Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

While this other was going on, we didn’t think much of opera. Opera was high-classical singing in a second language. It wouldn’t go away, we found, and the stars meeting and proliferating onstage spread their arms taking curtain calls before a giant meaning of brocade, the three women, princess, kavalier, and bride, and the bass baron puffing in preparation possibly for a seizure. The weight of the world can be negotiated — is not this the music, the lordly loveliness ongoing on and on of opera?

They turn to each other, baron and kavalier, a smiling moment between singers. Tonight is an articulated structure that gives play to a multiplicity of small-scale units. They turn away together into the broad face and mouth of the audience. They are female and male — separate as we already recall the music being from the plot, but electric magnetic singers.

But what memorable thing did the infamously gifted general officer of a South American republic’s navy say to our diva offstage a few minutes hence when she had feared he might extract from her her secret the tapeworm? It was her autograph he wanted, raising the Japanese pen, that’s all, her signature. And as she was reminded of the Ojibway-Sioux medicine man now long since back in Mille Lacs, she saw over the mufti officer’s (the civil villain’s) shoulder her breathless doctor entering backstage with a host of silver roses, and she answered her military admirer in translation, "Oh — autograph me." But when on bended knee the mufti officer now made to write across one satin thigh of her kavalier breeches, she raised him telling him softly to take her literally and then she introduced the physician her long-time friend who now materialized and tilted his head at her for he was off balance asking her without words if their secret had fared well. "Supper?" he murmured, old intimate that he must be at this moment, coveting hours of moments, old listener at her breast, breath cutting life into words, a sentence into meanings. But she put him off for the evening: "Can we make it tomorrow late brunch instead?" — flashbulb lighting—"I will be responsible for the coffee and orange juice, my darling, if you will bring… the brioches and—" she waited for a flashbulb—"and the atabrine."

He felt her know some moving part of him, then instantly swim away and know another part, and he loved her and he hated her for reading his mind. But she said, "You know me like a book." "A libretto," he murmured amazingly. But she shook her head sincerely with that ultimate sensuality that was not for him, her tongue tip tight against her upper lip: "Darling when you try to be clever. . forget it."

Atabrine, did she say? His presence drops him. His cerebellum wheels like the wind spoken of by Indians he has known. Can he cope? Is he equal? Hairline fracture arcs slowly slowly down the doctor’s face. Atabrine? Time to flush out the worm or worms? Has she, then, achieved the desired weight loss? Does he matter? He does not like the look of sehor who’s been introduced to him and he recalls this man’s name from somewhere, an important man, was that what it was? Latin, upper middle class, a light cruelty in the soft eyes (sex? tradition? some task?).

Opera’s not for everyone, especially at these prices; and in itself is overweight. We willingly recede down the wormhole but with an expansible width-capability such that we can avoid passing out with the wormhole when it’s flushed away next day long after that specialist brunch. But at our end now let us not breathe so hard as to suck in the tunnel’s membrane, we know that that far end, now a pinhead of experience, was our end, too, and remember what we should have seen more closely (for luminaries are entitled to have fathers, too): the diva’s endangered father glistening somewhere newly incarnate in her eye, far away along a coast where he was born and she was, too — she who in Rome, Milan, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, London, and here in New York is acquainted with so many exiles better than herself; and, half-knowing, she knew ahead of time more fully than exactly how she would feel when, later, sometime between love, her dashing questioner of the night (not now in mufti) who is himself a question asks her what she in the deep recollection of her body needs to ask him: How is her father?

For we have, you know, more than enough information on other matters. Yet for what? For remembering? To do what? We already remember we have changed toward life. The unexamined life is well worth changing. We knew life, yes even when we were least together. Though not how long it was. While knowing life was brief next to light. Had not the Latin thinkers called light longa? A good question, though just what light was seemed lost in mass and speed.

We will — you will — change your life on May One (why wait? asks Grace K. gently touching up her voice with revelation). Buy yourself a plastic speculum and examine your body/self; you have a hand mirror already, feel yourself, look at the surplus, are you getting anything out of it? eat live food, take the time to chew and especially if the live food is moving — lasts longer and so will you if you can not be so available to your family all the time, right? and look at your posture, you’re round-shouldered, what are you protecting? — got money of your own? this is nineteen seventy-seven almost. Do you even begin to know what you’re capable of, honey? even if (so long as he doesn’t specifically make the request) you are a Sunday cocksucker, investigate alternative sources of protein, information is all available but we don’t share it, honey, we didn’t share it like we should.

Surplus of information such as that kid with a regular contact smoker’s hack at eleven studying rotation, is that the kid assembling facts on the sub-Iranian desert channels? Because if so time has passed; because in that next room the kid is four years older at least because he’s studying sunspots now and has learned that sunspots rotate around the sun they are part of that itself doesn’t rotate like something solid, and that when the sunspots along the sun’s equator speed up, this may mean an ice age is coming. Like the Little Ice Age which began in the middle of the seventeenth century and lasted seventy years and is called the Maunder Minimum and caused suffering in Europe. The seventeenth century is the sixteen hundreds.

But sunspots have been on the scene for centuries, and, as an inventor based in nineteenth-century New York City told a very young woman from the immediate hinterlands on her way to and then later from experiences westward, sunspots and money seem close kin by cycles coming and going, but that is mathematical moonshine (she smiled) and little more (for she was interested in the planet Mars and how livings were made and Africa and the anti-vivisectionists and tall buildings in Chicago moving against the great cloudy American winds, and interested in Indians and not only in general). He and she had met eight years before in New York harbor on Bedloe’s Island, she scarcely twelve—1885—fledgling observer come with her father who brought out a small weekly newspaper in New Jersey to see the more or less uncrated pieces of the Statue of Liberty; and, standing in unmown scrub grass, she watched over the shoulder of a photographer taking the Statue’s detached face from the inside, which though inside out gazed through the open frame of its crate dolefully and dark-cheeked (and was there even a touch of the Native American or jojoba-au-lait there?) and with huge, curved Grecian pout gazed back at the photographer in front of the girl from the hinterlands yet stared (did the Statue) a hair to their left as if over their left shoulders like a person at something beyond them until this twelve-year-old who looked thirteen from New Jersey heard behind her a voice muttering sotto voce, "Too big— never get the damn thing together. Facing the wrong direction, for Pete’s sake. Unequaled, my foot," and she turned, amused, and he asked her, 4’What’s your name?" and when she said, "Margaret," he said, this weathered old Hermit-Inventor of New York, "Go west, young girl, that’s where you must go, and you will," and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will, a whole world outside tracing your window and bent like weather by light." And Margaret said, "Of course she won’t, because she’s only a statue," but Margaret stared hard into one of those understandable eyes and when she turned with her small leather notebook in hand, "How do you know?" she retorted; whereupon the Inventor of New York with the wind of the harbor uniting them, retorted in his turn, "I bet you can recite poetry." Thinking this tall, brownish man with squint-small cavernous blues for eyes rude and funny, but hearing her name called in warning from the far side of the Statue’s strewn sections, she thereupon recited what came to mind: