But Sarah could do strange things all right, like in the drugstore insult her old long-unseen acquaintance Leona Stormer revisiting town who lived in Chicago (which she said was nothing like New Jersey), and Jim at the insult his mother spoke didn’t get embarrassed, did he?, and she did things posthumously for if Brad’s Day a month or so after Sarah’s very own drowning —a Sarah special—had been Brad’s coming out into the open and grieving like an African, like an Italian, like a Jew, like a non-crazy old Indian speaking to the winds that cornered the world maybe, there still Sarah was, talking through Bob her one-time quite secret lover’s mouth and creating the swift, breathless hate of Brad when Bob put into his own mouth his own recollected remark re: winds, "What a lot of stuff—" he had told Sarah—"they ain’t curved."
Unless you were talking about a hurricane spiral, Jim observed out of the blue to Bob, who didn’t know Jim had been sitting here in Bob’s basement thinking, but now said, "We had a false alarm that day your brother carried on," as so they had, for no less a member of Brad’s Day than Mel had arrived in that strangely focused living room like a "living" wake with the info on his lips.
And so Jim found and soon afterward must have left it there unsummoned where it belonged in what rapidly developed into—hell!—the past (shrug), that he could collect if he concentrated (sun heat, uneven Earth shape, airflow cells, pressure belts, horizontal current)—all there was to it, you had to concentrate—not be confounded with "Get centered," from Grace Kimball which three whole decades later nonetheless comes out as unison to our ears, relations though we only are, the skeleton of that Brad’s Day talk about the weather. (You’d make a good newsman, joked Ted in their Washington bar not twenty years later and got a wrinkled forehead from his hunched, heavy set friend and a snicker from none other than Spence, whom they often had at the end of the bar pigeonholed but too sleazed-out and too silly for Jim to ever contemplate picking on him—under layers of slightly ugly comings and goings.)—and the skeleton was attached to people: for it was grandfather Alexander who had claimed that air travels from your high-pressure areas to your low, because to begin with, as Mel had pointed out, you get your pressure belts because air heats and cools and when it expands and contracts to put it ass-backwards (though isn’t that where the ass was, the last time we didn’t look?) and your pressure belts move because, to begin with, like stays with like, so you get cells of wind despite the warm always moving if not spending itself toward cold—which it becomes—for to begin with, whatever is true of the water which Alexander predicted would be on the warm side should anyone sample it this afternoon, the air moving at speed over an erratic Earth’s land of mountains and valleys, beauties or pockmarks, is not warm, as Margaret said with something like faraway anger, but not because water is slow to lose the sun’s heat, land fast (which is why the far, far more than cozy warmth of the sun’s radiation journeys so many million miles earthward while Earth in its ball of damp vapor is always moving but cannot ‘scape this given life, though by what or whom given the shouting tenor of the doctor-organist Sundays when Jim for a time, then, at (what?) fifteen attended service, could not say).
But Bob, why did Bob, eyebrows and all, dispute what Sarah supposedly had said? Well, Bob himself was the source: ‘course wind curved, Jim thought, yet when Jim did think about it one Sunday in church beside Anne-Marie Vandevere, who set no more store in church than Jim and did not find the doctor-organist much to applaud as a person perhaps because his daughter Cornelia wasn’t in her group, Cornelia could hear the horses whinnying for their corn in the stalls at the military school down their street (Do they feed them corn? Jim asked), Jim had to wonder if Bob all in all wasn’t right because what could nudge a wind off course except another wind and yet his father said there was no question about it, winds do curve: until one day that like other days in that year of his mother’s suicide might have been easy to forget he kept Anne-Marie waiting in Bob’s pickup discreetly (because illegally) down the street a couple of blocks clear of school because he had been thinking analytically and nonetheless passionately about dropkicking in a wind and whether his father would come to see him play since his father really didn’t have the time (But yes he did, intervened Mayga, swapping her stronger old-fashioned for Jim’s while Ted looked on)— As it happened, he did, said Jim, for Jim had been discussing basketball with Ted, the enclosed court, the trick of taking up position so it was (you hoped) clearly, stably yours then by law, and preferred not to find his father in the discussion, though then Mayga’s kind interruption had turned the talk to that afternoon of the pickup truck parked two blocks or three from school, Anne-Marie still sitting upright in the cab (as it happened, the driver’s seat) of Bob’s vehicle while Jim was somewhere (he had to admit it) thinking—if "thinking" didn’t make it more than it really was—why yes, leaning on the glass above that great old green-gray-brown relief map of South America somebody’d donated to the high school: thinking that if the fucking wind (which might curve around buildings like New York City or mountains) was in cells like individuals, well, how about a football? it got going its way up above the ground, but the land wasn’t promising to be there where it was when the ball came down. Ted and Mayga and Mayn all laughed at that expurgated evocation of what he did not for a minute know was a well-known effect that got named eventually after a Frenchman far more recent than it and that at some time had inspired Mayn to go get stuck in some difference between inertial and non-inertial systems, which explained why science had no satisfactory way to acknowledge this Coriolis effect; but there was Jim leaning on the glass above South America, as a familiar commanding voice called at him, "Get off the glass," and he removed his arms, transferring the support of his extended weight to his stomach and back muscles (no doubt), exactly at the instant he had seen that distant continent move beneath him and understood with a shiver, hearing scary words from his otherwise friendly coach, not just that it depended whether you were here on Earth or beyond it; and if you were out beyond it the wind down here crossing at right angles to the kick that he’d aimed downfield goal-postward, was straight as a die, even if Earth wasn’t; but if you were on Earth the wind with indubitable deflection warped—wait, I thought the football was yer wind, said Ted (and Yeah, echoed the wise little bastard free-lance photographer and news "dealer"—if the deal wheeled to his sleazy satisfaction—at bar’s end)—but coach John Rocker was asking if Jim had heard what them two girls in tenth grade had done, and at that moment like another discovery even more confounded unless you just stated it and let the fucking flickering mystery be—like the would-be dream that kept Jim "busy" (as Margaret said dreams kept her when asleep), the would-be dream Jim had-and-lost the very next dark, dark morning when he saw he wouldn’t have the chance to understand it except he did hear singing in the next room and it wasn’t his brother’s (room, that is)—which was in one sense the only next room next to Jim’s— but the music room downstairs and his mother was singing interrupted bits of a song teaching it to apparently Brad who was there with her and the word "world" and the word "morning" that came through the emptied, dark air were all Jim knew or was let know and what was between—well, yes, what was between, except the usual nothing—and yet hearing John Rocker’s hairy, husky voice discovering what it was saying just as its own words croaked out happily, "Why they damn near killed themselves in that pickup truck of Bob Yard’s I heard—hey, don’t you go with the Vandevere girl? what’s she doing driving a pickup truck when she can’t drive, the Pietrangeli girl was with her and I heard the right door was open when Anne-Marie swung the truck around in the middle of Manalapan Avenue so it almost tipped and the other one fell or jumped out and a car hit the right front headlight but they’re O.K.": so it wasn’t clear whether this was something two girls or one had done: but, leaving the glass counter covering the crocodilean relief map of South America and angry and reluctant but expressing only surprise and concern to John Rocker to whom he told the factual truth at once and John certainly did h
elp out in the next couple of hours, he found pockets of relief in the middle of his anger and chaos—because his mother was dead and he was expected to, he was expected to, he didn’t know at all what? but pockets in the anger that were independent minds self-protected where the understanding had come along with South America moving beneath the glass (maybe you needed glasses, said Ted)—which marked the limit of what Jim could confess to this good friend whom he would go on joking with and detailing packages of fresh information to year by year over a drink or at a ballgame, baseball that became football that became basketball Washington, New York, Washington, home ‘n home, two decades upwards of—while to Mayga—
—Did he not broach these remembrances with his wife, asks the interrogator whose empty face has grown tender eyebrows and sprouts smallest tufts from shadow-erased nostrils, maybe he don’t got a nose—
—no mo’ (sang Barcalow Brandywine, upstaging the doctor in a warm, boisterous room at grandmother’s house)—
—I mean, adds interrogator, you have such friendships really in American Marriage or so our informants report—
—to Mayga, while she was available, Jim brought out the subtle blanks between the lines, explaining that the insight of South America moving beneath the glass above which he had been watching (thinking about, perhaps, wind and Earth) had been not utterly blown away by Coach Rocker calling the disgusting news of that girl apparently making a botch of the afternoon, the two of them too—but the insight had held to Jim, that is, without his havin’ to do anything, and it was that Bob, who had heard actually Sarah say that owlish junk ‘bout wind and all at the beach (—at the beach? asked Mel at the kitchen table and both Brad and Mel looked in wonder at this intruder Jim Mayn standing in the doorway, come home—When were they at the beach? —but Brad said, The day that old man came to see Gramma at the beach)—
—it was that Bob had needed to be part of Brad’s Day, well he’s a nelectrician ‘n has a pickup truck ‘n a dark red Ford sedan simonized like grandfather Alexander’s shoes, and a load of friends who say, Good old Bob, you have to watch him because only he knows where all them wires and cables are going—and he hardly belonged with the Mayns in Throckmorton Street or even in Sarah’s awful story but was in it no less and knew he would provoke by introducing that staggering fact of Sarah’s expressed opinion re: wind curves and re-provoke by citing his dismissal of her late view but it was where he was—where, Flick Mayn years later able to bring herself to say, where he was coming from, he wanted to be part of it and so—
—and yet as Jim raced through the uncaring halls of the high school, damn it, to the no doubt real location of that bashed-up pickup truck that was his responsibility when he had only a picture of it in his head, a blonde girl with lipstick (judge’s granddaughter) embracing the wheel of an endlessly rocking vehicle, a dark-haired girl without lipstick spilled, Catholic thigh by Catholic thigh, out of Bob’s stupid truck with her history notes bound in a notebook but adrift, Jim knew more, knew more than he knew, so he was minutes and minutes getting clear of that high school and a picture of a blackboard full of fond chalky shapes abandoned by human hand, but the very obstacles—
—read ob. (we recollect already)—
—very obstacles that kept him forever from getting out of this high school and down the street to stupidly hunt for the girls and the truck without asking directions though it was his hometown, wasn’t it?, the very obstacles that seemed to make his run down those halls endless wonderfully let him see, let him see—
—not a principal and a journalism teacher in passionate dispute or a male math teacher with some solid on the board and his head on a desk evidently too tired to even think "n’est-ce pas" at the end of one of those loud challenging non-questions of his—but that something in Bob Yard had loved Jim’s mother, and Jim, who didn’t care for either man too much, might be a hair closer to Bob than to his own father Mel, but that was crap like everything else, and beside the point and one more obstacle while the world seemed to be rattling yer cage, you had two systems no matter what the truth and so on about Sarah turned out to be, and it was more than that, oh shit, she was right ‘bout wind and Earth, and Bob (yer uncle!)’s right too even if he didn’t honestly and truly say it to her, except Bob’s the one on Earth, where winds what with Earth’s easterly rotation do look like they curve, whereas he’s takin’ the view from out beyond the Earth that ought to be Sarah’s. They had their problems all right, that clung to them like this sight that came to Jim and stayed after Coach Rocker launched Jim outward with his scary words, and he felt denied by those goddamn girls the chance to hang on to the two systems but they held on to him and went on knowin’ him even when he left them, seemed like, to rush away to handle one of those well-isolated—
—incidents, the interrogator fills in, proud of idiom—
—incidents to be handled, dealt with, coped with, covered, etcetera, as if this up-to-now continuous world, one by one—
—taking it a day at a time, adds the interrogator—
—oh, were you divorced too we chime in? did you have your limb cut off and then regret it? did you lose a loved one by unforeseen overdrift and have a really hard row to hoe because of it coming out of left field where there was no warning track to tell you the guys off there on the firing line rattling the fences wasn’t just taking batting praptice (as Sammy pronounced 4’practice")?
—we do not have divorce any more, the interrogator intones, we sent all potential (joke) divorcers via matter-energy dome-trans (a mere pleasant buzzing in the temples is all they feel) so that—
—they arrive in Locus Libration translated, each couple, into one?—
—into one? but surely you have not the technology yet to do dat, have you? asks the interrogator in a new voice coming through him from elsewhere—
—never mind, we have enough trouble launching our new cars, we reply, feeling more American which may feel like an isolated incident—
—sensibly handled as such (of the two-girl accident in Bob Yard’s pickup borrowed semi-illegally by an underaged borrower of the first part who was absent mulling over South America under glass), concurred Ted, one’s fellow newspaperman (you couldn’t say "fellow colleague," ‘twould sound redundant ‘stead of the succinct that Mel espoused ad nauseam, favorite theme, witness Sarah’s obit written by the proud widower himself—
—and if it was a mystery why Brad went to pieces that day, Brad’s Day as it came to be called, never mind all its wrinkles, its whys and whys and various crap you can’t know, maybe he discovered jerking off the night or afternoon before but was too young surely; and who in the hell cares, comes a foghorn-strong voice both far and close, hard to tell, we almost miss the later James Mayn expressing good-(more-or-less)humored disdain for something or other, maybe family history:
and you come up to the present with a lot of interesting enough memories, no doubt about it, hearing your mother’s fugitive brief lover (who loved her but would never have called her "nice") tell of an argument they had about a piano being out of tune and he heard it, a foreign vibration, a separate if not isolated sound, and she didn’t: sharp-edged memories often become surrounded by a nothingness of what lay around them I mean the idea of all these never-to-be-known people who knew your folks and arrived with horse-drawn (in Windrow, horses could draw, you see) vanilla ice cream at twilight saying but once, You have a lot to live up to—she was the nicest woman . . . and you hear them in the woodwork, then never more, such as the vanished voice that called the cemetery four, five days after Sarah disappeared and got Eukie Yard mad in his voluminous one-piecer to ask if interment had taken place and when Eukie retorted that the drowned lady hadn’t been recovered, the voice from New York re-retorted Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, which Eukie said he knew already, he thought; and somewhere before a trowel clanked under a porch but not before Lincoln’s wife was identified as an impossible woman, a voice with shoes on said to another heavily shod voice that Alex
ander had said the second voice ("you") had told him it ("you") had gotten opera tickets for a special road opera performance in Trenton, because it ("you") was afraid Sarah’s going crazy or something, and the other voice said, Yes it was Vurdee’s Ba[w]llo in Mascara (like a brilliant woman designer of revolutionary new men’s shoes with whom Mayn discussed South America all too briefly who insisted on pronouncing as Bore-guess a known Argentine storyteller and poet whom Mayn had never read and possibly never heard of) and what had been said to Alexander (who once observed that some Armenians are gypsies) who thought for Pete’s sake he’s going to start bawling on me, was that the lady in question might go crazy living with him, Mel—
—close down some of these systems, a voice says firmly at a semicircular meeting of Grace Kimball’s workshop, close ‘em down, don’t go back for more, ol’ Freud’ll have you sniffing around day and night till you got a snootful and it’s like booze, one snootful paralyzes you as good as another, close down some of those systems, you’ve seen ‘em, they work, he do act like that some of the time? you know it’s most of the time, which might as well be all the time, so don’t go back for more—so that we might have substituted the verbal sound "voice" for "workshop" and dispatched to the heart of what’s just been said—
—hear those voices with their boots on comin’ down through the woodwork and you’re under the porch but outside if you want to be—and the memory is worth not maintaining major space for, so store it dehydrated it’ll keep next to Brad’s brief vision he recalled and recalled and recalled of Sarah with skin peeled raw when the draped black towel came off which meant the waters tore her clothing, she left no garment in the boat, and she had gone away on her trip—
Women and Men Page 99
