Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Good material for Spence blown adrift in the vitals of a divided history. Looking through Mayn’s daughter’s keyhole in Washington? Or her address book while she’s down at Tradewinds, having a beer, talking to a boyfriend about another apartment, being possessive or being low-key (well, her father himself would like to know, but not through keyholes), or thinking about conflicted parents but about important stuff like her life? Good material for Spence, who come to think of it liked cappuccino and pistachio or vanilla ice cream like a regular person who, disreputable skew-handed trash-purse that he was, had had at least a father or a mother (grant him that!) maybe the bad bean of a good marriage (for that could happen, like wondrous spinoff of a supposedly bad marriage), didn’t seem to need to go to press briefings to find out, for instance, as Ted, who ran into him "retailed" to Mayn, that the unthinkably rich relation of the low-profile Argentine silver magnate who ran the string of eastern papers Mayn worked for for a time had not gone up in smoke with his plane but was redesigning a private golf links surrounding a green-bean plantation once owned by the Presbyterians of Cameroon.

  Spence was the problem. He was no less than making a living. Mayn joked with Norma, the night Lincoln had called her: "If he gave you all the news—" "—not me."

  ‘ The, uh, storied botanist-explorer Marcus Jones used to object to having to explain himself, why, for instance, he loved the blanched lips of a lady scientific colleague he used to run into in the desert—" "Someone your grandmother knew? I think you mentioned the bicycle before, and . . . and ..." "Spence did, probably." "But Spence called Lincoln, not me. You never mentioned the botanist to me, just that your grandmother traveled to the West in the nineties." After they hung up, Norma came downstairs and rang his bell and she seemed apologetic, as if she’d ask was it true Brad had needed more attention. They didn’t talk about any of this. Mayn was concerned about Lincoln. He felt he had already talked to her—as if Spence, crawling about in some lightless bloodstream of phone lines, shaped time and Mayn knew what was coming up. Mayn didn’t want to talk to Norma and got her gently out of his apartment. He really liked her. She didn’t understand. Probably thought he was feeling a little seduced.

  He had to cut off this period, the arc-second segment of these few days. Just say where this unchecked inquiry and publicity stopped. But Spence was making a living.

  Yet, like having the power to know and look hard but being convinced that history was a costly drug that played at being a secret that would not be there when you needed it, while he knew he was waiting for Larry Shearson to get back to him, that third woman-phone-call detonated by the creeping Spence made Mayn start again asking himself about Spence if not about such historical convergence as Spence sought or preyed upon the shadows of.

  And listening to this woman he’d never met but who’d met him (!) (who had just become "a carpenter," God love her, "it’s like a revelation—used to be in your business")—he could not tell if Spence had or had not heard him one time speak of the Brad’s Day wrangle re: bent winds, so far forgotten by i960 that Mayn’s "discovery" of the fictitious Coriolis deflection of winds when he boned up fast to check NASA’s U-2 cover story did not at once bring to his mind his mother’s words or that dubious giant of a debate that never stopped growing between the Indian and the Anglo of Margaret’s private dispatches to her grandson, and Mayn imagined first that Spence had made up independently any number of events signal in Mayn’s abortive or largely unreportable family such as (though he had no evidence that Spence did know) that the cousin diarist from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Marion Hugo Mayne had recorded from an adjacent table a potentially erotic meeting in New York in the 1830s between a young woman whose lover was in trouble and an anonymous but most powerful statesman-dyspeptic friendly to M. F. Mayne because of the Mayne family’s New Jersey newspaper founded to promote that statesman’s political career; then a moment later Jim Mayn was thinking that Spence just plain knew about him what Mayn did not know except in this windy code of scavenged surplus connections that had a dollar sign haunting it, hence for Spence a credibility value.

  But this woman with the rather large, husky, yet naked voice, Lincoln, who asked like Mayga years ago, Who is he? (and unlike Mayga would bleed words into Mayn’s ear for a moment) had not only been interrogated and apprised by Spence, she had been stood up by him maybe because she had told him what she looked like but have to learn to take rejection but that wasn’t the point of the meeting she had thought, and she’s actually very nice-looking especially now that she’s been cleaned up—

  "I know what Spence looks like," the voice came back to her and she added, "And I know what you look like and your daughter read me one of your letters."

  He did not stoop to the bait if that’s what it was. In his eyes, in some one of the liquid, lucid filters his eyes maintained as memory chips not worth circuiting into the brain, he did feel someone looking at him in a restaurant, and so what?

  ... but this Spence had called to ask if Lincoln knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where her own whadda-ya-call-it consciousness-raising (—it’s not conscious-ness raising, if you don’t mind, she’d told Spence, or not what you think that means, if anything) workshop, where the workshop met, where there was another woman—

  "I know all this, Lincoln, I’ve had it from another source a’ready, and your Spence could probably be in two places at once, he’s something else again, stay away from him, he’s down a burrow half the time breathing his own carbon dioxide economizing on being human while he makes these phone calls on someone’s charge card."

  So she went on to more painful Spence as it turned out—"I feel I know you, Jim," she said, "please call me ‘Lincoln,’ O.K.?"—(well Christ maybe Spence was a lunatic, whether or not that was his voice so deep dark inside the still athletic James Mayn it could be where the tawny cirrhosis crouched, budded, unbuilt and rebuilt so process supplanted its normally maintained result preferring to the degenerate future-liver a richly compacted coffee-black hole Indian tandouri, one thousand pork chops, twenty-three hundred New York steaks, eggs rancheros, soft corny chicken enchiladas suizas, and enough veal Parmigian to melt down the James River clear to an Italy where Jim had been but once and once was not enough)

  —at each point on this skewed circumference someone stopped him inside himself and he looked across an edge into a dark he had always taken for granted, no use surveying there, do the next thing, etcetera:

  Spence—Spence had interrogated, apprised, mingled the two modes: for as a talker he had a voice that could almost sing, high-frank, working, eager to help; and she had answered him, she couldn’t tell why, could-be it was that she’s a carpenter now!, and he in turn asked if she knew this man who had followed the Chilean economist’s wife and Lincoln said, Only his daughter Flick, who’s a wonderful girl; and he asked if she knew a "chick" named Amy who got free opera tickets from the Chilean whose wife (her workshop acquaintance) was friends with a singer whose father belonged to a venerable logia lauterina which the regime like emperor and pope before them would smash if they could as if the freemasons were still stoneworkers and their liberal (here, liberation) lodges were made of masonry or for that matter secrets, and Lincoln, alarmed, said, No she didn’t know any Amy; and Spence asked did she know any journalists working in or out of Minnesota because his instinct told him she did, and she suddenly didn’t know but had asked what he wanted and he said, To enjoy a meeting with her (—enjoy? it was like experience, she imagined) if she (Spence went on) had any related information for sale or barter; to which she retorted she had no information for sale; but he: Ma’am you’ve already contradicted that; and she: Don’t call me ma’am—yes she did know someone in Minneapolis, and Spence replied, By name Pearl W. Myles around sixty years of age? who lost a job because she did some hot-shot legwork all written down but never printed to do with a person who disappeared off the Jersey coast right when a maverick U-boat had been seen in the camouflaged vicinity and linked
with a German composer (read perhaps compositor—no time—copy both) who had bought all 250 eel-steel feet of it for delivery in Chile where he was going or already was?— does that ring a bell? Never knew so much talk about curved wind, by the way. But Lincoln loathed Spence. (Like a relation? Mayn asked, and she laughed.) She had tried kidding Spence did he know Mayn had visited Medicine Bow at least twice to see the giant windmills where her own workshop leader Grace Kimball’s non-smoking Buddhist brother Walter hailing also from the southeast territory of Kansas used to be a trouble-shooter for the Department of the Interior—and when Spence after a pause called this sheer coincidence (while Mayn asked if it had been she or Spence that had "never known so much talk about curved wind"—Spence, she said; Spence, Spence, but I don’t know if I told him about what your daughter said about him or he me).

  So Spence became formal and polite, different, as if asking her out— and she saw a buggy all painted shiny and black and gold with a Central Park horse distinguished by a large bunch of flowers between the ears, yet no future in that buggy or a dangerous future like a waterfall he for me or maybe me him—for all the world as if Spence was forgetting he’d already asked her to meet him: Had Mayn’s daughter (he wanted to know) spoken of a certain Mayga?—Mayga?—A South American woman with a round and not-at-all-bad-looking face who lost her life soon after being associated with James Mayn, who’s married, isn’t he?

  Mayn hung up on her, hearing only the word "not—" then had to call back, didn’t have the number, last name, any sense of her except information he didn’t care about.

  Lincoln, he laughed within himself. Oh nothing need happen. He had fallen forward into life beyond Windrow. The house phone buzzed and he did not go to speak into it, for Spence was at work in him; the layers of dirty cloud passing the Empire State tower that looked like it was falling was the atmo healing itself getting ready to "wet-clean" the air in a city where the sun’s light is easier to look right at because of—what?—he had never gotten the cause of the seasons straight in General Science although he recalled it was to do with tilting—maximum scattering of light in the line between looker and light source, you get your man-made brown haze but not your natural gray haze so the faraway ridge is made to seem less different from its sky, easier to understand than the seasons, the salt microns, the soil invisibly infinitesimally tilling the sky’s presence so if you could only see it you’re in a desert dust storm, but give me your poor man’s filter the blue haze, but you have to go to it, to Grand Canyon if Australia’s out, not even an electron micro-eye for auras can bring the blue haze to you, where the milky sky-within-a-sky draws viewpoint through semi-precious distance, opaled, to tell the truth, by billions of turps! yea turpentine, but organic natural, not combustible like the human brain’s troposphere of endless economixes.

  The house phone buzzed again and the phone rang—something abstract in us won’t go away—and, seeing that in the absence of knowing what had gone on between his parents he had looked into other lives—a world of workshops helping themselves to the apple pie of change—he took the telephone on the way to the house phone and was saying, "Who is it?" while hearing the puzzled urgency of the woman Lincoln apologizing, then again apologizing ‘cause her house phone just went and she doesn’t know who it is, and he sympathetically allowed as how the doorman in his building was half the time in the deli across the street though they did not employ a doorman in the deli, the illogic of which she seemed to understand and told him she was sorry she hadn’t told him . . . that in the workshop she had passed on a story she had heard from his daughter about the Navachoor Prince and his fate that Flick had figured out—she said Jim didn’t sound like his letters, though "Your daughter in this long thing you’ve probably seen doesn’t read like she talks, of course."

  Cut to where he was a week ago and will be a week hence, as if he waits for what Larry comes up with. (Isn’t there at least another person all this years of stuff has been about? Margaret? Sarah? Grace Kimball!) Cut through a movie years ago containing a scene of a movie being made, with director in breeches and a second pair of breeches enclosing one of the actresses, and Jim’s friend Sam opening a crackly-wrapped Clark bar in the dark one week after Jim’s mother . . . "went" (as Jeanette Many, her musicale friend, who actually believed not just in God but Jesus, said, who years later wrote Jim at an address she said she didn’t understand because it was not his wife’s to ask what was "going on" in his life, she "just" needed to know so she’d know what to pray for (read pry; just read on to the "Fondly" at letter’s end))—cut to the Bronx Puerto Rican woman wonderfully at rest who looks at your aura which is what you said you came for, recommended (you say) by the lady Clara, who is deeply troubled but it’s only partly events in Chile (you add, as if you’re a friend), but the broad-shouldered, heavily rouged queen of a vision sees what you said you paid to ask about even if she’s declining to discuss that other client Clara whose husband is mixed up in an intrigue at the prison with the man whom Foley knows less about than his words are able to say, yes Hortensa, here beside the thunderous traffic of the Grand Concourse in a furnished but uncarpeted parlor with the freshest sunlight everywhere so you must be sharp to see an aura, tells Mayn his aura gets denser, like breath that as it speeds up finds more and more energy instead of less, but it has a limit though that limit hasn’t been reached and not only isn’t dependent on who else is reacting to him, it depends on his not being touched by that—but he has been in the future (she says) too long yielding only a shadow here and now, and his aura is of great force waiting, waiting, the light around the torso give waves no less, a person trying to get back into you, she’s claiming—

  Cut, past her name, which is coincidentally also that of a guy in prison Foley knew; past Spence; but, though snubbed at bar’s end, it was Spence who did the leaving, if only for a few minutes to ring up a (Kontac: new Russian, poss. borrowed fr. Amer. Eng.); cut fast to a light plane, but not Mayn’s that landed in Spence’s wake and yielded a wingtip vortex-turbulence formula in the form of a dumb grin, passenger-to-pilot, instead the plane the boy-man Jim nev6r saw nor could have looked for except its toy remains: the one that came in like an exchange for Sarah almost to the day, in August ‘45, driven by mind, by wind, some sea-to-land meteorologic reconnaissance?, air-to-earth purpose (do not read porpoise-quoia)—and the man who was surf-casting saw it out there in front of his arched rod, saw it bank sharply, come round, turn ninety degrees plus, and aim at the land on a course that seemed to fix on a house it wanted, not an empty house that time of year but under renovation, the occupants doing most of the work—and at the last segundo the small aircraft aborted the house mission and lowered its sights, reeled in by could-be the God whose "Divine Wind" means Kamikaze, and hit the beach at around six A.M. , the dawn coming down this time and not like thunder and hardly burning. It was the day after Sarah "went," and Pearl Myles asked Jim if his family knew the man, a breakfast-food heir and sportsman-diabetic who had a medical degree but had never practiced. Jim didn’t know the man, but his father asked him what Miss Myles had wanted to know; at school, Sam’s fat brother, always on the move within some larger laziness of nonchalance or rest, casually reported that "Pearl" had bothered the owner of "the" suicide boat and that that was why she was quitting—she was being fired because she was asking questions, according to Fulkerand, about a deceased citizen of the town of Windrow. But Jim never knew. But why didn’t he ask {per quoit pran-quaia)? Too much else going on? But what?

  We’d say, today, Heavy. Ever lose your mother in mid-o’bit? Jeanette Many volunteered that it was just her view but she for one would not talk about the Miss Myles matter; Mr. Winekoop, who underneath it all including his excellent, sporty clothes, didn’t "shiv a git," told Brad and Jim that Pearl Myles had had a run-in with the after all very-peculiar-looking principal over a range of activities that had a generally extracurricular tone and had kept answering, People matter, people matter. Jim got stuck. Never told a soul. Stayed in his h
ead ready-formulated. (What? An idea? Himself?)

  Who was Spence to think that bent winds were code for what happened to Sarah and that Pearl Myles a colleague distant in time and many leagues west of Mayn’s New York apartment was still on the scene which would not go away because it was connected or waged in the tactics of an action Mayn kept thinking was really all over, and his own interest, as he had tried to tell Jean, who was more understanding of his motive than Jim was, turned not toward such grand machinations as a prison break packaged to hide a violent political purpose but to some coincidental wisdoms that Mayn had been reluctant to ask for right out because from the start the figure of Spence, at Kennedy Space Center and later, had interposed itself making some deal with the Chilean economist who was evidently in some danger perhaps because he was not really incognito yet acted like it, so he was in some fashion parallel to himself.