Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  first, to "O.M." (as in Open Marriage) from the Indian humdinger song about the "Oh Woman" with which the East Far Eastern Princess like Margaret the wife of Alexander was familiar:

  thence to "M.K.," short for that volcano-of-the-decade that an implicated young friend of Margaret’s grandson James named Larry time-framed (we’d already forgotten) ninety-four years after Krakatoa’s mountainous eruption with the also circa 1883 locoweed-naming spree of the botanist Marcus Jones and the rhythms of his original bike tires congruent to all surfaces through some adjustably cogged memory of any landscape, but also time-and-space-framed in an elastic year with all the weather work that Krakatoa opened up, the new twilight effects, the layers of stratospheric aerosols, the staggered New Mexico sunsets protracted sometimes by the cosmic-cleft synchrony the Anasazi healer explained:

  and from "M.K." (with its proven fallout of noctilucent cloud so influencing the Anasazi’s sense of his own resolutely non-reincarnational future that he, who in fact gave us our word "fallout" for a certain kind of mild and generous death, planned on becoming such a cloud—(at an experimentally lower level) the interrogator, dreaming on from wherever he is to New York, New Mexico, and from w/zoever he is to being a roving intelligence officer (naval in training like the lover de Talca, high-caste and broadly cultured in origin, individual in personality), double-shifts (codein) to "D.M."—which may be the Dreaded Modulus of Lar’ fame whose meaning the interrogator has temporarily forgotten, though more likely (since lives hang upon it) is DeMilitarized, without the "Zone," which has disappeared in a puff of once-up-to-date bomb that rules all acts to be transitive, hence, as a prepositioned hit man "offs" an approaching or receding contract, "disappears" zones (a "zone bomb") much better than simply demilitarizing, or witness the reciprocals P.M. and/or P.R.M. (shorthand), each derivable we now know from the other (like Some People) with or without we disappear the R (he knows by rote): he hence leans toward that "old friend" (as he puts it in his second language) the Dreaded Modulus by which one system can be turned like tables to another (though the Friend concept functions more really in terms of the white American males Mayn and Larry, himself the user if not proved discoverer of D.M.) by which the even slightest Nanosecond-degree Rotation normally needed to turn from one pivotal view to another may, in sleep or some alternate refiguring, be bypassed, so that, say, hearing what some bond teaches you to hear can instantly by Modulus mean not the duplicity of answers tortured (or not) out of interrogees, but a woman’s thrilling hunger for her lover in an aria betraying maternal hunger for a son sung by a curvaceous diva to a man in her life listening in a small theater, fellow national at heart who this afternoon arranged the release of her faraway father precisely at a moment when a news flash erroneously had him falling from the roof of his sixth-floor bayview casa de pisos—doubtless a victim who only thought he was her father, dreams the interrogator, and anyway in the southern hemisphere we fall upward, we already remember, which gives a lightness and unreality to events and whole centuries—and for a second he knows he is not dreaming but witnessing in his sleep facts and could move with that implicated white male, age eighteen to nineteen, from the either I or system-switch of D.M. to the twain egal individualized screens seen bothland, and thence to the theory this newly real interrogator can embody so why trace it as a dreamed-up substitution (occupying conveniently a position) in the way, which might be calculated for Through and Around, but better instantly (codein) shift M., whatever this constant scrambled or unscrambled equals, and, through the D. of dread and the K. of that volcano thinking through its dream to spread twilight effects into the air we see for years beyond, even unto the present, reach D.K.: but by now he imagines he is no longer himself but solely into the flesh of that other, de Talca, and can leave a Don’t Know, with, inside it, at secret rest, the knowledge that, like information shared, Don’t Know is the answer to two or more questions.

  Because people often don’t answer the question asked, Grace’s friend Maureen had been fond of saying—who had been all for going ahead with the "spontaneous light rape" plan (first man to enter Grace’s apartment after a randomly set hour is to receive multiple, painless, nurturing rape by sisters assembled —"like the millionth couple to make it across the Verrazano Bridge get an instant free legal separation," Grace joked with Spence).

  Spence himself, it transpired, would have been the man in question, that day, if the first candidate had not failed to ring and gone away; but Grace had called it off, and when Larry had come up to see her soon after Spence had left, she had taken Larry into the bedroom to get away from it all and to give him support for changing his life at least so far as leaving his father and that apartment downstairs and moving in, à trois, with Donald Dooley and his girlfriend not because Sue, Larry’s mother, would then be more likely to move back in with Marv (which Grace figured she was going to do anyway because Sue was too sex-positive to accept a pair-bonded hyper-romance-serious Lesbian relationship) but while men living together was healing because it opened them to each other’s bodies, an experience pretty much taboo’d in male heterosexual society—Larry was a natural Top, Grace was convinced, and had lately run a number on himself in habit patterns of misplaced loyalty and compassion and identifying with one parent or the other, and had faked himself into playing Bottom, when his father Marv was the natural Bottom, which was probably what Marv was going to his new girlfriend for and likely why he didn’t bring her home but stayed at her place (didn’t he?). So Grace had supported Larry’s moving out, getting into threesome sex and healing self-sex at a time when he wasn’t so sure what he wanted. But the upshot was that Larry had thanked her and said he most probably would stick around for the time being, which only proved he was still Bottoming out while closet-Topping.

  It was late afternoon of dress-rehearsal/preview day of the Hamletin warehouse opera. Grace and Ray Spence contemplated Grace’s body. She sat cross-legged, small, wholesomely rosy all over, freckled along her shoulders and with a lovely, perhaps yoga-related light that curved across her very flat abdomen. Spence was not the same person as a week ago. He told of his sense that he might be brother of Mayn. Grace told Ray that when one of her workshop women Lincoln had told her months ago of the Navachoor Prince she had recognized through her own part-Pawnee blood and her sense of that strange Indian’s centuries-old need to grow beyond tribal/racial roles that she (she was smiling like she really but only half meant it) had been him in an earlier life that nonetheless included Now and partly because of the obvious S & M dogging his trip in pursuit of the pale, doubtless Oriental East Far Eastern Princess.

  "Your abdomen," Spence said; "you could fly, I’ll bet."

  Grace looked at him and said she was willing to believe, O.K., that he knew what he was talking about. Spence was enthusiastic. He said he didn’t know really why he was here. He had heard there was a new type of reincarnation that could be scientifically proved. Grace said he thought like a newspaper. Grace said she gave Larry a week in that apartment downstairs, he was such a great kid but was freaking out telling her a Chinese woman he had seen in a shop uptown sitting on some old phone books was real and then he had looked through his peephole into the hall and there she was but with a little boy who looked Puerto Rican ringing the bell of his neighbor the opera singer but still he knew she was real. There. An ordinary non-freaky person. Spence said there was a report in the Mayn family that the young person who discovered a new form of reincarnation was doomed. Grace said that was masochistic thinking. Spence said she was mixed up about whether it was good to go along with S & M roles or they should be exposed for the silly numbers they were. Grace said that was male thinking. Spence said it probably was, and he asked whether the Chinese woman had actually taken the Hispanic child into Ford North’s apartment. Grace said Spence was into intrigue like Larry. Spence said Well she was coming back as a Navajo scientist for God’s sake who died in strange circumstances apparently two thousand miles from home you know. Grace said, "Unless he turn
ed into a slave cloud"—because a friend of Lincoln’s had said that was one possibility. "Well, his Princess evidently turned into a mist to give him the slip," Spence said.

  "Oh I figure I’m a couple of thousand years old," said Grace. She had urged one of the women who could not let go of her grown children who were living back in Chile but they apparently thought the regime wasn’t so bad, to go with her husband to Past Lives Therapy, because Grace knew in her body someplace that Clara and possibly her husband had had such a hard time being born into a previous life that they felt hurt and guilty about it and had projected this onto their children who they thought (or maybe dreamed) were saddled with this terrible load they couldn’t see was blocking them.

  "I’ll settle for just plain mcarnation," added Spence, and, they both knew, was surprised at himself.

  Then Grace said—but Ray, too, then, and simultaneously, "We ..." and then again and simultaneous, "We . . ." they said and touched each other laughing, and then started all over again and all unexpectedly said "We" together a third time but then said together like a longer effort, "We’re onto—" but stopped and said, rehearsed, "something."

  Where did we learn to do that?

  We were together.

  Let’s try it without sound.

  We already are.

  You rippling?

  All ripple.

  What time is it?—oh, two hours till curtain, but they’re doing it without a curtain.

  That’s why you got a light in your eye. At least it’s gay so they won’t be doing that opera trip.

  There’ve been some changes. The composer’s more serious than anyone thought. He might even be a crook. Historically speaking.

  So we’ll go together.

  One on one.

  Let’s be nude.

  You already are.

  With the women two days ago at the moment the steps came to the door, we were in battle and it was long ago and we could have been seen by the future then if we had known how, and we were on the move goddess-like and by a dark river that moved like an isthmus between partially congruent globes, and to break the cycle now in the New York Body-Room one had to turn away from that well-meaning but reincarnated group and be alone, and time collapsed like the Goddess into one self and another person was at the door with whom one could turn away and be alone, younger brother-going-on-son, maybe not yet a natural Top but a Larry.

  O.K.—and by like token wanting to tell about our life too but frankly not knowing anything about our life (except it was expensive especially our beginning that we didn’t know about)—we found ourselves in a mountain probably of flesh and trying so badly to get out that we seldom caught on that the mountain with this stumbling bloc of us inside it did not want us to, until our motion and the mountain’s mixed, like pulse, and, no less no more representative than that one life left at Krakatoa the heroic micro-spider not Mayn, not Ted, not Pearl, not acid-tongued de Talca knew we were at least as interested in as a Boston-born internal medic in live physics more far (worm-thread) fetched than the dark, flabby leaves we have heard about in some northern New England Indian swamp—spider so tiny that Krakatoa had not seen it, surviving ultra-privately under a horizon that was beyond itching and disease, just acres of ash and igneous and seismic junk ... we (O.K.) fought our strange way out head-first guilloteeny or feet first (we already forget) mutilated unit by unit as the clockless hermit notches his stick till the head (all that’s left) comes out and there’s only it with all its relations asking who that first comer was before Spence, and hearing what we did not know we knew that the man she’z shure she saw from her peephole, with one, two, three women and Maureen behind her, was walking away down the hall toward a dark-haired, much younger girl in a sailor’s pea jacket waiting at the elevator and seeing him like he’s her own grandfather, and we were born in that previous life dead and had to get over that while the mountain moved on.

  He made ready to leave in anger and doubt. He stared into the paragraph his still-prospective father-in-law said might after all be usable and he could just about crunch it in his fist so it would crackle like fire. Anger that Margaret —Oh God what was going on out there along the footsteps or railroad tracks or horse trails of the continent! Anger that Margaret—for what was between the lines, was there any curiosity as to what Alexander had been doing all these months? he had had tea with a Senator’s wife in Washington and she had asked polite questions about the Democrat and had urged him to visit Boston, he had deplored the need for troop movements after the panic of last year, she had asked him if he knew the poems of Matthew Arnold, whom in fact he had read with this damned Margaret who he was sure had been sinisterly changed by her visit in 1885 to see the Statue of Liberty before it was put together, her father’s strictness seemed only to indulge her, while Alexander’s indulgence and intimacy ("Ah, love, let us be true ... So various, so beautiful, so new . . .") only made her more—more strict! (the only word for it) and now, instead of her at last coming home, this damned paragraph from Cincinnati. His cousin who was visiting for a weekend watched Alexander yank open a brassy highboy drawer. Anger that Margaret, who had his trust, could write so outrageously intimately this account of sleazy commercial types in a hotel parlor discussing paperworkers out of work in Chicago, a rein(t)arnationist spouting at the Chicago Fair last summer, the future of ballooning, the next world’s fair in St. Louis maybe, but nothing this time to Alexander about when she was actually going to be home, though something between the lines. Between the lines there was—"Look at this darn thing!" he handed it over to his cousin who was at the university in Philadelphia, who said, after a moment, "But this Jacob Coxey who’s organizing the march on Washington—if she’s really interested in what he’s doing—I mean, a self-made businessman who cares about the workers—" "It’s sinister," remarked Alexander, looking into an empty satchel on the bed, "a sinister history, this slowdown coming home." "Oh it’s probably her pre-wedding trip," said the other, who had amusing ideas undeniably and was going to Paris in July. "It’s one thing," said Alexander, "and it’s another thing, and which fits inside which I do not know." "You want to go to Paris with me," said his cousin, "that’s what you need. Get you out of your books for a couple of months."

  Her father could bring Alexander the copy and seem worried to death and ask him what he thought, that bluff, bearded gray gentleman with a family mole on his jawbone like a dark stone beneath running current; and Alexander knew then that he was going to go after her.

  "Uncle Jim will be glad to have word of those union people in Pennsylvania, but how far do you intend to go?" his cousin asked with a light of humor in his somewhat nasal voice. He laid the crumpled paper on the white bedspread beside the satchel that now contained socks and long underwear.

  Anger—"Do you know that Mrs. Lodge asked me if I had seen any Venetian glass with that special exquisite crudeness. I took her reference as being to Ruskin and asked in turn if she found the living wage advocated in the Gospels, but she may not have taken my reference for she said God helps those who help others to help themselves, I think that’s what she said, maybe not, maybe not, and she asked me what sold newspapers and I said sometimes it seemed to me imponderable, but I had lost my wits because I felt she was telling me something I wasn’t comprehending, or making fun of me, and she said she would like to introduce a young man like me to Mr. Roosevelt."

  His cousin laughed and straightened his necktie in the mirror. "An imponderable young man. A vendible imponderable."

  "Oh dry up," said Alexander, examining a stickpin Margaret had given him a year ago Christmas and wondered if it was a real emerald.

  "Are you really going to Pennsylvania as a journalist, Alexander?"

  Anger at the imperfect curves and edges of Venetian glass, anger at Paris—for, yes, he might just go to Paris with this cousin with the square head and fat jaw—while between the lines and more finely still between the words, he felt his dear Margaret was in trouble and he didn’t know what it was and
it might be his trouble, and, worse, it might not be his at all.

  "A self-made sandstone-quarry businessman from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, indeed," he said. "Is that where his quarry is, then?"

  "I know not a thing about Jacob Coxey," said Alexander’s cousin, "but his heart is in the right place."

  "What place is that?" said Alexander suddenly and did not know why, but felt he was watched, no doubt by townsfriends and family who wondered with him what his supposed fiancee was doing between the lines of her less frequent dispatches—so he could not see in the great banks of leaves out the window anything but the future as if it already existed contemplating him with doubt.

  His cousin was laughing at what he had said. "Where is Selinsgrove?"

  "On a river," grumbled Alexander. ‘The Susquehanna, or anyhow close by it."

  "What did you mean ‘one thing’ and ‘another thing’ and you didn’t know ‘which fits inside which’?"