Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But, the South American woman asks, two days after Mayn’s son’s first birthday, in 1961, it is quiet in these libration colonies fixed between Us and the moon? because it feels quiet—the great torus sealed up, the cows safely grazing down the spokes of the wheel, individuals fathoming their origins in couples that were dissolved on earth.

  They chuckle with reciprocal memories.

  Why hasn’t she ever questioned his sincerity in all this? begins Mayn with a seven P.M. grin, he’s been telling her he’s actually in that future whatever he’s doing here, and the colonists will be doing their future farming under ideal conditions getting eight hundred and fifty pounds of grain per acre per day and just like the desert greenhouses on the southeast shore of the Persian Gulf speed-picking tons of potatoes grown with unsupported roots—vegetables prospering on Styrofoam boards and spin-off colors spraying the roots that hang down below. We’re maximizing milk production using tomato-vine-fed goats that weigh a tenth what a cow weighs but give a quarter as much milk which will be all the sweeter if you keep the billies back on Earth and inseminate by space shuttle.

  Why not scrambled messenger?

  The matter-energy transit works better with two.

  The two messengers.

  Not to mention fish. In a weightless farm where gravity wouldn’t collapse their gills out of water, they could be raised without water. Yet since we’ve got artificial gravity, they’re raised in phosphate ponds that recreate the food chains we’ve snafu’d down here.

  It all sounds possible, the woman said. And your place in it?

  Mayn had to shake his head that she believed his basic report. Fantastic as his mother’s presence, that fantastically had never felt (whatever else it was) skeptical to her son.

  And we in turn, like the diva, have to ask the interrogator (right back through our newly violated ear), Do you question the whereabouts of Mayn’s mother Sarah?

  —and we get back not even pain through this torture device.

  Do you question, we add, that she looked at him that day on the beach also to look over his shoulder at the horizon of the sea?

  From a distance the interrogator does answer now, like he’s at home or at some other end of our body and he is murmuring with a lover’s assurance, a superior’s shrug: Was there ever any doubt that he turned and followed her look out to sea?, knowing that come hell or high water that was the nothing she was bound to, irritated, caustic, and anemic, deeply watchful of the boys they always felt, and there on the beach that day setting sail for where her sense of humor wouldn’t have a chance to—

  —You mean this came through? but to even speak of her we need more of a handle on what she’s like, I mean wasn’t she involved in the War effort? the War was going to end soon. (Yes, she played with a Coast Guard pianist at the Coast Guard station at Manasquan, some violin sonatas and some old favorites.)

  So that to see what she was looking at, he had to look away from her, the younger Jim had to turn at least his head if not his sporting body one hundred eighty degrees around to look and see for himself.

  So must we resist the temptation to be judgmental?

  Yes, but mental even more.

  Yes, our body-selves will sing to one another if we let ‘em.

  So let’s stay here and see if help comes.

  What if she was waiting for a fugitive submarine to come and take her south?

  —trouble was that very soon afterward Sarah the mother sent—or told one she was sending—her two sons away, one to be human, one to be an animal (were these the same? the same-san?). But has a woman the right to talk like that when she won’t come right out and have a fight with her husband?

  Why must to be good mean to be angry, however, dear ducat, oh why not keep your opera light and save our steam for cleaning up the neighborhood? Pursue the provenance of your text and you damn well will find yourself in some Chilean household of the last century but who cares. Are you—dee dee dee dee—inspiring me to stammer more, damned ducat, oh!—sein oder nicht sein, stubborn boy, designing boy, your music comes from my heart strangely, too—unpack my heart, Roslein, design or not design—you’ll have your Hamlet opera in your warehouse with one great voice if not the two, but I’ll keep trying. Oh it’s the neighborhoods we have to clean up, you dum-dum ducat you, blares the basso rotondo, not the true source of your stolen light masterpiece, ya little bitch, that’s why I’m moving out of the apartment. Hookers on every corner. I ask you, Roslein, asking me if I’m going out tonight, of course I am—with you—though I know they are goodhearted, those women in their hot pants, if you could scratch them. And please don’t get depressed because your opera’s sorely needed and don’t ask about One More Hamlet opera when the real question is, Let’s Have At Last a Good Hamlet opera, wherever it comes from.

  The neighborhood problem (comes a voice we don’t buy or, having bought, don’t use) is potentially statistical, therefore reassuring. And it may be stated: What is the ratio of prostitutes on the job to potential prostitutes?

  Let’s stay here and clean up the neighborhood.

  There are more things than are dreamt of in your whore-ratio!

  The moment or phenomenon of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-old Jim’s sudden sticking in the sand on the point of falling upon and perhaps doing away with his half-breed little lust-bred bro assumed by most to be his real—

  —baked meat, dear ducat, bawls the basso who incognito rotondo is to sing two and only two performances, as a favor to his ducat, of an unheard-of newly resurfaced Hamlet opera in originally envisioned former bank branch converted to a darkly echoing Baths tiled with abandoned Coney Island landmark ceramics in which Hamlet Senior (father of the good news) comes back to life for love of his brother Claudius, and Hamlet-son (whose madness is supportively encouraged to work withm the system of Shakespeare’s mere working original) is reunited for whatever it is worth with his mother Gertrude both settled in Wittenberg for a season—

  He heard music late that night as if his mother sang to someone. Brad had been sick on Alexander’s chowder, frowning from spoonful number one. Alexander, free as a cook after hours, did not drive home to Windrow with them but remained reading and dozing in the Mantoloking cottage as on an island content that a boat would come back, though missing his cribbage game. It hung—the music—the song—Jim’s mother’s—at the margin of Jim’s remarks to his old pal Ted in ‘63 and later they discussed the possible explanation of young Jim’s sudden down-rooting in the Mantoloking sand arresting his fall all but his shadow upon his little brother, Brad, the good little son of a bitch: it could have been psychic hesitation, you did not really want to kill him and your brain bone connected to your stomach bone and thus held you poised out there above him; it could have been sheer convergent accident, your foot found a shelf in that no-man’s land to brace your ankle, an ancient spar weighty as your all-purpose iron I-beam; it could have been a miracle, Jim—

  Let’s exhaust other explanations first. He got sunstroke later in the afternoon.

  I believe you, the South American woman had said in ‘62 at this same Washington bar that the creeping, odorless, lank-haired, would-be hip-Western photographer info-scavenger Spence had just appeared at the lower end of, for the place had a higher ground where Jim and Ted were, that after many drinks you might start to slide from, don’t you know: I believe you, she had said the preceding year, I’m more interested in what the place is like or is to be like than how you get to be telling me the truth about elsewhere, if you see what I mean: all right, you have come back like a cast shadow of light, she had said—and he had known that that was it—but is it that you are warning us about that future from which you are maybe a reverse reincarnation, Jeem, or are you really telling me of a place that’s fascinating, where—

  for with charm to spare, he had expounded an actually wet oxidation process that heats wastes to 500 degrees at 100 times atmospheric pressure for 90 minutes to yield rich water yet a purified gas as well whose carbon dioxide
will feed the space-farm plants to supplement what our compound colonists breathe out.

  And the song Jim at fourteen heard late the night of the Hermit-Inventor’s last words with Margaret on the beach (if it was the Hermit) was "I Hear Music When I Think of You" as an unfettered sweeping, and as professional as on the radio Sunday night, only this was piano: and it was his mother and she might be singing to someone and so, as we say, he "stole" downstairs past the great real-copper Indian-head calendar, past the yellow sweater with the buttons, folded at the bottom of the bannister, and stood at the closed music-room door, his brother asleep, his father downtown at the paper, a sweet scent of tea-biscuit crumbs and, he could swear, iced tea—and he didn’t know what kept him from falling into the white-painted wood of the door he stared at and listened through, as if its oblong within oblong of molding directed him to his mother’s meaning; for she was alone, she had to be: until Jim, not wishing to disturb her with a knock, took hold of the doorknob and slowly turned it and let the door open, and let the knob all but silently return, until he could see her, and later knew he’d had a message for her retarded because it was inside him and could only be gotten by her not given by him, he didn’t know enough. Well, he didn’t really know at that time that she had been loving Bob Yard, who was comic and rough, but nobody (wasn’t he?)—

  —maybe loved only once, because that’s all it takes—

  —and the rest of the times they were . . . what? . . . lying side by side under the midnight sun communicating by profile—

  —until she said to Jim breaking off the song alone there at one in the morning unsurprised in the music room, Are you a fox with your hair all up in the air? (for he had been sleeping) your hair’s been dreaming! so he suddenly knew all over again that, unlike other people he knew, he did not have dreams of the night variety as if knowing replaced remembering—or are you a bear standing on your hind feet?—you better go away and find out what animal you are. Jim recalled the funny small moment as making him a little too young, as if he had skipped that state or she had leaned away into another.

  Which leaves room for growth. Which we know through him, but know through others. For from our own words when asked and even when not asked, we learned that we were as many things, live and other, as we were willing to divide into and be partial and patient through; be sometimes overriding yet only through leaning upon what moment’s Body-Self we could be like; or contenting us with being the marine varnish that brings up the amber grained in a plywood slab; in short we were relations, that was all, or the fork a baby playing with it above a rimmed dish of pancakes finds a use for, and upon raising a piece of pancake is praised by the whole family, oh they are all wonderfully there, and thereupon baby eschews the achievement, waves the implement above his head beaming and takes the cake off the prongs and flings it on the floor, the wide oak planks where a circle of milk stands near a toe print of banana: and these would word our presence if we needed to tell that we found being in the fork, the praise, the act of giving away the achievement which may be digesting it, assimilating it, divided by the name of the floor (which equals home) and the brown, cast shadow of the small puddle of milk-white telling us in turn all the co-laborings that gave this child room to breathe, some actual abstract, angelic disappearances into the body of a universe even Einstein plus or minus Euclid would calmly grant to be flat for purposes of love: while we, in or out of such words, knew only by being known, and became in our very own absence the tree in Central Park growing out of our thereupon absent eye or via our ear when its potential pollutions waxed shapely enough to make a tree, unless that destiny came out of us, an interrogator internalized off duty dreaming of the diva’s desert succulents and sugarless polio sundae under the eye of a woman at an adjacent table who must have known who the diva was but might well be a what-you-call-it, a tail, following them: and yet the diva feels she had been waiting for them, she for them, which the diva, if not the still green memory of her dream-tapeworm, far sidewinder gobbling where it went, great as a winter whale blowing the Chile coast, can’t understand quite, except to hang on to like a new stateless passport because she has to get through the wings of a theater that’s putting on an opera she is supposed to agree is unknown—Verdi daydreamed of it and may have felt it in his angry hand but hardly wrote it down—until if she can’t ask the internalized interrogator (for he had been that in her and he is breathing, we hear him, feel it on our silent voice) and she can’t sing, because he is dozing against her throat and they two are to be mentioned in the same breath so she can’t kill him quite, though he is what he is and his superiors or he himself may have asked her lone father far off in Chile questions that answer not words but body language such as shortened fingers or temporarily separated testicles: and so she disengages herself from his breath together with his cheek and chin, and gives in to the desire of her life and, as normally as if she were going to the bathroom to sit upon the John (though not like the new acquaintance of Clara’s at that workshop who according to Clara squats with her feet on the seat!) and as normally as if she the diva (daughter, priestess, lover, unborn mother) might "light" the refrigerator to pour herself some orange blood, instead with an art evolved by long unconscious history of need, of human hope to find the bit of courage to take the next barefoot step—

  —Quit the corn, we got a funky opera to put on, and the main actor’s traveling incognita (ha! ha! ha!) Speaks aria darkly hinted to be the great man’s fragment abandoned in anger when he fell out with a librettist on how to liberate the musical nightmare from Shakespeare’s edgy depth—real fragments of reputedly Verdi’s Hamlet text—eased away then (could he care less?) from Verdi by the young friend Muzio who toured Civil War America laughing all the way until they hit him with a tax (was it, within the larger inarticulate structure, a particular logical tax on Italians?) and somewhere out there he unloaded or purloined such sheets folded and refolded of aria and scene as threatened to summon from Hamlefs gravity of relations two triangles past and present pivoting wife/sister-in-law/mother Gertrude into deep, rainy par-allelogrammatic refractions of male poetry/love/power: so in Muzio’s wake were to be found unrecorded frontier traditions of some Latin’s wild horseless yet familiar opera—Amleto? Amleto did some Mexican-Indian divisible into one Mexican and one Indian call it?—performed in a southern Colorado saloon with, the story went, a mathematician’s daughter in the lead: and these traditions dispersed themselves during a rare symmetrical tornado in Navajo country in the eighties, only to appear as folded pages in a Victorian melodrama in New York not read but used as part of the insides of a prop, to wit stuffed desert javelina, its head and shoulders crisped with blood guaranteed by the naturalist wife of a commercial saguaro-cactus exploiter to be female human blood not shed by the javelina whose hind-mounted scent glands puzzled South American zoologists and travelers for decades until one of them nurtured an idea slowly northward following the javelina hundreds and hundreds of miles till in some wonderful dependency the tracker, feeling and at last smelling that she was tracked by what preceded her, knew so surely and doubly that she was and yet was not the momentum of the sparse herd ahead of her that she foresaw a moment when she would gain traits of theirs in exchange, possibly, for some collective mind of theirs situated who knew where, outside us all maybe, for as a system like war or love marginal to one eye may to the one next it be viewed center-stage, so will one day an immigrant cook come to teach natives that desert-fried javelina chops may bear their stuffing owfside:

  —chemistry that, on its way through systems able to digest its clouds and pellets, carbons bows milks and staggered scaleless explosions, so becomes its course it reincarnates mere myth into day, a coastal day in ‘94 when the sometime Princess was turned by the Hermit-Inventor of New York to an experimental mist, to be secreted in that great, once upon a time dismembered Statue carrying a torch for the elaborate harbor, the Unknown State, in which meanwhile at other places a brave lover-scientist Prince ran up the steps into Mis
s Liberty’s folds about the abdomen and the might of the virgin wind-cooled sun-heated breast and felt in him a touch of her as of the entire continent so prodigal in finding its way to the wrong home at last that the only memory is ahead, the only work is a change made of knowing you will never come such a distance again from your People in the West and must now only internally howl and yell for a girl who took from what he had to give, took love, then self-protection, then more love and power part pressed upon her then acquired till she flew away under her own power, not wings of a father’s loaned bird circling in the skies above the Four Corners of a universe: so the skies themselves seemed spirals feeding on species with no compass, no princess, no crystal monitor to fly it back to Choor or the whereabouts of the Princess to whom the king had entrusted the giant bird as he had entrusted her to it:

  —and the diva who has her part in many operas secretly picks up a phone in her dark duplex kitch, and because her totalitarian beloved is nearby is glad it’s a pushbutton and "dials" her friend Clara to ask her what she and her exile husband know of the sexual officer still mayhap asleep in her otherwise directionless huge bed or watching from some wonderful naked limb of his equipped with sight.

  For the correspondent-woman, who tried and tried to hear the bell that rang in the void of all her memory’s trained convergences, while she kept an eye on the man with gray hair and the young, intense-talking kid and, of course, the girl, who paid as much attention to the man as the boy to her, recognized in the fresh absence of the auburn-haired dramatic woman’s elegant escort none other than the man in the park last Sunday his back to a tree beside the interior road where color-fast joggers, like all the different dogs there were, came contentedly by, passed by racing bicyclists who though they passed them seemed to stay with them as if the bikes circled the same center but further out (yet speedwise further in!), while for her part the correspondent-woman had been going through (on her park bench) being stood up by a man named Spence whom she had never seen and whom she had not liked the busy, riding-falling sound of over the phone (as though it was his phone, not hers), and to whom she had given a description of herself so he would know her, assuming he would give one of himself (when he didn’t), till a whirr of glimmering spokes soared past like force sweeping the last of the joggers past—and the Latin man leaning against the tree had a visitor out of nowhere, as light had tumbled into its shadow, a loose yet tense type of man in a ponytail wearing a fringed hide jacket glazed with some substance, maybe use, who craned his neck forward (so his neck was abnormally important to some rest of him) speaking: but looking once around the tree, he never moved his hands to express his aim, so that the correspondent-woman, intrigued, forgot she had been stood up by an unknown contact named Spence who over the phone had asked her if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where the correspondent-woman had attended a women’s workshop run by one Grace Kimball.