Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But he hardly had time to be startled at that old monicker from grandma Margaret’s talk, it isn’t as if Mayn don’t know from his grandmother Margaret the Hermit-Inventor’s name—that is, the H.I. of N.Y.—still he is a hermit and he is an inventor, and "of New York," no getting around it, plus Mayn hardly thinks about his instinctive nickname for the frugal meteorologist whose unified-field weather got him tossed out of the government-funded concern that had put up with him for just so long, and when next Larry spoke to Mayn, Mayn found that obstacle geometry—"optical geometry?" Mayn hesitantly asked his young friend— "—well it would include optical," said Lar "which I have heard of, but it’s ‘obstacle’—" "Well, did you make it up since I last talked to you?"—"No sir, it was there in what you said," said Larry.

  The kid’s in his own world, hermit of the pay phone booth, private even from his apartment when his folks aren’t there—but Obstacle Geometry, misheard from optical geometry, can find its own way from day to day and call to call. And it warn’t why Lar’ exited laterally rather than through the roof of the booth, gently taking and shaking the surprised hand of the amused young blonde woman, while she feels that his gentleness seems overconfident though all Lar’ can get through is the words "You were waiting for me?" to her "You want to come home with me? I live four blocks down—" to which he, still one line from what his offered hand had meant, replied, "You probably live in my building . . . four blocks?" But she laughs, shakes her head with very friendly authority; has a shopping bag in which he can see a bottle of wine with a red cap (of vino, his father would say) and a bunch of celery, leaves greener at the top, and the darker shoulder of an avocado—so she is not a prostitute; her clothes are a little mussed, she’s been working; she’s not a prostitute, he repeats to himself waiting for something to happen, for Larry then regretfully smiles friendly to the blonde whose bra shoulder strap under the loose knit of her dark sweater passes palely on its way—sweater or blouse or whatever it is, and says, "Really, thanks—I’ve got a girl and"—he shrugs with aeons of masculine understanding in his sensitive mouth but she says, "Oh," so softly, "whaddayameaj??" as if she uncannily knew that that other "older woman" (Amy) isn’t his girl but only would-bz.

  As she surely won’t be if she hears Mayn mention that Larry cut short his call because of a ladyfriend, though, once more home at his desk amid the empty apartment because his father’s at a men’s group tonight over at Hudson Guild where they get info on loving their bodies and (Marv smiles) brushing their teeth, Larry thinks of the loaf of French bread sticking out of that girl-who-tried-to-pick-him-up’s shopping bag and he should laugh at this but all he can do is leave his mother-bought roll-top desk that he rolls down roughly every other night to cover up the neatness with which he leaves his books, pads, and a diary he hardly keeps and his father would never think of getting into—and wander to the phone to ring Amy’s ringing ringing ringing phone thinking Grace Kimball is entitled to her views and Larry is the last person to damn her new Open Marriage law that has had such consequences in his life, whether or not he would point out that she herself having first closed out her marriage never got engaged in Open Marriage except as extended sexual partner (ESP) no longer called Other Woman. But as for Larry, it’s the whole works or nothing, and, listening to not even a provocative busy signal off there at Amy’s number, he visualizes the blonde girl smoothly two-handing a record down onto her turntable and then removing from her shopping bag with those friendly hands of hers one avocado, one crisp loaf of bread, one long bunch of celery, one dark bottle with red cap, and he can’t think what except he is convinced with a rising mist of intense interest that there was a chicken in there, yah he is so clairvoyantly certain a roaster was waiting down in ye bottom of ye bag that he dials for a moment his mother’s new number on the Island and hangs up in mid-ring and dials Mayn’s and a woman answers with something heavy in her hand, he’s sure, and Lar’ presses his finger down on the cradle-bar rather than let her hear.

  That is, what’s going on at his end. Which is not only but also marital bust-up (read single parents’ divided homes, read Susan’s got a [read] friend [read] going through a stage, take a book any book, book equals read, but equals equals means, and since read means means, clearly son-Larry means —hence, equals, hence reads . . . matter—read Mayn because Mayn is "good people" (his phrase that Larry now uses) and People R Matter.) And what Lar’ reads is something he’s got to settle, and before he knows it Lar’s over there only a six-minute walk at the apartment of the girl who, yes, woke him from the longish magic of his call with Mayn, and to Lar’s mind she has now changed out of her loco weed purple into what he can’t see because he in his mind is animatedly telling her this dream he had of waking in a moving house rumbling down a highway in the middle of somewhere almost definite but it’s March and everyone out here is asleep as he passes, although when he lets the shade up to see the moon there’s also a helicopter silvering in on this wide load of Larry’s house that he’s woken up to moving (for crying out tears, as his dad says) and Lar’ can’t object or even speak, which makes the blonde girl in her bathrobe (but you can’t make anyone do something) feel something and at her open fridge door nod to Larry happily. Yes, she agrees, that’s what happens, you want to cry out or something but you cain’t even request directions, like what state you’re in or where it’s going, because the house isn’t only your house now. Except what comes next’s too private ‘n crazy to tell the girl, and he loves her, but beyond her waist in the lighted inside of her fridgerator he sees a whole familiar two-part thing/amenity that fades the second he identifies it as a telephone, well you don’t know what other people like girls keep in their refrigerator (read icebox, as Lar’s dad calls it) but this fridge phone naturally isn’t a pay-type but a "home phone" and thinking to reach and call whoever it is that will come to him when he gets hold of the phone and is ready to poke out the number adding up to get a result at t’other end, he feels the phone lose mass, let it by modulus be a piece of angel cake fading through mouth water, into the night-white of the refrigerator’s ambience, for hasn’t the blonde closed the door? and how’s he going to make sense much less have her like him for telling her how, when randomly turning away from the parlor window of the moving house in his true dream whose wide load he has woken into in the middle of the night, he finds framed on the wall a digital sampler stitched with tracks of chickens crocheted from real fingers if not from the heart, and framed on the wall behind the davenport—all of which keeps constant (as our wide load like yr mob’l unit rumbles through any continental region) bedded upon the great wide-load (house) hitch trailer (itself a long ways from the slanting Indian travois dragging the horse)—the sampler says not HOME SWEET FOLKROOM HOME much less SHOULD MUSIC PROVE THE FUEL OF LOVE LAY ON OR IN GOD ‘A WE TRUST BUT PEOPLE R MATTER (hence ticklable! it comes to us): and the girl in purple and her home phone are gone just like that; and Lar’ is at least left with the current obstacle to their union, and he doesn’t want to tell about either the Two-on-One Quantum Regress, or the Dread Modulus by which one system can be turned like the tables to another, or about the individualized screens that tell Lar’ two things relatively at once; trouble is you can luck into them only by a mode he’s on’y dreamt, which, try as he will, he must know through refiguring it, while anyway what matters is that the two-thing-at-once is what Larry feels he’s been told in Mayn’s informations vouchsafed to Larry in a stream of talk.

  What was this information? And told how?

  for one thing the eight-hundred-unit, Mayn-mentioned, ancient Indian apartment house that was cut like its myriad portal shadows out of and into what’s already there under the sky that was hardly without would-be dust pollutants, if altogether less fragile in those days;

  and for another thing, that hermit from the City of the East occupying one of those eight hundred units for a few months at a time in that ancient multiple dwelling in New Mexico, who befriended Mayn’s grandmother or the East Far Easter
n Princess (who had been no doubt overly influenced by locoweed her horse consumed and her veins embraced through the softest of saddles), or both grandmother and Princess, for after all it was the grandmother that (Larry is well aware) the Princess saw herself distantly conjoined with in the glint of the hermit’s eye up there in his niche;

  and for a third thing, the odd economical conjunction of changed patterns of rainfall evicting the cactus-tough Anasazi from the wondrous cliff they lived in as if it were a body, with the epic cycling through all the kinds of locoweed (plus one) by the botanist Marcus Jones roughly a decade before these events and roughly—with an approximation about as useful as the eleven-year paralleling of sunspots and economic cycles—roughly at the time of Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption mentioned by Mayn which opened up to scientists the night-shining mother-of-pearl clouds fifty miles up in fact and the twilight effects, and, behind the cosmic New Mexico sunsets, the stratospheric layers of aerosols whose infinitesimally particled optical properties became a central thrust of atmospheric research which, if it does not include Mayn emplaning to Colorado to the Weather Center or to a barren rock in New Mexico near three other states of the Union, does include Larry maybe someday going out there, having been propelled by his elder new friend Jim (who in such an easygoing warp unloads on Larry these scrambled matters for Larry) to refigure:

  an eight-hundred-unit Indian cliff dwelling; the Hermit from the City of the East mellowing out high "upstairs" in one of those units marked only among the blanched sheer face of cliff and the portals of shadow by his glinting eye observing spiral wind playing with native snakes; then the rough intersection of Krakatoa’s upburst circa Marcus Jones’s botanical bicycling jaunt in those parts; and, in Mayn’s minimal maundering, the rain that did not come and did not come except in the pattern of its change spelling disaster to those Anasazi Indians who must quit their multiple dwelling and move elsewhere.

  Was Mayn telling Larry something? Marcus Jones the epic-cycling botanist ran out of names for locoweed—a hermit in motion, he was like the plants he found, a navigator among driest shrines to wind and sky, the rain that came and was saved in memory of need, and, centuries before it, the rain that for one mere decade did not come, whose absence plus perhaps a few enemy Apache scaling ladders made the Anasazi by the hundreds vacate the premises not questioning this edict of Sky and Earth: Lar’ can see it, while he stands still in a room that may be no huger than a transparent phone booth and he feels like one messenger in the world who stays put, but can’t take the next step to account for this curiosity of the messenger who is borne down on by the message, but that’s not it—Larry sees the lone pedaling botanist content though running out of names; and Larry, for the purpose of hypothetically modeling whatever may prove to be there, creates a one-greater space frame that can appropriate territory south of Jones’s dry run of floral Utah thus take in a multiple dwelling looking out for rain, and Larry creates also a freer time frame to please find—in the same great elastic year—both Jones’s botany looking out for locoweed while looking inward for new names for it, and Krakatoa’s upburst with its long weather fallout—so, with these model space and time frames, Larry arrives at Mayn meaning a woman envisioned escaping via some reciprocal rotation of a distant mentor’s eye into another story: evidently Mayn’s grandmother, who entertained him, had been in this history and had escaped to or from the West with the aid of some male solitary or other, and the rain that an unthinking child will tell to go away, go away, come again some other day, could not be counted on to come again yet wasn’t gone either, not over and gone as if forever after but was elsewhere in a similar hemisphere, the rain that left the Anasazi high and dry found new forms in the rocketing riot of Krakatoa’s eruption that rained magnificent nuisance far and wide upon its island and the sea but rained also permanently upward arbitrarily to help create those twilight aerosol and mother-of-pearl clouds noctilucent as the dream’s wide load which then in later life newsman Mayn pursued in the form of upper-atmosphere meteorology he occasionally reported on, especially long-range decay factors though even with his own normal quota of two evolutionarily-rather-small-lungs (chest expansion be damned) he’s hardly on intimate terms, he said, with nitrogen-oxide-measuring instruments (he’ll let the air-flow cylinder do the driving, and the reaction volume and the purge volume) though he is sufficiently cozy with Savage’s gadget aboard the ‘75 U-2 and is on friendly terms with ERDA’s Ash Can program balloons.

  Well, a little knowledge used to be a dangerous thing which is why we have always been in danger, as Larry’s economic mentor and interrogator said, always never out—but now a lot of knowledge is as much more dangerous as Larry’s twin-twain two-thingama-screen personal system matters more than where in the end this Mayn’s really coming from, or the true whereabouts of Krakatoa to whose foot Lar’ thought he should have come having imagined Hawaii’s leper colonists not wiped out so much as re-pondered by a record tidal wave gushed from the sky directed by Larry himself from a high, pastel sea-view balcon (corbelled out over the beach from an elegant dark hotel room behind him where his parents weren’t quite talking), or the actual position of ten-thousand-to-twenty-five-thousand-year-old Midland Woman lying patiently in Texas waiting to be discovered in 1953 under much younger Folsom Man and the remains of his half-wasted bison all of which Mayn had deleted from some New Mexico copy of his as a subtly irrelevant look southeastward from Ship Rock to that postwar oil-boom town (you guessed it), Midland, Texas, upwards of sixty miles east of the New Mexico border that in ‘53 made it onto the Digger’s Map of Ancient Time though all that Midland Woman gave was her good head, long and delicate, small-toothed so Lar’ imagined beneath the unthinkably deep-set eyes of her precious skull a glistening tongue that could do what his mother Susan could with hers—a big thing with Lar’!—fold it to a long-tubed music-flower yet flute the edges of this scrolled and folded pipe—what no one else in the world would do.