Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

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).