—"A gnomon!" said Ted, out of the crossword muzzle he could tighten round his mind lest it tell his long, lumpy body, Be sad, or, Be sick, when, as now with the late Chilean journalist-woman, it captured something elusive and/or disturbing—"a gnomon!"—upon which Spence abruptly left the bar for all the world the way he left when he had a phone call in the hotel lobby. "What’s with him?" said Ted; "he cuts in and cuts out—"
"He’s a creep," said Mayn and ran his hand up his neck into his hair that he certainly wore longer than in the high-school brush-cut days: "I know him a long time. He photographed a divorce-murder once that got into a Newark paper but he had some deal that he never got called by the People when the case came to trial. He parlays and parlays. People owe him."
At Mayn’s urging, Ted explained his gnomon. He drew it on a bar napkin that ripped. The thing wasn’t quite clear anyhow except in his words. "It’s the thing on the sundial that throws the shadow, the angle iron, the thing that sticks up; there’s a word for it ... do you—"
"Gnomon?" said Jim, Caribbean, and they laughed, and both looked at their watches.
"No, I mean for ‘gnomon.’ You sometimes farm out your sense of humor; how do you do dat?"
Jim wanted only to get back to his wife and kids who at that summer moment sojourned in western New Hampshire—full days without him—and whom he swiftly then left the bar to phone, as the disreputable Spence curiously reappeared, brushing him in passing, returning from the lobby and no doubt the phone, so their speeds were to be added together, Mayn’s and Spence’s, in opposing directions. Spence’s irritating voice rising with verve, greed, a deep-creep-rooted silliness re printing tycoon Morgen: for "Morgen has a brother in Philadelphia, a left-winger, a job printer whose uncle once carried a card—the brother’s just a common, garden-variety job printer and there’s his tycoon brother friendly with Mayga and her husband has the national airline, a piece of it at last word . . ." as if someone’s nose would be put out of joint by whatever Spence was trying to say.
But how on earth—?
—did we get from there to there?
—Well yes; but you—how did you?
—We aren’t there yet: there’s so much in our way—
—As long as it is your own by which you get there, right?
—Leave it to us—
—Getting there your own way is all.
But you: what of you?
Indeed, adds the interrogator, what means the U in the contemporary saying "U-2"?
Don’t worry, it’s not your responsibility, anyways. We’re not up to there yet, observes your all-purpose child in the memory of men who over a series of years are always getting back to the family along a curve of more and more advanced homework until one day a girl child who swims like the wind in the summer where there is no homework reveals to her father (is it a float to be built?) a rectangle without firm braces—or with the nails coming loose— that tilts sideways in order to become . . . a parallelogram!—good, good—
—while (to jump the gun) the information that a son went suddenly in search of (for himself and for his brother) after being left in that "lurch" immeasurable except in games by a mother who seemed herself (having told her sons to depart) to have been the one to go—this information has itself divided and divided like some difference between a good, strong, honorable person and a disreputable hound of a trash-purse slew-handed if not lunatic information-salesman investigator loose in the vitals of a divided history which the, well, more or less good guy all honorable and aforementioned acknowledges, with a jigger of calm and a twist of resignation, harking in his daydream and, here and there, in person to some sequence of loving his grandmother Margaret and of her love of a variety of truth—that may lead between a Princess who came imperially on a huge, pony-consuming bird from an unquestioned mountain sovereignty of the East Far Eastern Manchoor cum nee-Choor and a doughty young last-century woman named Margaret who, dispatched by her editor-dad from New Jersey to Chicago, thence sent him dispatches that by the time they reached Windrow no longer came from Chicago’s famed World’s Columbian Exposition—and to and from whom goes more due than she would claim were she alive now and not a lucid, "terminal" suicide in 1950—a superior mother making her own daughter’s life come true, we may say, jumping the gun.
So that—in 1964, in the bar of a Washington hotel whose sidewalk turning right yielded a view of the front porch of the White House—Ted, Jim’s colleague and friend, might answer Jim’s guarded sorrow for the late South American lady who had "believed" all his stories and took notes to prove it, "Why, hell, we always knew history was made up!"—in between the now serious dispute over how many runs the left-handed-hitting first baseman of the Senators batted in the summer of 1957, who for better and for worse went with comparatively light-hitting Washington when the franchise moved to Minnesota where he might have wound down his career fishing Mille Lacs with the Indian descendant of that part-Ojibway half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer who passed on to the ancient Anasazi healer the revolver he accepted from a dying white settler in southern Dakota with hope between them if not in pure form in either the prostrate owner of the blue Anglo eyes of the dying or the timeless custodian of those faceted orbs set against the brightly narrowing sky—
—So that we, on whom Mayn hardly knew he was too proud to draw, might from time to time feel blindly (if we did not actually make up) the prospect of a certain non-sweet nothing at the rough or no-man’s-land center toward which were pointed, still, many of these that we take pride in having known: the printing magnate Morgen who was at Mayga’s side when she went to her death largely without help; libration colonists each one of whom twain Earth and Moon leans like an inhumanly extensible shade back to where he or she once upon a metal plate was two; not to mention the Mayn-family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat who vainly asked Old (Seminole-and Cherokee-baiting) Hickory (who, once, in the absence of information that war had ended, ended it all over again with his wild gusto) why he had met as if in secret in a dark coffeehouse whose front was half blocked by dark kegs of flour the village girl who had followed her lover William Morgan from upstate New York where he had been imprisoned briefly for vowing to tell Masonic secrets and then on being let go escaped death by ambush; not to mention the welcoming mother of the Navajo Prince whose head was the subtly gaping issue of the Night Sing when Margaret arrived, saddle-sore but in love—and who instantly gave her an amulet and said to this visiting pale-faced princess Won’t you come in and bring the bird with you, upon which Margaret smiled and looked into the gaping but unwounded hole in the lady’s head and then quite coolly looked about her until she sensed in the periphery of her vision not right-or-left-cornered but in some higher margin a movement in the sky and she rolled her eyes upward and bent her head with the gentlest ceremony back to catch it; and not to mention Alexander either, the young man waiting in Windrow and later grandfather, who poked about in his shop where he had for sale or inspection tables and chairs and things on them such as small objects in small boxes, and had for sale also framed things and well-preserved cloth-bound tomes of travels and battles with pages you would not bend a corner of to mark your place for fear of cracking brittle paper or a rusty note inscribed, even a clef’d line of song from women we relations utilized more than once to infer an entire articulate structure even when words aren’t music, thanks be—Alexander, toward whom with his own half-forgotten gladness the family pistol from its twin source via the Anasazi ancient points, who despite rank, baggy, navy-blue, beyond-shiny worsted trousers with the cuff bottoms worn through, and a khaki shirt that must not be ironed, and a gray-green (apparently gray or green) clip-on bowtie that belongs in a fatly rounded attic trunk, walks always in a pair of size-thirteen dark burnished cordovan brogues supplied him each year by his younger grandson Brad, who keeps the haberdashery establishment and is kind enough to recall a William Heighton who in 1828 was an editor in Philadelphia and led the Cordwainers’ Union (isn’t that right, Granddad? cordova
n?) but not that William Morgan, the President’s rival for favors or secrets or both, set type at Heighton’s Mechanics Free Press—a memory whose fault Jim’s life-support (luggage) system can, externalized and unbeknownst to him, supply. We and our multiples had looked into the incarnations we had so needed and curved for and found; but once in them we some of us or parts or branches felt these bloodstreams and fibers of true feeling and stomachs and eyes and bone-play to be bodies we for one had already been and left. And this was a sensation so unlike leaving one another that we or a breathing majority proved what we then saw we had known already, that we had no angels keeping our curve just and our histories and our fluid breaths pure of interruption—for we were those angels and being so we must become ourselves forever, which meant losing those incarnations in order to guard the curve of consciousness, even thought, if not pure gold. Which in turn, though we accept the truth we speak more than take time to know it, the people aforementioned such as Clara or Mayga, the physician and others, untold and unportfolio’d physicians, have learned to breathe quite regular now in the workshop where we take responsibility assez hopefully for ourselves though with baited breath and less the lung kind when naked, for except for the buttock places on the kitchen stool all the naked points are of breath, the body’s bait to whom it may concern, asleep as the fellow-countryman-lover admiral ashore-intelligence observer he’s supposed to be, and unlike the reputed anti-Castro Hispanic inmate reported scheduled to escape really is, as she presses out Clara’s phone number, the stab of current beeping in her ear, yet then as the phone begins its purr and she knows that besides asking Clara what she knows about this man who Clara just possibly might guess is with her now and growing, oh she’s thirsty for her father’s safety so what is she doing with this mine of a man reverse-mountain she doesn’t know what she feels the thorns and hot stones of something more like love than torture melt the balls of her feet in her mouth and she is thirsty for watermelon not really danger and could drink whatever the poet says, cataracts of dark blue night, could drink the South Pole even if with her feet here in New York she would be upside down, she wanted also to say certain words of poetry that she can’t just recall (though grasps) to this lover whose flesh she suddenly knows so well she knows his soft sinewy armpits have creased the night atmosphere of her flat as he moves, and the fingers of his hands are reflected in the next room in the piano’s darkness and the balls of his fine feet cross her living-room carpet where he could stand on his own feet in English while in their own tongue it is wings—to stand on one’s own feet is to fly with one’s own wings—yet his skin tracks the carpet in that next room so lightly he is almost here as Clara answers the phone and words come to the diva after all that are the most beautiful words she would give up music for and this man too, who is perhaps a terrible person whom she never imagined murdering for she is using him and, surprised, she believes he is using her (he likes to be with her) for love half understood—which is at another diameter (completely) from the love that is itself fondly half and yet is wholly understood, with her Boston-grown physician to whom she haltingly said some of these lines in English that now months later in her own tongue she doesn’t forget so that having near her the all-but-breathless yet not odorless idea of her lover all but beside her behind a threshold and not present here in New York to manage the clean seas as a young admiral should (except they cover all that he is truly doing as a visiting intelligence), she is heard to say in English to Clara, the exile-economist’s devoted wife, "Forgive me for phoning at this hour—yes, it’s Luisa—I could not sleep trying to remember the lines that come just before . . . Listen, what is going on—do you know what is going on?" and, since he has followed Luisa this far, he is not in the bedroom to pick up her other phone, which she and Clara would hear, as Clara asks in Spanish why she speaks so softly, and Luisa recalls then all the lines (and then, with a suddenness, that Clara’s man visits a prison somewhere—a kind man yet with some curious purpose there) and Luisa recites, like some American or English verses,
"that on the coast scattered with wild rocks
the sea the fields come together, the waves and the pines,
petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.
Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,
watching how they fly? They seem
to be carrying the letters of the world . . .
. . . something something . . .
. . . pelicans . . . like ships of the wind,
other birds . . . like arrows, carrying
messages from dead kings, viceroys,
buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,
. . . something something . . .
and seagulls, so magnificently white,
they are constantly forgetting what their messages are."
She weeps, and she hears a man’s voice near Clara, who says, "I don’t know what is going on. There is nothing between ‘las costas andinas’ and ‘las gaviotas,’ ‘made of whiteness,’ ‘of purity’—but what comes before all that?"—she asks her husband for the book that’s on a table in the room across Central Park from where Luisa sits on the kitchen stool, one hand warmly snugged between her thighs—"but I remember . . .
‘Tu me preguntas donde estoy? Te contaré
—dando solo detalles utiles al Gobierno—’
por supuesto, Luisa, el no quiere decir eso ..."
No indeed, details useful to the state are not the sea and the fields, petrel and the meadow or even the sun’s atrocity upon the nitrate miners, but why an (albeit officially Swiss) opera donna should permit—why, is there a Swiss opera, as there is a Swiss fleet high and cold upon an angelic peak at the upper end of the world looking for a flood to float a lone whale to give their navy sperm power? The answer, my friend, lies in some Protestant comedy night that asks the question what nationality is the Pope’s gahd?—why, that is, a Chilean opera star (to continue) with a father under house arrest in the land of her birth, the land the earth the ground, permits an agent of that Chicago-model balanced-budget economy to take from her gently her clothes (read gently tug, read peel away from the very skin of her, life within life without end, slide down the grand pout of one buttock or up the soft give of her back while a thumb along the groove of her pretty spine keeps, with the operative fingers, love’s parallel compassed and gratuitous), the Druid folds of her priestess, the spangled shirtwaist of her barmaid’s Golden West, the silver rose from the auburn abundant hair of one who took off the satin breeches long ago and the white wig and doesn’t really like her lover to undress her anyway—oh what’s doing? she has to get out of all this—but would rather find her own way to the bathroom and come back smiling partly at him, partly at Clara reporting a new archaeological massage that you don’t have to wish would go on and on because it makes you longer(!), her robe of bright toweling open to her stomach for her not him, and yet for the first time she thought in her life wanted this man half lying half sitting by her bed table, his plain, uninteresting black shoes flashing, his necktie lowered almost like some more significant garment, opening the pages of a book she rereads at night that lies upon her tiny gilt address book {libretto!), to sort of follow her toward the bathroom having removed his shoes, his socks, and, leaning on the doorway or sitting on the edge of the bathtub watch her pee, her back thoughtfully arched, her eyes in his—but he lets her go her way though stares at what he’s reading with a close attention that to her feels affectionate as she recedes— follows herself—across her bedroom to the John, all but too absorbed in him to think (except she does) that she has the great silly Ford North’s unlisted number under M for Momo (her great bell of basso rotondo, her dear stammerer who finds his tongue in song, canto bell songo, and must phone to tell him of course she will not play Horatio to his unprecedented non-tenor Hamlet in his boyfriend’s three-night-stand opera (with-some-talk) (mysterious of origin, by repute) (J ... I Just want to die . . . I Sometimes you are so pitee-ous and pro-found) at the one-time ware
house owned by a ritual friend of course not, por supuesto, he asked her about it at the very moment when she was considering her naval officer on bended knee backstage finding a place to impress his Japanese now ballpoint upon her satin thigh, but Amleto, Amleto, what a lousy opera the real one had often made, Boito, Hignard, ho hum—in the absence oh what an absence of the only one for the job kicked by his priest as a no doubt cute young acolyte down the altar steps into unconsciousness (during which he might have imagined the whole nineteenth-century opera of American life if he had chosen), kicked into such near-immortality that if, long past his Requiem for a novelist, he wrote Otello at seventy-three and Falstaff at eighty, why not at ninety La Mestizia del Danese if those windy young waters ‘tween Elsinore and Sweden didn’t rush too wetly neither to be nor not to be for the old field marshal’s baton (for we know in all our keen relations that death don’t either want or not want us) . . . if in fact some text of Hamlet was not written years before and scrapped, dispatched, appropriated. . . Hamlet’s mixed-blood upon the stale promontory an angel swiftly interprets, but no—mestizia means just "sadness," or, if we will, "melancholy.") So that—so that, lengthened like malleable shadow, this moment when Diva Luisa fears again her lover’s absence more than anything else (for she can’t hear except in imagination and memory the breaths she knows are calmly being taken and absorbed by his naked chest in the darkness just beyond the dark of her duplex kitchen) comes to contain the presence of another man so briefly in Clara’s closing words that when a click occurs along the line all that is left is the man’s name.
Women and Men Page 69
