"It’s too late to punish him for your mother," said Joy. "Stop dwelling on it. It’s a mistake. It’s tedious for you and me."
Surprised into almost laughing at her "tedious for you/’ those shrouded eyes in the back of his head had sensed the onset of Joy’s left hand, her comb hand. Not in order to comb but to finger. To say that she understood and that it was over now. And to say she was glad she was pregnant and knew he was, too.
They laughed at that—at his being pregnant, too.
The warmth of her feeling went all over the back of his neck, and it went on for years and she wasn’t pregnant now. Children give you something to talk about, but they didn’t need that, and yet when sometimes they couldn’t speak, the thoughts spun off and they had this idea that they were thinking the same thing, though when they were married they didn’t know if they were spending these identical thoughts on each other, which would be a strange economy, or only thinking without conveying the thought to the other. Conversations repeated themselves, but she stopped occasionally saying there was a thing he wasn’t telling her. About the past? No. It feels like the future. (And this was long before he tried to tell his daughter, who had been vouchsafed these gropings by her mother.)
"I said there was a lot to my father—why do you blame me for what might be in my head but I don’t say it? Why have I got to be held for what I’m smart enough not to belly-ache about? I mean"—he was staring into a kitchen wall when the calendar and phone materialized out of it and were there—"why don’t I get credit for not saying some things? What is it with you? how come you’re giving me the business when I’m only thinking my spite, not saying?" (She laughed.) "Is this some punishment I’m supposed to get regularly? And ‘spite’? where the hell did I get that word, I never say ‘spite’—it must have come from you."
Well every event has a cause no matter what they’re saying in the next twenty, thirty years, and behind him knowing he hadn’t picked his moment to be provoked Mayn had seen the tear she raised the knuckle of her scissor hand to catch as surely as he saw her tongue tip come, but—like an emergency support mechanism (he heard himself later supply).
"In future you better watch it, kid," he went on lamely in such sudden unhappiness he thought he didn’t give a damn about this stuff that came out of his mouth as if nothing had just happened, but he was uneasily glad Lucille Silver wasn’t attending this haircut because she would have attempted to wipe him out for speaking that way.
All right, Joy made him say things sometimes; but this was worse— "better watch it, kid," fond slight falseness, that might be then so bad good as to be laughable and she’d either grind off his ear at the head with her shears, or make a funny sound as if having made contact beyond him, subtler than the silly old college songs she sang to her daughter.
"It is the future," she said, "and as whoever it was in your family used to say, ‘don’t spare the horses’ "; and he felt nothing between them but a long range; just as well his chair didn’t face a barbershop mirror.
But the arch cheer in that dumb remark had calmed her eyes, he knew, and he heard her teeth coming down on her chewing gum.
She snipped some more. "Damn," she said, and stopped, and curried him with her fingers and went on.
And so he plucked then out of a void—the void, if the void may say so—a story—every time a story, until their secret tempos {tempi, his mother would have said to a musical partner, No she wouldn’t) located each other again as really the same (as if neither could want power over the other), until years later (still like some future becoming the present), under more experienced shears a story came to him from somewhere in the luggage checked in his head on the flight home last week, and he smiled and he told it to his wife—his wife of ten years, Joy. He’d run into this smart guy Spence. The story came from Spence. He knew Spence from way back, talked in his presence, met him without meeting him, a good listener the shit, Washington, New York, San Francisco, someplace else—and what Spence knew Mayn didn’t want to know; and this time Spence’s back was to Mayn, who, in the lobby, had seen him saunter across from the elevator and enter the bar but whom he now recognized anyway for his richly stitched long buffalo-skin jacket, the heavy slick of now-Hawaiian-dyed black hair, and the speckled hand moving out to the side independently to take nuts from the dish the bartender had set down between Spence and a woman in a suit and a big red hat. Mayn knew Spence’s face before it turned and the high husky voice easily included Mayn in what—after the too brief reference to a job he of course knew Mayn had been offered—Spence had resumed telling the bartender.
About a pounding (the pounding) in the Earth that Spence had heard and felt, so that the crowd voice that came with it seemed to come right up from the Earth he was standing on, right?
Yeah, said the bartender, who was very big, well that’s a funny location for it right next to the cemetery.
For Spence had been in a fine American cemetery hunting for the caretaker so he could check the lot chart and take a look at a grave—old mound that had never had a headstone—but he happened to find the family on the far edge of the cemetery and just when the pounding faded and Spence later recalled some bright colors moving through spaces in the trees, he heard this swishing and scraping. He had found a space that he thought was the unmarked grave and he was turning around to check exactly where he was when he heard a click nearby and a golf ball skipped off a gravestone apparently and rolled past and he watched it stop a few paces away; and he now realized he’d had a sense of being watched on this weekday among the sweet-smelling green and the personal gossip among the breeze-freshened gravestones and the doors and windows of the mausoleums, where he was exposed as if bright day was creepier than darkness honeycombed inside, but this sense did not go outside the cemetery on the side where the golf course was—but was right here.
And then the door of the little mausoleum next to him opened out a bit and a young man in white jeans appeared and watching Spence every foot of the way went and picked up the golf ball and returned to the mausoleum, closed the heavy door and stayed looking through the glass and ironwork until the glass absorbed him and he wasn’t there.
But Spence is grinning at you, is very open—as everyone’s beginning to say—the word, that is—and Spence includes you so you can be part of his ongoing business—and incidentally at this point grabs with one speckled hand for the peanuts, looks between Mayn and the guy in the red jacket behind the bar, and says, "I know what you’re thinking"—goes back to work, checks out the stones in the vicinity of the unmarked grave, and, without giving the guy in the mausoleum the benefit of a so-long-buddy glance, slopes off down an aisle, his hip-pocket notebook in hand. But runs into a big angry blonde who materializes in a red-and-white polka-dot sunsuit with an iron over her shoulder and she’s looking for the golf ball. So Spence gives her a smile and says he saw the ball but didn’t get a chance to pick it up and shows her where, and they separate just as Spence sees on the other side of the golf-course fence a sturdy Oriental gentleman all in this loose bag of a pale blue costume flanked by two golf carts (his and hers) with a hill behind him. But now the blonde calls back to Spence, What did he mean, a chance to pick it up? Well, he feels that he’s half-interested and he walks back to her and tells about the guy in white jeans and points out the mausoleum and she’s looking at him pretty sharply, she’s got a couple of inches on him and he says, "Yes, no kidding," but grins again and he watches until she gets to the mausoleum and tries to yank at it and can’t, and other sounds come from the side of the cemetery away from the golf course and Spence looks at his watch and thinks of the dead conversing with one another lying there on their backs not turning their heads. Give Spence credit, he’ll hold your attention if he can. And the blonde is over there shaking the door of the mausoleum but she stops, and, shading her eyes, she leans in against the glass. Then she yells that there’s no guy there and Spence shrugs and laughs and goes away toward the gatehouse where his car is and when he hears that po
unding in the Earth again he thinks it’s what it was, but then he hears her breathing and it’s her and she’s striding toward him her iron in her hand like a drum-majorette baton and she says, "You bastard," and he starts laughing and runs like hell and they chase all over the cemetery until he shortcuts himself to a good enough lead near enough to his car so he can get to it and make it out the driveway, and he’s thinking about the guy who went back in the mausoleum—relative of an old fragrant guy in overalls maybe—and Spence looks back and, you know, she’s still coming when Spence is out at the highway waiting his chance to turn, and here she comes so he’s got to get onto the highway the only way he can, going the wrong direction, and almost steers over the white line looking back at her. And at the cemetery, the whole place somehow.
And when Mayn asked what were the other sounds, the bartender said with a frown, "It was the pounding he mentioned."
But no, it wasn’t. "You know the pounding," Spence had said.
"Horses’ hoofs," said the bartender.
"Oh man, she was beautiful," said Spence, "but she was angry. I stay clear of angry people."
Pulling the bartender’s leg surely. But if the tale was true, say the pounding was Spence himself. Does a man with speckled hands have a heart? If so, the tale had left in Spence more than a smile accelerating down a highway in the wrong direction as if the blonde had commandeered a car and left her lama boyfriend holding two bags. The horses (spared or not) weren’t just one of the seven American winds, and Spence was no touring humorist, he meant something; the speckles all over the backs of his hands looked scaled but as if scabs had melted back into the glistening skin.
"Your golf course next to the cemetery, the cemetery next to the race track!" Joy said.
Mayn felt his heart surface. "The race track? What track? He didn’t say a track."
Mayn found the scissor point upon his temple. Joy would tell Lucille for sure, and he could see Lucille’s hair, a lock, come down over her forehead as she lit a cigarette and listened. She called them two hundred percent married. He recalled Spence once telling one of his own stories back to him, a guy who was Bob Yard’s niece’s friend by marriage whose shoes had hurt so much that he hadn’t gone out onto the Lakehurst airfield with the other newsmen for the Hindenburg mooring, and when the silver bag let out its potential fire and blew but not sky-high and somewhere a radiocaster was crying, this man with tight shoes who hadn’t gone out onto the strip had a headstart on everyone else getting to the phone.
"What’s Spence doing in your old backyard?" said Joy, who didn’t know Spence. Her hand was smoothing, smoothing, as if thinking, but not about the haircut. Call his cemetery a backyard? There’s a distance and he’s nearly there in Jersey in the town where he grew up. Cemetery, race track, mere coincidence.
Mayn thought, "I’m crazy, I can’t help asking again." And he said—but without turning to look at his wife with all those years of cut hair around them—"But you know what I was thinking."
"Oh I suppose, Which were the names Spence was looking for?, because maybe they’d mean something to you, does Spence do that kind of thing?" Joy’s hand ruffles the back hair upwards, then smooths it down and lightly left to right.
He said, "I know you hate newspaper work, you do." "Just what I was thinking—but the names that Spence was after?" "It crossed my mind," he said, "but I don’t know any unmarked grave, but I was thinking, Was the fellow in the real mausoleum or did Spence make him up?"
Mayn did not ask to be caught up on what he’d missed, but you couldn’t tell if the bartender was falling for something or Spence himself had fallen into some unexpected field of the cemetery—Mayn hadn’t words for this likelihood—a field—a field of pounding inside the Earth (O.K.). Who was it said the Earth was the roof of hell?
Mayn, when they had met after the U-2, had thought he wouldn’t want to get drunk with a man whose mood jumped back and forth (let alone the speckled hands) from these little stories say of the Chicago wire service (AP had he said?) borrowing the weather off a radio station and then selling it back to the station, from the cozy, maybe-it’s-the-end-of-the-world-tomorrow interrogation of others as to facts he seemed already to know, to an inquisitive fear one night seeking Mayn’s eyes out while plucking the mouth with the speckled fingers (God, were the tips speckled? he didn’t remember and maybe he had been drunk, so a past he didn’t recall was why he told himself that he would never do any serious drinking with this adroit, neutral, orphan man whose curved fingers plucked at his lips) as if to tempt out the idiotic rage Spence (neutral?) had betrayed in Washington the night of the U-2: it was the camera’s beam, that’s what it was, the reconnaissance plane is beam of laserlike (well) venom multiplying down altitude upon altitude (but upon Russia!): so Mayn had felt drawn into that cemetery. Well hell! so what if no one least of all Mayn talked lasers in ‘60.
He told that whole story to his barber. "You know what I was thinking?" he asked to the wall in front of him, feeling the cool blade rub down off hair onto skin.
"Oh my God!" Joy said, thinning the sideburn near the earlobe.
"What?"
"And right now you’re thinking, How did you manage not to guess Spence was talking about your own hometown."
What happened then was that—his head whipping round toward her— no music, it happened without music since the last record had finished—his head came about so suddenly that he thought, How could I not have been afraid to lose my eye, for where would the scissors be? And he heard Joy cry out—at maybe his anger that she’d heard his story better than he had—though she had made him feel, yes, not alone; but no, she had cried out because of what she had done to herself, she’d pulled back the scissor point as her left hand came across and he turned—and her left hand like a padding had followed the scissors faster than they jumped back, and the palm of that left hand caught the point with a surprise as sharp as the medic’s detonating prick in the pad-tip of the middle finger for a blood test now no longer jabbed in the finger.
"Hey," so quiet he had surprised himself; and he took her hand and licked it almost before his eyes could see the thick point of blood there. Kissed her hand as her nails clawed in against his cheek and he stuck out his tongue and touched blood.
The music from the other room seemed long gone.
He had a hair on his tongue, which she did not know about.
But he’d already found the thing in her palm.
It was the future he’d been living in and coming back from. He would like to tell his son someday, but his son would believe it too easily.
"In future," his father had said at bedtime after Bob Yard and the newspaperman with all the stories had gone, "you will not be eavesdropping under the porch when I have visitors." But Jim had been there first. Under the porch. Just there, not waiting for anything, much less some bald-headed visitor talking about death and about trotters, methods of execution, evidence and verdicts—rendering a verdict, the word was. His father had it all turned around, there’d been no eavesdropping.
His father did not hit him.
A slap might have been a relief, a kick from one of those shoes scraping overhead in place of that punishing tone you couldn’t quite see. A punishing race, the local paper reported.
Mayn tasted blood, but he was in Joy’s body looking from that future he habitually came back from. Came back to this marriage even as now with the salt of the blood sequencing to him he wanted to tell her but did not dare feel the reaction he’d get from this smart person, tell her that as the holding pattern at the end of his latest trip went on he had for a while not known where he had been—that is, where he’d had a quick shower and breakfast; that is, where he had Departed from (with a capital DEP)—so he’d squeezed a hand into his pants pocket to find the ticket, and seeing Springfield he then found next to TO (next to three or four TO’S) the typed word VOID, and he started to show it to the woman in the window with its tight shade down against the New York afternoon sun just as he caught her e
ye and he wished Joy could observe her.
And in the blood that clung to his tongue—moist to moist—(so his tongue felt creepy sprouting), he knew that he would give up, he and Joy; they would do it together, that is give up, as staringly as he had once said to Flick alone, because he didn’t want Andrew to hear, that he didn’t blame their mother for feeling him impossible to live with—so smoothly said that the girl answered with a diplomacy of her own smoothness to say that that wasn’t true—definitely, you know, not true.
But when the blood went down and he gulped and he heard his lips smack a little as he opened his mouth and closed it, he was in the wind like the tatters of plastic wrap caught and streaming in the trees up Park Avenue, wreckage of things not said though chased right up to the skin of these things by what on the other hand had been said—"You said I should take a job but it’s not easy when the children are getting home at three, three-thirty in the afternoon." "Three-forty-five." "And you thought you were thinking up ways to pass my time." "That’s how I passed my time flying home from the motor capital of America." "Is that all?" "Wasn’t I right for the wrong reason at least?" "Pay attention, man, don’t you understand—you’re never right—" "—or am I ever right?" "You sound like my father." "I don’t complain like he did." "You’ve only heard me say so, Jim." "You made me feel like I was there." "You gripe about your father." "So do you about my father." "I hardly know your father." "O.K., then, neither do I know him." "At least I take the children out to see him, Jim." "Not always by yourself." "Once with Lucille." "Once?" "Another time, too." "Then twice." "And I will again." "With Lucille?" "I will again."
Women and Men Page 164
