Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  For, figure it out, you’ve had more than enough time to take responsibility for what you see, even if you now think all you’ve been doing is waiting to remember. For see the diva’s (the lovely songstress’s, the recently officially Swiss-passportable transplant’s) painful if prolific, faintly lyrical, divisions of heart and head: think of it, there was the infamously gifted general officer of a South American navy whose regime’s unspeakable intelligence arm—to its own music—endangers her loved, outspoken father; and here was (in mufti) the graceful man who touched her even with a Japanese ballpoint which left its impress with code-like interruptions upon her satin thigh backstage the night of Rosenkavalier; yes and, to go on, by the same dual but separate-scoped oscillation, there thousands of miles south was her broad-faced, silver-mustached widower father guarded by that navy like an electrified coast to the point of apartment-house-arrest; whereas here, in New York, which is an articulate structure accommodating for her a multiplicity of grand commutes to Munich, Vienna, La Scala, Covent Garden, Adelaide or Sydney-Melbourne (anyway Australia) where Lohengrin and Otello are housed by two turtles copulating if you’ve ever looked at that opera house above the water and if they even bred above water—here in New York, she grants that her operatic life and body fill to bursting with small-scale honesties accommodating her career, her flow of breath—of blood—the breathing of her thought, the honest ungated thinking of . . . of—but, to enlist the lyric of that American wartime hit, is it all of her?—of all the range of lusts even to the faintest infidelity of plot-twisting thrill in sauteing for her naked Chilean visitor in her seldom-used kitchen, which is duplex and balconied, the pink, dense shad roe her old friend the Boston-born Manhattan physician had brought her earlier hoping to tempt her for brunch, her own family G.P. if she had a family.

  And what is the yes or no answer in question? Do we take all of her or don’t you? It sounds like rape, we mean a little light rape, rape in hopes of romance—but wait a minute, we said nothing about a yes or no answer to that song?

  For we move if not exactly from war to peace to war, still from question to question, through long or brief the light makes equal, we move well together, you are magnetic. Yet if meaning something is (really) like goin’ up to someone, as the philosopher saith (to unquote the lisp of some grownup who, hearing the wind the far side of an obstacle drawing us toward the obstacle, hears not the noise of the wind but a song because leave it to a grownup to hear a song in the wind), we now know how to lighten that wide load of going up to someone: what you do is answer a question with a question, a trick used by endangered peoples under interrogation (older far than the manipulative modern Can I ask you a personal question?) but you talk to the question, point to it, and you promise it all the feedback it can hold of questions that readily come to mind, like would any Us worth its self settle for being relations?

  Which turns her stomach—though she doesn’t catch on at first why—toward her lover where—this third visit to her well-loved apartment—he stares softly at her bedchamber’s birthday-cake ornate whipped-cream ceiling considering her much more than she thinks amid her post-coital wonder (that the tryst goes on) and a premenstrual void that feels like a dressing room that keeps out a dozen people she’s got to see in short order, which is not now but tomorrow when her week begins, not now in the cushioned interstices of this fantastic love meeting, her stomach against his arm, her mind upon his which she can’t quite hear until he speaks: and then what she hears in his idling question upon question may be not some hunt for information but a funny comfort with her, in her, for her.

  The war between the women and the men, was his New York tourist question out of the corner of his supine eye while against her the rest of his arm comes into being—yes, this much-advertised war, was his question, does it really go on here in 1977 in this advanced city? And she softly, huskily answered in the twilit room where colors like the force of his eyes hold some reserve of precision, "Well I suppose that by temperament and by professional independence I am hors de combat."

  "Because," he went on, "I sat near an older man and a young girl who I’m sure were not related last night, there is much of this in this city, I think, or is it like arranged marriage," he quips, "without the arrangement?" (Is the demufti’d officer making talk? His murmur passes on relaxed to whatever the smell and gentleness of her yields in his happy spirit at six in the afternoon) "... do you see people in the audience or just see the mass?"

  She hardly answered, "I see friends sometimes if I know where to look." Is he probing her relation with Clara and her husband?

  But the next question leans over against her. His far arm runs along her shoulder and for the moment triggers nothing. She recalls well his question ten days ago (hours after Rosenkavalier, two in the morning, three in the morning), How is your father?—which was the question she wanted to ask him, about her father, for he’s the one who’s just come from the padreland, the madre-earth, the nation that’s in the news, the long place she’s never really toured, never seen the ice, the desert, though as a child she visited the primitive Indians, the mapuche prehistory, the villages with the one abandoned house vacated for the use of las dnimas, "souls" you say—and she sensed that her lover’s question How is your father? meant she could get no answer to her question How is my father? and she answered, He is in a smaller place; he is himself. Perhaps you know him? No? I guess he is O.K. (She would not ask this man; why’s she lying here with him? to inquire for her father?)

  And now ten days later when she’s let herself be interested in this young Fascist admiral if the navy isn’t only a cover for whatever he’s doing here in New York, his next question, "Were you looking at me the first night?, it seemed to me you were, and yet we had met only at the consulate I think," brought out of her with languid clarity just a hair too soon—so she regretted saying—"No, there were two friends of mine near you, I didn’t know you were there" ("my dear," she adds) remembering already that at the next performance {Norma) those two friends of hers Clara and her exile-economist husband had changed their seats (which they had insisted on paying for at Rosenkavalier but were the diva’s gift at Norma) because the wife Clara, her particular friend, had asked for the change; and they were better seats; but then they had not come.

  And why, she murmurs—moving one thigh off the other so he on his back staring at the symmetrically swollen raised plaster design on the ceiling—a free clock of space, she wonderingly heard him call it with some casual touch of intelligence she warmly adores—floats his fingertips over to her nearer thigh—why, she murmurs, or how, did a man of good family find himself posted to the naval base at Navarino, the end of the world?

  The southernmost inhabited place if you don’t count weather stations, he informs her softly. Oh, it was seven years ago, he now whispers, everything’s changed; whispers so very privately: the South Pole is indeed hollow, the stories were right, but the lingo of the Fiery Landers down there is not hollow: They have a verb for kneeling in a bark canoe with a hunting spear poised to launch at a sea otter who is especially elusive so they stay poised ready for minutes at a time to make their move—one verb for all of that.

  He sits up and bends his head to her thigh like listening. There’s still room, he says, for grand opera. All the music—it spaces it out.

  She will not get depressed. Is she a traitor to her father? Why did she seduce herself with this military man her father would despise, would kill?

  Have the Fiery Landers a word, she asks, for wanting and not wanting, one word for loving and despising and fearing and at the same time being delighted and wiped out and soothed by?

  The man’s ear warms to her thigh. I didn’t get that far, he dimly answers, listening still upon her thigh, speaking so slowly. They don’t think that way, he goes on. Therefore Darwin dismissed their language. He found it simple-minded; in fact, it has a matchless grip on things; but then he was fooled into accepting answers that those he interrogated thought in the generosity of
their imaginations he wanted; thus though they did not eat dogs which were useful in hunting otter they did eat old women who were of no use and were smoked to death, their meat a very delicate texture.

  When you are here with me, she asks, are you outside this apartment also? Are you in the other places where you do whatever it is you’re doing, on the phone, in the park, at a consulate, for all I know your work may take you to the opera.

  No, he says, resting his whole head upon her thigh, the edge of his dark mustache on her skin, I’m only here.

  He keeps his thoughts a secret, she translates aloud from what he may or may not know he heard in Italian last night, and the man alertly drowsing his blue eyes up into the folds of her body lifts his eyebrows, and upon the skin of her thigh a corner of his faint smile moves and she’s certain he doesn’t hear Norma’s Ei face I II suo pensiero from last night right after she’s answered Clotilda that she does not know what strange fear moves her to send her children away, for diver si affetti I Strazian quest’alma, and she loves her kids, she hates her kids, it hurts her not to, or so she sings. And knows she could be no angel, let alone what some sexist flatterer suggests, because angels already are in her, welcomed by her as they come and go bearing no brevity for brevity but only for becoming, like interior clothes.

  They have a word for "depressed," he whispers, undermining what she feels she’s undertaking; they use the word for the crab when it is soft-shelled. Have you hunted crabs with a long-handled net off a dock and just when—

  Yes, she mildly interrupts, I did that with—

  —and just when you spot a big, hard-shelled grandfather sashaying away (her lover speaks this thrilling, menacing English, always, a love code in lieu of their native Spanish), you find in the corner of your eye down through the dark, clear water the motionless thing you really wanted, the fat, skeletonless, defenseless one, its body gone to sleep, female, slightly swaying with the living water (you know what I’m talking about?)—

  —if poets have to be in some way criminals, she thinks, nowadays criminals could try being poets—

  —its shell sloughed off until it can grow a new one, its body all succulent meat, and you could catch it with an espatula, just lift it up like an egg out of a pan, it wouldn’t slip off. Mmm.

  —with my father, she finishes, I did that with my father.

  She absolutely will not be depressed; and along a route as unclear to her as what she can find to do with her fellow countryman’s head picking up nothing but the luxury her leg likes to give his cheek (his ear), she will persist with her interrogation looking for the right question that will tell her what she probably knows already about this intelligence from a land where her father lives, a planet in essence long, that a tall (too tall) young American woman poet told her is a shadow cast by the overlapping sea which is the silence of the world breaking upon the southern continent, a ghost coast this Chile like a mapmaker’s lost lore, words at a gathering in New York, standees boycotting the Queen-Anne-imitation chairs, but whether the young poet had been to Chile or not, it remained the remote, 125-mile-wide 2,500-mile-long world where the diva was raised, where once she stood breathing (picking up a tincture of the preceding night’s tobacco smell) beside a grand piano that made her singing into music; for she was singing, although in those days it was more a very big business of your coached attack-plan of breathing of which she was often more aware than of a bar of Bellini or of Iago’s love scene with Otello drugging that dark ear to know Desdemona is untrue; and there was another scene she can’t at this moment find, an opera that didn’t get put on, a very old one, a scene for which she produced a breath control like ambition itself, singing beside a piano near a painting of Chile’s first woman lawyer, 1890s, friend of the family, and while she sang hardly seeing out a tall window (with curly molding) a park, a wide boulevard, and the Pacific raising light back into the air it came from, as high as eagles she never saw, and a mountain of thorn she and her father and brother once found paths through, a mountain with year-round snow she knelt in.

  But she never really explored her long coastline of a country so narrow they had to find its richness by mining downward and could not answer the young poet’s question What became of Neruda’s library? But she will find the question she needs, interrogating this man her lover whose head is suddenly in her hand for his head began to stir from its listening rest and to decide; but she holds it where it is and its momentary frown pulls at the temple which tickles her skin, and the living blue of his eyes might be saying not a thing blinking open and drifting closed again while he goes on listening. And what was the scene she can’t recall? But he has called her an angel.

  A system big for her, though her own, and for a second she can’t hear all of us inhering in her and ongoing; and so she has a clue that we were. That is, going on. Which, realizing suddenly her unsupported nature, she hadn’t known, though has felt more, no question, than this community of us in her, though relations including her—whatever these acoustical divisions in her were; we find that to breathe is to feel, perchance to think, and in this resumption we almost have not heard her breathing till now, and while we had thought that in our angel quest we had minimal designs on her, bony and abstracted as we feel, this diva with all her paraphernalia has gotten she feels quite real—we hadn’t been looking for it, she was our transit, and now it has just happened, as she recalls the forgotten scene from that Hamlet opera by the Chilean woman who could not get it put on.

  Who says? And is this increasing community heard in so many of us what was meant? And was it only a thought of this community that angels sought to evolve toward human, toward potential, and used our bodies? For that late Chilean woman composer seems to reach out—northward—toward the diva and her attached cast, even to the Ojibway with all his moving, American-related background, our Ojibway-Sioux medicine man, now matriculating thanks to his sporting acquaintance the diva’s Manhattan physician in that aeronautics program at a Minnesota college within shooting distance of Lake Superior together with several youngish fellow nationals of the Chilean diva’s (forget if we can her Swiss passport) and of her officer, who by a convergence often wrongfully identified as accident or as the Indivisible Hand was considering the culture potential now opening at home in the huge import of TV sets duty-free by order of the junta’s ruling general, just at the instant when in the diva’s mind an unknown man’s face would not go away, who, with a girl, had sat somewhere in front of her adoring officer yet behind the two vacant seats Clara and her husband were to have occupied; and after the first-act intermission after Norma has arrived in the sacred forest with her fellow Druid priestesses and, upon praying to the Moon for peace and cutting the mistletoe, has harangued fellow nationals of hers here in Gaul who instead of waiting for her prophecies to come true of corrupt Rome’s inevitable fall want to revolt now against the Romans occupying Gaul, and has at act’s end guessed that a "tall brass-helmed" Roman soldier her novice Adalgisa has confessed inspired in her a blasphemous love is none other than Norma’s own faithless Pollione who deserted her and their two children whom she now both loves and hates—oh how can you hate a child unless you have first stabbed it?—the diva’s unvirginal priestess Norma recalled Flagstad ready to sail from New York when the Germans invaded Norway, and returned at the opening of Act Two to her house intending to kill her sleeping children only to find the orchestra seats that in Act One were vacant of her friend Clara and Clara’s exile husband, the distinguished economist in the wonderful Dr. Allende’s regime, now occupied but by strangers who’ve no doubt assumed that the ticket holders absent for Act One would not show at all.