Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  and while Larry’s feeling a shade less Real than, say, he had planned to, in this and other phone exchanges, the stuff that’s piling down the wire out of Mayn is (granted) told like conversation along a well-tended bar; like chat in transit through the Happy Hour, while conversely what’s this guy doing, where’s he coming from, ‘z’he just like Larry? and why why this absolute stream of talk taking for granted that Larry had no other reason for phoning than to be there: for example, to hear what one knew already, that standing on the subway platform in Lower Space doing some last-second drifting so as to end up in front of the subway-car doors, you never knew any more which half of the two doors was going to open since now only one did; and before long (the man Mayn spoke as if he’d been away from the City a long time and was coming home, well he was moving back into an apartment he had once lived in) the (said) subway doors wouldn’t open at all and hopeless passengers would turn into a new mode of expectations, stand hopeless on the platform in Lower Space, watch linked cars roll into the station, stop, and slide out without opening their doors, and, interjected Larry, if you looked hard into one of the windows you would see two workmen inside the car sitting legs crossed chatting as if there wasn’t a platform with its dim exhibit of stalled passengers outside, and a toolbox on the floor of the car near one workshoe, and a kit at the belt, and a length of rope. Mayn remarked that his grandmother had taught him to look at things and had traveled widely in the last century when the family newspaper in New Jersey had still been going strong. Larry said he was envious. But no news can be good news, said Mayn, for Andrew Jackson in whose behalf the Democrat was founded went right ahead, first week of January, decimated countless seasoned British troops because the news of peace signed Christmas Eve didn’t reach New Orleans for what is sometimes known as a fortnight, so that for Jackson no news was good news, otherwise known as first win the war, then win the battles—Larry, there’s a key there if I could only find it, for—(I mean history has its laws, said Larry)—If so, said Mayn, I haven’t spotted them, they’re like the laws of a humanly lazy if insane visiting despot, there’s just no telling, except they are barricaded behind Fort Nightmare which we can pass through and never feel, like books almost read in one’s youth such as the heavily grandfather-recommended Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens—while, thought Larry, was he kidding about his grandmother at some pre-twentieth-century age maybe still in her teens (he certainly seemed to like her) traipsing off to the crystal fountains of Chicago’s World’s Fair then changing her plans and traveling West further than the eye can see, fields of globe mallows and all manner of southeast Utah and Colorado May flowers, magenta, darkening violet, down to the very finest royal purple locoweed swaying not far above the ground— but Larry’s phone is lost to that We that’s bigger than the both of them—that drives a whole canyonful of color-blind Indian horses to the winds of princely addiction and was known once in the beat of its digested purple to penetrate through her soft Indian gift-saddle to the actual blood of its noble rider the East Far Eastern Princess who must have sat her horse at least as well as this Mayn’s grandmother Margaret tripping out there a decade and less after the botanist Marcus Jones negotiated the terrain on a bicycle who, when he ran out of names for all the specimens of locoweed he found there, named the next one desperatus, bicycling such rockland!—the cliff-dwelling circuit— (Wait a minute, breaks in Lar’ like an emergency operator, a nineteenth-century botanist bicycling hundreds of miles through southern Utah?—but Larry’s always got the little-known Modulus, it will be known as Larry’s Modulus, it came from math but made him its own, working turning and remixing.) Mayn’s talk into-onto the good old screen closer to home so if Mayn persists in not sensing that this phone call was because Lar’ had a thing or two on his mind, Lar’ will do the understanding for Mayn—cliff dwellings, Mayn went on, I’ve seen some of them; apartment houses call them, the sun shines up against them and makes shadows that seem to wander way way back into those apartments: one of them had eight hundred units but whether the Anasazi six hundred years ago had co-op ownership like your modern Pueblo Indians (and the pueblo at Taos is thought to be nine hundred years old) I don’t happen to know, and just about all I know about anything I just happen to know. What are you doing out there in a pay booth? did I say I had basketball tickets? I’ll call you back—and Lar’ thinks Mayn hangs up without having been told the pay number. Larry is absorbed by the thought that Mayn himself passes easily between one thing and another, the peculiar Princess he’s got one or two low-profile stories about—a guy whose interest in meteorology, perilous dusting of our atmosphere in, for example, the Junge-layer of aerosol particles above the tropopause, and the mother-of-pearl night-lucent clouds and the "twilight" effects first pondered when Krakatoa blew a shitload of volcanic dust into the stratosphere, takes him two thousand miles west to check out reports of sky scraping windmills, though it’s one of those somewhat technical though probably not boring assignments of his: a guy who has done, for his boss, as much homework on arms limitation as, if not more than, the government guys whose fringe personal habits he’s got anecdotes about as if he doesn’t want to deal with the "bolts" (for example, one missile delivery system he specializes in, he knows all about that one, yeah); a guy who flies from a Vienna conference to Stockholm, where the disarmament information center is, but then to New Mexico in order to examine strip-mined land at first hand to see if he believes the corporate claim that that landscape can be duly re vegetated within twenty-five years (for whom?), while he stands thirty miles away scratching his head afloat upon desert in front of a giant rock-thing through which he passes himself hardly thinking about the Four Corners coal-into-gas plant but of a red convertible automobile driving across the water of a New England lake once when he was in the vicinity of his daughter and his son, at any rate a man (whatever his unknown personal life) up on what’s being thought right now even though just a journeyman journalist, he claims, and inclined to keep lowest possible profile, anyway a journeyman, an "adult," really into the East Eleventh Street "sweat equity" windmill, called by local Puerto Rican kids "the helicopter" and by the East Eleventh Street older residents "the fan": yet so easily, with Larry, this guy Mayn seems to—What’s "sweat equity," Jim?—Oh, fancy talk for, well, more fancy talk . . . "urban homesteading," Puerto Rican low-income tenants’ tenement renewal, do it yourself, in this case a five-story disaster area becomes the pioneer wind-energy installation if the thing doesn’t fall off the roof, don’t forget New York’s a harbor city—so easily seems to, yes, switch between his son in college who doesn’t talk to him, and his daughter in Washington whom he gave an old white "auto" (he calls it), and an environmentalist group in New Mexico urging him to come back and report in "depth" what strip-mine interests are doing to the land—(which Jim says means "their side of it"—though granted the right side) so where’s the chance Lar’s ever going to broach with James Mayn the Two-on-or-in-One Quantum-Regress shifts, when Mayn’s got not only QR shifts of his own but Larry as a mere function of it, so it’s more germane to ask where is Larry in this momentary empty breath along the phone connection, i.e., where (to wit) is Lar’ except in the husky space nearly guaranteeing Mayn is there still, and Lar’ names the numbers: so now Mayn rings back, which in the middle of the visible noise of the City gives Lar’ the illusion of inventing a way to beat the system and more of being able like a pedestrian who flags a vacant vehicle and is given a free ride which the materializing driver will be repaid for elsewhere in the system and not necessarily in kind, a sense of being able naturally to use the public furniture of the City, a comfort subtler than mere economy.)

  Oh the ancient apartment houses, continued Mayn, a day later face to face, they spread south from Utah but in Jones’s time the Anasazi cliff houses, not to be confused with the Pueblo co-ops, had long fallen vacant but for a hermit occupying one unit six months of the year in northern New Mexico; it was a multi-year summer plan he had, I mean a hermit from the City of the Eas
t, remarkable man whether real or made-up. Unusual, no doubt, but your hermit needs a break once in a while too, though not necessarily in terms of seeing a whole lot of people (You mean, said Larry, not necessarily a vacation from himself?—Yeah, that’s it exactly).

  But Larry’s not sure if Mayn said this line of hermits included this Hermit-Inventor of New York. But could Lar have made it up? lately he thinks of invaders in his bloodstream (maybe they’re good) but then they aren’t the We his mother Sue’s always speaking in—(We feel that only through money can we achieve power) but (God, maybe) his own We, but does that make him wacko or a vehicle for these bloodstream visitors to (what? "get real," as his own mother puts it, even when she tells him he lives in his head and ought to—) feel, not think. Yet this hermit is into quite threatening meteorological thinking and it has made Jim Mayn reflect upon a certain Hermit ®f New York who befriended Jim’s own grandmother not quite a century ago when she came down through canyonland a timeless Victorian girl-explorer with a box camera and on a horse brimful of locoweed at one point so it leaked (and beamed and radiated into her legs and eyes) full filtered through the bliss of her temporarily insane horse and, as a consequence, Jim told Larry one evening meeting at a newsstand beside the cafeteria where half a dozen cabs were pulled up, she could see just what she wanted though with the help of a fine young Indian who had given her her skin-and-dyed-wool saddle and her horse and some high-class guided companionship to boot (though Jim deep down felt this Navajo princeling had come to a bad end because of her eventually)—he was sort of a brother and perhaps husband-at-first-sight and Jim wished he had asked his grandmother more about him though he had gotten the impression that the Hermit of New York had kept an eye on her: so Lar’, who’s thinking Why’s this old guy (well, not that old) kidding like this in the middle of well what else? until Lar’ feels, yes feels, that this young woman of the last century, Jim’s grandmother or person beyond her, could see in the high-up and far-targeted reflection of the cliff-vacationing hermit (whom she couldn’t see except for his eyes like one eye, one platinum ingot) someone else entirely, astride this Indian pony (God, thought Larry, looking into the window of a furniture store all alone the following morning on the way to the subway to go to college, this stuff is driving me loco and all I get from Jim Mayn is this sense that he’s a down-to-earth not very intellectual regular guy, divorced, yes, he did speak of that as if we’re—what?—equals? like Grace said, speak to everyone as an equal)—till Larry’s telling this ancient story himself, Guess whose reflection the visiting Princess made out in the pin-glint of platinum light from the hundred-foot-high tier of cliff caves of that centuries-old multiple dwelling of the departed people who had once had a sterling culture of pots and cloth, and larders stapled with corn that some said had been transplanted hundreds and even thousands of miles from the original southeastern soils long gone of this continent the Princess was discovering, plus dry-country native seeds help save Africa from famine, a woman friend of Mayn’s is seriously thinking of giving up her career as a journalist to work on this—but guess whose reflection the Princess made out.

  Oh, why it was your grandmother’s obviously, said Lar

  How did you know? called Mayn, laughing elevator door closed. It just came to me, said Larry, who saw Jim for an instant as a family man coming home, though Lar’ knew there’s nobody upstairs. (Or was there?)

  Platinum don’t come in ingots, is that what you’re thinking?

  Somewhere through these days and mostly phone talks after the two had met when Lar’ had by chance heard Mayn discussing basketball in the lobby with the doorman in Spanish and had joined in, Larry became attached to Mayn, maybe because he had been places and was cool. Until Mayn was in Larry’s head often, like opinions, and Larry, who did not ask Mayn about himself, saw the fact, one night, hearing his father come in, and could not imagine why Mayn’s college-age son didn’t want to be in touch with Mayn, because while Jim did not think at all the same way as Grace Kimball, he was funny, like her, and heard what you said, though she maybe made up what she said (though out of what?), did she really think her kidneys spoke to her brain and generated dreams?, but the man whom one of the women in her workshop reported had never dreamed must exist, though when Lar’ was going to raise the question of whether it was possible not to dream, Grace told how the woman was ready to be in love with that undreaming man sight unseen, which was a perfect example of love addiction. This relationship with Mayn was easier, though Larry woke up in the middle of one night, hearing his father come in, and remembering soft joking in the next room long ago between his father and his mother—and now recalled Jim Mayn just now saying in this dream Lar’ had been having, "Get out of there, Larry," Larry driving through a three-sided bowl of rocky mountains, desert deserted for days of a poor man’s travel, "Forget it all, Larry, forget the family and try thinking something new," whereupon Larry asked something, and Mayn said, "Never dream": until Larry at once grasps the light where some modulus of the dream has vanished but leastways it’s light and has come to rest and is what’s between the two men, and Larry knows he’s Mayn in the dream, so maybe dreaming for his friend—has become this other person while simultaneously being, well, almost-Larry, but he is certainly not the women who arrived as the dream was curving away around a tree trunk or down the Earth just barely held by gravity to the surface: they were his mother and a band of others like her: he was in his clothes on the bed, but his father wasn’t about to open the door, and dreams thank God were garbage, all these angels and his mother were pleading with him, "Let’s be real, let’s be human," as if it’s up to him, when it’s no more up to him in some dream than when his mother said those very words out loud in the next room to her friend Evelyn so Larry heard. At least not talking about him. Or telling him he thought too much, which was a hard one to answer, he was working on it.

  Yet he was talking to Jim Mayn days afterward only to know that on the night of that garbage dream he had had a theory as clear as if he could say it: it was a reincarnation theory that was true this time but must find itself in Larry before it could be clear.

  Larry wanted to ask Mayn a direct question about escorting Amy to the opera when Mayn said he don’ like opera.

  All very poor out there, says Lar’ from a phone booth and digs for a nickel, comes up with a quarter, all he’s got, then remembers Mayn called him back from Mayn’s home, did Lar’ pick up a signal?—responding anyway to Mayn’s claim that certain Indians of the Southwest come all the way home hundreds of miles from boarding school for the weekend and nobody knows how they make the trip, they disappear into it and materialize hundreds of miles later.

  Mayn had a relative who went out there before the turn of the century and stayed almost too long and when she came back an Indian she was mixed up with followed her clear across the continent.

  There’s hardly anything to fill this break between the hard facts he speaks of (such as water, and the litigation over it against heavyweight Anglo lawyers talking water so that Indian irrigation plans, their own and those of others for them, go only partway, everlastingly partway, poverty and water)—this break between the hard facts and such allusions to that relative often a grandmother but then allusions to lore that feels true like dug-up-bits, including a Princess from elsewhere who had a protector in a hermit who sat up in high tiers of wind-hollowed niches (also believed to have been the result of the actual rock’s thought) and she would catch him far far away and high above her watching her and recognize in his platinum hermit-eye the grandmother Mayn recalled so fondly.

  "I mean," Mayn went on, "you can make hunger dramatic, it’s got good bone definition, cheek, chin, ribs, for those who don’t share it you know, and so when the Princess turned into her reflection at a later time," but as Larry put it together still later, the grandmother must have been really someone, whoever the Princess was, because she criticized her Navajo "protector" and his people, who weren’t too well off themselves, for having driven the
Anasazi people out six hundred years before (though it may have been that the river had cut so deep down into the earth that the irrigation ditches were amputated high and dry like reverse waterfalls that can’t draw water up any more).

  Larry later felt Mayn had been entertaining him.

  Apartment tiers as vacant as the sunlight: when she looked again, she thought she saw one hundred, two hundred scrawny physiognomies with blanketed shoulders, blanket-hooded heads, looking out of that cliff dwelling answering like tidal creatures coming out of the shadows that lined the fingers of sun bent and crooked because of the openings.

  She looked again and saw but one hundred. But arriving at the ceremonial sing where the Prince’s people tried to find a way into the Prince’s mother’s trouble through a hole in her forehead plain as could be but full up with demons that left little extra space but didn’t leak, the East Far Eastern Princess asked how the two hundred had become one hundred—those impoverished, derelict Indians back in the "apartment house," did they have a way of making people and things fewer, like the one used in her father’s East Far Eastern land of Manchoor? There, far away, her father had taught her to ride on the worst giant hill-sheep of the Manchoor Mountains he owned, when he was not gathering information about other countries. She would never ride like a Navajo sheepherd no matter how long her fact-gathering visit. Contemplating the two hundred or the one hundred, she asked herself, What of excrement? But Rivertalk, who was the Navajo Prince’s second mother, was surprised, for didn’t this fluctuation of numbers just happen? It was either death, a natural result of living among the unseen presences; or it was that when you weren’t looking, half the people went back into their cliff apartments; or it was that two became one just as one became two in many ways, hadn’t the Princess seen one hundred before she saw two?