Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But did Mayn have to know how reincarnation worked in order to believe in it, Larry asked from a midtown pay booth. Mayn laughed: no, not in either case. Either case? Yes: regular and special reincarnation. Oh, "special" is the "something else" you mentioned the other day. Right, Mayn laughed and Larry didn’t, and Mayn said Larry might take him too seriously. "Did anyone ever tell you that?" Mayn was asked and said, Well, yes—once upon a time his grandmother. "Well," said Larry, "some people feel a lot older than they are, maybe hundreds of years older." Both men found this amusing and upon checking each other out found that getting out of shape had occurred to both of them, Larry thinking of his father who complained about not having time to work out, Mayn of himself, and Larry of Mayn, who was in hard if heavyish shape if he didn’t ponder or talk about it overly, and worked out. Mayn heard himself say: "I guess I had to first believe in an old medicine man’s turning into a cloud when his time came, in order to then figure out how he did it." "He had a reason you said—he wanted to make that trip." "That post-mortem junket," said Mayn, shaking his head. "So what age was the cloud he turned into?" asked Larry, as if the answer might yield data for further steps. "Have to figure it was a newly formed cloud," said Mayn, reckoning not uncomfortably that he was out of his depth, but remembering, then, with a wrench (or a rake and a half! or a shot of sheer void—the waste and pomp of the thank God unvoiced inside-the-mind travel!), a fact he then had only the shape of: "so travel keeps you young, kid." "But," said Larry, "he changed before he went away on his trip."

  Which gave them both pause, and Mayn heard the doorbell go and said he had to hang up—but Oh one other thing, Larry—but was it from Anasazi or from Hermit or straight from Margaret, through whom the others came down to him?, and pondering this irrelevancy, he lost the thing about light again, but it was about light . . . "had it and lost it, Larry—got a visitor ringing the doorbell." "From outer space," said Lar’ like he believed it in theory, and laughed somehow convincingly, and Mayn knew he worried about the boy, about Larry; and at that instant he felt he was saying the words that Larry said to him, "I’ll tell you about special reincarnation someday, Jim." "Thanks, kid—what I couldn’t quite recall was about light being associated with weather masses just as much as temperature which we all know causes things to get moving." "But Jim I always think you know more than you’re saying." "Thanks," said Mayn, "that’s a power I have no control over; I often had that feeling about the Anasazi medicine man." "But he’s dead, I gather." "That’s what I liked about him—none of that regular reincarnation business for him." Mayn told Larry to take care of himself. Larry thanked him as the dime ran out into a recorded voice like the average of mortality itself and Mayn thought that he loved Larry—as a son, a friend, and some further way that brought to mind a separation between the astronaut and his traveling salesman’s life-support overnight case. He thought of Dickens—he had once read David Copperfield and remembering the sea in that book with all the light that must have gone into it lidded away from our eyes at some point of death in the book—who died?—and almost immediately upon opening his front door commenced talking about it.

  Well, he Jim unlike the Anasazi Healer warn’t especially wise—let a goodish marriage go—were a but-average dad and left his own son on subway one Sunday who turned up identical and eirdly unworried on platform of next station—yet like the Anasazi, Jim wasn’t specially watchful for here’s a limit even among the most official of vigilantes to how much contrail (read control, too) you can lay on the falling sphere of the world, yours, ours. Yet one hour later, by some token (read totem, too) falling controlled downward to ground zero of multiple dwelling (read dwelling-quoia) with wonderful scientist girl movie fanatic who holds her humidity and dryness in seductive suspension when they have to interrupt a quick, passionate discussion of two-week-Europe-package-for-two, for they enter elevator already occupied by two western-rawboned ladies powerfully enthused having come from a group session elsewhere-san in building ("She gives you hope"—"She lets you give it to yourself’ ‘—"I’m not sure about the masturbation; I mean"—"What it does to your expectations—" "No, it’s really pretty boring, isn’t it? But she’s very funny"—"How we look for subjugation—" "But are carbohydrates really the same as romantic love?"—"She didn’t say they were" "She’s so alive, she probably gets mad but when she does she puts her hand on your wrist, I mean Maureen got her mad once I think and she turned to her and put her hand on her wrist, body contact, eye contact, and said whatever

  she said without putting her down, but Grace is so alive that the last time after I left I sort of couldn’t imagine what it was like with her, you know what I mean?"—"Yeah, you’re saying a lot of things fast, you know. The South American woman really doesn’t dig Lincoln"—"Lincoln’s sweet"—" No no"—"Shit, man!"—"I mean, it’s a real honest-to-God workshop! We work!" "Sue, did you say’God’? It’s 1977!"), . . . he was made to remember that watchfulness according to the Anasazi healer was a mark of reincarnality or its yearning at any rate, which was ultra-slow-beating to tease the mortality that set him apart (and by centuries) from his people who had all gone on to other things depending, Mayn guessed, on what they watched most watchfully until a luminous javelina behind replete with scent-gland system or, say, a jojoba bush beaned with commercial possibilities ranging from shampoo through fry oil and engine softener to a standing reserve of fuel which that little hustler Spence had doubtless heard might do in sinisterly minute platelets for a future generation of renewable missiles—or a hundred other living identities—would imprint their current essences on some supple mid-grid of opiate-receptor molecules that were the immortal genes’ message bearers, as, that zoometeo-rological night the Navajo Prince took off in pursuit of his beloved, his mad mother’s return to life and lung matrixed ever afterward on each downcoming and upgoing weather in that part of the world (Larry’d tell us how that phenomenon was managed!), and one watcher might return as a javelina’s behind, another as a jojoba bean with a solid-missile future, another as a function of some old wind demon if you’d been watching for it as it breezed in and out of town, or some poor gal’s head at childbirth when, say, her unhappy marriage doesn’t quite leave her thoughts even during labor (though you could be a kid in the next room doing its ancient-Mesopotamia homework where when the gods disappeared upstairs to have at each other or just rest—or maybe economized by becoming Us), the weather was caused by demons and omens and dreams of void-like absences which are early unidentified forms of low-pressure zone, though if James Mayn, his once-heavy life delegated, along with such weathers as leaving and arriving, to those growing relations in and out of him busily at rest and medium cool ‘bout the "we" of it or the "they" so long’s the plural obtains and don’t for the time being bother Jim or James how far these relational structures (articulate and/or blessedly non-so) are something he’s in, since evidently they are as well in him, if James Mayn (we say) had done the regular reincarnation trip he’d have gone for someone he knew so little about that there would be plenty of room for initiative as with the Navajo Prince who suspended his studies of God knows what all to chase after—

  —the new friend Larry, as Mayn looked ahead to their next discussion, concerned Mayn, he definitely concerned him; for they had got each other into troubles best left to dream, especially if like Mayn you didn’t ever "have" dreams to the best of your—

  —while Mayn, impatiently waiting for the next talk with Larry though not getting in touch with Larry, felt that a century had passed between now and the time when he had known more than he knew and had consigned it to some curving-away-from-him (might’s-well-be-movin’) track in the sky of his private fall away from hometown and from the muted melodrama back there, or six centuries he smiles, hearing some old beginner’s logic of yarrow leaves with now in year ‘77 of his own century in question the forty-nine yarrow stalks introduced to him at a sunset swim-party (at a blue, skylighted pool on the thousandth floor of some quick(-lime)-rise multiple dwellin
g serving tequila sunsets and cucumber prods) by a seventy-five-year-old real-estate executive as the right and traditional way to "drop" an I Ching: for what he heard was himself, on a day in April or May of ‘46 soon after the Hermit-Inventor supposedly died to be supposedly supplanted by his nephew, knowing without ever having been taught what a tea steeped in yarrow leaves was drunk for by Indian women: and Margaret, or for that matter the East Far Eastern Princess, had been the pregnant one, not Jim’s mother: and that was why she had to get away from the Navajo Prince or she would never get away: and, with spiral weathers, or some genuine obstacle to all this void in the form of a preciously durable friendship with his grandmother, Jim had put away for the future’s rainy week which in the controlled environs rotated for gravity’s sake between Moon and Earth was never to come unless the controlled population voted rain, a marvelous if broken train of thought, if not in a class with the special reincarnation that he knew in his bones (the rest of him stored in that radiant, rumored mountain fed by the minute Pressure Snake of the South) that Larry had or was about to eerily come up with—whereby, O.K., if Margaret was pregnant when she departed her Navajo community in ‘94, then Jim’s mother by some law of non-coincidence was not the pregnant one when she invited the New Jersey sea to take her away from it all in ‘45; but Sarah, it had been firmly speculated, would never have killed herself pregnant. Therefore?

  Answer: at least half a generation of falling forward toward the horizon—leaving town as his mother told him to, though then it was she who did the leaving, if only first. (And are the first to leave like the first to arrive?) He heard his little brother play a sad thing on the piano haltingly and realized he hated his mother for good reason, while loving her unknown thinking yes, in a piece she played of . . . "Schumann" (Braddie called, looking up and down from his music to the keys and back as if one or other would get away from him if they didn’t stay close), Braddie her love child played it with beginner’s skills—in an always somewhat energy-inefficient sound-escaping home, out of which Jim was often coming, often starting, hearing things, well little more than basic equipment sliding/shifting/rattling around in him, voices as unreal as Miss Myles’s "You’re a brave person, Jim; this has made you grow up fast; tragedy does that; we can’t always pick the pace at which" . . . or words to some effect when Jim wasn’t being brave at all, but dwelling upon Anne-Marie’s breasts which he had just the day before touched in daylight and for a time thinking there really had been a Hermit-Inventor, that is in the Anasazi sense, and so there had been an Anasazi healer give or take a few prescriptions immortal enough not to have expired after several centuries, though smart ideas can get passed on for a long time and still apply, even if saying the thing in French compelled the mother, then, to say to Braddie in Jim’s hearing that the piano was to the orchestra what the individual was to the mass except the orchestra was better than the mass. But, asks the interrogator so long quiet as to have been legally absent (though always in the wings, his own, and more than in the wings, indeed in the feelings of all these relations circulating like money but also like Grace Kimball so clear about history being written yea razored on the male’s ever-’vailable tabula the female doormat that her power has been to be known and used changing in the imitable warmth of her own that multiplies in lives of women and men where she might be as invisible and inaudible as a spirit that reduces surplus though vulnerable always if not quite ready—for she’s a monologuist—to the blunt male word working at its insidious, non-leaderly worst, in interrogation’s interrogatory, But) were you, about your maternal parent’s embarcation into the unknown not at least as curious as Pearl ("statuesque" but only "-esque") Myles who may have lost her job through inquiries about the abandoned rowboat and the lack of a traditional-type suicide note, i.e., about the How of Sarah’s exit? Or did you clandestinely check on the time-distance odds of her meeting the lofty waterspout reported nosing the ocean near the Barnegat seafront between Mantoloking and Point Pleasant that afternoon appearing so unusually free of its normal thundercloud source a mere-mile-high cumulo-nimbus from which it funneled down to vacuum the bright-foaming salt scallops of whitehorse whitecaps the afternoon she "went"? (Answer at once not only for yourself in the usual rousingly dubious way but up front for all of you—and oh yes are we as history-buffers expected to swallow as mere coincidence a modest interest in weather work in later life and those earlier self-embedding weather trips of the boy-man’s extended clan interracial, continental, ranging upwards and downwards thirteen decades or more?)

  "You are pretty hard on that little shit," said Ted of Spence one evening in 1965 (probably), "and you don’t know much about him," Ted added, pushing some cigarette change toward the barkeep.

  Mayn would grant this, but not that Spence carried especial violence or energy around with him except as an alertness for profit. What Mayn (and, to the amusement pretty much of both of them, Ted) did know about the worm Spence was at least three things: that through alerting the relevant parents— one pair split and remarried, though not to each other—Spence had sold to a New Hampshire newspaper for $4,300 a photo of two evidently male Americans blindfolded with bandannas and wearing major-university T-shirts facing very close-up an allegedly Cuban all-male firing squad (cheeks crushed against rifle stocks, berets tilted except for one potentially-female member wearing an identifiably Pittsburgh Pirates cap); second, that Spence had sold for a greater sum an underwater photo of a free-lance salvage diver on vacation embracing two luminously dark and universal daughters of a Bolivian general against priceless ceramic tiles of (at the diving-board end) the deepest privately owned swimming pool in our hemisphere; and for a bargain-low barely-five-figures unloaded a dossier (he had first ingeniously "rented" overnight to a foreign "buyer") documenting a blackmail-and-(party-)favors network extending through uranium options on Indian lands, embezzlement of tribal funds, sexual action by civil-rights coordinators ("red" and "black") with pictures involving entrapped foreign acting students and a safely incredible pilot "map" (read project enterprise) to recycle mystery wastes on scales of such "load" and "breadth" and "profit" that its susceptibility to seeming in general "good for America" plus its emergence less than six months after (and thus in competition with) the killing of a President (on the birthday of Spence!) not to mention a tragic twin-miscarriage suffered by a prominent microbiologist right in her lab, caused the whole dossier both with and without its powerful abstractions to fall back into a regularized dump of history to be of a significance as uncertain as were the views of this moral orphan Ray Spence sometimes confusable at will with a part-Sioux part-Ojibway entrepreneur whose name after it was given him by accident he deliberately adopted under stress as noted by clients who may never have bothered to find out about each other, assuming such basics, nonetheless, as that they had been mothered and fathered and come from real places, demonstrable places, whereas Mayn (who amused a woman friend who pointed out that, his humor notwithstanding, she personally had nothing to go on except his testimony) had inferred Spence’s origins as "something else," a message not certainly aimed at eventual re-constitution in human language (read terms).

  But if this was all Mayn troubled to actually know about the despised Spence, the rest of it could seem to know Mayn, or be borne by him unknowingly recalled like things he hadn’t understood but recalled and recalled, the dreamlike late night when he opened his mother’s music-room door till he could see her and he had a message for her sort of dumb-in-the-head ‘cause it could be gotten by her not given by him.

  But what was this "something else" Spence was coming from? the long silently present young woman Jean (or to her parents Barbara-]tan) asks— who once four years ago in her half sleep heard her motel-mate Jim Mayn mention Ray Spence, a Chilean economist, some "choor" or other until she was awake and he, this mid-life athlete next to her, was the one half asleep —counts down through Spence, Chile, Choor (born into it?), and a long, white mountain that had thoughts if unable, at the drop of a fracture
zone or the pivot of a scissor fault, to turn thought into dream: so maybe marry the two, yet she could have sworn they were born into each other.

  Now it’s four years later. She doesn’t—he knows—know what their relation is, it’s as deep as friends for sure.

  He backed off sheepishly: "Have to think Spence was a snake in a previous life and didn’t make it so they demoted him to a human snake— except there’s no ‘they,’ is there? I’ll say one thing for him: he has the stick-to-it-iveness of a good journalist: he listens and he goes looking."

  "For what?"

  He knew she didn’t get it, but in his own behalf he could at least claim not to have read the book though he’d had its meager theory digested for him by his friend Ted; but they went into the movie theater they had been slowly approaching, as it them, with its potential images at rest in the money in their pockets, then in the tickets rolled out onto metal by the box-office attendant, images including one at the start that made you think was it mist or was it fog the East Far Eastern Princess got turned to by her friend and adorer the Hermit-Inventor of New York? For mist—whatever its uses in the vigilance of precise umbrellists or poets or measurers in Oregon and Scotland who name it, as a hundred winds are named, for their place—is essentially distinct droplets; and fog is a cloud of condensed moisture as close to the ground as the Great Spirit’s Four-Cornered Ear, oft free enough of wind to hang, yet if wind-moved enough, apt to gather more air to be cooled by the cold, cold ground as if the Earth were the sea.