Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But that was it. They didn’t matter, yet they insisted on mattering: but, to a man, they were able to place me only on their well-swept sidewalk and could not imagine any more than a jury of unknowns that I had come to their doorstep as if it was only one center of many rounds, for now I was also in another place round the corner having a long overdue talk with the roughest girl in school, Louise Agniello whatever her name was now, who’d vouch for me in some way more real than words—I heard her thinking at that moment.

  That was it. I was just an ordinary guy she remembered liking; that is, part of life’s untouched potential, Jim.

  But these people, one now breaking through into the dingy, dim vestibule, made me matter, when all I had wanted was a few words with one of them —or did I, now? And, expecting to see in the corner of my eye the light turning round and round like a lighthouse on the roof of a squad car closing fast to double-park hopefully at a scene of perpetration, I heard a whirring close to me and knew it by a foreknowledge of what I later knew there was no getting round, and I made my move toward the outer door calling to the loved figure opening it, "All I want—" as the loved figure replied as she was joined and half dragged inside by the father, not as if I was exactly covering them (right?), "Go ahead and tell him." And I heard my name and a clank behind me, and knew it was a bike leant against a car, and, at the same time as my name, the father saying, "I’ll talk to him, I’ll talk to him." But he’d already sent me the messages: sent them with my help between playground fence and newspaper store whose proprietress had phoned him the info he’d kept from his daughter until just now; sent me the messages with the help also of his future son-in-law. For Kallman was here, his hands came down upon me like the /^meditation that I claimed later to no avail, for they narrowed the scope of my arms and hands (his too), dropping my right hand into my jacket pocket; so as we fell together I could do nothing but, first, gripping Mrs. Erhard’s pistol, hold it away from me inside my pocket; and then, hearing Miriam shout, "You’re an asshole, George," as her father ripped her dress, I saved my leather pocket by lifting the pistol up out of it and touching it off like pricking a balloon, firing wildly at her father who was tugging at her from behind the glass-paned front door, with a City inspection sticker on the upper right corner and a cardboard cup sailing down half empty from someone’s window to hit me cheek and roll away with great commotion where I lay trying to recall where I was, and what was important, my right hand alone on the sidewalk hurting like a tooth with a terrible cavity, my arms not held now but without value, Jim, like I had always been close to marginal and now was for good. But I heard a voice saying "Miriam" more than once and a voice saying, "Blow in my ear"; and I knew that whoever those warm words had been said to, the voice was mine and I must become its breath, wherever you are, Jim. And I got to stop thinking there’s what was and what will be, and start thinking there’s a story in between.

  Who are we, then, Jim?—you to come here with something to tell us or more like a thing you would get out of me, when we were in connection all the time by colloidal particles. They won’t tell you. Don’t ask. Don’t ask and then maybe they will tell you. The bad raps. The lawyers who didn’t show, the lovers who were too prompt, the lawyers who overdid it in court. The say-so of some mouth in a bar at two in the morning, circumstantial hearsay that helps get you eight to twenty if you can believe in it. The guy who came back to his old apartment because he had been in love there and they hadn’t changed the locks and a new tenant was there and he scared her to death and stole some money and some grass. The guy who could hear such fine and delicate sounds that nobody believed anything he said. The woman who was in a holdup in a supermarket and didn’t remember all that she had had in her pocketbook that had been taken off her until the perpetrator came to her home, and ate an avocado before exacting one long desperate kiss from her.

  I have looked for the things that endure and recur, what rules hold firm, and in Foleynomics have urged landscape gardening within the walls where you can see it.

  When I engaged the Chilean economist in conversation never guessing he had an Irish name, I was pushing a broom and had heard someone say behind me, "Nobody comes to see Foley," which was because I told them not to, being in a large enough communication to do without visitors as well as the vending machines that line the walls. I know distances. Down the gallery I hear a message; it’s six snores and four dream-curses off, and one astral projection from here to New York down hairpin parkways that throw you always back. And the message is no less margin than are visitors, but it has been passed to Efrain by the man the Chilean came first to visit who was never Efrain’s friend until a week before Efrain, who had lost good time he thought in the Box where he had nursed one and a half busted ribs for curtaining his cell and expected his parole to be held up a month at least, unexpectedly was released from here as if his recent Box time counted: which wasn’t the newsbreak you were after (smile) when first you joined us, for you named, bless you, space-time’s Colloidal Unconscious, having half-sensed its power in yourself and homed on another center of it, where you know at last what no one else knows—not Miriam’s father who looks for her at twilight in garbage can after garbage can of chicken limbs and leftover wordburgers of our nation’s half-read magazines, and is not sufficiently developed to get through to me; and not even the red-headed black kid who helped me ritually drown the kid from parochial school with white eyebrows: he, not Miriam, is the one I think of, with true guilt never spoken, never stood up for in court, for after what we did to him at camp that kid never slept again, so great was his fear confronted with the dividing and dividing particles of air he had such a quick concept of, there under the float, but no inner resources to find multiplied in connections among all our minds; and so some nights, when Miriam joins Larry, and, however good and friendly you’ve been, you merge with Spence, and the Chilean economist’s wife imperils her own husband-mate by enlisting his brother who while in Philadelphia sees not only an opera star’s recital but that lady’s dangerous paramour visit some old, ill printer who answers, "Very possible," to each query and returns wisely to firmer ground, which is that a female relative by marriage once put Andrew Jackson everlastingly in her debt by ordering for him in a tavern a radical if not quite borderline-toxic colloid to allay if not suspend his dyspepsia (if not his desire) but, too, his hunt for her beloved who sat back in the shadows of that tavern having let himself be disarmed by his beloved who later herself got rid of the darkly engraved pistol not by throwing it into the river they had both seen from end to end and on spring days when a woman and a man might spear the great bodies of the sturgeon running upriver above Albany, but by slipping it to a reporter-diarist in the shadows of another corner of that tavern, friend of Jackson and of his namesake Andrew J. Downing, protege of the Austrian consul general with whom he had collected mineral samples on walks in the Hudson Highlands but, more important, ideas of landscape and gentility whence to emerge as a great American builder and planter—on such nights, I say, even some twilight payload of a mountain moving our way to be deposited somewhere in this general region of the Northeast so that only those in active possession of Colloidal Unconscious will resist the bent of that mountain to make us think that it was always there and that we have found how to make our living together—on such nights I think less of Miriam, whose fate her father dare not take responsibility for, than of all those roadblocks the kid we scared must have had to draw near and bend himself around all his life. And so, Jim, for I am with you even if you have taken your message whatever it was away with you never in body to come back, we have reached a simple truth. If prison is irrelevant to the work of the heart, lasting time inside’s mere transiency, too. Therefore, it does not exist. So as for escape, who needs it?

  Yet if it does not exist, then it presents no obstacle to escaping. I shared this with the old scientist-man whose lady companion came from Cincinnati thirty years ago but came to believe she was in New Jersey half the time and he replied to
my letter that he thought her delusion was her way of being part of his early life. He whose work is clouds and winds, the newer rains and the particles of power in our atmosphere that may still have the wrong names, is all for my plan to exploit the potential of this place. But I sent you the F.E.P. as an opening cover to carry the real Moon rock of C.U. but I see it all about me, the Foley Economic Plan, and find that planning to build a home you may start by seeing you already got one built.

  I am someone you have told your friends about, I hope. I see someone take up a letter of mine off your mahogany table, maybe your kitchen sink; your window sill, car seat, motel carpet, beach towel, or out of the wastebasket where you have saved (smile) other exposes of life’s stacked-up words including (remember?) your little brother’s who when you told him he didn’t have to thank you for helping him frame a scenery flat for a high school play said to you his admired elder bro what you said you never forgot, "The rest is silence"; or my letter comes out of your coat pocket while someone’s standing next to you; or I’m in your mind and you are in prison while snoring away first thing in the morning next to your wife, do you have a wife?, a future one, a past? maybe seeing yourself on one or other screen of long historic time. So here is my news article, get in get out you said, the larger frame of history is nowhere, which is how there can be an opening in what is already open as hell I told the anti-Castro Cuban (who looked at me weirdly), but the opening I meant isn’t some escape he no doubt plans but the one snoring along a thruway through Old States, New States, to be totaled soundlessly when we all run together, for is not history’s frame everywhere? Charlie and Carlos I know say hello. They know we correspond. The guards in their slots send best, having heard from Juan that a Chilean prison cleared out all their beat-up inmates the day of an OAS human-rights team visit and put the guards in the cells, but in this joint there wouldn’t be enough guards to pull it off, but they have their daydreams like you who I had this sense in a dream last night do not ever recall your dreams, so you move ahead imagining there’s none to recall, or could the South American gentleman have told me this about you?—except how would he know? by the very fluid bond I have called "colloid"?—which, had I broached it to that girl-sensationalizer of life inside, I would never have shown was part and parcel of the Foley Economic Plan since it includes the fuller use of our esteemed visitors as well—and was that anti-Castro inmate right to wonder about you?, but he could not know you as I do—I asked what he thought of the man who got bombed in Washington last September, he said Letelier wasn’t far enough left to matter—like, upper-middle-class semi-guilty husband with extra-love on his mind—but it did not sound true to me, for I have read about the man since the car bomb blew his legs off under the car, and I have asked our Chilean, who knew him and I could tell respected his energy but would not speak of him—also in the Eyes of my fellow inmate the Cuban supposedly anti-Castroite I have seen Escape, for he weighs time here against the blind light out there of mere explosion. Won’t stand up in court, Jim, what I put in writing, what said in person, what you’ve received through being tuned towards me and what you’ve added, for we make our contribution I mine here and you who might here and there say it all in your own way better—so much for Foley.

  rent

  Rent a city, if you were rich enough.

  Now use it. Take occupancy. Put things into it. Run it. Look at it. Keep it from others if you wish. Sublet it. Inflate it and paddle it. But if you sound funny here as if you don’t mean what you say, remember to be serious. Be objective.

  He saw through the changing charm of his six-year-old daughter into the future, and he wondered what he had learned. He saw ahead to when they would come early to the park to get the best choice of bikes. But this time and last time he was renting just one bike. His daughter was learning. This time and last time they had come early to get ahead of the crowd in case other children were learning in the parking lot.

  But as for getting the best choice, he saw that at that hour you couldn’t tell for sure which bikes were better. A hundred bikes were standing against each other in the rental shed near the boat pond, and they all looked pretty good. Collectively they looked quite new.

  At that hour to reach in and pull out the bike you thought you wanted was hardly more difficult than to see one bike clearly from where you stood outside the door of the long shed. Jammed together to economize on space, the bikes fit together in a loose, extensive lock.

  He had a Raleigh Grand Prix at home and he bicycled to work when he felt like it. But he wasn’t going to ride his bike thirty blocks to the park when he had Sarah with him because he wouldn’t carry her on it in traffic, not even on a Sunday. Now Sarah wanted her own bike, and he would buy her her own when she learned to ride. But that bike she didn’t yet have she wouldn’t be able to ride except when they went away for a weekend or she was out of town during the summer. She was too young to ride from the apartment to the park.

  Last Sunday Sarah had told the man she wanted training wheels. He’d said training wheels wouldn’t help. Sarah went along with that. When they took the bike across to the parking lot Sarah was ready to ride. He thought she had a city child’s sense that the time was now and might not last. People might be too busy. The park might fill up with traffic. The bikes might not be for rent any more.

  When she had begun, he’d given her long, running pushes, and each time she and the bike had keeled over because she stopped pedaling. She would be about to cry, then anger drove her onward, she said he stopped pushing—or pushed her so she fell. Two Puerto Rican kids passing through sat on the curb of the island that went most of the length of the parking lot. They laughed when Sarah fell, and she cried out mumbling somewhat incoherently, "You don’t even have a bike." Which embarrassed him, while the boys only shrugged to each other and sat waiting for the next development.

  The next time she went down she got up and kicked her bike. He righted it for her. She flung it away from her and it clanked to the pavement.

  "Damn you," he said.

  The boys were laughing again.

  But his anger and their laughter seemed to help her take their laughter as applause. She smiled at last. O.K., the thing was funny. Yet he knew she wouldn’t use it to clown. For she meant to ride. With his help she raised the bike and he gave her a long, bending, trotting push that left him panting and wanting a cigarette.

  But there she was—up—leaving the last wobble behind her— accelerating—taking the upper turn at the end of the island, pedaling alone back along the far, slightly downgrade side, pedaling a little faster.

  This time her turn was wide but no one was in the way.

  She was coming toward him and the boys. She called that she couldn’t stop, and the boys started laughing again. He wanted to tell her to put on the brakes—when he realized he was thinking of hand brakes. The boys stood up and got out of the way, and Sarah went over onto the curb of the island just as he remembered the right words and said them: "Pedal backwards."

  But she had not fallen; she found herself standing on one foot and supporting the bike naturally.

  So now this second Sunday she wanted the same bike she’d had, a blue one with balloon tires.

  The man was saying, "So aren’t you glad you didn’t take training wheels?"

  "Daddy, you can take a bike if you want," Sarah said.

  He thought he wouldn’t; he’d watch her—it was only her second time.

  He and Sarah were practically the first here. His eyes were indirectly connected to her hand, which he held. But also between eye and hand he felt a gap, a nothing, and his gaze slid from one responsibility to another thought.

  To his gaze the bikes gave a collective promise. Bright steel equipment, moving parts beveled, balanced, cogged, and slotted, polygonal, tubular, ringed, invisibly greased and able to lend power independently. So in the shadow of the shed they had that glimmer of many motions that you saw in the spokes of the racing bikes in the sun when you looked beyond the parking
lot through the trees to the road that went through the park. It was a different road on weekends. The road with the cars was somewhere else. A road for bicycles and joggers went through here on weekends. It had been substituted for the other, and it went past the parking lot. It seemed temporarily unrolled through the landscaped rises and falls of a city park by the advance guard of serious bicyclists whose spokes spun in multiple superimposed illuminations and who always seemed to be racing those fine bikes of theirs, taking possession of what the city offered on the weekends, some with goggles on, and caps with the bills turned up, thick socks contained in striped shoes that looked like track shoes or bowling shoes, toeing ahead pumped by heavy piston thighs.

  Sarah looked up at him when a blue bike with balloon tires was wheeled out. She said it wasn’t the one she’d had, and he remembered that in this place they had the nerve to hold your ID along with the deposit, and he asked the man to look again. He pointed out to Sarah that this bike had a bell. She rang it. The man took a quick look and said last Sunday’s bike must be way back in the shed—he didn’t have many of the small bikes. Sarah said she liked this bike, the seat wasn’t so high.

  They wheeled the bike across the path that led off down to the cafeteria. Sarah said, cT’m not sure I remember." He didn’t smile, but she didn’t look at him. Distances multiplied between them and he was very far from her and very close to her. He looked at his watch and thought he’d like a container of coffee.