Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"No tools are neutral," Rail was saying — and the point would go on into the next week if week is the word — and de repente one saw form on the board a second southwest-northeast hypotenuse hammocked below with saggier bows likewise labeled with national initials—"Put these in your provisions for the long trip, Donald" — for here were graphs of injustice, graphed inequalities, on one side income distribution, on the other concentrations of wealth compared to yearly earned income. Rail’s points were two (but do they fade as one makes them, Amy?): first, that pre-industrial economies showed more inequality of income than advanced economies while holdings of wealth were spread less equally in advanced economies than are annual earned incomes; second, that these inequality curves implied in advance a wish to guard against extreme inequality, yes?

But while all eyes turned to Donald Dooley’s quite electrifying "No!" and to his combed barba and his blue-eyed iron and the lumps and pricks and metal-looking edges packing the khaki knapsack occupying the desk seat beside his, one’s own eyes found in the silver horseshoe bell curve lying on its side buckling Rail’s belt and half hidden in the stress of his paunch the making of new equals, like equations so weird that like digits on the same Invisible Hand their kinship was the void with which they threatened sight. Hey!

And while one heard the campus camper Donald the survivor al campo raso, the viajero y autostopista, retort in another medium but like a standard metal template laid down for pattern, "You’re telling us those curves defend the workingman under capitalism but you know as well as I do except it doesn’t freak you out that they secretly annihilate socialism, and those curves whatever you call them are next-door neighbor to that Italian Pareto whom you yourself would never call a Fascist maniac" (laughter set loose in the room, rising like hope, falling like breath, like eyes before staring power) "yes that Fascist statistician who made those charts you know that show that income is distributed the same in all countries no matter what political institution and tax system you have, and as for no controlled experiment, Doctor Rail, what about the man in the big bank across the river — what’s his name? you know — who says O.K., guys, we raise the interest rate tomorrow morning, and Doctor Rail none of your equations is telling us that the workers spend what they get and the capitalists get what they spend and telling us that we own seventy-five percent of the world through multinationals and if you want the GNP of Iran your same old equation C plus I plus G ought to be divided by CIA — because the CIA rents Iran, mon," one found Rail looking at one and saying what he then seemed to see that one knew (though perhaps not able to imagine one looking back to the night when one had leafed beyond, leaped ahead of, next day’s assignment through the skewed and sacred text like a diviner celebrating chance), "Lorenz curve, Donald, Lorenz curve," but Dooley cried, "What is economics, Rail?" and Rail, looking all around the room while simultaneously up the warp of the girl’s lap next to one, said quietly for a laugh, "It means ‘housekeeping’—Greek for managing a household," and when Dooley groaned and reached over and slapped his knapsack, Rail turned his attention to one and said, "Larry, I haven’t seen your hand up this term, what do you think of these curves?"

Well!

One might have answered,’ ‘They are a convenient method of representing the difference between income property and income from work." But one found oneself thinking that though of course Rail could not know that according to one’s mother Susan one is "too fucking smart," somehow Rail knew one’s name — wow! — and thinking that by some new math to divide C plus I plus G by C plus I plus A might yield G over A, one actually said, "I think these curves are a way to get from one point to another point and back again," to mild titters male and female, while then one shot from life to Eco and back as between Adam Smith the father of the Invisible Hand and Adam Smith who retired to take care of his mother knowing as well as the capitalists he left to their own devices that to fleece the future of its true unknowns the employers clipped the present to make it come true. But, following the normal bell-shaped curve of error, one’s concentration turned so repente through the horseshoe buckle edged by plump puffs of stress that one reached Lorenz through an unprecedented equals sign between the elastic modulus for Volume-Receiving-Stress and the form of Rail’s Velocity of Circulation. But Lorenz! — the name — it rang a silent bell in oneself. And whatever Rail said now of pure economics in this class this time or next time or several-times-this-class, or whatever he said of the apparently neutral theory that reducing income inequality won’t increase saving among poor people — one could not help contracting (if not shrinking) toward one’s home or homes where, being their product, one then felt the talk of one’s parents touch one so that like a snail’s raw lip one sucked back out of sight, or like a turtle, spider, or person of one’s acquaintance retracted liable limbs and contracted in or out of the harsh light that was invisible to parents debating the marriage contract that one sensed must be so late—"God, Sue, next thing we’ll be on a regular budget" — that when one’s female parent said a year or more ago, "Every other week, condoms," one must question what they would be for — the condoms. For even if, as Mom said, "we spend the same whether we budget or not," Susan and Marv who once were supposed to have been one seemed now two, as if a template had got warped between the first and second print — do you see, Amy? Yet these two people, Susan and Marv, one’s parents, were so contracted into one oneself they seemed to be oneself until, by a heretofore unheard-of trick of substitution without trade-off, one economized on action, put Amy in a class by herself where no longer employed by a foundation on research into right-brain projection for the handicapped she spent her days finely, subtly, warmly outlining one’s name in the palm of her hand like a model of something in the invisible and intimate void separating one from her only for the duration of the entertainment, which turned heartfelt stress into such storyteller’s speed, sweep, and volume that all one spent one saved, and a beautiful hand, a girl’s strong hand, a father’s empty hand to grip at a distance, a mother’s rule of thumb were one that put together such amazing tales by wielding a modulus, an elastic modulus of common ground between the change that stress gives a body’s volume and the velocity of circulating money which Rail could make circulate — blood money — circulate through all the curving continents of a globe that is believed but not seen except by the unseeing totals of that blood which one has paid and might again to unclench one’s parents from what’s bigger than the both of them, the ruling junta of their Open Marriage.

"Larry ought to get laid" — the word issues from the junta like a bulletin, like the ring of a bell telephone, like a parent, like a digital stat. A breach of their own open laissez-faire, for justice sake! But who said it? The junta en conjunto? Or one’s own congruence waiting elsewhere like an Unknown Soldier? Or a Buenos Aires cab’s exhaust pipe? an exhaust pipe which James Mayn was once invited to screw, having asked a man on the street where he could coger (catch) a cab when Argentine coger means something else also. Or did those words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the right or creative side of Amy’s beautiful mind dropped out of college and learning her living in the air force of the employed? Or did the words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the grin and nod on the far side of the eighteenth green of an IBM golf course — not exactly one’s favorite game — after one has said, "No, you go ahead, Dad," who might smile at home after the aforementioned words "Larry ought to get laid" and almost but not quite bring himself to say, "Leave him alone — he’s not indifferent to sex." Or (yes?) did the words "Larry ought to get laid" originate somewhere in the anger (yes?) jumping from an unexpected level of what proves to be the next room in spring twilight in what used to be one’s only home when one (one then tends to forget what it was that one) said, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?" — a question, a query, a fair question (yes?), a fairly clear question, not a queer query, not a demand, but oh an error, a dumb error that multiplies the more one thinks, for she wants us to let her be, for at the moment that one asks, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?" she is standing on her head doing the sunset naked and looking just as young as some of her seems more upside down than the rest of her, for "Look, Larry" she has had (O.K., O.K.) and out of a ("Larry, you’re living in a—") vacuum she has been addressed by her son as not-Susan, an address she has changed in her head and will soon change in fact so the future can come true, though for these uneconomical months she’s living at the old address, and Dad’s the one in Manhattan though as he has said (when a third party asks), "I come and go and so does Sue" — which is what in this future night at a Manhattan roll-top desk open to laissez-faire one hears her doing, coming and going, speaking on the phone to the Unknown Date whom Dad has answered the phone call from though one oneself, twisting or rising or shaking free of this domestic freakdom (yet not free), still hears with mixed feeling above the fractions and equalities of Rail’s extra-credit problem, in which hunting for the investment multiplier that makes a drop in the nation’s bucket expand like liquid oxygen in the vacuum of space one kept backsliding down the more than forty-five-degree slope of the Marginal Propensity to Consume because one could not get hold of why Rail called MPC and Marginal Propensity to Save "mirror twins" when they were so unlike each other, the female voice of Amy now doubtless home from the foundation asking whatever she likes to ask — anything, Amy, anything, my constant heart, mi corazon, my hot Hispanic hand — the name and address of the man (Mayn) you saw me with who — genius that Mayn is beyond that inkling one has that he has been here before and has seen it all happen that’s now happening to one— has two extra tickets for the game, not just one extra, and so Mayn will be going with one and Amy.