At this hour, two tall boys in blue running suits which are called "exercise suits": window-shopping outside a restaurant: blue figures in a whole block of aroma-to-go conglomerated: from trattoria tomato crimson to national blue-and-white of Greek open to the sidewalk so he smells in the walls of his stomach tight spits of half-grilled, grease-dried souvlaki waiting piled like it’s already inside the people; then the sedate break of an awning (Chinese) and beyond it a fisheria, and on the corner where a Puerto Rican (a Cuban?) trying to give out handbills reaches to one side and then the other, there’s a white-fronted hot-dog stop. Suddenly, as one, the tall boys in blue are running, but for the fun of it; and now a black man poses in front of the Greek place offering a towering white girl in a skirt like a rim of white ribbon the flame of his lighter. But he’s caught in the act of walking, lankily at large, swinging one arm back, the other (with lighter) forward, a soft-seeming black hat high-crowned with a yellow band, a shirt shiny for a racehorse, brighter than yellow, silver pants with a split-seam down the leg flashing black spangles in there. What would one have to give for an outfit like that? But what would it cost this black to get out of this circus? The girl’s price goes up; so do her clothes. A skirt to ice skate in. She’s ambling on her long, rather grand legs toward Macy’s department store, but how far can she go?
It’s almost time. He had to come. The name Efrain is Spanish. Everywhere he’s seeing Hispanics, same as the area north of where he and Clara, his half-English Clara, live so close that they might never try to return to the England of the Andes. Take up position, and the newsstand is in the way. He steps back to see the girl in the high skirt bend toward a car stopped beyond the Chinese awning.
Down the other way across Seventh Avenue, Penn Plaza fills up but the people do not seem to be traveling. He gets the dizziness again. Sixty blocks north of here someone is reading in a high window down by Riverside Drive, and he knows it is Clara; the cigarette goes from hand to hand, she holds it in her lips attentively turning the page. Or, no, she has no cigarette; she is wondering when this can end, when she can at least write letters to her aging children, who may not wholeheartedly want to receive them. He must be with her and not in mere sympathy, mere telepathy the plain truth of which is worth so very little that Let us act out some terrible consequences so we’ll have messages for each other that are important; and in his dizziness the southbound traffic bends eastward like a London circus bending his eyeballs, not knowing what its bonded recipient is going through.
Why can’t someone take his place? For he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for—he doesn’t know why he let himself get into correspondence with an inmate who was not the one he went to visit originally, except because maybe this inmate with a kindred Irish name (who perhaps dreams of escape to Chile twenty years ago into a new identity beyond extradition) wants no link with the man he did go originally to visit, not to mention a known Cuban anti-Castroid incendiary also inmate there, and so Foley becomes a cover if one was needed, but if you start thinking "cover" you lose it, exile survivor of a vision if it can be brought about again, though he here, on a street corner of New York waiting for a letter, is a cultivated man who tried, who happened to be out of the country in the Chilean spring of ‘73 to see leaves yellowing here in an American fall, who himself might now be spent by touring thugs, and who investigates curves of infant mortality and of unemployment recorded "within shooting distance" (as the shy sportsman physician of Clara’s opera singer put it one night evoking a Great Lake where he fished with an Indian) of Santiago where the low, low peso and low low customs duties bring piranhas within easy reach of any poor family’s budget—statistical curves scanned since 1975 in a New York foundation office with stereo and with sensitive research assistants with good manners and often only a first name, Amy, and such bleaching of the withered leaves of world money that like the new head General Mena of our proud secret police those who doubtless watch over him here on a giant street corner of New York might conclude that he has taken to heart a compatriot military lord with a pied a terre in Virginia who rather than liquidate this resident economist of a (late) mere medical doctor named Allende, says, "You have betrayed your class," and lets it go at that.
He sees the Seiko clock and in the crowd there at the entrance to Penn Station two women appear at the head of the escalator and move forward with their suitcases. The young one sets hers down and is swayed by the people who must be coming from some sports event; then she takes up her case again to follow the older woman who, her arm raised, her finger pointing upward, is moving toward the line of parked cabs. Both women in white—what’s the difference between them?
But he doesn’t get the chance to think, since a Puerto Rican family’s right here on top of him; they come five, six abreast through him with their late-night shopping bags and small, striking children, tired, wide-eyed pirate marchers, long-haulers; and then two more kids slip around the curbside of the deserted newsstand and get back with the family and generously oblivious of him they make him step to the curb and he’s almost forced off—kaput.
Two pale-brown young men with Afros and army jackets step off the far curb and he grabs at his tweed cap and has trouble with the flap of his jacket pocket getting the cap in, and he steps off the curb and is almost hit by a cab, glaring yellow paint—but before he can jump back from it, the cab braked. The magic of the machine is in his stopping it. But he steps back up on the curb and sees behind the shadowed gleam of the windshield the driver looking back over his shoulder through his cage at the people in the back seat and the cab’s street-side door swings out. The driver is black, with a round, happy face.
People in clothes are crossing. What game were Americans playing at the Garden tonight? He steps off the curb. At the far corner he turns left and crosses downtown, turns around and, passing people who don’t look at him, crosses back to the second point where the fellows in army jackets stood when he first saw them. And now he glances at the corner on the other side of Seventh Avenue where he waited for ten minutes—having told Efrain he would be there. Efrain had some tickets to unload. To scalp?
What game?
Efrain explained and it was not clear. He was going to the game but apparently not attending. He didn’t quite say. But he picked the location because of the basketball game. Two people converge on one place, not a coincidence in this city. His assistant, the girl Amy from the office, talked basketball just yesterday. Nothing more definite than the game in general. The positions. Taking up a position so you could not be run into. A great American idea perhaps. What you could not do. She had been listening to a man who was taking her—and whom she had taken to the opera with free tickets from who else but dearest Clara.
People pass that corner, pass through it as if it were an imaginary point. No one stops but a heroic-faced derelict showing a pale thigh through ripped pants who stops, turns as people pass in four directions, and is turned by them. Almost full circle. Until he turns slowly back round and, a stubborn old mechanism made to last, he looks down upon the sidewalk at the point where a man with a tweed cap felt the West Side subway rumbling underfoot—and at last turns down Thirty-third past the trattoria’s side window, pauses to look through at the two young men in blue jump suits, moves on toward the cafeteria counters.
People pass through that point Efrain was to meet him at.
No one stops.
To occupy that position. The girl, his assistant Amy, with the sensual good manners, told him about occupying position in basketball, which she had picked up from the friend taking her to the game, it’s who gets there first can’t be run into—
Talk to someone; he has talked well for hours, days; has done so in nation after nation.
He withdraws the tweed cap from his jacket pocket and pats the pocket hanging smooth; stuffs the cap back in and feels a coin as cold beside the fabric as a hunk of glass and would like to have to say words but move only from light to light. (Until he reached Clara, that is, with whom the e
ternal excitement of not having to talk makes all the talk they have so full of light.)
Yet one might just talk in New York to anybody on a corner, a young heavyset fellow who looks as if he might not move for a year, a flash of a girl who was hardly there, then fleered away into the street. The hell with "dialogue." Some casual talk instead. Risking being thought a kook.
Efrain will be watching that corner from his angle. The man who is supposed to be on that corner is replaceable. A substitute would just wear a tweed cap. What more? But who would substitute for him? But to him and only him Efrain is bringing tonight a message he half made sound unmailable, from Foley, whom Efrain was with in that other world so recently, Foley— the one and only Foley—who bypasses normal converse because the phone is tapped and the routes between minds are full of parallels to find your own way. Foley conspiring with his own odd head and now a foreign national who can’t see Central Park’s roads and spinning bike steel except as a terrible comfort of failure in his own life. Life after Allende, Clara said. Why, though, let a prison inmate hide you?
"Thank you for taking the trouble to answer me," an early letter from Foley began, without humility; "you are not American, but your name is pretty weird for where I hear you are from (yet I’m a learner). What’s in a name? (smile)"—the parenthesis so the other words wouldn’t see. American habit? Uneducated? "... it’s your choice of words, not your accent, that sounds foreign."
So quietly reading Foley’s letter.
Everyone has trouble but not everyone is in danger. You sit years of intelligence, of awareness, as if it weren’t a risk, while danger is in the next room. But not here—here’s a woman in bed, she doesn’t look up at him taking off clothes he never thinks about, and she’s all the more intimate for not looking up from her book as if she shares her pleasure with him. She smiles—at a page—something has touched her, he puts one knee on the bed. But the next room is the danger—the traffic light changes—he recedes abruptly from New York, lifted away. He wants to talk only to her. Weak economist! My God, will marriage in a life like this in the long run get to be an exile? The next room is the danger. A groan broadens to a test scream, non-audible threats, the interrogatory stab, no scrape of chair leg, no shift of shoe sole, the action non-visible that the tortured sounds record. The screams aren’t quite shouts; for who can think of help or rescue, or a long haul, the upside-down-hung genitals (therefore this one is not a female) clamped by electrodes, yow yow, penis head pink to rose exposed, and refractory testicles autonomously retracting ceiling-wards, actually toward the ceiling light, big toes near a light fixture and already yanked out of joint plunging into the medium that waters pain to keep it live and/or optimum—as he thought the Japanese masseuse would do to his toes here in the great substitute place of them all New York, for which, therefore, there is no substitute when she made snapping sounds pulling them, those toes he never thought about normally, but it felt good. He isn’t particularly good at having things done to him. But you take up position and you hold it, isn’t that what was said?
Which way you going—home? A young voice, a young man’s, a boy’s.
Alone: it’s an alias, "alone." You’re not there unless you bump Another. Let an American mineral cartel exposed or unexposed be immortal, let people be parallel to people curving off into a distance which is optical marriage. Private existence with Clara is True Value, no substitution, small-scale units of book and pillow case and hand, clear and loving, where love might exist like disembodied angels in the upper reaches of an opera-house repertory but her dry-wrung washcloth laid on the sink like a Peruvian rug upon an iron balcony in the Chilean sun, to Saturday-morning piano music in a large dusky room—there is the true unit that someone was looking for.
People brush past, and he finds one foot in the street. Three people among others. And as he jerks his face away, and a blast of steam barrels out of the street, then in animate bursts, he jolts himself with the twist he gave his neck, did she see him?, it’s the threesome, a gray-haired, very broad-shouldered, stocky man is crossing with a fine young girl (much too young for him) who holds her cigarette out in front of her and touches the wrist of the boy on her other side less like his girlfriend than his married sister, she’s so clearly detached from him, if it matters, while he tries for her hand but her hand has slid up to hold his elbow and he leans his shoulder into hers looking straight ahead, and the girl thrown up by the field of New York is Amy—Amy his assistant from the office who was the one who spoke to him only hours before a phone call brought Efrain’s voice from some subway platform, couldn’t tell if the train was arriving or leaving, and here was the girl Amy with the extraordinarily good manners having converged upon him from behind and never knew and he was wanting to talk to someone and feels uncannily certain that if she, whom he liked so much, had seen him he would be in danger— why?—a dynamo would go off in his French-diagnosed ear and he would never hear it, but Amy was not the point. The older man points across the street showing them something. Has a broad tweed jacket on. But he is not so much older as he is familiar. Known from where? Stops in the middle of Seventh Avenue like he’s come up lame—but no—Cape Kennedy?—and looks around right through the immigrant with the cap in his pocket and two fifties and two ones in his trouser pocket, and the boy who might be eighteen or twenty turns his head to look at the girl Amy, who has looked back, they’re like the man’s own children, somewhat younger than the immigrant’s own children, American-quick to finger the button of that old New World so they absorbed unthinkable contradictions unthought, and the girl Amy who has looked back has seen, one knows, her bald superior from the foundation office and will not call attention to him and perhaps because of this will do nothing but continue with the boy and the man, this gray-haired man crossing eastward away from him, having come up to him from behind without knowing it and walked, brushed, right past him as if he were a marginal growing thing, a bush, this gray-haired tough-looking man taking two grown kids for a drink after a basketball game—is that it?—knows where he is going now, it’s the Greek fast-food place. (Can there be a "place" describable thus?) They approach tableau, he should pursue them, break in on them and stop what might be happening because he knows it has to do with him. He’s seen the older man before, but not from behind; yet in weather like this; yet not with that jacket. Months go by, tabled on a prison calendar isolated into days and numbers and events to be then swallowed into a flesh of unending term.
He has seen the gray-haired man before.
So? a voice shrugs. This is New York, the long run. He does not want to hear himself think any more. He would fight, now.
Efrain—he knew an Efrem once—Efrain is not at the agreed corner. Even minus the tweed cap he may be recognized by Efrain. Isn’t this so by law of streetwise survival?
By another law, Efrain has got to be getting something tonight in return for delivering the message from Foley. Why meet like this?
It serves both sides, maybe. For what if Efrain had said he would meet him at the apartment? Clara saw in her husband’s face that he might shift to Spanish speaking to Efrain. Jobless parolee hanging out.
The Japanese clock with its yellow markers makes time itself an advertisement, and it’s not always there—do they take it away?—it’s so big!— cover it up? (he would know if so) . . . the long hand is past the bottom yellow now. But wasn’t the clock digital the last time he looked? If the tight-fitting tweed cap goes on now, something will happen to him. Where would Efrain scalp tickets? Back there by the entrance to the arena? The slow or endless poetry of being aware, of being conscious, will come after decades to some random rapid moment of active void of police melodrama violently making the life of awareness seem like slow suicide.
Exposed, one stays where one is. His hand—his pistol hand—is in his jacket pocket as if to keep the cap from working its way out. He is afraid. The point of the meeting tonight was him, he senses, he guesses, but how? Not the message, but him. So he is to get the mes
sage from prison (this time unposted) and in exchange gives up what?
Himself.
But this is why he is here. He is the one whose life Foley’s letters intimate. "Life" so final and indecisive-sounding a word in English. Faster than saying "Efrain." Life is what Foley could be doing. "Natural life" means no parole, does it? and once he wanted to ask what Foley had done to almost get it, but you don’t ask, and if an inmate feels inclined to tell, he will—which Foley did not, except to write once about "a guy who has a score to settle with me who stands watch, week in week out, over a row of garbage cans."
Life, then. Less than natural life. Foley got eight to twenty. Imagine not knowing.
When what he wants to know is real. What he must know is how can he be in danger and in a vacuum at the same time? It is a life, says Clara. For how long? Old New York from other years they have dinner in, but this trip reinvents their whereabouts though they are in the phone book: just in from Stockholm for a week, consultant in San Diego, semi-retired in the Carinthian Mountains of Austria an hour from Italy an hour from Yugoslavia (at your age? and the "children"?): to meet the children in Mexico City (one lie compounded to) or New Orleans, we met on neutral ground in a New Orleans garden (and the regime? asks the friend or his wife; where do your children stand?—don’t ask—a subtle lie, for he doesn’t know).
Women and Men Page 72
