Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Larry was happier for having spoken to Mayn—and catching the eye of a tall blonde girl in a locoweed-purple outfit passing, so she leaned back and stopped, friendly, reminded by someone in the mid-City using the booth that it was there and she needed to put in a phone call. Larry, by now possessed not only by interest in the dual histories of this man who wrote news but didn’t believe in anything you’d be ready to call history, but also by the need to speak what he had called Mayn in the first place to say but had not been able to, along these last mutual minutes curving by swiftest increment away from Lar’s prepared question to nonetheless keep faith with the undeniably parallel tracks either side which happy parallels sloping off into the sunset over the Jersey cliffs he is moved in his abstracted heart to see behind these darker people going to the subway outside his booth, finds all turned now into the face of the blonde who’s waiting.

  There’s someone waiting for this phone, and all I wanted to know, though thanks I would like to go to the game, is—

  Listen, Larry, hang in there, you’re a good playground talker yourself, the formulas (was that economics or physics?) I probably couldn’t keep up with you, though that’s fun sometimes, but when you said you’re a good playground talker backpedaling one-on-two waiting to make your move—

  I said that? asks Larry, as the blonde looks at her knuckles. He had thought he had only thought it.

  Well, all I called about—oh gee I got to get off the line, there’s someone waiting—was, well obviously Amy is into work that connects with your work, right?, and it isn’t the right-brain video research for the handicapped, I know that, and she phoned me once to ask for your number which didn’t make any sense; so is she in some kind of trouble?

  In Mayn’s mind, Larry knows, come answers unspoken to Larry’s unspoken question Was there anything between him and Amy? Mayn is saying "We" about when they are going to meet for the game, and Larry is saying "We" about a couple of events scheduled between his father and him, like going out to dinner tonight and maybe going to swim at a pool they have a family membership at and they haven’t gone in a while. Mayn has said, Well, Amy’s a real pretty girl. But he has balked, Lar’ knows, at the bottom-line negative, adding, You say you got a lady waiting there? Jim’s saying, Between us, that Chilean exile I mentioned to you who’s . . . modestly shrouded in the folds and folders of the foundation Amy works for as a research assistant, Larry understands, and that Jim prefers not to say more—so that, realizing that Mayn don’ wanna reassure him that there’s nothing of a sexual nature between him and Amy, nor ask him to keep under his hat these mentions of the Chilean exile-economist, Larry separates the perhaps nothing political implications of his present rush and concludes that, O.K., maybe he is being used by some higher power (as Grace Kimball said once, using the Alcoholics Anonymous formula) and if the higher power someway equals his new sharing with Jim (or anyone else maybe), then try to flow along the curve of this whatever it is, because it is more than relationship softly resounding words like "We" through Lar’—it’s another type of being using him toward—what?

  Hanging up, Larry, tall within the booth whose roof he once hit his tender fontanel upon concluding oon call with Amy, understands that the blonde girl’s eyes are on him alone when she says, Well I almost gave up on you (though making no move for the booth)—when he doubly realized (having not till now guessed) that she is—but no, she is not a hooker, definitely not (she is wonderful, maybe) and much as (what with the gate swinging open, gate beep gate beep) he wants to get started at once exercising the dreaded Modulus upon matters shared through Mayn that are falling into place, still he toys with the idea that this girl and him met once, she’s a friend of a friend of his father’s, or of Grace Kimball’s, or she was seen doing water polo in an Olympic pool at Port Adams, Long Island, or she was profiled lovely against a sludgy oil on the second floor of New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art where the gross ornate gilt frames were once gifts to some potentate or are the sculpted coastlines of some old rich room’s ceiling Larry would like to lie down in at twilight. But no, the answer is easy: Larry and she Have Not Met; she is just plain here, plus it’s late afternoon of a day when Lar’s father’s been working at home at home at home, but will be going out presently to his group that he’s always on the verge of telling his son about (which suddenly now means to Larry that Marv has talked to the group about Larry—but that’s O.K., his father has lost love but not heart, but for cool feedback cum companionship you gotta go elsewhere).

  So what’s Lar’ going to do? suspects he’s lucking out, for a second hallucinates Mayn kept him phonebound so long, exposed to your curbside traffic and to self-preoccupied yet happy homeward (but of course it’s quitting time, they have punched out) wage earners for as long as he did because Mayn was sending this girl.

  But Lar’ has heard us, and (confirmed by the converging difference between the speech of a skimpily shorted jogger passing mid-Manhattan gridlock traffic-stall and behind and then ahead of him a high-stepping blackish sprinter in jeans who tears by and nearly runs down a bike that’s running a red light) Larry must cut out from the phone booth at once in defense of his own privacy, he’s got to make himself scarce from that booth, has heard us relations before we actually say in the voice of the Dreaded Modulus or we take the form of the resident child that reminds Lar’ of his youth, O.K., let R (for rotation) equal any number; having found that R may be positioned between two things in order to (through turning, looking, and merging through converging) make them equal, we suspect that R means "equals": hence we have the child’s R neatly inscribed between the two terms PEOPLE and MATTER, which together the child has heard from his immediate ancestors and seen in the culture so often as to mate the two terms and identify them: which the child therefore calls R (Lar’ recalls from a dream he had of working in a moving house): hence People R Matter, which might muddle itself slightly if the R be merely heard and not seen, since then it might come out as wr, or some like speech d’effect (not to be confused with "Drive-Ur-Self"), whereas sounding just like the word "are," the letter "R" works O.K. to mean "equals." But what bugs Larry is some half-received words themselves or emotion afoot in Mayn’s friendly chat, that the way Mayn’s diverse informations have been given is telling Lar’ two things at once on separate but equal machines-like, you cain’t luck into both at once ‘cept by a mode he has only dreamed of, and the two things are: PEOPLE MATTER; and PEOPLE equal MATTER.

  Larry feels one of these people disintegrate around him, it’s his too-young-acting mom, while around him in the terminal that he doesn’t travel through much nowadays living not on the Island but here in Manhattan, people hasten to get their train, and Lar’s humming of course at the premise that beyond this gone-to-pieces capability they will put themselves back together later. If Lar’s mom Sue one-on-one with or without possession took the court now, she might find the classic one-on-one upped by all the don’t know about her son Larry (though Secretly Can Come To Love) who like all the rest sees Life, does Larry, as backpedaling, backpedaling, and couldn’t Larry be seen by Susan as a divided and conquering Ewe-man Be-in not one but two sons to babysit (to diaper, to lift, to look into, to hear yelling clearing yare iddle lung, haroong harangue, to suckle mebbe two on two but maybe not) when by contrast she had been all but certain the unknown kid she looked forward down her front to seeing shoulder its way out of her, slow-diving ‘thout benefit of arms (don’t worry, it’s got arms, don’t you worry, they’ll come, they’re there below the tiny shoulders I thought; they’ll come, they’re there), was the one baby that she wanted and the only one, she said.

  ***

  Yet a Wide Load—to pick up Mayn’s words—a Wide Load coming out is what Larry believes he was: because, though no hysterect Sue (unlike her friend Lucille who, perhaps since she rec’d her hysterectomy right after an abortion, never blamed her hysterectomy on the size of her by then eleven-year-old red-haired son’s given head at birth), Lar’ sure got the idea some
where along the line that the parameters of his own capital (though maybe all that was inside his head) split his mother sorely enough to sever a faith years later acquired by her through a book, to wit that the mother ape (read baboon), while readily losing interest in a babe of hers if it die, loves and tends ye a live one for all the world by instinct to not remember the pain of childbirth as soon as it’s over yet as if that pain through some semen of amnesia remembers to beget mother love like an opposite of the pain, and so the Earth grows more rational.

  Yet did she feel mother love just in order to neglect (read forget) the kill of Larry tearing headstrong through her? (We can’t blot out a sex flick of the late century in question, and the star stud’s creamy baritone advancing his own original pleasure-pain theory to the featured lady above him slowly centering down around his disappearing X-erected membership also baritone-arm cartridge.) For then Susan, if we now are even still with Susan alone, might after all not have felt truly mother love but only that the obstacle-pain was a presence to get past until she was sheets to the wind yonder and knew oh that she still loved her husband after all: but then only if she was still really she, like the century in question, there within our accommodating Us where many women prove to be like her with her very same problems to her relief at Grace’s Body-Self Workshops—and they prove to be like, but prove as well to like—for it’s Important, it’s Important, she found out and cried out after years of needing mothering more than to be liked by men, which was what she had thought it was all about, namely what she fell out of bed into each tense, dream-rewired morning of her one-time life, namely that ‘twas men she must needs be liked by, she had thought. And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world until some sweeter obstacle dropped away leaving her in another female presence and her within ours among other women she felt herself among, who had not seen the porn film aforementioned except for—in this wall-to-wall Body Room—the room’s "owner," proprietor, and presiding spirit Grace Kimball, who had, with her young, delicate, stern friend Maureen, who went with Grace to the film with a small party of Grace’s friends so that later Maureen and Grace in unison in Grace’s Body Room during a session of the women’s Body-Self Workshop in unison like an octave had the same things to say about the film—the absence in it of authentic one-on-one masturbation but in all fairness the goodly stress or indication through close-shot focus on her requests that a woman might Run the Fuck, though granted directorial close-shot she-focus isn’t necessarily acknowledging the goddess nor is it any substitute for, though also no obstacle to, that adjacent ideal of directorial play, and when you come down to it sex was viewed as bounty kindly deigned by the male.

  Viewed upon the permanent screen also of a Manhattan movie theater at differing times by such others among us as further universalize our Sue, who is Larry’s mother but has or had the abundant dark hair of more than one other of ours changing from angel to human and had the occasional though not so lyric or so satin ("onstage") inclination of a known singer to dress now and again in men’s clothes: viewed, as has been said, on one screen at differing times, the now syntactically (tapeworm-?) digested anatomical film above mentioned lived a little in the minds of some of the current women we have bothered to respectfully discern within us, as if we were each of them looking back and forth multiplied by unresolved dreams between let’s say the inner, many-factd screen and the moving color cinema screen in the dark movie house of afternoon couples equal we see in number exactly to (two for one) the slouched, sporadic single men (no female singles) and all like communicants with the light they’re shadowed by, which is also the woman on the screen, a Miss "Jones," making up for (we’re asked to believe) her long-lost time and multiplying it with the support of a small cast of players coupling or even trebling always into her one.

  The diva saw it with her lone physician one afternoon long before the naval mufti put in; and she dressed up for her escort in longish gray silk, her giant supply of hair up, her mother’s lace mantilla drawn across a high comb like a veil chaperoning her girlhood, and her annually leased amber Porsche glowing in the garage waiting to be driven to Connecticut for dinner at an inn (by her there, by her escort home). She was having an afternoon off apparently from some articulate structure such as Norma or Rosenddmmerung able to accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale acts but comfortable in another such accommodating structure, her relation with the doctor. This relation she suddenly risked later in the self-same eighth decade of the century in question. For, having always, in and out of costume/role/voice, seen herself rather comfortably as many women—not excluding the patient who treats her doctor to a feast of stethoscopic auscultation, she came one day to risk all that and without a supporting cast: pinned herself down to two, all by herself—though she was in bed with her officer (i.e., pinned down now to two women): the one who casts a quiet hand upon the military man-in-question’s tough and interesting inner thigh whose mufti lies otherwise draped upon a chaise as fealty to this woman who would later contemplate sauteing him the slick, pink, gland-like sea roe left by her brunchen-hearted physician of the brioche chamber the medicine man where medicine is the man who, like the French physician Piorry whom the diva’s doctor’s own idol Oliver Wendell Holmes extolled as poet and percussionist expert alike in rhymes and in the chest-tapped "resonances of the thoracic cavity," unites the dual languages of his love (does the diva’s doctor) in listening ever and ever for the breath of his diva’s heart in all its grown chambers now reduced or maybe grown (half-beknownst to him her friend who really cares for her) to two chambers— which are threatening to be (equally): the One who casts her fingertips upon the sense of his chamois-soft sac easier to know than what floats so unknown within it while the self-same sac she will presently use her very sex to find lightly arriving and kissing regularly and softly the edge of her love, his against her, sealing each time the lip of her; yet also be the other woman of her new two, who turns interrogator as if only that way can she ask what on earth she means taking up with an officer of the motherland regime that casts her father as a danger man and does his grocery shopping for him once a week so he must miss that flower honey he loves.

  But what good could her presence do her old father? She’s a Swiss citizen, imagine! If she flew home to Chile and they let her in, it would be on condition she sing:

  sing near the harbor that her voice teacher’s piano once reflected through a high casement window and, facing it across the old room, a single round mirror which was the pivotal depth turning the coastal brilliance to a sound of sweetest history upon the grand piano’s shaped black top large as Brazil, as the whole continent, or inanimate as the future and firm as the Latin her teacher had her study.

  She could imagine her shoulder blades where his hands gripped her coming up along her back and over the top for a while, and, dislodging the flow, thinking of him for a moment where he now was, down below the deep breaths of her breasts to which his one blind hand goes passing back and forth—and with a delicacy of blindness brushes across. She thinks of him at her mercy, too—or of him being asked questions he could not but answer though he had heard if not them, something already, listening in on her thigh (what? some political infidelity)—she would then entirely take in this crossed cadence and the flow which after all hadn’t lessened!, so that she knew she had it in her power to be made to come: until, having once again hugged this power of hers with all of her legs and a brain in her belly that clapped its high slick pillows, she lay rolled now on her side, happy, and heard herself monstrously try him with questions. Power she all but handled while she swept aside her ignorance of facts that whispered with dangerous constancy while she it was who now asked and he answered, and all the time she feared and proudly feared what he might hear of what she’s thinking coming from inside her thigh.

  Which is no more political than dear Clara’s exile-economist husband, just as English as a Chilean of his class can
be, quoting Chaucer or Shakespeare, or the American Emily Dickinson who has music but frets so—that one might Waste—what? those Days we thought unwisely we could spare; or the dark kindness of the Scotsman Hume candled by love and such excellent amiability that that depth might some evenings find itself all alone emptying within covers of a small and economical tome, quoting others of that island and time from some vast anthology of English sound, so that one would never have thought Clara’s love an economist laughing his tall way through exile private more than incognito (and "I would I were a weaver," he was heard to say, with Falstaff, and Clara said, "I would you were, my love," because she knew he said a lot of things to entertain her: to which he retorted, "I am your love, my love, ‘And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, / When all the breathers of this world are dead,’ " upon which Clara laughed, no only smiled beyond laughter, thinking how far her children were from her upon a globe you might nowadays just fall off of—upon which her husband the exile-economist sang some American songs in a Hispanic-Oxford accent more poignant than authentic, more close to her than foreign—"Love O Love O Foolish Love," "False-Hearted Lover," "Irene"—that seemed no more out of place than English rock groups with the drive-shaft twang of the Bluegrass in their coke-cooled nose or the drawl of northwest Carobama or new Arkansoma.