Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But no, the father seemed like the friends to him because—wait—Jim slugged Sammy, they were fourteen, Sammy kicked him and ran, they all ran, they were running past the newspaper, the father was like the guys because, because, because he kept him from getting someplace he had to get to, that was how they were alike: it was dumb and a surprise arriving at that conclusion and maybe exhausting even while gulping a twisted toasty cruller at his grandmother’s, who wore her hair wound in a gray bun and had always told him stories you didn’t have to believe if you didn’t happen to but you still kind of did, and wanted more, and yet sometimes they had a funny brand of politeness between them, Jim and Margaret (he would jump up laughing even to himself in the middle of her story and run outside onto the kitchen porch and yank open the screen door and leap the seven steps(!) down onto the first flagstones of the backyard). Sometimes he thought he was supposed to be hearing things that he wasn’t, yet she left him alone, but not the way his mother had her way of being left alone. His grandmother smelled (more on one side than the other) of nutmeg he realized years later and soap the way his mother smelt of the same amber soap but pound cake and lemons for her tea. Slow the conclusion—like wading waist-high in Lake Rompanemus— because he didn’t quite know what it was, and exhausting (not his own word) because he knew he could follow it up, the conclusion, like the way he often thought about girls and what he liked and about New York (miles away across the Jersey flats with the Statue which was officially in Jersey very close facing away from them up the alley of the Narrows of New York Harbor) when they drove in once, he and his little brother Brad and two other kids with Mr. Bob Yard the electrician and his wife, who seemed to have a big running argument all the way so the boys stopped discussing how much money they had to spend for candy, the couple yelling at each other about his unpredictable driving and butting in when one or the other would speak to the kids who were not theirs, the couple making noise and all through this pretty much laughing, all the way to see Bing Crosby in a movie at Radio City Music Hall, New York hardly a fifty-mile drive, that seemed year by year more and more too close; but about his father being like his friends, well that conclusion wasn’t exactly exhausting either: it was like what you got left with when you arranged to already have other work (that you happened also to like) as an excuse when your father wanted you to work at (give him credit) a dime more an hour in the office of the paper running errands that involved taking down important reportable information, and doing "a bit of everything," with a chance to learn not only everything but how to engrave stationery—"where" what got substituted for, was whatever real reason stood behind the excuse of ("Sorry") already having more than enough odd jobs, a reason which was only half there, and this was like the conclusion about his friends and father which asked to be followed by a next thought but asked so that you half felt you’d made up its asking, and so this conclusion about his friends and his father keeping him from getting someplace he had to get to was more like letting go of a dream next morning that he half knew he could, if he tried to, follow up, since it had come only after he had woken up, not a sleeping dream which he didn’t ever have. And did follow up when he was staying up the street at his grandparents’, come to think of it, but this in turn wasn’t because his grandmother asked him for more of the dream once he got started; for she would have a story that was like his dream, he always accepted that; but with the conclusion about his friends and his father, he couldn’t follow it up, or not for a while; but then the next thought in the thought got together with the first one, he got to the next step by accident one day when he flashed anger like some ability withheld in his face at his grandmother for something she hadn’t meant to say but he throttled down seeing she was the one he loved, realizing it here fifty yards down the street from his own house but felt he hadn’t lost anything by blowing up, though it was wrong. And the step from that first thing about his father and his friends keeping him from where he had to get to was then that where he had to get to was this smart mother of his, but in her place was the future, and God that was where he had to get to. And the accident—accident?—that word his wife years later used when his own son, no paltry dribbler, unburdened himself in his pants at nursery school—was his grandmother saying, "Things haven’t been quite the same between your mom and dad since before Brad came along," but the next thing in Jim’s thinking was only months later and he’d been more openly opposing his father by announcing he was going to work for the summer on a friend’s family’s farm a few miles out of town where in the field where they would plant horse corn the furrows and red hunks of rock-like earth felt to the eye and the foot like a larger scale—planning to go to work there for the summer when his father wanted him in the office and made so much of this that Jim saw his father had gone a little crazy. Jim did not appeal to his mother. She was sick all that spring, that much he later and much later knew for sure: his father would tell her to see the doctor and she said he always said, See the doctor, or she said, Of course, of course; still, Jim found his way through the atmosphere in the house, he went to his mother. The house though he was older had gotten bigger. And the quiet after supper was a distance between his parents he would like to reckon by blame but he was stretched between where he’d been and where he had to get to and with no one to run him down more than his father who was somewhere downstairs or (who knew? by now) saying of Jim’s grades, "You have only yourself to blame," yet yes Jim went to his mother who was sitting on the edge of her bed watching him when he opened the door, one night after supper which she or Brad aged eleven had cooked, to tell her about the farm job that coming summer, and keeping in shape. She in her calm way smiled as if there were no trouble except maybe how to tell what was funny here, which you might get to in time but she hadn’t the energy for or maybe time. He didn’t mention his father, only the farm. She said she wished Jim’s little brother Brad would do something like that, that he would growl and sweat once in a while; and then she said, "You will go away where you belong."

  This scared Jim because it came out like a command—but whose?, and she was the one receding, or they both were and you couldn’t figure which of them more so.

  And he anyway didn’t get around to telling her—because he didn’t have on hand the words to say—her drawn sick face kept from itself a health inside as sharp and dangerous as it was far.

  "And live a more human life," his mother said, and did not reach out to touch him, though he saw it was late for her to tell him stories that she anyway had never been inclined to tell, for she played music instead, which his grandma did not, although his grandma told stories that at times came over as sort of true.

  He remembered this thing about living a more human life, and a month later, between two victories that came exactly between 1940 and 1950 (one Victory-day to the East-called-West signed if not delivered, the other Victory-day to the West-called-East, to come in mid-summer), between these she was gone, gone into the elements except for yon granite memorial in the family plot that Jim and apparently his grandmother but he thought not his kid brother Brad liked to imagine preserved someone underneath. Their grandmother wrote an obituary, tore it up in small pieces, ordered a marker practically before Jim’s father got around to thinking about it—and had it placed; and, beside her in the cemetery one hot Sunday afternoon, Jim heard a throat cleared beside him, the beloved throat of his grandmother who had made him mad that day weeks before and got her as close to (in her words) "flummoxed" as she could be, for if what had made him, her grandson, mad was when she said, "Things haven’t been the same between your mom and dad since before Brad came along," still it was Jim himself who had started it when he said of his mother, "She’s always so glum, know what I mean?—I mean, excuse me for living. Why’s she have to be like that?" It wasn’t that she felt her mother Margaret had gotten too much mileage out of that trip in the 1890s, it wasn’t exactly that. It wasn’t that family stories made her impatient—though they did—but did she not have any? But Margaret rep
lied, "She’s not always glum by any means." Which was very true. His mother’s drawn face was less sick-looking than (y’know) it kept from itself a health inside as sharp and dangerous as it was far.

  Jim felt sent away, but his mother was the one who had gone. To get salt in her lungs: but then evidently salt water if we could find her lungs; but sand in her eyes, Jim. But what is not being said here? Like we already remember we heard ourselves speak of an interim between his parents: is that not time between events? and did we mean just a regular old distance? To mean "interim" would be to go up to someone, isn’t that what was said? or was it angels using us voice-over flip-side to change their lives?

  Jim sent away for what? To become human—was that what she had said? (He would like that hour back.) She mattered more than she had a right to in her absence! But as potential relations we have a right to know how did she go away—and if someone goes from you, do you go from them, too?

  He turned secretly everywhere. He fell, but unlike his younger, less heavy brother, did not hit: he fell toward the horizon for both of them; fell right through solid objects as if they weren’t there; followed maybe where instinct led like a moving obstacle. But Jim Mayn, we remember, did not dream— did not have night dreams—that is what we know he claimed: if, looking at him, we can’t just say No to him on this—though how do you not dream?— mustn’t he have had something to put in place of dreaming?—and did he really not dream or only not remember come morning? He said it to his grandmother Margaret. And he said it to two or three others in his life of those he found in his way, halfway human like himself, women and men on errands that felt like detours or, next to all those bigger issues, not clear enough. He turned secretly everywhere, we already remember, but since this—his secret—was the future and was maybe what he put in place of night dreaming, he might (O.K.) expect these errands, his and others, like their warped course, to be in doubt.

  But they might come together from what’s left of the original cities. Errands veering all inward hit and gather tribal like a fair. Grace Kimball in New York one middle of the night on radio heard someone say that someone they in turn couldn’t recall had foretold—and Grace felt she’d had the same idea—cities in future like periodic fairs, you know?, a party of tribes for a few energy-transferring weeks. Show us that scene again, can you? Sure thing: the only cities left exist for a month or two from time to time. Festivals. Markets in the human sense. (A little business, too? Sure I don’t see why not. O.K., great—the market is unprecedented, we feel almost guilty.) Can you run it backwards, that future city, so we can check it out? Why sure why sure, we’ll get right on it. See, you’ve got your weak force that you get when things break down and run away on you and your strong force that brings things together and binds ‘em like the blessed tie (what things?); and you have the two together if you know what you’re doing, O.K.?, two in one if you can jump between, kin you jump between?, ‘cause jump, babe, there’s no power without the vac, jump the vac.

  What’s vac? / Where were you? I What’s vac? / Oh we forget, give us the replay give us—oh now we remember—

  Don’t want to know any more.

  But you are electric? / Is that all? / You are magnetic. / And?

  You shift before my eyes. Can it be our secret, our thing we do? Before my ears, you mean? I feel we have known each other all our life. Have I been in you like you have been in me? Oh like, but different. We can really talk to each other. You’re inside, you’re outside, then some days you are past all this mere physical jumping and have found peace past motion. If past jumping, then on both sides now: did we market that? Old angels they get a lot of them to the square inch of pinhead but they don’t get to be two places at once unless ... but if they exist in thought, angels have done so for a long time, so if they now, some of them, are discovering within their matchless power to be real an inner potentiality not granted them before, they would be within human being not for the first time but in a new way—in the bodies of us who, speaking now, are dazzled by this chance that just as we think them so they now speak out of us yet are we dazzled only insofar as we are not they? When do they speak in all this and when not? Oh ask our twenty-four-hour-a-day power vac—right, we’ve heard of it—well, it’s not used any more—oh but it’s been internalized back to where it all began.

  But if so, what happened to what we punched in? We punched in what we had and we didn’t write it down. Write it down, you run the risk of error, and that’s not the only risk you run, but I like the replays I like the replays.

  But what are we going to do about the kids?

  Their homework, you mean. We’ve tried to get a handle on it, we’ve looked up topology and rotation, and we’re just about read out. Displays and diagrams appear on the walls of the children’s space, interesting and decorative—damned decorative—till our heads spin with R and equals signs, and we with pride in our kids but authentic resentment too, think now that R is = , and all the = glance back at us for all the world like light off the wall.

  Yet we need that child or children. (There’s one or two of them right in the next room.) We said to our child in the next room, to our babe, our love, our hope for ourself, our sweet honest force, "How much light is there, then?" for the all-purpose child is doing its four terms of science dwarfed into one-and-a-half class-weeks (pill-assisted memory-wise, but we didn’t dare ask) and it should (our child) come up with a few of the answers and should know a thing or two about light; and it answers, "Plenty to go around," it was us, not the kid, the kid knows a dumb question when it hears it (How much light is there?); yet then, inspired by pity, the child with angelic directness is heard to say, "Light is inside people so long as . . ." and we add (because maybe that’s as far as our child is up to in class and because the light inside us feels deflected or busted, that sort of thing, though rebounding), "... so long as they turn," because we have found upon turning that there’s light that likes that, inside us, it makes sounds during eye contact and in turn finds others nearby who have just turned as well, though not necessarily to us—"as long as they," now continues the child formula from the next room, "turn it on!" This plus the cheer that accompanies the everyday discovery of the light that is cast by ice cream in the refrigerator.

  We’re getting warmer. Harder than double-checking the god is double-checking a checklist for desensitizing the room of a "breather" with a known-to-unknown allergy. Ready: damp cheesecloth over forced-hot-air inlet; no auras; no toys or stuffed animals, no pennants, no books or bookshelves, no rug, no pillows made of mold-prone foam rubber, no chenille bedspread; no ornately carved furniture; no flowers; no large, luminous reptiles; use powerful tank-type vacuum cleaner (a good buy) and vacuum the vacuum before using, and (hear?) always air the room after vacuuming, and (hear?) never ever vacuum with a breathing child in the room.

  Which child? One of them is a breather, one a bleeder, which is which? Let’s not take any chances. Shall we listen to them?

  We wanted to hear voices. And then we did, but while the voices were promising and boiled down from a cloud of near-angel voices (awfully like ours on a good day) to now and then one voice, they proved to be a band of tortured archaeologists, or anthropologists anyhow: pros, but tortured by doubts and with a pair of earphones at the ready, you see they were sitting on top of something big, they knew of a hidden city and they were sitting on top of it. But they found themselves tortured by professionals in a room and a next room, above a dungeon in the Southern Hemisphere, rooms fitted only with bare needs, an outlet for the earphones, a chair to be seated in, a floor to be stood up on, familiarity waiting to receive routine, plus the sound of the sea and, for those who don’t smoke, the old smell of the sea’s cool sweat down your own little wormhole’s thread.

  While this other was going on, we didn’t think much of opera. Opera was high-classical singing in a second language. It wouldn’t go away, we found, and the stars meeting and proliferating onstage spread their arms taking curtain calls before a
giant meaning of brocade, the three women, princess, kavalier, and bride, and the bass baron puffing in preparation possibly for a seizure. The weight of the world can be negotiated—is not this the music, the lordly loveliness ongoing on and on of opera?

  They turn to each other, baron and kavalier, a smiling moment between singers. Tonight is an articulated structure that gives play to a multiplicity of small-scale units. They turn away together into the broad face and mouth of the audience. They are female and male—separate as we already recall the music being from the plot, but electric magnetic singers.

  But what memorable thing did the infamously gifted general officer of a South American republic’s navy say to our diva offstage a few minutes hence when she had feared he might extract from her her secret the tapeworm? It was her autograph he wanted, raising the Japanese pen, that’s all, her signature. And as she was reminded of the Ojibway-Sioux medicine man now long since back in Mille Lacs, she saw over the mufti officer’s (the civil villain’s) shoulder her breathless doctor entering backstage with a host of silver roses, and she answered her military admirer in translation, "Oh—autograph me." But when on bended knee the mufti officer now made to write across one satin thigh of her kavalier breeches, she raised him telling him softly to take her literally and then she introduced the physician her long-time friend who now materialized and tilted his head at her for he was off balance asking her without words if their secret had fared well. "Supper?" he murmured, old intimate that he must be at this moment, coveting hours of moments, old listener at her breast, breath cutting life into words, a sentence into meanings. But she put him off for the evening: "Can we make it tomorrow late brunch instead?"—flashbulb lighting—"I will be responsible for the coffee and orange juice, my darling, if you will bring ... the brioches and—" she waited for a flashbulb—"and the atabrine."