Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  That is, without the two-on-one being submitted feedback loop.

  Larry says to Mayn, If I could be another person, she could be.

  Mayn says, It doesn’t matter, pal. You’ll be another person someday; she might stay the same. You mean, asks Larry, she’ll go on as she is?

  Probably go on, is Mayn’s reply.

  Stay married, Jim? Larry laughed. Oh, said Mayn, you need more than one sometimes.

  "I know what’s going on," an all-purpose child contemplating another nap who was apparently absorbed in educational television is heard by some resident adults adjacent to it to say. Adults getting equal with kids; seeking girlfriends and boyfriends. But not in response to Larry’s fine Either/And, which he would talk to Mayn about if Mayn weren’t already a motion within the reference frame of Larry’s life so how do you get an external fix?

  Larry’s dad one night, turning away from his personal TV when Larry came into his room silently wanting to talk, gingerly identified changes in lifestyle they were being buffeted by, ‘cause Lar’s old enough to hear. But Open Marriage (which is more like the U.S. Open than open house, though it’s that, too) gives you permission to stick it out. But Larry doesn’t say this to his father. Even if it is ‘76-’77—you’re never in a single year, it feels like, and he dunno if he wants his mom to come back—I mean, who the fuck cares?

  But Larry’s life feels like escape. And someone else’s escape that Larry figures in and has been drawn if not sucked into.

  Well, as for him, he works with the Modulus, Dreaded or not, that constant factor, it converts units from one system into another, which might be its own, so all potential partners in an extended marital system may observe laws of all divisions and games going on inside Me, making Me sometimes Us. Bumper stickers used to say Carlsbad Caverns, Howe Caverns, Pioneer Village. God, these married older people, they don’t have any standards any more, negotiating clean breaks and all that load of crap, and codifying power games like Who Called Who?—well Larry could pile right through a naked workshop recycling women and leave them scatter-cornered, multiply der limbs lying in his wake watching his stern lights fall back into the night with just enough glamor of wake to yield a bumper sticker that says, Have You Hugged Another Woman Today? and so also that, some nights, oddly when he’s on the phone with this older guy he really likes, he wants to be the one to say a whole lot of unrelated words, shit, fuck, cunt, asshole (asshole doesn’t mean anything any more although you wouldn’t want to be one), cocksucker, mother-fucking turd-master, chew-sampler, pimp-spread police-dog-screwer, you run out of those words.

  Were they funny once? he asks Mayn.

  Funny? oh yeah, sure, we used to call each other cunt lappers—what else?, scumbags.

  Hey you still hear that.

  Muff diver. Scum bucket.

  That’s pretty sweet.

  And during the War, when we saw all those movies, what was it?, I’m afraid it was the syphilitic afterbirth of a Japanese gangfuck.

  That’s not even sick: it’s not possible.

  We probably didn’t know what an afterbirth was.

  Well, it probably could be syphilitic.

  It’s history.

  Yeah.

  Larry still wasn’t telling Mayn the two-on-one problem. Yet how could Mayn be a rival? Obviously between Mayn and the unique Amy who is old enough to be Jim’s daughter there can be nothing save professional researches and contact-expediting assistance—people she knows (?) through the place where she works, but Lar’s not asking. He doesn’t sense that Mayn’s into Amy’s interests, right-brain video-projection hardware used by handicapped to make themselves understood, plus reading-playing-manipulating a console-operated screen—and though anything might happen in the weeks since Amy phoned Larry to ask if he had Mayn’s number which she either could have discovered for herself or already had, in which latter case, she was letting Larry know, Mayn might be using her.

  Oh Larry’s eyes hurt; they know how to turn into marbles; and his head hurts on one side—purely conceptually: he’s resisting a crowd inside him (well at least he knows and acknowledges—even welcomes!) that’s relations and all he can do is look back and forth between two eyes. And often now makes his phone calls from a pay booth, but rarely jumps as, booth-high, after the Amy call.

  And he would not get into hating Grace Kimball, she’s friendly y’know—y’know?—y’know the multiple child’s next-room door is closed and among other emblems on the door is "Love Ya," and not so loud— whose sway has swung his mom Susan who wished she’d been named Sara, no h—into quite a new life which she thinks she’s asking him along on, which sets her apart from Jesus freaks and other groupies of the Ideal who want no part of their parents but he feels, he feels . . . (and, like using the Modulus, suddenly conceals his life) "this friend of mine he’s freaked out, Jim, his mother thinks she’s a Lesbian, what do you tell a guy like that? he doesn’t even want to think about it." ("Nothing, I guess. I would just say, Hang in there, you know?") ("Hang in there, Jim?") ("I mean I couldn’t handle it. There’s nothing you can say, if you like her—if your friend likes her—so hang in there—it’s like what your negotiators mean when they say, At least keep talking").

  She wants to teach him No Dependency: see, you don’t hang on to any particular person (so the theory goes—Grace’s theory yet in words identical to others uttered by a dark man with no shirt on as Larry switched TV channels and just before a commercial break to the effect that if the winds of attachment continue to blow, the light of true knowledge will never be kindled). Yet act, he had heard, so as to benefit others. Yet have, he had heard, no desire. Yet Larry was ready to believe the words; they were now his. Don’t anchor onto particular mother, spouse, or lover, you hang on to instead where they came from, not the person in question: keep the standing reserve from your miles-deep soft wear dream-lab, it’s your permanent credit cord to the ocean, keep that and let the actual persons come and go. Yet go for total sensate focus: what did that mean? Your toe massage might trip you up the common thigh: it’s the sources in thyself you want to glom onto, definitely not the particular persons who are thrown up like visitors to your real past and come and go, or so the rumor spreads, and Lar’ has this shitty feeling right in his (yes, actual shit in his) head that it all has assumed great weight and point, greater than in any rap: he hears oh what’s he hear?—workshop raps of Grace Kimball; fond talk and joking talk of Susan and her "friend" in a next room at mid-morning one weekend, really getting along; and so lest there appear ground for suspicion, he’ll go his ma one better and will not bust out to this guy Mayn who is now for a moment a total stranger but Lar’ would ask him what he thought it meant to say you withdraw hearing from sound, for God’s sake, was it to listen to other sound, or soundless things? well Larry would buy that, too, it sounds like at least an effort to shake things up a bit.

  —(hear the song—song that’s just naturalized American noise, Lez-bee-in; once said, so what—the foreign plural of a visitor from an olive island. But all that funny material or its sources isn’t why he wouldn’t get into hating Grace Kimball. For she’s funny; O.K.? And she’s open (as opposed to—are you ready?—closed), but Larry thinks her book of changes, one a week minimum, had better not get too into ideas, even if where else is it at?— because as the energy level does in a roomful of people jerking off or in their heads, so the room leans its sides in on each other, driving the other equally parallel pair into slant formation, the room is energy-shimmying and maybe the building’s being squashed or at last looking like us to think as a whole building which even then may be but one of those parts of units within units capable of being accommodated in the articulate structure Mayn woke up in to hear a visiting economist preaching decentralization many months ago, but as the energy level of all those people in the happily collapsing room going public rises to some great explosion, you’ll smell the sandalwood but Larry thinks that in the very Near East (right round the corner, maybe) or Far East where
some of this stuff comes from, the sandalwood and all the postures in our New York picture book may be easier to smell—and haven’t they relegated the shit to a book of pictures?, although in a western vein among fellow discussants Grace’ll talk about bowel movements (squatting heel-and-sole on traditional horseshoe seat or traditional buttock-contact support) as if they’re a recent layer of awareness which is what Larry means, speaking to himself more than to this older guy Mayn, when he says G.K.’s O.K. if she no slide into Ideas: where she has, she says, done the Freud Trip, the Art Trip, the Marriage Trip, the Separation Trip, the Booze Trip, the Romantic Love Addiction Trip—the addiction number, how she makes the long trip equal the short trip: well, says Mayn, is it destructive addiction or not, would be what I would want to know—while, however, the best seedless grass is not addictive, Larry happens to have heard, for just you look, whatever she says about dudes, at the black truckers downstairs in the middle of any Monday through Thursday afternoon taking you know their break to breathe a king-sized Caribbean back-home-style baseball-bat(ty!) joint biggest Larry’s seen so fast their eyes can turn blue ‘f they didn’t wash the stuff back with Colt 45 you know and you can be sure they don’t rinse their eyes before repairing homewise, what would be the point? calm their wives and girlfriends? Wing it—and if Grace talks a lot it’s in a naturally fertilized voice—and to you— for she rides in on other people’s energy wings too, she flies them too, so it’s like she’s listening to your feedback as she herself says, while meaning only that she wants a supportive opinion for, say, her still-on-the-drawing-board nation(-cum)wide women-bathhouse chain: keep the sexes apart for the time being, just a working model, teach ‘em the wings they fly ain’t only yr joint wings twain bonded in the ground of birth, and Hey Lar’, she asked, where did the sexes first split? (I think it was the Paramecium, I go check the book or was it Jim who got it from the prison inmate appendicularia zooplankton that house themselves in their own mucus (read imprison self in own ideas), the more I think appendicularia the more I think Paramecium, ah go check mah book, want to get outa here—I know you do, baby, but come back soon, it’s just an elevator ride away—all this as noisy as your own mind).

  But we see Larry, and he knows Grace’s mere wish for supportive reaction even better than Grace, but he doesn’t know how much he knows, and knows the feedback mechanism is sometimes a homunculus-soul of Grace sucked actually back into him to listen to herself; but also she listens in the customary sense and in a jiffy would be naked almost without your knowing it and execute a hatha yoga number resectioning her old abdomen to music (if you call that music real noise), resectioning it in ultra-deep ripples that’re waves and are erupting muscle pregnancies now-you-see-them, but Larry won’t let her listen to his two-on-one oscillations, he knows he is no crazy after all, and everyone else probably has this same ballgame going, where there are long like pauses, your weak forces when things break down, or are in low-low-energy configuration, then will come like the strong force but you’re not getting them together, there’s a jump going back and forth, but Larry won’t show himself this scramble-minded in talk with Mayn (though there’s another person quiet and clear beyond the scramble and it isn’t anyone else but Larry, he knows) but he’ll guard his gourd, which was what they called your head in Mayn’s day, a day that sounded, when spoken of by the visiting man himself, physically rough in that old New Jersey township where he grown up, up—not that the man bragged—quite the reverse, don’t you know, but a lot of semi-serious sparring and shoving went on in his memory of the edges where everyone lives day to day not in the midst of what once was thought of as history, according (casually) to Mayn: edges where (though his father in this scene was on what you call the sidelines) Mayn drop-kicked a football for a field goal on a cold day that smelled, as he stepped forward on his cleats, of apples and cowbarns and a horse’s hide right under your nose spun magically to him at the twenty-yard line on the breeze curving around the recent brick of the high school and perhaps around his father too, where, to give another example (and another and another, for Horace Greeley, founding the New York Tribune some fifty miles away and but a few short years after the weekly Mayn-family Democrat burst upon Jackson’s strong-handed but anti-central-izing scene, believed "news" to be plural!), Jim Mayn got an unexpected lip, an enraged foul swipe on the mouth which he had to return though he knew he would smash his kid brother Brad, who was justified in his anger at Jim the older (though now to Larry Jim went on to something else, and didn’t quite tell what had been so important about) observing (through a mother-load keyhole) less than he could hear and hearing less than he felt he understood and understanding less than he had words for when he accosted his little angel kid brother Brad about the overheard scene with their mother in the music room, an intimacy with the scrawny Brad when Jim regarded himself as the preferred, the admitted animal of the two sibling species but though the admired animal of the two siblings not the child she would sit with in the closed music room, and that was Brad.

  No head for music, Mayn told Larry; an ear for noise, all kinds of sounds shilling about in the gourd, oh maybe back home in Grandma’s old brass-ring-handled highboy chest of drawers, and Larry felt something personal in the introduction of that piece of furniture and did not wish to be Mayn’s equal yet. No stamina for the opera, you know, Mayn said, speaking of noise. Mayn’s mother had played chamber music. It’s intense, said Larry. I’m told it’s like talk, Mayn said, and I believe that. And it’s nice, I won’t take anything away from chamber music.

  Mayn is in on something beyond Larry, maybe the Us that Larry feels invading; and Larry is tired and ready to be put on hold, an eighteen-year-old who really hears those three, four, five lone singing boxes, high-strung cabinets of explanation playing and singing, in a music room of a shingled house in a corner of a county seat, a house where Jim Mayn grew up on a street where trees had been put there by your ancestors and their chamber music or anyway beautiful homemade tables and cabinets: Yes, chamber music, said Mayn into the phone to his new young friend. Mayn was partial to supperclub numbers such as "Lush Life" ("the axis of the wheel of life") or "It Never Entered My Mind." So that Larry, listening hard and talking silently, drawing words out of Mayn’s mind to work into thoughts of his own, could have said, If you don’t have any head for opera, why didn’t you let me take Amy Tuesday night (answer? the tickets were Amy’s!): the words are coming Larry’s way. We see how Lar’ feels, camped above a receding economics assignment, or, where lately when his father stays home to work he makes many of his phone calls, in one of the two booths around the mid-City corner from the apartment, face (then) to voice with this guy Mayn who’s in his late forties. Oh well, Larry would broach the Two-on-One "Quantum Regress" to Mayn, if Mayn didn’t instead talk and talk—this distinctly listening kind of guy—interesting to Larry because two so different impressions, and Larry is weirdly feeling long-established, whose long-time mother thinks that she is a Lesbian and follows Grace Kimball in supporting all those desiring to get out of relationships— though wan’t desire wrong according to some doctrine itself paired with one that there is no right and wrong, which Larry shrugs roughly in favor of— and he vows to consolidate his gains of self, if only voiced in mind but voiced no less so that we already remember his words I am, and he complains to himself that Mayn, who’s supposed to listen, isn’t he?, is instead wiping Larry out just about, so Larry’s mere ear complementing one of the City’s earphones, a voice but we hope with eyes, for Mayn must at least see eye to eye, he couldn’t not picture the Lar’: a conductor of information indirectly to or from a voice third party possibly named Amy decorated in the old-fashioned way with a body—whatever his function, that’s what the Lar’s been reduced to, a presence included in Mayn s voice and a function brought into being with all these Mayn-generated bits that are interesting stuff just in their own right.

  And a rueful energy comes across from Mayn to Larry (you take it, Larry) in word Mayn brings of an elder me
teorologist now working "out of" a Greenwich Village railroad flat whom Mayn visited on impulse having heard the man had been blackballed as a maverick and Mayn could not fathom— only pass on, now—the coastline of that man’s theory: but Lar’ did not stop measuring it ‘gainst what he already knew: and so while Mayn and he went on, Lar’ yet reviewed that Maverick Mastermind Weatherwright’s theory— namely, that some new force roughly west-to-east is now altering the modified sine curve which said Maverick long since worked out for the relation between sea/air temp, differential along selected coasts, and consequent updraft deflections of air current; but as this sine curve of late alters erratically, so does the configuration equation for the coast itself which the elder meteorologist worked out by a math he would not trouble Mayn’s mind with except to say the equation for the possibly limitlessly wrinkling and, perhaps literally, broken coastline in question felt like a Canadian sine curve worked out for the coastlike pattern path taken by our own neurons retrieving memories yet sensing always that, traveler, there are no paths, paths are made by walking: in short, the Maverick Meteorologist is sure something else is arriving, apparently from the West, and collaborating with coastal configuration perhaps by some odd congruence as if a possibly metallurgic radiation affected temp, and pressure differentials along coastlines, affected in fact weather, through indirect congruence with coastline itself possibly complicated anew (or even broken) by this same radiation not to be confused with radiation as in radiation fog where radiational cooling over a land mass reduces temperature to around dew point: yet Lar’s mind swarms, now, with coasts, and now margin seems so central, there seems no boundary at all to this promontory or island as its successive discoverers invent words for it and Lar’ feels drawn toward maybe weirding-out an equation relating the (possibly due to radiation pollution) variable coastline and—