Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —but no, said Clara, resting her hand on his so he crooked vaguely his little finger where it touched the valley orbit of her groin, no hole but a glint of glitter she had applied to her skin that came out under the—

  —no matter, Ford North’s bombastic stammer was Hamlet turned briefly buffo, said her husband yawning; but no, his wife retorted softly, Ford felt a ray of trouble coming from that little bully at the piano before he knew why he was mad, and responded in advance—

  —like provoking a fight because you know it’s coming—

  —exactly (though a car blows up in bed their minds silently in Central Park but two bikes rented with the two of them hiding away was dangerous enough to be trapped for assassination) a few moments later left again, had hired a Chinese woman to spirit away the kidnapped child of the Cuban just escaped from the prison so familiar to her husband, he believed he had—(say that again?)—though neither of them as the cab wound past muddled old Columbus Circle into the older lights of upper Broadway believed the missing Cuban posing as anti-Castro could succeed in killing "Pin" whose Santiago security was in inverse relation to the Food-Employment curve’s Reassurance Skew; and whereas for a second both Clara and husband believed that the man Mayn’s leaving precipitately after the "buried heart" line had nothing to do with de Talca following him, Clara shifted her lap in some abbreviated irritation or anxiety, and disagreed—while neither she nor her husband could talk in a friendly way now for a block or two about the relation of the aura reader Hortensa (present in the theater) to the florid fortunist from downtown, Seiiora Wing, known to be a Castroist information service, who sat actually near a black boy with a large, somehow familiar head that was turned right round facing back so one saw his lightning-bolt T-shirt when Clara and her husband looked back and saw Mayn leave and heard someone say, "You all right?"—doubtless the young friend of Amy’s, Jean, said Clara, but her husband added superiorly Amy was a friend also of Mayn’s and had been escorted to Madison Square Garden by him on one occasion:

  until, easing away from their clothes, murmuring of the Leipzig Ring last year they would have enjoyed seeing, where a white web spun by the Norns ensnared the whole stage, they said simultaneously, "Yorick" and looked with humorous sadness at each other and moved gently toward each other’s welcome strong bodies:

  until, in bed, they disagreed about Grace Kimball’s doctrines regarding women, money, and the patriarchy though their minds were elsewhere, and disagreed softly as to the nature of Margaret’s Ghost—Gertrude’s, he said— What did I say? said she, oh! and laughed—Your grandmother! he said—he then feeling the Ghost was a living double Other reincarnating Gertrude here and now by some scheme divined by Shakespeare and kept to (even lazily) himself; she feeling (with her hands now, and while one sole ran up his hard shin) that the Ghost was a dead thing in Margaret, a dead part of her— Gertrude—Yes, Gertrude, yet "Margaret" was also from Grace Kimball the other day meeting a demented old lady in the street in Greenwich Village who had had to leave New Jersey, and her name was—yes, the Ghost was a dead thing that had wound and fumed and circled its way up out of Queen Gertrude’s ear earlier-sucked like priming pump, to recompose in the outer world to be seen at least and last as the trouble it was, and make trouble by just, you know, standing in the way, and by the way (were they falling asleep or would they make love?—why, love made itself over and over with them—and under!—yes!), and by the way, Clara said, he had heard the young fellow behind them say "reincarnation" then—but her husband rolled toward her so she loved that mouth of his and brought his hand up in hers, and he said he had heard nothing behind him but she said that was the source of his thought, and he disagreed, here in bed, and then disagreed on the issue of Luisa’s "My love, my love," not sung but called sharply {porque?—well, Clara thought Luisa had not liked leaving abruptly like that, but Clara’s beloved knew deep at the base of his own horizontal, tense neck, which he therefore asked his love to gently but firmly rub, that in that sudden light-shed in the opening of the double doors at the back of the warehouse theater she had seen de Talca her lover in difficulties, but he did not say this to Clara) and he also disagreed about their not visiting Luisa after the outrageously aborted rehearsal-quasi terminus given the performance in disastrous arguments onstage and, too, because Clara was tired—and getting out of his seat he had known that he had seen this reincarnation boy in the row behind someplace before—and disagreed, too, on what the young Prince growing into his horse meant, and the issue of whether all our appearances turn double at times so that in the botheration of their obstacle-hood we help oneself to find (but he did not express his disagreement here either)—to find ... my love, my dear, this April night when our grown children may be lost to us like our country, we will always love each other, true love born again all the time in a wild land, music isn’t it?, side by side combatting fear, fear, which we’re not so prone to but as, with sex-sleep’s congruent drug encroaching and sex always between them whatever they got up to, be it nothing even, the phone rings and stops, rings and rings, and stops, in some void of headtripville threat, until, passing through each other toward first sleep which is like the most ancient first love he senses like blood not his own splashed from some passing adult onto the face of a small child and for one flickering frame of wish sees de Talca turned into news in next morning’s newspaper dying as he lived by bad works though he could not have been all bad if Luisa loved him even as she did, and Clara murmured Maybe the real ending of Hamletin tonight was elsewhere—and he didn’t care to discuss it and they passed into sleep and the mutual dream they will eventually forget for they’ve too much good stuff to remember already, each other’s ventricle of memory.

  We already know what will have just happened next, Mayn’s dream in the Windrow burial ground (known as Maplewood Cemetery by people who lived in that town who would not necessarily know more about it than someone gone far away from it, say to name it). But Mayn and his grandmother named the town Windrow while he was still there in it, gentles the interrogator. But, we counter, she had already long since gone away. Yes, but come back, compounds the interrogator who fears what he can’t put into words, which is some newly arrived-at integral personality we wordwise help-ourself to.

  We already know what will have just happened next, but not what that touching new bomb device will make its dreamer do—beyond laughing; rising by his personalized gravestone; and taking certain steps toward the girl Jean through the night obstacle course of model edifices capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale unit-memories, a stone city built up rather than out. He bears on his very tongue words he will say to Jean because you can’t rely on mind-touch here, and you can’t pick your place; and he loves her and will ask her despite his age to marry him. But then he hears a voice abstracted in him of our very interrogator now more himself than once, who disagrees "You can pick your—" and O.K., O.K., growls Mayn, damp as hell and with a granite print upon his upper back’s mind and his thick-haired cerebellum; he will go along with that; and when "We don’t know enough about Barbara-Jean" is dimly pursued, But I do, spreads answer into the body of all of us —and, for one thing, she is coming from a different place, scientist (or, precisely, technologist), prospective childbearer, she would not lie dreaming above family graves making herself accessible to what traces be windowed by a heart’s half-memories, which collect right now only parts of the Jim Ash dream, but enough to go on as the distance closes.

  We saw the Indian on a wheezing blue horse at night; saw him come near and then there was no horse; yet he was on a train describing some diagonal through a land more and more settled, until there was no train—no more than the buckle-like silver money clip he had traded for money which would be the speed to reach the coast, lightning speed if the Spirit of Good Power allowed, to reach a place where, his beloved Margaret had said, harsh January winds blew always behind you even when you turned, and the rich, red fields of New Jersey were deeper than even the greatest planted fi
elds where he came from, where the sun now would be bringing out colors of the desert and beyond, the purple aster, the blue-eyed "maiden," orange clown locoweed named by the two-wheeled nine-fingered man who knew the javelina-tracking woman who brought strange written music to the Anasazi who didn’t want it, the dwarf yellow-wort, the white sand-lily, flowers blooming but always there in the life of the land, like the weather that the retired healer insisted to the retiring hermit might go away but never could arrive because that weather was always somehow in this original place—power, though sometimes without body but only there like a track, a good bear-claw track, or the rattler-jaw arc-like sunray

  but with teeth drawn inward

  or the lightning arrow reversing the Anglo letter Z, for these signs in absence of the thing itself meant it would come back in body as would some Abundance known to be in a big mountain and waiting and remote yet close as rays of thought that took him back to the isthmus at the top of the world that he had told the blonde woman of (for he could not help telling her) where something he did not yet understand had happened, to do with the two trekkers from that other world and with some air or storm that ... he was not sure, except that the rays of thought took him back as fast as the train dissolved in the power of his poverty (though hadn’t the money gone too soon?) though the silver had mattered only as a means and the sun graven upon that Zuni money clip stayed with him as certainly as the bison-tongue chunk in his pocket and a huge dollop of light that had thick-watered down into his upturned face-mouth from the night cloud so it sucked him as he drank it, and then he could not be sick, could not, but the waterfall dollop-tongue from the Anasazi’s noctilucent cloud stayed in and he accepted what had happened like new weather that came from new acts and seemed to help him go on east but both for the sake of the bison tongue and the Anglo girl Margaret, white but so deeply tanned, neither for one alone nor the other alone, he said to himself, regretting his blue mare but knowing life left death-things and was right: so the pursuit of Margaret? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself; the quest for knowledge-energy? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself to explain this trek of his over the—the landbridgtl the land-sea bridge! it came to him like one answer to how many questions. Yet he looked back at least in his dreams of coasts and guessed that she was on some diagonal like his and had been thus behind him some of the time, and he met an old man with a wagon and one horse working their way up a hill toward trees and rode with him and realized Margaret was both behind him and ahead, and remained convinced she was with child. And stranger, he felt close to many people who would not protect him from his wandering but he would gain from many knowledge. So much in him still unknown seemed to know, as we, that an ending had already come long ago. But what was this?—these senses that others and he converged and were all equally alike whether from moons of distances or from nearby, from New Mexico mountain and Arizone and Ute-Colorado trails, or from Chicago to New York—it made no sense, drawn though it began to be along the curves of his thought: for people differed as the bison from the eagle, even as the pistol from the saddlebag, or the track from the gila "dragon" making it; or Mena’s words about this written-down music-messagery she showed the An-asazi and the use she might make of it, taking it home to a woman of her family who made powerful music for many voices and instruments but no one would play it. And the Navajo Prince as if his Margaret-given name drew the curved eastward parallels of these people toward one coast or point felt in his belly hungry for some fact, a soft shape drawn within them by not all these people but some very few he knew of, west to east, and the shape pulled him on toward where he would meet Margaret.

  So that one day along the Hudson River close in to the ancient city of New York or New Yorkondo or -quoiandam, he had within him not so much food for thought (as Margaret had sometimes said when he told her things) as thought for food, and the question whether thought followed energy or energy thought, thought its way through his feet and his loins knowing that, close to him in time, others who were close to him had passed, and passed him, but he was almost there, the outer parallels, the inner shape, the strong sound of Margaret’s voice in him, the bison tongue in one pocket, the metal implement in a bag across his shoulder.

  Yet where was she? they heard each other think, and what had she done? it was still inside her, and not all the words she could think up helped her forget, mmhmm not words written down in secret pain (the interview with Coxey, interview words) and posted in gaiety from Ohio to her father in New Jersey made what was still inside her speak, so she needed to just understand it and think that it was not the same as the new burden she carried with her on a train that could take her almost home to be met anyway in New York by her elder friend if he had had her letter, and she held (she smiled at her own phrase) on for dear life to the parcel wrapped and layered in years of weeks to hold its breath until, once home, she could do what a dream of her lover told her to do which (she smiled again and was smiled back at by the gentleman facing her) justified her in what she might well have done even without the dream which was wrapped like the cocoon she had in her arms, and she smelled the brown wrapping paper, breathing it so crazily and desperately she could smell the color, which kept her from crying but may have made her look a lunatic, the glass and upholstery and even the sound of rolling stock dissolving away into a sadness that might have been freedom but was not yet freedom, so that herself dissolved leaving for the unknown gentleman across from her only the smile which in turn recreated her by reminding her of the lady and the tiger, and the rhymes, and then the whole thing; but she did not laugh to let her fellow passenger approach what she puzzled through, which was a dream about a daughter she did not have:

  She and her lover had ridden across a mesa into a ravine of strewn boulders so largely tilted they seemed about to roll together, all different shapes; and she got off her horse and the horse vanished and she saw a cave in one rock which began to move as she entered it but so that, once in, she did not feel the motion; but because of this she could not get out but could only call to her lover who called back from his rock where he was living similarly. Then she heard but did not feel all the great shapes of rock come together, and she looked out her cave door with a terrible pain in her stomach to see a warren of levels and corridors—because all the boulders had been connected—but she didn’t know where they were going because she couldn’t see out, and she resolved to tell her daughter when she got home—her daughter? yes, her daughter—but then she saw through awful mists that maybe they were not going home, for her lover called to her that this was how she had gotten here from home. But he was somewhere else and she was afraid to go look for him until she saw that she was the awful mist in the complex caves of some other stonework all here joined in a great artifact but then saw he was right there but could not see her, and she had woken in a friendly stranger’s cold Ohio house, her secret hospital, weak and in a state, and reaching suddenly and with pain for the parcel under her bed she found she literally poured like vomiting such quantity of tears onto her nightgown sleeve and the floor that she thought the bed was full of blood, and she thought, What if it’s a boy?, when, after all, in a way, there was no child.

  But when she boarded the train having heard that Alexander might be in Pennsylvania or even seeking her and wondering where her elder New York friend was, she felt boxed in by these men east of her, west of her, while seeing that they all took her side. But the box was on the move and she knew that her dream of her lover had determined her to do what she was doing which was bring her stillborn child swaddled and sleeping in its mother’s dreams which were all it had, to Windrow to tell her faithful Alexander. And when she found the Hermit waiting for her in the smoke of the terminal and looked about lest Alexander be there, or, who knew?, the Indian, she knew she would tell him her dream. But when he said to her Did she plan to go west again soon, her reason deserted her and she thought she could smell the package, which he reached for, and she cried, "I love him, he is my own true love," and t
he man said, "There, there." But later, when she told her dream, the act it had now determined her on seemed one answer to two or three needs: to be honest with Alexander, whatever it cost; to be faithful to the Indian, whatever he knew, so far as honoring the stillborn child; to obey her simple, not morbid need; and thus to hold some freedom that began to shape itself in her head as a taxi drew them gently to her friend’s house, among all these New York bicycles, and she knew she would be a good and firm mother.

  We are waiting for it to come to us. We know it does. It was, like something to do, in us a long time back, where it ended to tell the truth; and thus transit angels not always out "thataway" to incorporate but inward to this other body of information so lovingly marginal we will let ourselves not know which we are, the margins or the core-core; yet we have found within us a pair of high workshoes given him—Who? asks the interrogator—by a doctor driving a one-horse shay who found them under the seat and they fit and the doctor confided that that coming Saturday he was remarrying (no wonder; he had been happy the first time); also a dark blue woolen shirt, held out to him by a fair-haired girl in a doorway holding a tiny red baby in her arm; an old, sun-singed straw hat with holes in it a short, bald holy man with a white, round collar gave him on a Sunday in front of a white mission built entirely of wood; a princely new pair of overalls donated by a fat young woman who found him asleep on her property and said he must be tired not to wake when she come along; a green-and-black-checked bandanna given him by an underwater swimmer, who came up out of a lake near Yonkers and offered him any clothes he wanted from the pile by a birch sapling. No one knew how he had come so far, but the Hermit-Inventor, who tried to comprehend his own responsibility here and what might happen, did not quite wonder how the Navajo Prince had come so far, not only because Navajos travel vast distances but because he had heard scientifically proved that things might appear at widely separate places with no apparent movement in between, and so why not people?, and he had voiced it to Margaret when he had interpreted her dream for her a few days since. If the Prince detected anxiety in the Hermit looking fitfully out a begrimed glass window into a street full of yelling and horses clattering metal hooves like weapons on the stones of the street, and bicycles running in and out, each felt somewhat cared for by the other, and they spoke of the people here—some girls coiled their hair in squash blossoms each side (Yes, replied the Hermit, they are Jewish); and they spoke of the weather and of the late Anasazi whom the Hermit joked about affectionately and warily until the Prince said, "He is in Maine by now and I will join him there," which turned the Hermit from alarm over Margaret to alarmed fascination over this after all strange possibility, the single tie or question between these events, these consequences, these "event horizons!" in New Jersey and in Maine being this long-haired, long-fingered, diamond-eyed traveler so honest and so momentous that astounding strength in him had made him perhaps an answer not a question; but still they did not speak directly of Margaret. They spoke of seacoast and its limitlessly varied and mayhap variable outline north to south, of the east wind that may penetrate a thickly settled coastal area well inland whereas an inland wind from west has forests obstacling its progress and is deflected and dispersed, yet why should there not be forests that will take that force and use it as the Navajo barques coming across the sea kept on when reaching land and sailed the land as well? The young man stood by a window and asked what were the shapes upon the posts in front of the houses across the street, and his Anglo elder said they were pineapples, a fruit yellow and juicy on the inside, prickly on the outside, a sign of friendly welcome, of home, and nothing to do with pine trees. The young man said he would go to both places. Both? Yes, to Margaret’s town and then north. When the Hermit upon being asked with such directness of vision what Margaret’s dream had been and what it had meant, that he must answer (and having anyhow previously brought it up himself as if to put it between him and the incredible young Indian who had walked into New York and found the Hermit and on his way here inspected the new great arch not two years old) answered at length concluding that her dream had brought her home, for it was evidently of the Statue of Liberty, whose parts had been the occasion of their meeting almost nine years before on Bedloe’s Island and which had now been assembled (She had told him, she had told him, the young man answered, not of meeting the Hermit but of the Statue in the harbor, and she had laughed about it and said it was big but not very good, but he would have to make up his mind himself and maybe she would meet him there, too)— anyway it was there, said his Anglo elder, whose charts and instruments cluttered his home, that he had told her to go west and later on her way to Chicago she had seen him in New York and—