Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But Luisa holds on to those words What is in others yet has others in it: which later she’s not sure belonged only to the bend of the tall poet-girl’s retreat, but stayed in Luisa’s mind (in her, she-sees-now, doomed, though naked, lover’s presence coming to her which might surprise her or pass her by, acoustically adorned with his "You exist in the hearts of so many people"—that is, Don’t get mixed up in the troubles of exile-economists; think of the life you make for yourself though no one’s saying singers are dumb, "we" know how well you’ve personally managed your household finances long distance to Zurich where the portfolio info if not the buck stops; but also the way this gifted scholar-compatriot of yours, the husband of your friend, trots in the park, he is drawing some attention to himself and did you happen to know—which comes through as his quietly interrogating Do you happen to know—)

  "What is in others," she breaks her lover’s silence (hearing again Clara’s last insinuating word "Mayn," a name, Luisa is sure, interrupting barely her lover’s silence), his approach, his amazing gravity flavored with her refrigerated peanut butter and as male as it is more hooded than blind, more blind than false—so her breath becomes "What is in others" (her breasts softened each upon his chest then gently filling at the rub of fur—as she continues "yet has others in it?"—

  —for we, with her in us, stand ready if always on the move like her father even when he’s (as now, if not defunct by someone else’s game plan) under house arrest, stand ready, being but relations in the vale we genuinely rent though it gets smaller contrarily the closer we get to it—constipado we try out with the o ending, for the universe is now allowed to be too-badly male, and the female principle is considering having nothing to do with this pustulated uniwurst before it disappears into its own core-needs—

  —meanwhile, Luisa’s real; she’s no longer the vehicle for tapeworm tracks to get us from there to here in or out of the persons of a diamond-squint Ojibway medicine man operating just a stone’s throw from the Great Lakes system, or his New York contact in this inter-worm arrangement the sometime fisher-friend guidee the Park Avenue doctor who swears by wood fires and reads by them to drive off winter spirits while thinking often of beloved Luisa, now still more real: her that does not—in her lover’s mind, say—quite add up . . . this just plain naked lover adds to all else he is half half-feeling, for he thinks pretty well without clothes on, though never has been obliged to as it were kill naked, and wonders if we had here (in others, others in it) some mere fresh citation from Hamlet—could be Horatio herself speaking—until it crosses his mind bound elsewhere unto the unknown that naked he might be obliged to undergo death, and cannot tell where that thought came from or comes to, for he is not given to whim—

  —or totally to any one (the fur upon his buttocks might tell that to someone too late for it to matter), while not so knowingly for he is not by himself a poet he ships daily on the ship of state without questioning you know the Chicago-school anti-inflation economics his captains import to run the ship which lately has expanded its range though no less tightly compart-mented against local breach from ghost coasts it cruises multilaterally by theoretically lethal instruments only occasionally looking out a porthole into a life where this mufti officer himself will see here and there a wood fire, or its tiny glint from cabin embedded in a childhood mountain so that if we have, though not knowing him well, told him, we did not need to tell him, he’d suddenly like a wood fire right here in Luisa’s bedroom with its marble hearth (and could almost go looking for wood, send out for anything in this city) and at a moment when he finds he loves her, he does, and so won’t say (for now) the name he heard her (intelligently) say into a stage phone in her kitchen with its cold linoleum some minutes ago, he can puzzle that conundrum, puzzle and puzzle it with a lover’s fanaticism while not hearing in his arms Luisa’s mind say again the name from the phone—but now her lips themselves breathe the name, and he won’t seize whatever lead it gives, the name from the phone—and she runs her middle fingers hard down his spine, and he is quite taken if unprepared for the bumpy impress that is one track, one touch, and answers breath with breath, "There is a future in those fingertips—" "In America it is known as foreplay," she breathes back with an extra exhalation of smile—"Preparation," he breathes, and she, ‘7 feel it too," and part-withdraws part-draws him with her by the small of his back when he murmurs like a sleepwalker, "The motive of our preparations," as they move together, where are they exactly?, the bed gives off light through her hair, and he knows for certain that she knows Mayn only as a name, a word, no doubt through her friend on the phone, yet knows that she has decided something about this unknown "Mayn": Absent, intimate, sitting on the edge of her bed, "I know," she says, "that that little woman you said watched me is a journalist; don’t ask me how; I know," but where her absentness is now he doesn’t know, but feels her friendly hand on his buttock, and his toe, firmly in the carpet, feels waited on; and "Good," he firmly answers, "good," while, being almost in the ship of kind, he is not enough there to know what would happen were he to find his sea to be land and if so if he would crash and crumble and kindle, or would pass simply into another life.

  For we exact but what we are: we are relations. And if not always so perfectly where, yet we will loyally to ourself ever exact what. Between kin and kind, between blunder and art, between the first words of the saying the diva distinctly heard from the ponderous, shy, likable young American poeta and the second half of them, which seemed to come to us from other distances if not from no distance at all. And turning from the poeta (who was in turn turning from her) Luisa found in the three hyper-dressed men less matter for speculating what, say, they did than lumps taking up room unless one were to remove them by coup, by blender, by dribbling one’s salt on them so they dissolve on the rock threshold of one’s private house imagined beside the strong leg and ribs and shoulder of one’s father giving a nature lesson on a mountain rock that for small Luisa became a doorstep of a crazy cottage in the trees, far from all else save father and brother, and where question fades into question along with their interlinks: oh such as the one hundred percent inflation through the first nine months of ‘72 and how much of Chile vanished into Bethlehem’s pocket through iron from 1913 to the fifties, and what sign hangs over the sale in ‘23 of Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine, to Anaconda by the multinationally musical Guggenheims and who had told her lover she’s bought and sold and bought some shares of Voest Alpine for he so so so carelessly mentioned it as they stood together operatically approaching the monumental dirty green of the Statue in the harbor only the other day (who got herself together, walked out across the waters of New York, and took up her stand in the last century Luisa supposes it was and hasn’t moved since)—while her father’s prominent nose so large and beautiful and, in those childhood days, straight (not the nose of a frequently interrogated subject nor ever the nose of a drinker) and, in the days of her adolescent music training, without those hard-to-appreciate (you know) dark hairs creeping out at the nostril, is recalled withdrawing, almost funny like a Walt Disney cartoon she saw where creatures come and go and those Marxists aren’t yet explaining that in Disney the only workers are lumpen thugs or noblesses sauvages and you will no ever see them makin’ steel to make trusses to make a bridge to carry coal over and/or be in slow motion blown sky into wind high: no, you might see that culminating reality but never the industrial process.

  Did you mean (?), asks our (now old) friend the shifting interrogator not wishing to be indelicate on the score of sexual version, that, well, the lady in the harbor otherwise known as a one-hundred-fifty-odd-foot copper envelope without portfolio had in the course of this American greening we used to hear about acquired a warped relation to the one-time Guggenheim gig deep in Chuquicamata (a vintage Chilean wine) on which we have run a time-and-motion CAT-type scan turning up no link with Voest Alpine or Bethlehem (iron, that is), which does however sell on the Zurich exchange—

  —for
the interrogator, part of us as we him, can use wind as we while not quite ‘‘getting" as we do the concept of passive energy to process us inward while more and more as if with interpurse generosity accommodating the multiplicity of small-scale relations, as that ironmolder whose father had been inspired two generations earlier by editor Heighton of the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia and who met Alexander in Pennsylvania in early March and met a thousand striking/striking ironmolders of Coxey’s Army with

  The seed ye sow, another reaps

  The wealth ye find, another keeps

  : not that Jim young or older would know or care for Luisa’s doctor’s haunts—such sayings haunting him as "When me they fly, I am the wings," though that devoted one-shot-and-only-one-shot tapeworm importer, who got from Boston to New York years before the flying shuttle or even pre-shuttle flight scene yet stays young, has those words in common with Jim’s mother Sarah, as few would know nowadays besides Brad, back in Windrow, N.J., who might not know he knows, nor if it is a "quote" or a bone-deep gene of his long-gone mother: but in the midst of such outlandish matter at graveside as what Sarah who ridiculed weather conversation said once about wind curving, Jim easily retained a mystery he had already worked out for himself— that according to Sarah, speaking to him when he told her he’s going to work on the farm this coming summer not in the office of the newspaper, he would go away: "passed" away, Miss Myles even in a model obit could say—which, O.K., also retained mystery, if you want, and as with Jim and his mystery, or was it his mother’s, the mystery didn’t get solved and shelved or even lost, but got said: yet really just remembered:

  : we already remember what had been going on, the whirlwind ride in Bob’s first pickup, the unknown piner boy who got on and off but appeared only to be first there and then not there, in the bed of the pickup, though visible at a distance that didn’t add up and apparently not carrying the later missing evidence of thievery that was all Jim would report to Bob, who at first had said if Jim had wanted the gasoline can he would have given it to him, then shook his head and agreed that the piner kid had taken it, what’d you expect of them? (—but what did that mean? Jim abruptly asked—Mean? why that those kids are survivors; that’s what Bob meant):

  : we already remember, despite the red herring interrupting us as to confuse what’s the margin, what’s the leverage, what’s the center, what’s the fulcrum (to compound the possible confusion if not the possibilities, for the interrogator had tried to cut in, perhaps just to show he knew what’s gon’ on to ask, Do you mean that the diva’s giving her lover head while contemplating murdering him on one of the unwholesome nights during the degenerate run of the gay Hamlet opera-ette?, and who, by the way, is doing the script?).

  Already remember what’s so soon not here any more; remember at last what’s been here with us so long we had more’n enough time to see but now would seem to have been waiting to remember.

  Oh that’s crap, all that regret crap, say James Mayn and Grace Kimball in unison at a distance so that curiously they hear each other but don’t know it, a distance that could be stereo if Jim chose to say it as loud and long as Grace; but less noise betokens often superior conviction, where here, Jim, in a Washington hotel bar, having described the mourning of Mel for Sarah, heard dry colleague Ted "agree" you don’t know what you had till it’s over, and described the love of a woman he had experienced only to find out upon her departure for Hawaii on a bird-study vacation that he had felt stifled by her attention, though granted it wasn’t yet quite over but her absence was like it being over, and only then did Ted see what he had been living inside of; and Mayga, quietly or, rather, patiently and strategically there with them at the bar waiting till she knew what she would say and had the right moment, seemed then to say we have the time to see but we rather let it go, you know?, and then remember it, remember with rue, let the marriage go, then lament that, let the life go—

  —but crap, the fact of the matter, broke in Jim, his hand belyingly gentle upon Mayga’s sleeve, and as near to the White House fence as a trip to a window would evince, and he’s albeit freshly shaved and facing the crystal cone of a martini that particular very late afternoon or earliest evening (recalling a daiquiri his mother sipped all by herself in the music room before Sunday lunch once) the fact of the matter (having been, he feels, succinct all day, he repeats the words but hears himself gabbing, hears himself from an interior angle, which maybe is just the bullshit-radar often birdlike or snakelike sweeping the area, so he starts to say) "Wind does curve," but only gets out the first two words and will improvise, "Wind does know which way it’s blowing," and while Ted does his theatrically hilarious coughing at this, Mayga holds on to the spirit of the word "crap" and Jim suddenly sees she meant slantingly what she said and doesn’t believe you have to look forward only to figuring things out after all the damage is done, and he wants to embrace her there and then, and then somewhat untogether he does embrace her, but it isn’t just because he sees what she meant, and later that night, oh yes it’s about time (quips the interrogator) that this relation was owned up to, Mayga persuades Jim that the real indirection was his own, oh I know you you see, I know you, I am proud to, you understand, but I do know you, it’s you on the contrary trying to tell yourself what you don’t much credit—

  —and here I am letting my marriage go? he asked—which made her unhappy but not unintelligent because she will be at peace with him lying down or sitting at a bar or in a restaurant booth—with her going home to South America and "going home" with him tonight each has said to the other that this is the first time unfaithful to spouse:

  : which Mel never could have been, and that’s all there is to it: and while his fidelity to Sarah, who hadn’t loved him, survived her presence in his everyday life, though he became capable of passion expressed (in volubility) to Margaret ("I could have made her like me—" "She did like you, Mel, she certainly did—" "At least I could have made her love me, there was something about the shape of my feet, the front end of them, she couldn’t take, it wasn’t my lack of music and she didn’t mind John Charles Thomas, at least I said what I liked, no, it was me, it was that I was on the ground trying to take off but knowing my limits, and she was in the air, trying to find the ground—" "She was not," said Jim to his grandmother, when told, "she was not up in the air," and Margaret to each of these males, the husband, the son, said the same thing, "It didn’t gel, so I guess it couldn’t"), Mel fell in love with Brad for a while, they comforted each other, Mel told him please not to feel he ought to work at the newspaper office, and got into the longest talks at the kitchen table with Brad so they took the consequent years of Brad’s growing-up, it seemed, and when Jim got back from a date, or, once, from the most terrible scare involving Bob’s pickup truck, and once got back from the whole summer away bartending at the shore, there they still were at the table and the only thing Mel wouldn’t discuss was Brad’s (to Jim, dumb) nightmare of her, of Sarah, coming close to him, drawing bow across string, marking time with a conductress’s finger, reaching for Brad in the most loving way whereupon, his fault, his fault, he awoke, fighting himself free of the sheets to find her not reaching for him any more, or the reach was there but not his mom—but still Brad had his Day (as Margaret said to Jim one day at the cemetery), and Mel insisted Brad take more piano, with Barcalow Bran-dywine’s sister-in-law who jabbed the keys as if to position them, smiling, and, when she served as accompanist, could keep up the pounding and still look away from the keys and up at Barcalow in his orange-and-maroon horse-blanket sport coat that excited him almost like college colors on felt pennants or football jerseys, he got taken to the Princeton-Harvard game by the bibulous doctor who was Dr. Range’s main competitor in town and whose house Jim had taken to visiting unannounced not hesitating to go on in and sit down even when often the doctor and wife and sometimes daughter looked interrupted in the middle of something not too good, and the wife and daughter shivered on their stone seats in Palmer Stadium and glanced
but didn’t want to look at the program, while the doctor hollered somewhat embarrassingly to particular guys on the Harvard team, because he had gone to Harvard, to get cracking, which was a little like Barcalow Brandywine arriving at a gathering and beginning a little too soon to lead some singing and standing up with a glass in his hand to announce that he was still enamored of his wife after seventeen, eighteen years, nineteen wasn’t it?, years of married love (which was the title of a book Jim got hold of from one of his friends who actually had gotten it off a girl in the eleventh grade)—and once, to Jim’s amusement and Mel’s discomfiture, the doctor got unwound enough in the midst of the singing (for he—and his wife at least—did attend more than once, though why was not clear in memory), so the doctor told Barcalow Brandywine he had never liked him, and now he was thinking that he still didn’t like him (he burst out laughing) and never could understand that family of his either. But then there was Brad, right there, saying hotly—aged eleven or more—"Then you’re not welcome here because my mother was Barcalow’s friend and played for him," upon which all laughed except Jim who could have brained or throttled Brad whichever was surer (forget "faster"), and Barcalow genially told Brad it wasn’t his house but his grandma’s.