Women and Men

Alias Missing Conversation

On this noisy night corner of New York he would say her name out loud almost, but to whom? Did not Chekhov the doctor say a He and She is what you need? How well he knew love’s labor.

Clara, the mind calls, so clear it’s felt inside the mouth. Clara. Without his wife, he grows specific here on this giant night corner of New York in a fashion that could put her in still more danger were she here. The equal, his Clara, of some Shakespeare lady stronger than all the others if the mysterious stagehand had lived to write her down out of the light in his eye. Clara, he hears Shakespeare call, as if to offer them help here in New York City, or (chuck the husband) help only the brave dame. He had seen it all by the time he passed fifty, fifty-one, more scenes than one might slake a shtick at: yet if he could steep the globe of his teapot to dimaxial Carib tempests, why not a pastoral history of some Chilean kingdom by the sea? Used Verona, Venice, Vienna — a very used Vien indeed (and wasn’t there a Polack in there somewhere?) — so why not The Damsel of New Netherland, why not Fluellen of New Yorkl The great stagehand, spurred by a moment’s clairvoyance or by his own warlike name, Shakespeare, replies that, Ay, he has visited New York some time after Hotspur’s rejuvenation and while composing simultaneously those "Co-supremes" the Phoenix and Turtle-dove and a major work Gertrude s Revenge and in fact had named that small island village of Canarsie Indians New Ork (a few short years later mispronounced by Hal Hudson as New York but in any case ignored by his Dutch employers just as the Florentine John Verrazano’s "New Vera" had been ignored by his French employers) but anyhoo has visited New York but does not know it well, his time was limited and he desired to visit the Painted Desert, the Mesas, and those terrible Mines that when you’re not looking move their mountains from place to place not with kettledrum or bray of traffic but by rumor and dangerous richness of vein, and on returning a few short weeks later to that strangely crenellated East Coast had had to get back to London for rehearsals, though America was a great place to visit. .

Clara: he wants her here with him on this street corner across from Penn Station. So he could nod west toward the glimmer-glass colony escalator’d like some insect civilization and cylindering in light the sports-arena complex: and say to Clara who holds his whole history in her heart collapsing or extending time at will, "Scale model"… or "Do insects play?" So she, a citizen of his exile very watchful lately, answers whatever will bring what he drily sees more to life.

But she should not be here. Not tonight. Not right here, where it is unclear. Unclear if something superfluous or terribly risky wants something of him — help, even. He would like to speak to someone and fears the dizziness as if it comes to lone tourists endlessly self-conscious in foreign parts. Silence is the real crime against humanity. "Here the Earth still shakes from the old battle—" oh, that Russian lady Akhmatova and her friends they really had it bad, dizzy inside the stomach of the monster capable of accommodating even them, or dizzy just from hunger. Phone Clara to tell her that. But no; make not a phone call.

He takes up position alone out among the night lights of New York City, never in all his visits only a tourist; and now a resident for — four years, is it? years measurable even as minerals are measured whose sale might (as the Americans say) "fund" the noble Doctor Allende’s posthumous terrorism or so thinks its putative recipient Pinochet whose name Clara plays on, on and on, her only tedious habit.

Now tonight a tourist again, when anyone you run into tonight might be a visiting limb of your lamented nation’s intelligence that’s changing its name — going through Changes, as they say here in New York — so even the Chilean navy is getting into the act tracking down the doctor’s son Pascal.

He takes up position to receive a letter from a man in a New York State prison: Foley, who always has a thing or two to say but this time is passing it through a private mail service.

Not the one he has conceived that would compete favorably with the U.S. Mail. But one that’s operating now just for privacy, or so this privileged (foreign) correspondent here on the outside figures, standing steady 20/20 but, on this huge avenue corner, always looking out for a dizziness inside himself he would rather leave in the doctor’s office diagnosed by its French name, a distinguished dizziness if the doctor’s right.

Standing like a domestic tourist from Akron or Tulsa, or a scholar from San Antonio surveying river cities of the world, now on a Sunday night in the nation of New York having taken up position where agreed, he commands Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street. This is it. He wishes he were in Boston, in Cambridge, for a moment in a Chilean friend’s house discussing skiing. Why did he permit this mail drop to be private to the point of clandestine? It might tell the wrong people if they are watching that he communicates secretly with a prison where in turn there is someone they are interested in, though not this merely "interesting" Foley.

"20/20" the prison inmate Foley ranks his own insight into life and the world, and seems to expect his correspondent the economist to think constantly like an economist — which is how? But one was moved by Foley. He got to one. There in some margin of life where life occurred and political acts aimed at stabilizing things instead doubled or locused that great margin where NATO Nixon thinks of Einstein as just home folks playing classical violin and Einstein while thinking only of his own vast difference from God descales his model universe and, at a stroke, decreeing this Far to be equal to that Near, sees it whole, we are told.

On this side of the street the enclosed subway stairs into the ground generate people — that’s what they do — to eat the cardboard-contained fast-fodder at the adjacent chrome door in order then to be seen by family groups in pastel-colored ready-to-wear (already-/?^mg-worn!) garments slowly issuing out of the hotel under lights of a rehearsal they are self-consciously half aware of. Across the street a hundred functions housed all under the massive complex: mainly, though, the sports arena and the railway terminal you would not know by sight — all seen through signs that say nothing of a mighty athlete, a discus thrower, an ancient pugilist, and now an African giant bombing a net-skirted rim Americans call a basket — signs that also tell nothing of a night sleeping-train smelling of comfortably used steel and carbon afloat in the dreams of passengers upon steam buoying out under the platform — all hidden by the complex — taken for granted, like home.

Solid people are cutting through three, four lanes of Sunday-evening cabs and cars, ruling out risk like hunters, daring the world’s in all probability mad reflexes, occupying sudden positions against the will of yellow horsepower southward.

He has the tweed cap on, he’s exposed, and he’s at the northeast curb as agreed — where the voice on the phone said to stand. Tweed cap, his idea, English. As he sometimes in the past has quite been. Though never to look at. Though you do get English who’re Latin-looking, tall, moustached, because he’s seen them. Walking the fields, from a train. Dangerously private. Walking streets in black suits and capped, bird-crest fashion, by black knobs of bowlers.

Folding his arms he surveys whatever could be watching him wait, his consciousness strolling on and on yet lingering, worded. But this is no such place. He can just about feel the slide of home fingers after dollar bills in his trouser pocket, his Clara against him telling him to pick up a stick of butter if anything’s open on his way home, and did she wonder tonight if it was just their neighborhood he was heading for? Tonight she is further away from him than she would wish. Younger than he, slightly and magically; less foreign to New York — is it because she’s a woman? — though half-English, which is also foreign, yet not like Chilean.

So fresh and trustworthy: oh, he wants to phone her and say so.

He found her this afternoon half-dressed posed in the mirror. He came back from nowhere, alone on a Sunday — feeling official and uneasily at home but especially childless, walking with the river, sitting on a bench. Two little girls were hugging and hugging each other, giggling, and those gross apartment towers across on the New Jersey palisades are the "settlements" you get today.

Inland to Broadway, he had found the pay phone free that he had been directed to in a previous letter by Foley’s in all probability gratuitous code which was just close enough to real thoughts so you must pay heed to it, though it seemed to invent life when we had discovered enough to work on already surely: and then received the call right on time from a man called Efrain. And then went home to Clara feeling technically unfaithful.

To find her half-unclothed before the bedroom mirror.

"Thinking of changing your life," she said, as if she might be the one— ‘7 know," but did not ask where he was now emerging from.

"Our life," he said, which they both knew was true all around, for they were in love and had no internal passport restrictions and could go anywhere in the States where he was invited.

So full-length, she was: skirt off (or not yet on); gartered stockings on, he was glad to see; no slip; stocking feet with silken insteps. Not those gymnastic tights revolvingly displayed in supermarkets (like postcards) next to tall cans of pineapple juice on sale or in drugstores next to a stack of painkillers. And after years of essentially the same body in roughly the same full-length reflection, itself a place they took with them into the countries they lived in, he didn’t know entering the bedroom of a rented sanctuary in New York whether she was half-dressed or half-undressed. So they soon found out. Oh, the Kimball women’s group she went to which did a lot with mirrors, pelvis rolls, "love-your-body" techniques (that doubtless he could use) began in the mystery (for him) of why Clara went at all, and has turned two degrees to what was always there: Clara herself. A woman who had only those secrets from him that made them more intimate and said of the workshop, "Consciousness doth make garbage of us all."

She had not found out until the dark green candles were lit and supper was on the table that he had to meet someone this evening, this night. He and she are so allied by good humor, by potential disaster, that she may have felt the public facts of oppressed female life here on New York’s famed battleground bending her own private but political exile toward some fresh distance she wasn’t telling him about. But she had no need to be that species of feminist with such real risks nearby and the tragedy of their country as near as their very bodies remembering what they had escaped suffering.

He hears her being tortured for a second; hearing is all he can bear. They were lucky. His luck spins again for a moment. A French disease a presumably good doctor said. Meniere’s Syndrome. Stress, ear buzz, counter-clockwise spin, look out. The sidewalk trembles, someone sidesteps him, and a block or two down across Seventh Avenue (which the dark blue-and-white sign names Fashion Avenue — which is news to him, as they say here) the no-numbers clock above the entrance to Penn Station gives him in its passing design the message that he’s ten minutes early. A bicycle floats before his eyes, it goes with the Jap clock, the black boy in his lane at the edge of the packed, three- or four-lane traffic takes his hands off the handlebars and smooths his wondrous long face and crosses his arms in front of him, patting his bike handlebars on automatic, his sneaker laces tied. The sidewalk trembles, and nowhere is there a tweed cap like the one that the young man Efrain was told he would wear. Through the music and the motors and the wheels he hears the traffic-light control-box an arm’s length away run its cycle of two double clicks. He is exposed. But to others’ vengeance?

But this is New York, not Switzerland with its passports, yet not Sicily, not a pueblo in Chile, not Ireland where the village grocer expects you to have a local girl to do your shopping for you; and not a Kansas farming town like twenty other grain-elevator towns at eight-mile intervals where they might know no more about you than Indians in Brazil measure how far a brainy anthropologist has come from his Paris desk; not the large Kansas college town he actually had received an "invite" from to make an appearance at and had been tempted; and not an Andean village where dark Asiatic faces watch and watch and drink corn until they don’t see much of anything, except mountains rearing in the mind; nor is it the mineral cartel that would not go away even after finding an inter-American association reciprocally funding and funded by his own foundation to be drawing on a D.C. bank account in the name of an agency which his photographer-journalist slave/master Spence happens to know is brother to one of the CIA’s sister laundries, and so it goes, the foundation seems conclusively as free of CIA as CIA is free of all ties by virtue of such reciprocal trade-offs as ensure that private life has a future, the only future. Which is not much more private than Asiatic faces reflecting the natural light of some landbridge long lost and invested in their bones and music and autonomic poverty system, looking, looking, deaf to a secret radio rebroadcast of Allende’s ultimate "History is ours, and the people will make it" speech from La Moneda.

Yet here in New York they do look. And look away. But stand on a corner, and call, shout, scream — though "scream" is what they say they do, when all they really do is speak rough. And probabilities are that passersby don’t look around to see if you have someone to call to, yet, with an indifference that is not bad but O.K., they sway you as they pass.

The tweed cap lies exposed upon his head. What if he looks afraid? He paid two pounds for it in Cambridge as an undergraduate. Good island tweed. For the wet. The chill upon the bald street of his head skin more naked yet less skin-like than the nape of his neck. For the long haul. A mass of woven yardage becomes a procession of cloth caps on Ellis Island an age ago, then grows into a mass on foot — but was there emigration from the west, then, too? He needs to speak to someone. Is he already observed?

Tired and muddled masses. Huddled for the long haul. Who do not care if you are a constitutional democrat distinct from Marxist socialist or a Marxist socialist paving the way for a secret police name-change, one hears, from DIN A to something less human. In a carpeted museum, somewhere inside the Statue of Liberty (or its pedestal), Clara had ventured ahead. She passed the tall glass case displaying women’s dresses — a turn-of-the-century her and companion him — the he, say, fifty, here in the glass case; she, say, a good forty, all very reasonable. Clara disappeared around yes a curving wall, he recalls just now for a Seventh Avenue street-corner voice says into his ear, "Goin’ out tonight, honey?"

And turning to the (truly) black girl his height who, against his eyes and his face, with a tall hotel rising behind her, is a flower of splendid eye rouge, lip paint, cheek warm tribal beige — he’s shaking his head vigorously, hearing the buzz in his ears again like torture in some next room, smiling No thanks, to make it clear he’s a person with an appointment, not in from out of town, yet adds, "I am out," for her to add upon her cinnamon breath and with a still grander smile than before, slowly, "Right" and lifts a hand toward his, and the curving wall of night and light round which New York bends and sweeps into a Beyond that’s right here curves into the carpeted Immigration Museum; seeing Clara that day disappear beyond the tall display case of long dresses and around a curved wall, he had not followed her at once. He would take bread from her hand, he’s taken cake. How far was she going? He had put a hand in his trouser pocket, felt some folded fifty-dollar bills; he and Clara wandered through a museum inside the base of the Statue. Folding money. Paper. Worth its print in silver. He never had to think how far his own would go, unbudgeted, half spent, stretched only as reimbursement as if for feeling under threat of death (possibly from competing intelligences!), so the slow middle-class poetry of being alive or at least for decades conscious comes to some late unexpected stage when in an hour your police melodrama lands on top of you and that’s it, a touring messenger from an office in Santiago could kill him yesterday or tomorrow in a cab or browsing at the newsstand or between furrows of a vast Kansas field so God-given at dusk.

And when he found her, his Clara, she was looking at where the wall gave way to show some drab, rust-green metal, just a slope of Lady Liberty, a section they were working on before they would put back the wall; but Clara said in English, "It is definitely her underwear and she can’t see us down here staring."

He had been in love on an island — that was it — Liberty Island; and he touched a palm to her shoulder, courting her. He hadn’t seen what this thing was that they were looking at. Now it was huge. It was part of the gross Statue.

Well, he’s an immigrant. A secret. A secret kept. By his wife, kept subtly alive; professionally kept, though, by a rich man he doesn’t know enough about — kept fed and occupied in the pyramid that that man’s foundation bestrides in which (a phone call once said) you always have a place, you’ve earned it and you can be as incognito as you wish until after aeons of quiet consciousness someone decides it is all over: and so, with humor and killer rage, he could shout out now on Seventh Avenue, secretly meeting this Efrain whoever this recent parolee Efrain is (who says he saw him in the Visitors Room talking to one of the Cubans) — now, though, on this street corner in New York shouting silently that he is here — as if They did not know he was here in New York: so come and cancel him, go ahead, he’s not protected by a pyramidally founded health and accident and whole life policy, and not by sharing some unassailability spun off New York’s singing no-hands bicyclists, nor by the ticking of the green light or the brujos his grandmother told him purred in the jungle bark and took off your head until you went crazy and then put your head back on — all whistling in her old teeth transplanted into the roots of beasts, a giant leopard cub being born in the crotch of a swaying tree to be lowered yowling to mulchy earth by a python that curls spring-like about the new cat only it is sprung from these coils back into the leaves full of ancestral eyes because a pregnant king is stumbling through the trees looking for his queen. Better in the quiet delectable terror of a grandson’s bedroom than in these lurid books flowing out of some South American continent zoo full of whimsy-malmsey not knowledge, not philosophy, therefore no hope except for another dream on tomorrow night’s pillow to sell a South American spirit that middlebrow New Yorkers buy the way they dream of Vietnam girls in some uniform of ripped camouflage, though that can be done more efficiently.

He is a secret kept, maybe from the city too, like death — or your personal Dial-a-Bomb frequency. A secret given the city like a hard figure to be absorbed in the long haul. Hard as drugs; solid as food; a dimension you lost track of in the longer run. Ingest now, digest later. Gulp down like a frog a fly; eat it slowly like a snake; drown it and swallow chewed-off pieces whole. New York is an open secret. For a talker with a community ready and already in conversation in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, he himself has done nothing but talk within himself. A he and a she was what was needed.

He often looks up out of a street.

Oh consciousness raised under the sky, look what there is tonight! Under the sky, the Hilton Hotel on this side of Seventh, what a system! — the Statlex-Hilton is six softly lighted pillars based high above street level. Gray curves glow above the marquee that drapes canvas to the sidewalk; then across on the west side of Seventh the vast Penn Station — Madison Square Garden Center marquee bearing upon it geometric shapes like a children’s advertisement for, maybe, dual-engine monorail hover-power, a clock’s bright wheel and a giant electronic oblong of changing words listing events he will never go to, not even soccer, which is catching on here; and then, risen above Penn Plaza and massively set down upon it, a lighted block of offices with a steakerie slotted oven wise above the street, but behind the building and to the right or uptown side what he now senses he’s been looking at all along from his angle, from the moment he came up out of the subway and tried to avoid the wrinkle of danger along his scalp and sounding inside his armpits, a vision, slanted parallels of light, doubtless the Garden, escalators lighting levels down one wing exposed by treated glass that dusks the down escalators so they glow the foreground and yield the traveling heads of people: oh all the lights and their spots of sheen make a night space of spaces in which he feels held by the whole city. Nations are not people, a nation is not people: is a conglomerate jumping the needs of people through parts to a whole that like an automatic attack-response system works on its own in the long run, works on — or, as thought, collapses what went into it, into fine unknowns in formula, but makes them go away into the generalization where they can then never be quite seen, unlike statistics, which in the long haul do not lie if you know how not to make them.

A streetwalker stands. A taxi joins her, and she looks around her.

He is out here but in hiding. Maybe he has stopped fighting until he finds himself in a fight again. It could be anywhere. Suddenly at a taxi stand. He did what he expected of himself once and did not lose his life, not even his livelihood if in another country; and now has for his trouble and study a counter-clockwise buzzing in his ears and brain and the painful power to think about his country and his grown children; and how they may have accepted the government — what fascist promotions advertise as a renewed nationality: while ancient property that’s no more than breeding thought its way to good sense and good sense to protein programs for undernourished children’s brains and to negotiations with the American mineral mind that led to southern workers taking over factories, but a good doctor when he becomes President needs more than medicine, more than character — until now he weighs earth inside him against property that in his own country is haunted like immense charcoal beaches by the absent owner of America who can be abstract and a man. Meanwhile breeding leads to music, to routine, to thought, to light if only light cast by the wit of love, or, beyond exchanges among prisoners outside and inside, to the courage to be only here. In the long run he is exposed, while danger heard in the next room — if only of his brain — corners him here but only the danger on this corner he came up onto from the IRT subway that he now finds again moving under the sidewalk of his shoes while pop lyrics grind and pass as deeply as the dizziness that pivots taking him with it and its French name to remind him that the stage he is on is perilous to the health. Yet has he planted the flag of Chile in these straits? On this corner he stands between a yellow control box for the traffic light and, on his right, a newsstand sealed for the night, a stained, dull-silver container containing unsold early editions and lurid weeklies, the real news. He has become a Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

A fine woman in paint-stained bluejeans coasts past on a bike, staring— an advert for Join the CIA and be a model; work for a foundation, ride a really good bike.

Some of the music stays still; some passes; and he turns to look behind him, he doesn’t get the words, he understands the cello, but not this, he understands viola, French horn, the Chilean gut guitar even when his beloved cousin played Broqua, stranded each Broqua mystery like minimal song of the understanding to affront the understanding at least of those who in the last century sat through an Alfonso Broqua piece that retimed and so puzzled their own expectations that the mystery was over before outrage told them to get up and leave — and his cousin with the downcast eyes and small hands could play Broqua, some said they did not know how, he sees or feels her fingers cut off, wafted through sounds of silence and agony in a stadium, no Olympic marks in sight, while here along Seventh Avenue in New York the recorded singers are either nuts or having their entrails drawn out to be fingernailed by bare nerves of concentrated electronic juice. Well, did he get here early in order to back out?

At this hour, two tall boys in blue running suits which are called "exercise suits": window-shopping outside a restaurant: blue figures in a whole block of aroma-to-go conglomerated: from trattoria tomato crimson to national blue-and-white of Greek open to the sidewalk so he smells in the walls of his stomach tight spits of half-grilled, grease-dried souvlaki waiting piled like it’s already inside the people; then the sedate break of an awning (Chinese) and beyond it a fisheria, and on the corner where a Puerto Rican (a Cuban?) trying to give out handbills reaches to one side and then the other, there’s a white-fronted hot-dog stop. Suddenly, as one, the tall boys in blue are running, but for the fun of it; and now a black man poses in front of the Greek place offering a towering white girl in a skirt like a rim of white ribbon the flame of his lighter. But he’s caught in the act of walking, lankily at large, swinging one arm back, the other (with lighter) forward, a soft-seeming black hat high-crowned with a yellow band, a shirt shiny for a racehorse, brighter than yellow, silver pants with a split-seam down the leg flashing black spangles in there. What would one have to give for an outfit like that? But what would it cost this black to get out of this circus? The girl’s price goes up; so do her clothes. A skirt to ice skate in. She’s ambling on her long, rather grand legs toward Macy’s department store, but how far can she go?

It’s almost time. He had to come. The name Efrain is Spanish. Everywhere he’s seeing Hispanics, same as the area north of where he and Clara, his half-English Clara, live so close that they might never try to return to the England of the Andes. Take up position, and the newsstand is in the way. He steps back to see the girl in the high skirt bend toward a car stopped beyond the Chinese awning.

Down the other way across Seventh Avenue, Penn Plaza fills up but the people do not seem to be traveling. He gets the dizziness again. Sixty blocks north of here someone is reading in a high window down by Riverside Drive, and he knows it is Clara; the cigarette goes from hand to hand, she holds it in her lips attentively turning the page. Or, no, she has no cigarette; she is wondering when this can end, when she can at least write letters to her aging children, who may not wholeheartedly want to receive them. He must be with her and not in mere sympathy, mere telepathy the plain truth of which is worth so very little that Let us act out some terrible consequences so we’ll have messages for each other that are important; and in his dizziness the southbound traffic bends eastward like a London circus bending his eyeballs, not knowing what its bonded recipient is going through.

Why can’t someone take his place? For he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for — he doesn’t know why he let himself get into correspondence with an inmate who was not the one he went to visit originally, except because maybe this inmate with a kindred Irish name (who perhaps dreams of escape to Chile twenty years ago into a new identity beyond extradition) wants no link with the man he did go originally to visit, not to mention a known Cuban anti-Castroid incendiary also inmate there, and so Foley becomes a cover if one was needed, but if you start thinking "cover" you lose it, exile survivor of a vision if it can be brought about again, though he here, on a street corner of New York waiting for a letter, is a cultivated man who tried, who happened to be out of the country in the Chilean spring of ‘73 to see leaves yellowing here in an American fall, who himself might now be spent by touring thugs, and who investigates curves of infant mortality and of unemployment recorded "within shooting distance" (as the shy sportsman physician of Clara’s opera singer put it one night evoking a Great Lake where he fished with an Indian) of Santiago where the low, low peso and low low customs duties bring piranhas within easy reach of any poor family’s budget — statistical curves scanned since 1975 in a New York foundation office with stereo and with sensitive research assistants with good manners and often only a first name, Amy, and such bleaching of the withered leaves of world money that like the new head General Mena of our proud secret police those who doubtless watch over him here on a giant street corner of New York might conclude that he has taken to heart a compatriot military lord with a pied a terre in Virginia who rather than liquidate this resident economist of a (late) mere medical doctor named Allende, says, "You have betrayed your class," and lets it go at that.

He sees the Seiko clock and in the crowd there at the entrance to Penn Station two women appear at the head of the escalator and move forward with their suitcases. The young one sets hers down and is swayed by the people who must be coming from some sports event; then she takes up her case again to follow the older woman who, her arm raised, her finger pointing upward, is moving toward the line of parked cabs. Both women in white — what’s the difference between them?

But he doesn’t get the chance to think, since a Puerto Rican family’s right here on top of him; they come five, six abreast through him with their late-night shopping bags and small, striking children, tired, wide-eyed pirate marchers, long-haulers; and then two more kids slip around the curbside of the deserted newsstand and get back with the family and generously oblivious of him they make him step to the curb and he’s almost forced off—kaput.

Two pale-brown young men with Afros and army jackets step off the far curb and he grabs at his tweed cap and has trouble with the flap of his jacket pocket getting the cap in, and he steps off the curb and is almost hit by a cab, glaring yellow paint — but before he can jump back from it, the cab braked. The magic of the machine is in his stopping it. But he steps back up on the curb and sees behind the shadowed gleam of the windshield the driver looking back over his shoulder through his cage at the people in the back seat and the cab’s street-side door swings out. The driver is black, with a round, happy face.

People in clothes are crossing. What game were Americans playing at the Garden tonight? He steps off the curb. At the far corner he turns left and crosses downtown, turns around and, passing people who don’t look at him, crosses back to the second point where the fellows in army jackets stood when he first saw them. And now he glances at the corner on the other side of Seventh Avenue where he waited for ten minutes — having told Efrain he would be there. Efrain had some tickets to unload. To scalp?

What game?

Efrain explained and it was not clear. He was going to the game but apparently not attending. He didn’t quite say. But he picked the location because of the basketball game. Two people converge on one place, not a coincidence in this city. His assistant, the girl Amy from the office, talked basketball just yesterday. Nothing more definite than the game in general. The positions. Taking up a position so you could not be run into. A great American idea perhaps. What you could not do. She had been listening to a man who was taking her — and whom she had taken to the opera with free tickets from who else but dearest Clara.

People pass that corner, pass through it as if it were an imaginary point. No one stops but a heroic-faced derelict showing a pale thigh through ripped pants who stops, turns as people pass in four directions, and is turned by them. Almost full circle. Until he turns slowly back round and, a stubborn old mechanism made to last, he looks down upon the sidewalk at the point where a man with a tweed cap felt the West Side subway rumbling underfoot — and at last turns down Thirty-third past the trattoria’s side window, pauses to look through at the two young men in blue jump suits, moves on toward the cafeteria counters.

People pass through that point Efrain was to meet him at.

No one stops.

To occupy that position. The girl, his assistant Amy, with the sensual good manners, told him about occupying position in basketball, which she had picked up from the friend taking her to the game, it’s who gets there first can’t be run into—

Talk to someone; he has talked well for hours, days; has done so in nation after nation.

He withdraws the tweed cap from his jacket pocket and pats the pocket hanging smooth; stuffs the cap back in and feels a coin as cold beside the fabric as a hunk of glass and would like to have to say words but move only from light to light. (Until he reached Clara, that is, with whom the eternal excitement of not having to talk makes all the talk they have so full of light.)

Yet one might just talk in New York to anybody on a corner, a young heavyset fellow who looks as if he might not move for a year, a flash of a girl who was hardly there, then fleered away into the street. The hell with "dialogue." Some casual talk instead. Risking being thought a kook.

Efrain will be watching that corner from his angle. The man who is supposed to be on that corner is replaceable. A substitute would just wear a tweed cap. What more? But who would substitute for him? But to him and only him Efrain is bringing tonight a message he half made sound unmailable, from Foley, whom Efrain was with in that other world so recently, Foley— the one and only Foley — who bypasses normal converse because the phone is tapped and the routes between minds are full of parallels to find your own way. Foley conspiring with his own odd head and now a foreign national who can’t see Central Park’s roads and spinning bike steel except as a terrible comfort of failure in his own life. Life after Allende, Clara said. Why, though, let a prison inmate hide you?

"Thank you for taking the trouble to answer me," an early letter from Foley began, without humility; "you are not American, but your name is pretty weird for where I hear you are from (yet I’m a learner). What’s in a name? (smile)" — the parenthesis so the other words wouldn’t see. American habit? Uneducated?"… it’s your choice of words, not your accent, that sounds foreign."

So quietly reading Foley’s letter.

Everyone has trouble but not everyone is in danger. You sit years of intelligence, of awareness, as if it weren’t a risk, while danger is in the next room. But not here — here’s a woman in bed, she doesn’t look up at him taking off clothes he never thinks about, and she’s all the more intimate for not looking up from her book as if she shares her pleasure with him. She smiles — at a page — something has touched her, he puts one knee on the bed. But the next room is the danger — the traffic light changes — he recedes abruptly from New York, lifted away. He wants to talk only to her. Weak economist! My God, will marriage in a life like this in the long run get to be an exile? The next room is the danger. A groan broadens to a test scream, non-audible threats, the interrogatory stab, no scrape of chair leg, no shift of shoe sole, the action non-visible that the tortured sounds record. The screams aren’t quite shouts; for who can think of help or rescue, or a long haul, the upside-down-hung genitals (therefore this one is not a female) clamped by electrodes, yow yow, penis head pink to rose exposed, and refractory testicles autonomously retracting ceiling-wards, actually toward the ceiling light, big toes near a light fixture and already yanked out of joint plunging into the medium that waters pain to keep it live and/or optimum — as he thought the Japanese masseuse would do to his toes here in the great substitute place of them all New York, for which, therefore, there is no substitute when she made snapping sounds pulling them, those toes he never thought about normally, but it felt good. He isn’t particularly good at having things done to him. But you take up position and you hold it, isn’t that what was said?

Which way you going — home? A young voice, a young man’s, a boy’s.

Alone: it’s an alias, "alone." You’re not there unless you bump Another. Let an American mineral cartel exposed or unexposed be immortal, let people be parallel to people curving off into a distance which is optical marriage. Private existence with Clara is True Value, no substitution, small-scale units of book and pillow case and hand, clear and loving, where love might exist like disembodied angels in the upper reaches of an opera-house repertory but her dry-wrung washcloth laid on the sink like a Peruvian rug upon an iron balcony in the Chilean sun, to Saturday-morning piano music in a large dusky room — there is the true unit that someone was looking for.

People brush past, and he finds one foot in the street. Three people among others. And as he jerks his face away, and a blast of steam barrels out of the street, then in animate bursts, he jolts himself with the twist he gave his neck, did she see him? it’s the threesome, a gray-haired, very broad-shouldered, stocky man is crossing with a fine young girl (much too young for him) who holds her cigarette out in front of her and touches the wrist of the boy on her other side less like his girlfriend than his married sister, she’s so clearly detached from him, if it matters, while he tries for her hand but her hand has slid up to hold his elbow and he leans his shoulder into hers looking straight ahead, and the girl thrown up by the field of New York is Amy — Amy his assistant from the office who was the one who spoke to him only hours before a phone call brought Efrain’s voice from some subway platform, couldn’t tell if the train was arriving or leaving, and here was the girl Amy with the extraordinarily good manners having converged upon him from behind and never knew and he was wanting to talk to someone and feels uncannily certain that if she, whom he liked so much, had seen him he would be in danger— why? — a dynamo would go off in his French-diagnosed ear and he would never hear it, but Amy was not the point. The older man points across the street showing them something. Has a broad tweed jacket on. But he is not so much older as he is familiar. Known from where? Stops in the middle of Seventh Avenue like he’s come up lame — but no — Cape Kennedy? — and looks around right through the immigrant with the cap in his pocket and two fifties and two ones in his trouser pocket, and the boy who might be eighteen or twenty turns his head to look at the girl Amy, who has looked back, they’re like the man’s own children, somewhat younger than the immigrant’s own children, American-quick to finger the button of that old New World so they absorbed unthinkable contradictions unthought, and the girl Amy who has looked back has seen, one knows, her bald superior from the foundation office and will not call attention to him and perhaps because of this will do nothing but continue with the boy and the man, this gray-haired man crossing eastward away from him, having come up to him from behind without knowing it and walked, brushed, right past him as if he were a marginal growing thing, a bush, this gray-haired tough-looking man taking two grown kids for a drink after a basketball game — is that it? — knows where he is going now, it’s the Greek fast-food place. (Can there be a "place" describable thus?) They approach tableau, he should pursue them, break in on them and stop what might be happening because he knows it has to do with him. He’s seen the older man before, but not from behind; yet in weather like this; yet not with that jacket. Months go by, tabled on a prison calendar isolated into days and numbers and events to be then swallowed into a flesh of unending term.

He has seen the gray-haired man before.

So? a voice shrugs. This is New York, the long run. He does not want to hear himself think any more. He would fight, now.

Efrain — he knew an Efrem once — Efrain is not at the agreed corner. Even minus the tweed cap he may be recognized by Efrain. Isn’t this so by law of streetwise survival?

By another law, Efrain has got to be getting something tonight in return for delivering the message from Foley. Why meet like this?

It serves both sides, maybe. For what if Efrain had said he would meet him at the apartment? Clara saw in her husband’s face that he might shift to Spanish speaking to Efrain. Jobless parolee hanging out.

The Japanese clock with its yellow markers makes time itself an advertisement, and it’s not always there — do they take it away? — it’s so big! — cover it up? (he would know if so). . the long hand is past the bottom yellow now. But wasn’t the clock digital the last time he looked? If the tight-fitting tweed cap goes on now, something will happen to him. Where would Efrain scalp tickets? Back there by the entrance to the arena? The slow or endless poetry of being aware, of being conscious, will come after decades to some random rapid moment of active void of police melodrama violently making the life of awareness seem like slow suicide.

Exposed, one stays where one is. His hand — his pistol hand — is in his jacket pocket as if to keep the cap from working its way out. He is afraid. The point of the meeting tonight was him, he senses, he guesses, but how? Not the message, but him. So he is to get the message from prison (this time unposted) and in exchange gives up what?

Himself.

But this is why he is here. He is the one whose life Foley’s letters intimate. "Life" so final and indecisive-sounding a word in English. Faster than saying "Efrain." Life is what Foley could be doing. "Natural life" means no parole, does it? and once he wanted to ask what Foley had done to almost get it, but you don’t ask, and if an inmate feels inclined to tell, he will — which Foley did not, except to write once about "a guy who has a score to settle with me who stands watch, week in week out, over a row of garbage cans."

Life, then. Less than natural life. Foley got eight to twenty. Imagine not knowing.

When what he wants to know is real. What he must know is how can he be in danger and in a vacuum at the same time? It is a life, says Clara. For how long? Old New York from other years they have dinner in, but this trip reinvents their whereabouts though they are in the phone book: just in from Stockholm for a week, consultant in San Diego, semi-retired in the Carinthian Mountains of Austria an hour from Italy an hour from Yugoslavia (at your age? and the "children"?): to meet the children in Mexico City (one lie compounded to) or New Orleans, we met on neutral ground in a New Orleans garden (and the regime? asks the friend or his wife; where do your children stand? — don’t ask — a subtle lie, for he doesn’t know).

They see a play, a movie, an opera with a friend in it, two operas. He has heard tell of a Hamlet opera — a Hamlet of the Garment District with roles altered. Where does he know the gray-haired man from? They’ve turned left at the far corner where he was to have met Efrain. From England? from Chile? from Rome? from gatherings where he sits and listens and does not ask questions and feels like a Jew in a Cracow suburb? The old Nobel scientist from Florida — Switzerland by way of Florida where he lives now — stood in front of a blackboard and said there are no vacuums, and later was interrupted by a student bearing socialist manifestos, issuing garbled challenges by which the old man’s beautifully economical physics was not touched, for students here don’t cut through so — so fiercely, with cool passion — the way students back home used to — to the salient contradiction, the contradiction, the suddenly grasped contradiction! — though it is true, too, that the old man was good, very good. Better than a Nobel economist who comes to one’s mind at this crowded, empty moment who is of course right about money but about nothing else. And when Clara said on his return, "If there are no vacuums, what have we instead? What takes their place?" And he laughed until, like swimming in his employer’s pool in winter so in the long run he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop swimming, but then dizzily did, he was stopped by the famous physicist’s answer which he passed to his wife Clara: "There are only areas of low energy."

A scene he’s absent from is what he gathers across Seventh Avenue. A theater set, the cast for a moment parting like a curtain, like the space between the great charges of steam wasting up out of a hole in the street, and the fatherly broad man with the greenish tweed jacket and Amy, her bright pale hair in a single brain, and the boy, gaining the far sidewalk, swing off left, so the eye moves ahead of them to the open-front fast-food Greek eatery to a dark-olive-faced young man in a khaki jacket, trousers, beret, all khaki but for one detail and he’s standing at the counter watching the sidewalk as much of it as he can see and Seventh Avenue and theoretically the unsuspected far corner on the west side where the eye watches him, seeing what he cannot see because it’s around the corner of the restaurant’s open front on the sidewalk; so the eye unclouded by a dangerous tweed cap that’s been pocketed, and uncluttered by the aching dozen of all different simultaneous thought clustering about the half-known name of the fatherly man with the two young companions, feels this group who now on the far sidewalk approach the open front of the fast-food place where Efrain, for it is and must be Efrain, waits with the one non-khaki detail visible upon his person, and the cars build up between the eye of the immigrant beholder who ought to be building something now himself but has left it in his native land destroyed and is touring some place that turns into scenes of his own absence, a scene across the avenue: the three reach the souvlaki place Giro II (!) — someone’s head chattering away against the vertical barbecue, la par ilia, which in Chile they may even toast you with — and are visibly hailed by Efrain who eases over to shake hands with Mayn — yes — and be presented to the two young people; yes, Mayn was the name, Mayn it is, the name as sure as his coincidental second materialization walking up the Upper West Side block five floors below the window of Clara and her husband’s flat and as certain as Mayn’s first appearance in Florida days after Allende’s speech to the UN months and months ago at a point on the planet’s surface free of visual interruption so one felt oneself standing on the planet, until late, late at night long after this friendly newspaperman named Mayn (who made you think the big events were not so big nor necessarily elsewhere) had — yes — asked if he thought people were interchangeable: while an old friend sat behind them at the Voice of America table beaming Apollo 17 information to, among other targets down the long continent below this one, a large room or a next room where an old good friend at last and still for a moment in power might turn from debt rescheduling which will always be with us to copper and back again but only to substitute one for the other and never admit a tie-in no matter what a CIA economist might urge, an old old friend a medical doctor with an inflated government staff who did not himself know how soon life would replace him.

The one visual interruption high, white, steaming on the face of Florida’s eastward-empty beach-coast lifted off above the fires that it and its voyage were based in and turned away toward that horizon that only instruments made manifold; and he had felt not at the outer top of the turning Earth as earlier that warm December evening but at a deepening bottom urged further by the presence by then beside him, on the infield at the Press Site (like a dig) looking off over the silhouetted heads of photographers and, across the inlet-river, of a man so unlike Mayn when it came he knew, he had predicted this other man, this journalist-operator Spence (who would be more threat than help before they finished because his proposition was important as well as an intrigue, and yet he seemed paired further with Mayn, this Spence: were they brothers in arms? for one didn’t know or want to, but Spence had concluded he a mere marginal economist with Allende’s precarious regime was knowingly in the employ of a foundation marginally central to the ongoing American war effort hence must know much more about a certain Santiago junta’s life-support system, spring-loaded to — upon re-entry — course-correct for target arrival, but Spence would find out even what one did not know one knew), would warn him against the agreeable, inquiring Mayn whom Spence had seen him in conversation with by the Voice of America table, for the old microphone was a finer power than all incendiary ignitions banging and cracking each other into a disappearing century’s nucleus. But that finer power of wave and vocal cord dissolves too in all the words using it, and many mouths mouth People Power but Clara laughs and he grazes her hand, and they talk, they have always talked.

Efrain looks across Seventh Avenue and with his shoulders and hands is telling Mayn and Mayn’s friends that a person was not here who was supposed to be here, but Amy won’t recognize Efrain’s name for him (if sounded), because it’s another alias, the name Foley knows. Her eyes were bright once — it was this week surely — when she took a messenger’s manila envelope, brought it to his office, and explained basketball to him. Setting a pick, charging, traveling, occupying a position before an opposing player charged into you, all most logical. He himself was once a footballer, he found himself discussing with her his assistant the fine art of centering the white ball from the corner so far away it was almost not on the field or in the game, curving the ball softly back into the heads and legs in the goal mouth, the whole mind of the goal mouth. An old woman on this new corner of his touches the immigrant elbow, a striking person, white-haired with a mole on her jaw, hand in hand with a tall, thin, glowering elderly man not as old as she but lined and stretched by the long haul and preserved in vinegar and by some long, possibly original, preoccupation, who steps away from her as she says, "What is your name?" A random man, asked what his name is, a verbal promontory who reads books from cover to cover all week in the midst of a life that feels like an interruption, he has Some answer or other for her, while her escort stands away, irritated, and the answer seems to please her: "Alias. . Alias is my name." She sidles off amused, saying, "Alias, Alias" — a well-known and interesting name (not "Mayn," which he had almost said in the night light) and she’s nodding in recognition, and then the elderly man, compelled by community or by love’s hermitage, explains, "Her concentration span isn’t much now, you know."

As if he would know — and she goes off, taking away with her some message or glancing light from him, this random man. There are no random events, which could be as sad as our ideas of them. In New Jersey a group of Cubans stand in unison and snap into flame their thunderbolt-emblem cigarette lighters in honor of Pinochet.

While over there across the street, Efrain is charming those three. He’s recently released. Maybe he is the Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

The wait has upped the noise, the noise level’s a hood coming down over the skull and lowering over forehead and eyes to the bridge of the nose and tickling the rims of the nostrils until dizziness can be relieved only with something to eat or drink or some talk, but the four people across in the fast-souvlakia are not eating, and the boy is looking at Amy, who glances more cool than calm at her watch, she wants to go, but is this because she’s figured out who Efrain was meeting and planning to introduce to Mayn and has thought fit to miss the meeting? Mayn is the trouble, but how about Efrain, you don’t need talk to tell you that Efrain made the arrangement to meet Mayn. Efrain takes in all three, while the boy looks at Amy and she keeps looking at Mayn but not wanting anything. Efrain’s eyes see the street too, the far sidewalk far as the corner where a bald man with a distinguished mustache pushes his right hand into a bunched-up cloth cap in his pocket.

A man who now moves toward Efrain but out of his sight, moving east toward Efrain’s side of the avenue, moving across Seventh in a mob of basketball fans jostling each other quite dangerously, perhaps thirty percent returning to New Jersey. Amy and Mayn and the boy have come out of the restaurant. They have turned away toward Thirty-fourth Street, and the unknown or unseen fifth person moves without having decided what to do, moving with a crowd of shouting fans, young, strong, drunk, elbowing each other so that the tweed cap somehow comes half out of the pocket as they all make the corner where half an hour and more ago he was to have met Efrain.

Efrain now has turned left out of the restaurant toward him, toward this corner of Thirty-third; and what seemed in the mineral glare of the souvlaki place the one detail not khaki is right there in the pocket of his loose military jacket. But, perhaps under Amy’s backward gaze, a decision has been taken as five fans veer up the block and he with them as Efrain has to stop to let them pass and is so close that Efrain as they pass does not feel the long white business envelope lifted from his pocket nor begin (as yet) to imagine what the tall blonde girl he’s just met with Mayn and this highly alert youth deduces as she looks back again to see a man she knows in confidence to be a distinguished foreign economist pick a pocket — or worse — while the potential light of her sharp gaze is followed, even after she turns again and sees Mayn flag a crosstown cab, by the eyes of the boy, slight of limb though tall enough, eighteen or twenty with a load of cared-for, wavy dark hair, who thinks he knows what her cool eyes have seen and seems then to absorb her light and forget her in contemplation of a visiting tall, bald man with a known mustache, who meets his eyes reflectively — which is the most signal thing that has emerged in these glancing turns of event — and bends into a downtown taxi that materialized at the curb, the avenue is downtown, all taxis therefore.

He has felt at once the boy-man’s eyes seeing what there is of him through the cab’s back window, homing on his brain (though Clara would laugh at such imagination from him) and was glad of the round-faced black man in the driver’s seat, and has given the address uptown, thinking he didn’t mean to take a cab.

Foley’s envelope has the five-day return-address box number instead of " — Prison," or "Correctional Facility" the Americans say, though how many know they do? The envelope comes unsealed too easily. He will explode the taxi if the driver is his personal DIN A agent. The letter hangs fire. Is it the margin narrowing his private personal life to one last light that will not escape him even into the heart of his life’s companion and must turn toward political anger to see if it is in him?

With this secrecy of the code directing one to a pay phone on upper Broadway, this meeting, and so forth, who is Foley protecting? His correspondent? Efrain? Efrain said on the phone he had to stay out of sight but then was bringing people together right and left. Was the clandestine process protecting Foley? His letter this time, one felt, would not concern itself with the long haul, with the Utopian sewage or a free-enterprise postal system, or deep-Earth steam power lately Foley’s passion running nuclear coolers without coal(I), a nuclear-powered prison! and running electrical transformers without oil, by piping water miles down into chambers of molten rock a thousand degrees hot to bring it back as steam to make turbines reel with rage and joy. Foley’s privileged correspondent replied that he could see the steam project erupting in volcanic magma spews loading the sky with geothermal plumbing exploding sky-high which if the pieces went high enough were reassembled for use in orbit. But Foley — at his end of this slow joke-by-mail never knowing when he might get a live visit — retorted that clean power was the only answer, one of his contacts had told him what was going on in New Mexico. Yet in the end Foley can see an ultimate nothing but brain power nakedly moving Earth by intercommunication. And if you wanted to talk about volcanoes Foley would be glad to discuss Hibok Hibok, or Paricutin which came up out of a cornfield, or, his mysterious contact’s favorite, Krakatoa in 1883 which blew stuff seventeen miles up into the atmosphere and created legendary sunsets for years.

Had the letter been opened? Or come unstuck? Let the letter not matter. Hungry people matter. In the short run, too. An educated Cuban who announces himself anti-Castro long before he finds himself in prison on a spurious charge of planting weapons in a Korean grocery in Manhattan known to be a Cuban socialist cell will not (should he escape) be denied sanctuary in Chile, it stands to reason, unless he is known to have Allende friends. Clara heard the rumors before her husband did but knew that the man he first visited in prison here was a friend of a friend, and that’s all there was to it.

The dizzy buzzing in his ears wheels right to left. He tucks the back flap inside the envelope. Heart running fast and heavy as two magnets. Cabdriver missed the light, he’s been doing something up in the front seat. Has a French name. What if he is Hamlet? And his district is in motion. Why have they missed the light? They’re stopped at a red light. He slides the envelope inside his jacket into his wallet pocket. He hears music and hums like Hamlet thinking.

And when he lies back easy in the leather seat and looks out the window, he meets Efrain’s body, and knows the letter could be trouble, like an engulfing cloud that wraps round him and Clara and the cloud is targeted, only the cloud, but that would be enough to include them in.

He finds Efrain standing above him on the curb apart from him staring past the cab he is in, looking around for a man wearing a tweed cap until he happens to glance at the cab under his nose, the cab of the unknown person in the back seat who doesn’t blink, as the light conveniently changes and Sir Isaac Newton jolts your vertebrae, and Efrain claps his hand to his side like a holster and digs his hand then into his pocket.

And as he wheels wildly as if to see the thief, the moderately impressive fact is observed that he does not reach for the pocket on the other side, the right side. For he knows where the letter was. Does it matter in the long run? An episode in Foley’s private life and fantasies maybe no more, no plot, no intrigue involving other inmates anti-Castro, maybe no Chile, maybe just a letter by hand.

"You are from Ah-ee-tee," the passenger says to the cabdriver, and puts on the cloth cap.

"Yes," says the man with a look up into the mirror. "And you?" A he and a he, and a hee-hee-hee.

The passenger leans so his nose is almost against the steel divider screen, and three hundred or is it two hundred and fifty years of what-have-you, sophistication, responsibility, family, and geography in the mind start to speak for him words he wanted to speak to that unknown Puerto Rican Efrain, and to the man he buys his coffee from, and to a neutral econometrist who says in the long run "it" evens out, and to Lord Keynes who said In the long run we are dead, and to the man Mayn who probably knows the words by now, and to one’s grown children but so young — Efrain’s age — wandering a muddy street past breeze-block housing named La Hermida, named Joao Goulart— but in Santiago no one wanders any more — or up against it in a sports stadium; blinking up from the bottom of a limestone mine that will not be mined; working perhaps for the regime — and to whoever wants him dead, if anyone — and the words areI am from Chile—yet the words turn into one spoken word: "Chileno."

"Lejos de casa," the driver says with an accent, turning left on Thirty-second, which is the long way to the Upper West Side but with lanes of cars to their right it would take him two blocks to drift across Seventh to turn right and get over to Eighth Avenue, which goes north. Escape the scene, but to do what then? Go home. Home is Clara.

"Far from home, yes," the passenger agrees. And smiles; and, feeling the American language close, adds to the man in front of him, "You know it," and it comes to him that he is over that dizziness, it will not visit him again.

Then he remembers, and tells the man, "Your parking light reflector’s broken."

And while the man knows, the passenger wonders how he himself saw such a thing in his haste to get into the cab.