Spence persisted from talk he had heard, through hearsay he had not, as if infected by the future of jojoba as a fantastically superior dry-land reincarnation of the vanishing sperm whale’s oil, yielding from that plant’s durable bush such motor coolants, human foods, shampoos, commercial hopes for endless other transformations as might explain why (per quoit) an English furniture maker whom Margaret Mayne met on the slopes of Salt Lake City could excite her so with tales of the Japanese-speaking American inventor whose interior wound had been healed in the desert with jojoba balm only so that he might be murdered for having seen the connection between that bush bean’s pod-oil and the (in fact) mw-sperm whales with which a group of Californians tried to stock the Great Salt Lake: and altogether did explain why Spence’s nose for profit led beyond the venerable jojoba bush and its lucrative basic-research future of remedying the particular acne if not spleen damage or excess gravity in the lower limbs and spinoffs of the chemical from which is derived dioxin of Vietnam fame to the woman Manuel who had healed the ill-fated Japanese-speaking Mason in Utah, had herself shampooed with the jojoba oil for years, and had so applied it to the riven scalp of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the lovely sounds that came from her small cranial crater as well as her demon-hassled voice’s mouth foretold if they did not cause that legendary comeback from death usually attributed to her son’s hasty departure. Spence had heard some of this firsthand through Mayn, but some of what Mayn heard from at least two people, whom Spence now in 1977 insinuatingly contacted, seemed almost as far from Mayn as it had unquestionably not been overheard spoken by Mayn in a Washington bar in the old days in or not in the presence of Mayga, the beloved South American woman-friend, at Cape Kennedy before and soon after the liquidation of Dr. Allende’s government in Chile or at one or two other times when their professional paths crossed, Mayn’s and Spence’s. Yet indisputable it was that the Navajo matron upon revival had spoken in the voice of Owl Woman and Owl Woman’s name had been Manuel; indisputable that Spence had heard through Mayn of Marcus Jones, and anyone but Spence would have settled for this—not reached, instead, his fifty-foot extensible arm-hand out of the wiry plastique of his western-wear-clothed body to ferret out the fact that the American printing magnate Morgen, who had been strolling with Mayga when she fell to her death, no one else’s (the ultimate breather), from the breezy cliffs of Valparaiso harbor, was brother to a left-wing job-printer Morgen in Philadelphia—all intensely suggestive to Spence, who though Mayn figured Spence cared not even a fuck for the journalist Mayga noted that in the late fifties/early sixties her husband had helped run the national airline and that Mayga’s work in the States was covering copper mostly and talking up Frei’s next run for the Presidency of Chile—work just ended by her departure for home summoned by husband, now ended with her life.
Mayn had told this Spence years ago to shut up, which Spence did with such a lingering smile that he might in every other respect have been elsewhere.
Mayga was dead, and that was all that had mattered then in 1963, not the tilt at which we received the sun and the rain, nor any historic small talk that was all of it bigger than the death of Mayga—and welcome to its bigness. Yet recalling and recalling how friend Ted had told Jim the news not imagining it would upset him for he had met her maybe half a dozen times in ‘62-’63, he could get to another fact of Spence by the trivialest gnomon yet congenial because he and Ted had tossed this all-purpose gnomon back and forth, the L of the sundial or anything that tells time by the shadow it casts (though what does it tell time?); for one day at the beach Jim had stuck himself strangely into the earth of the Mantoloking sand just on the leaning point of pretty well murdering his little brother Brad:
and that "fact of Spence," conveyed on a gray day in New York in 1977 of the perishable century that aspires to be our civilization’s hour, he heard in the voice of a nice woman he had had steak and enchiladas with (or what did they have?) in a bedroom suburb of Albuquerque hard by Sandia Mount, calling to say she’s in New York, has to talk to him, she was supposed to be joined by Ray Vigil (remember?), she had to see Mayn, not talk on the phone—look it wasn’t possible to put down (put up?) a mountain overnight, was it?, whose mineral "bank" could make anyone near it think it had always been there, and listen, a man who disturbed her but maybe wasn’t crazy had told her that Jim Mayn’s mother had disappeared into the ocean but his grandmother had stood at the memorial marker in the family cemetery plot and said there was something real there and a person had phoned the cemetery from New York to ask if burial had taken place, and the woman from Albuquerque her voice quiet with chill not privacy thought it all might mean nothing against this Spence’s allegation that she and Mayn’s daughter whom she did not know, if not Mayn himself, could be involved in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something she heard Spence call National Technical Means Capability for verifying placements of missiles—but... she had come to New York to talk to Jim about partly this mountain perhaps though she had not heard about it till she got here and of course didn’t believe it but also a strange thing she had heard in Farmington, a west-east nightmare for environmentalists, this mountain minerally capable of making people believe it. They would talk tomorrow, she said, as if it wouldn’t be now. Her firmness brought them full circle but it wasn’t the same spot, and looking over the edge of the phone or the circle, recalling her curly, dark-blond hair and a quick smile in the midst of fact and dedication still hoping she could save part of a landscape from being darkly stripped by some epic modulus but to store that landscape no more than the windmill prior to the giant electronic pylons of Wyoming stored wind for current elsewhere, he remembers her given name Dina like it meant something and despite her having just said her surname he can’t hold it in his mind until he thinks of once itemizing for his daughter a bleached beer can next to a candy wrapper in the desert brush at his feet when he stood contemplating Ship Rock while the Four Corners plume and gasification of cheap surface coal escape him, and thinks of another person a bearded son of two opera stars who changed his name to West which amused his bearded sometime-earringed father and upset and haunted his mother, she told Mayn. Dina West. Dina West. Spence had phoned her. Which meant he had known she was here, and where. Which meant he knew o/her. Which in itself proved for some minutes of this year of 1977 to be so tiresomely credible that Mayn could go back and bury himself in some New Mexico town with one broad street, a desert’s exit and entrance, and drive a new pickup truck and wear dark glasses and pump gas obscurely for the rest of his life. Dina West.
He had told a couple of things to a nice neighbor named Norma one night shortly before Spence’s name entered her ear, touched (and probably lowered) her consciousness (itself less "raised" by the woman Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops than reassured by the stories of other women and the gentleness that let the heart speak for variety more than bitterness, at least to Norma, who made Mayn think maybe his own wife could have been helped in workshops like these though he still did not understand why they had relinquished each other); and Norma conveyed to him some of this gentleness, and while deep rainless thunder-pockets cracked the long clefts of Manhattan (which would have been the name for New York if Mayn had had a say) he told Norma that the woman who had been neither Mom nor Mama, yet Mother, and his, had told him to go away, to become himself, and then she was the one to go, and that way of putting it was the mystery, not what’d happened. Norma did not dispute this. The advice, she pointed out, was still good. But, she heard Jim (this nice, only moderately articulate-seeming, modestly macho man) muse humorously, his mother had taken her own advice, which people didn’t always do. But what was the trouble? asked Norma—that Sarah was s’posed to let him go ahead first and do what she after all had said he was s’posed to do? Norma liked Jim more than a little, and whatever it was was gladly unspoken. He tells her that clouds heal the air. She likes that, but she wants to ask him what he’s feeling.
"You know where I heard that?"
he said, and then, "Why I think I said that myself, that clouds heal the air. Almost unprintable."
Norma said Grace Kimball for all the enmity she laughingly bore men would say maybe Mayn’s mother listened to the good advice she was giving her son—a man—and one day decided to—
"—She wasn’t well," he said.
She waited.
"Go on and say it. It’s O.K."
"Decided to take some of it for herself."
"You don’t know," he said, unable to tell her, but feeling passion staggering stagy through his heart, the self-pity of cloaked melodrama.
He knew Norma wanted to ask, What happened with her? To leave a husband, two boys, a home, her things! He waited, for a time, to speak, and knew in his shadowy sense of immediate future time that he would have the chance, and saw for the first time that this sense meant he cared about her. He wanted to know, Did Norma ever have people she’d been getting ready all her life to see?
"Well, you.’9
He didn’t mean himself!
"You mean you look forward to knowing them?"
He guessed he meant that.
"No you didn’t," she said. But she didn’t press him. She said she didn’t buy all of Grace Kimball, her best traits were warmth and intuition that gave her listening a power of itself—though she was supposed to have had enormous influence on dozens of women breaking up relationships—no, that was putting it clumsily, but ... the workshop did get heavy, you know dogmatic—inner-clean, clean-break, get rid of all that furniture, honey—but Grace you know was still in the place she had lived with her husband in, though so what?, but the workshop’s too supportive, so much womanness you sometimes aren’t sure it’s old-time female, but Grace she liked, she had such a lot of bounce in her, she put her hand on your wrist rather than put you down—a beggar on the street with a brown paper bag over his head with eyes, a crazy old lady Grace told her of, some bum she’ll stop as if she’s barefoot too, give him a buck, tell him about A.A., she sees things so simply but what she says about men and history gives her all this preachy power and influence but when she uses it in all the talking she does (which includes putting down words, words!) it’s humor and a little-girl ("little-w^m^m"?!) changeableness breaking habit patterns (being constantly her funny, bumptious self . . .) that is left with you like some good medicine that hasn’t anything to do with power and living-room politics, well Jim knew what she meant, didn’t he? Norma asked— Grace always meeting the most ungodly people, you know what I mean—
—have to get around to meeting this woman, there’s a Lucille in her group of friends, isn’t there?, who sounds like someone I knew—
—the strangest people, this red-bearded Canadian economist who O.D.’s on pastries and attends—
—Which one? Mayn asked; I know two of those.
Do they attend swings?
Do you? asked Mayn—wait, what’s a swing? ... oh yeah.
With tea and apricots. Maybe these other street weirdos "came" to Grace or something.
(Are there never any women bums? Mayn murmured, and then answered his own question, Of course, of course: they’re sleeping in the doorways with their bundles—as if he had to find out all over again what he didn’t know he knew.)
—like an old, irritable man shepherding a demented and beautiful old lady, Grace is looking them up again, she liked them. The man’s a wonderful grouch, very serious, the old woman spoke of his laboratory but obviously didn’t know what she was talking about.
Don’t be too sure, Mayn said.
Then one night Norma received a call which was like a call from Spence. A woman in Norma’s Body-Self Workshop, who evidently did not know that Mayn lived in the building, had been concerned by a phone call from a certain Spence who asked if she knew that her friend Flick Mayn had once lived in the multiple dwelling where her workshop met, attended significantly by a woman suspected by a visiting south-of-the-border counter-intelligence ‘‘enforcer" of collaborating to set up a major act of leftist bloodshed plus the abduction of a venerable Masonic socialist who’s father to this woman’s friend who’s herself more famous than her father and recently seen with a distinguished young naval officer known to be diplomatically trouble-shooting for the regime now in power in her country which may be Chile in her heart and soul and body but not on her passport. "Yeah, sure, the opera singer," Mayn answers promptly, "and I think I know the other woman you’re talking about; but bloodshed?"
But the new friend of Mayn’s who has phoned him this data, Norma, residing in his building and with whom he had talked only two days before deeply about his life yet leaving out one huge space of Fact, now asked him if it was true, as Spence said, that his mother had committed suicide—the one huge fact—and that he had investigated it; and he said very calmly, that there’d been nothing to investigate, nothing to look into, there was a note, a boat, perhaps a motive. She did not ask why he hadn’t told her before, and he was privately impressed because he should have told her—because they had talked about Sarah’s leaving as the thing she had originally told Jim he should do—which, granted, was just a parent telling a kid to make his way in the world, though advice inspired by disappointment.
Mayn remembered Spence being in the bar years ago because he had responded typically to hearing Jim tell Ted about—yes—the day (was Mayga there, too?) when he as a boy in a raincoat had questioned a man surf-casting who had sensed something terrible in the questions and had changed the subject—"Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that"—but when Jim asked if he had seen bodies come in or if a body might sink for good for sure, the man looked back at the high, windy breakers (oh yes, that’s the name of a fine old firetrap hotel, The Breakers) on the Jersey shore, and later when he asked another man down at the pier about the incident, the boat, etcetera, why the man laughed and said there were things that mattered more—gratuitous remark that Mayn recalled ever afterward as being revealing of the quality of, well here come deep waters, "so much" (as very serious folk are wont to say) "so much" that is our life right up to but not including what we call history but do not ever grasp, "un . . . photograph . . . able," but is this a view of history even in its absence? as Ted used to say to Jim, Ted now has a hard knot of cells in his neck on the right side "arrested but merely resting" (Ted jokes very precisely and Jim knows the cancer is memory but can’t take the thought anywhere, potential force resting up inside you that you can’t tap for yourself except, in its time, to launch you out of here). Ted goes on working out of Washington, and now during these curiously pressing days somewhere going round in Jim he found Spence out making a buck, a nickel, again, and recalled he had agreed with Ted he had been hard on Spence, this this this . . . words had refused him like angels flapping humorously at the dim margins of his eyesight, words that were actually there already put, already remembered—this little bastard (simpering scavenger, looking, looking, sniffing, listening) . . . but wondering now, a decade and more after that chat with Ted, if Spence had acquired data Mayn knew nothing of, he phoned Washington to find that old Ted had just left for San Antonio, and in the gap of this phoned also in Washington his own daughter, who was not home; phoned the Albuquerque woman here in New York to get Spence’s number if any and she had left her hotel; phoned Norma for the other woman’s number but hung up in order to phone Amy to ask if her distinguished Chilean economist, who Mayn had never stopped knowing was there at the foundation, had acquired the opera tickets Mayn and Amy had used from the diva Luisa in person, only to hear Larry answer (hey, hooray for Lar’) in a voice very grown-up through a storm, a virtual apparatus, of systematic static Jim-jamming by load factor divided by search-intensity quotient, divided and divided by his journeyman self falling forward in lieu of looking, looking, looking for it might have been Spence sotto voce reporting-in with information in the form of a question—or turn that inside out, a mountain of a dream Margaret thought up for him that supposedly the East Far Eastern Princess dreamt: a g
rave she saw into but had no mouth for words, words, words, it was too full—of words? of something solid?—and she dreamt she woke and was wet all over with tears of every feeling you might feel, and she went through maple trees, their leaves’ undersides blowing up palely in the wind, and passed an old swimming hole and got to a pretty field and found the grave of her dream which was so deep that all it had in it was the egg the lion left, not a hair nary a finger of that grave’s tenant who kept at best a low if not departed profile until, surrounded by dirt-tired Indians not dressed for our weather, she felt them edge her toward the grave only to get her attention to tell her she had lived the life of this dead person and now was this person and ready to go on as such, and, relieved, she told them they had no such belief in reincarnation, to which they replied in a unison all the softer because they all spoke, that she was the one who had told them: and when she felt awful about this, they lowered gently into one fluid thicker than blood and as live and glinting as the tongue of the whole world and before she could reach for that egg down there, they simply flowed into the grave, which became the hillside:
: inspired by Spence, who was nonetheless real and if (give him credit) turned down by the U.S. Marines nonetheless semperfidelis to know what he would not report himself but package for even Mayn to bear:
: who in turn is uninspired himself no doubt, a journeyman who among the violence of an indelible child’s bike devoid of training wheels falling on a small, caged leg, and the violence of an unknown husband’s head that, with all its holes, would not pass, by terminal magic, through the grid chamber of gut pressure he himself has had strung into his wife’s racket frame so she can kill him, and the violence of an anonymous wife’s love for her husband precisely when he (having spent an evening having Hemingway prove that it’s people that are the matter) is telling her her women’s workshop puts down men, and the violence of a teenage child whose anguished anger normal for her age multiplied by (and perpendicular to) the parents’ separation after years of uncertain vibes (read frequency, read in-frequency) divides and divides until the simple knowledge is too large to quite see, to wit that when you get to the age when you want to kick your parents around it’s easier if they’re living together, two still one—among all these violences which were not a newsman’s reportable Delaware Water Gap development or income-tax reform or wind energy used right in the backyard (read roof) of a Lower East Side apartment building—Mayn could see Pearl Myles on her ambiguous exit from Windrow High School, urging her Journalism Circle swansong fashion to remember that anything might be news but it must be something, something, and while you were wondering remember that in the City was where you found—and some snickered, including Jim—"human nature posing in the nude."
Women and Men Page 140
