a hole chock-full of demons, and this old all-purpose hermit, Margaret’s ally, who needed a break once in a while and went out West to occupy one of the ancient units of the Anasazi multiple dwelling but not necessarily a break from himself:
all of which super-rapid communication joins simultaneously as a tear of anger blinds Larry’s eyes as he shifts to low gear approaching a light that’s still his so that two lunchtime Riquenos (or who knows "what" they are?) slowed down if not quite on hold or the worse for wear join in Larry’s tear for him just as he half brakes then accelerates between their merged units and, clipping a coattail, an elbow, a hand, feels the merest swipe of a furious limb as little as a finger or two upon his shoulder as he passes and, heading through the intersection wondering how he could do such a thing yet seeing, as clank gives way to whirr, that Marcus Jones when he couldn’t think of yet another name to call a new variety of royal locoweed called it after himself, his legs so weary, his porous mind desperately interested which at this moment of near accident that wouldn’t make the papers Larry (who has grandparents only in California) finds the grandmother Margaret was as well—desperate—now where did he get that?—but on the locoweed breathing into her from her soft-saddled horse or from some horse or some prior anguish wherein, for sure, that hermit in his portal-shadowed high unit gave her his eye to pivot her from self to self.
So, as the two Hispanic pe
destrians, lurching—nay, lunching—across against the light, close ranks behind Larry’s bike, he feels the two of them like one kindred gap he’s passed through when they weren’t concentrating, feels their flesh by way of, first, one cluttered storefront window (in the next block) with two TV sets angled toward each other, one off, one on, as a hand reaches over a partition and switches channels—and second, a couple of seconds later at the other end of this new block, another storefront and another TV set being watched from the sidewalk by a broad-shouldered woman with two loaded shopping bags that like buckets and for balance’ sake she hasn’t set down, while the same TV’s watched from inside by a man sitting in a corner of the storefront window beside a Messenger Service sign, the man for that moment as odd in himself (his dark hair thickly threatening to grow down his short forehead to join forces with the frontier of his stubborn black eyebrows) as Larry, seeing on the screen Grace Kimball in boots (one of them crossed, man-like, across the other trousered knee) and a broad-brimmed hat beneath which she talked, knows that the screen with entirely other contents that he’d seen barely a moment ago at the other end of the block was switched to the same channel. Now how did he know that?
Well, it might be important, he hears—it might be important, Larry, the words say, voicing a female presence that he had an appointment with twenty minutes ago, a motherly voice that catches up with his silences to irritatingly say, What are you feeling, Larry? it might be important—and to say later, You’re irritated, Larry, that every little thing matters—Yeah, that’s right, that does irritate me—that you’re one of these people that every little thing matters to you, it’s, it’s—What, Larry? can you say it?—Oh shit it’s heavy, it’s, it’s, well greedy—But we deserve it, Larry, we’re working together for it, we deserve it—Wait a minute: who said it’s both of us that every little thing matters to? who said that?—Maybe that’s what we find out, Larry, what we’re always finding out, that every little thing matters—Greed is what my father’s paying thirty bucks into, but you’re getting all this stuff you’re going to use, you’re using it already, it’s greed doubled if you ask me—O.K., Larry, what’s wrong with using it?—You’re so moral: that’s what’s wrong—Wait, Larry —Laying down the law—But I’m not an authority figure, don’t make me into one—That’s it, Martha, you’re greedy and you’re moral about it—That’s good, we can work with that, Larry—You go right ahead—But every little thing does matter to you, Larry . . . Larry? Breathe—What if I don’t?—and we hardly know each other and already we really have something to work on—But I don’t want to pay you my father’s money to attack you; after all who are you?—Why not?
The voice of Martha, in her ripe thirties, receded when he turned left; he rolled a block west, silently, fluently, and cut south down Eleventh Avenue (a narrower-feeling two-wayer with a divider), and the voice picked up when he turned north again until the moment when he cut between the two Hispanic lunchers threatening to be one who unanimously could offer him bilingual abuse, which helped to shift him recycled from between them and past the changing light into the new block, to be visited then by genius (I’ll be thinking of you, Larry, said Mayn, who also said that you wouldn’t get him on one of those things in today’s traffic)—genius? because now, at the very moment Larry’s wasting his black Raleigh bike (ouch) on the topographical feature length of Manhattan’s theoretic island, the ruts, crevasses, minor lakes dammed where a landmark sewer’s backed up out of sight and his naked tires can’t see beneath the surface the sharp mean trowels of broken glass (tooled from last week’s jettisoned boddles) he finds what he wouldn’t have if he’d kept this third date with (read the Electric Chair, read D-D-D-Destiny) Ma Therapist, Mahtha by name she’ll answer to ‘n come runnin’ while yet seem to stay where she was a minute ago at home curled stockin’ feet in her soft mobile chair who his father (who he wishes would stop thinking of him) has "brought in," though it’s Larry who’s being brought or biked in to the therapist but en route though receding from the therapist, has found, namely, the real action and Larry finds it is laid out for him somehow while the ground plan of it is half asleep there below him and his emotional bike dozing like only a city can doze, steady and gapped, like breath when it comes only faintly, don’ you know—
But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.
So saying, having been told to go ‘way yet retaining (like fluid) the stored (if irretrievable) impression that she had been the one to depart: and, thus, so saying, we betray in the best sense, that is to oneself (because we don’ need no one else to criticize us we can do it well enough alone), that we are we in two ways—a 2-folded we like him and I, and a all-type we (Do you mean, asks the interrogator all but forgotten except by our hellishly independent Pain, do you mean we all?).
But as soon, thinks Lar’, as that grand ground implied itself to him through the tight-sprung folds of a twenty-two-buck bike-saddle, it found itself obscured by the small tip of an elbow appearing just within the operative TV screen in the first storefront window of the block, before that silent screen was rechanneled to a segment of swarthy marchers flinging shouts, cries, arms, hands, bottles, one at the camera enabling it to pass to a revolutionary man or woman face down in the gutter one bent arm at rest along the curb. So, having registered the well-clothed host on the previous channel and the bright elbow resting on a talk-show chair arm right next to the host’s ribs, Lar’ could hear the broken English abuse projected bilingual rehearsed so often as to be now unrehearsed after him by the guys he’d nearly hit (hence distinguished for a moment one from the other). Which was an improvised audio for the swarthy marchers on the news channel especially since they were at once replaced on camera by the body holding its breath in the gutter. And a moment later, riding past the storefront TV displaying Grace Kimball like a message of wares within, Lar’ knows that the elbow was Grace’s elbow in the other TV in the first storefront where he now already recalls there were two TV’s angled half facing each other and one TV wasn’t on.
So that, coupling if not cubing the two operative storefront screens with the two different channels employed and the second, unemployed though not necessarily inoperative TV in the first storefront plus the man inside and woman outside the storefront both employed and unemployed, Larry turns away from the nice lovable therapist his dad fixed him up with who at this instant of her full day is "with" somebody else, not Larry and his wide and klutzish shitload of half-life dream which to tell the truth he isn’t bringing her because she would rather he told her his daydreams, some less in him than he’s at large in them who himself for all he does know doesn’t know that between him and the therapist (who’s on a high floor) is somebody at street level waiting to waylay Larry and bother him, a fact at least three people know but not Lar’.
Who now—as if his front wheel were his vehicle—turns away and must cleave to his own route, obstacle or no. For Mayn did half-know what he conveyed to Lar’. Such historic debris as might slip between the twin screens twain or just wipe them out: yet Krakatoa, from which arose stratospheric phenomena in which Mayn would one day find (if such a man—though ever off-handedly—ever found) cause for inspiration—Krakatoa 1883, which Larry not finding in Hawaii has quickly moved to Indonesia where it belongs, volcano and island near unto congruence, blew up and killed people married or unmarried on the shores of neighboring Java and Sumatra as if they were so much debris to be incorporated, were matter smashed by the continuum, sons, daughters, families of matter, Larry hears them in the shouts of the two men who left just gap enough between them for Larry and bike like the wind to startle them into spontaneous commands to do something to Lar’s mother; so that he with his running shoes stirruped in his pedals’ toe clips can see those People in the light of Krakatoa mattering, and angels, being in Larry, are shown what we cannot escape—such as the tip of the elbow, as they say: and that goes for when you can’t see those People well too—although an elbow that talks louder than words on one TV set turns
into a Grace Kimball on a set down the block almost at the next corner where nearly causing an accident Mayn’s hermit’s blank gray ingot of an eye high in that Indian cliff dwelling returning young Margaret to the gaze of the East Far Eastern Princess (for one screen deserves another) takes Larry out of a tubeful of womb-men to his sole self for a time, he hopes, not being thought about by anyonel
Therefore, wishing to be Not Thought Of, Lar’ cut then as diagonally as the city let him back toward the East Side south, pumped so alertly through El Parque Central and beyond that everything he saw signified, and yet was, nothing, though the City’s dormant ground plan had begun to stir, to move Larry—ipero adonde?, but where?—well, clear to the busy image of Grace in flesh emerging punctually (it goes without saying) from their multiple dwelling strutting gaily out, her arms swinging as if powered by the small, red, water-resistant, mainly empty pack on her back, so that Larry gallantly risks running her down and brakes at the last second while she grins welcoming him ne’er doubting he will stop, and he understands through a channel-shaped elbow and with a happiness like unexpected basketball tickets or quiet praise from his mother that "frees him up," that the bright patch of cloth on one screen back there on Tenth Avenue was the funny bone of none other than, in the flesh, "Kimball" (as Larry’s Mom Sue called her sometimes), an elbow corner of a puzzle getting you to the other screen where, as TV talk-shows show (even with audio off or behind a storefront window) People Matter and the headless elbow traveling fast as a bicycle made of thought (or light that’s itself at rest) takes you simultaneously to both Grace’s hand and Grace’s face, the one lightly and joyfully slapping, the other telling host, audience, and tube of some mouth-watering surprise that came to her one day as she’s succeeded in living her life, fighting the Habit Patterns, ever making new friends, turning an audience on to how sex and drugs bound to go together in a guilt-ridden patriarchal society, how else can we bear to have sex (—But is there that much in sex, a devil’s deviate (southern) woman host asks) but we’ve got to take a break but we’ll be back even younger!
Women and Men Page 59
