Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

For one is in college, one is in the flow now, one can split one’s mind and, for a second, step outside the Gross National Product of which one is fast becoming a part and see that GNP equals Consumption plus Investment plus Government Expenditure and see that if Net National Product is GNP less Depreciation, that’s what one may also be joining, for, big time or not, one feels the onset of time’s warp, and if one’s tennis forehand is improving one yet feels a depreciation in, as one’s father will say over his cocktail-hour joint, the quality of life, one sees this concretely and without bullshit in the cracked handball wall against which one lashes one’s forehand or in the new distance from any such wall when one is at the Manhattan apartment of the revised junta and not in Port Adams though this has to do with the changed equation between one’s married parents, and apparently not to do with what is no less true, that one is in college not high school any more with its occasional substitute teachers yet only in truth a potential continuum of substitute teachers, for one enjoyed modular classes in Port Adams, yes the school was often better not worse than what one’s got now in the big league so that one is inclined, like one of those lines the man calls a curve, to shoot up one’s arm saluting the schlock of collective education and when recognized by the amazing short man in the black shirt up at the blackboard ask a very general question about the point of it all.

But one is only inclined.

The short man at the washed blackboard — one has described him to Amy when she phoned from work and got one out of one bed or another — Manhattan or Port Adams. The phone’s voice so warm that Amy’s employee cheek seemed pillowed on one’s own — even on one’s own breast, or chest, patiently listening to one’s unemployed description of the amazing Professor Roger Rail until this employed twenty-three-year-old older woman radiant Amy warming one’s whole body from cheek to pyjama pants must say, "Got work to do, Larry — oh by the way, babe" — asking for information de pronto (suddenly)— de repente! (suddenly)— impulsivamente, Latin passion oh beautiful Amy Hispanic heat sin la reflexion debida —"oh by the way, babe" (she says), "what’s the name of that nice newspaper guy who’s taking you to the game?" — but not before one has made her outgoing laugh come in along the phone wire bathing the whole side of one’s somewhat unshaven face, for one has been describing Professor Roger Rail. Assuredly an amazing customer the man in the black shirt at the washed blackboard who starts to write upon that tabula rasa only to abort his oracion, stop his chalk, lean on it and push pensively off into the vertical space just off its surface, and give the assignment for next time, which means the next day that one and one’s fellow classmates with him in Economics meet, but not always the next day from this, he not in a suit but in black shirt and long black sleeves so his white hand fingering his chalk looked there like the pale bald tonsure his scalp makes against the bristling black or dark of his remaining hair. The bald area is time, a time in his life, yet one that has now passed and is surrounded by the hair remaining. He is the medium of exchange here, he is the potential speed with which one’s class leap through the many used but virgin copies of the sacred text, he moves before one a bound variable furnishing the classroom with his unavoidable circulation, he is the velocity of circulation multiplied by M, which stands for one thing suddenly with one oneself and another (Money) with Rail — who thinks in other velocities but not this that one has oneself begun to dream.

And he it is who says, "One may wish to substitute one good for another if. . well… if what has happened?" and who says at some later point in the morning’s curve, "One may frame, yes? a law of substitution which will embrace equality of price, yes? between commodities, yes? as well as the phenomenon of increasing scarcity," and who says, "given an extra dollar of income — a raise in New York, a rise in London, yes? — why one may choose to spend the whole dollar or spend some part of it — and since this dollar is in addition to one’s normal income heretofore, one may call it marginal, yes? and since what happens to it in one’s hand or purse or under the mattress, eh? or in the tight back pocket of your preshrunk bluejeans or a slot in the old money belt (he tapped his paunch above the silver horseshoe of his western belt) depends on one’s own personal inclination to hold on to it or blow it, and since to be inclined or favorable is propendere in Latin which one may safely bet that less than one percent in this room would read even if they could, why one calls the amount of extra consumption generated by an extra dollar of income the (yes?) marginal (yes?). . pro . . pens . . i . . ty … to consume —or MPC — which one may picture. . like so" — the chalk consuming itself like a comet, the graph squaring and lining and dashing itself off before one and one’s male and female classmates on the heretofore washed blackboard as if what moves the chalk were that Invisible Hand Rail speaks of, which a great thinker named Smith said guides each individual through his own mere wish for "security and gain" to use his capital "to promote an end which was no part of his intention" — namely, the interest of society as a whole. So let him alone, let him be — and a roomful of hands write down the words (but did he say them? and is this, then, telepathy?) laissez-faire, which is the same in Spanish. Yet if embedded in everyone else’s property one’s property is one’s own, the shtik is more co-op than condominium— face—"One may plot," "One may represent," "One may argue" — and then like magic his back was turned, and he said, "One" to the board chalked erased chalked erased, washed with the manual action of his mind into soft, gray-white nebulae of layers — his thing, one thought, his world! one thought. And one said it to Amy, whose soft, pale hair surrounds one by surrounding her ear and her receiver at her end, which is a desk at a foundation— foundation, the word attracts, envelopes, envelopes and erases all the curves one can think to draw between the vertical and horizontal with their reminders of the hypotenuse of junior year in Port Adams, that shortcut to Diane’s through used-car lot, church playground, shopping center’s parking lot where Mother Susan’s trunk was rifled while she was in buying a last-minute buttondown for one’s birthday with, under the rear collar button, a fag-tag loop Diane with Visine clearing up her eyes crept up behind one one day and snipped off — a beeline, no curve like these curves a professor sweeps away with a black-sleeved thrust of himself and all his Ones enveloped by Amy’s foundation, which is her job, from which at twenty-three years old in the morning from eight miles away her invisible hand touches one’s unemployed pyjama cloth, augments one’s marginal suspense, propounds yea extends one’s capacity to hunt down the curve of one’s desire, down from up where hovering hung-up above the landing pad, strutted, outstretched, and hang-gliding, flapped and blown by winds from the window of the sky, one seems to reach one’s base for the first time, to make love, juntarse (for love is reflexive, one has found out for oneself not in the book), consuming the reflexes as Amy’s real job consumed (when she called at nine-fifteen in the morning) consumed and erased the picture of the ecognome skating his thing, his thought, across the slate walls of a carpeted cave, the bell you see but don’t hear of the mountainous bell curve showing the normal symmetry of error, and the tilted long-tailed