Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Yet if the system has outdone itself by projecting these three events congruent less with the "handiness" of Adam Smith’s old-fashioned limb the Invisible Hand than with its twin trait of being as out of sight as the old and ancient system behind big-board stock exchanges, it yields still in its own until-now unforeseen precreation a mind-blowing safeguard. For having projected instantly a consequence so real as to be actual, the system hence provides itself, to its own actual surprise, with both base and time for countervailing action backward from the projected future which has become as good as present, while these unprecedented redaction sequences (now conceived by the system) seem a prudential future. For the disasters now beginning to satisfy the functions of their prior and apparently independent sequences now are held back as their concepts bend back into this unforeseen dimension, so that with the new future-system working the world is ready for the new laissez-faire. And the waitress makes her way toward one’s table where one and one’s mother (who once forgivably said one ought to get laid but now seems nervous and looking about as if about to see someone) will order carob ice cream. And some amazing stuff goes down. Yet also, as you’ll see, does not.

(Oh Amy, why did you ask one if Mayn knew any Chileans? You could ask him yourself.)

For the giant orphan plane, having lifted off from its Asian field and lost altitude with dramatic suddenness, finds near the water a huge, dry cushion of air current that should not be there and is due to weather activity at a distance, both satellite-observed and program-stimulated — and along this cushion the plane slides horizontally round to limp back and land for repairs.

And the Chief Executive, having reached the lip of the cup, receives a message from his mujer, his esposa, who’s been playing tennis she says, and he thinks for a moment and walks abstractedly away to the edge of the green, before smiling then to his now distant caddy, who holds the flag. Then the Chief Executive waves the back of his hand, upon which the black man who was substituted only at the last moment before the round began picks up the unholed ball and hands the flag stick to the second caddy and follows the Chief Executive, who now remembers, and turns and approaches the black man to shake hands.

One’s audience does not exactly answer — though radiant, she does not answer — she only outlines one’s name again and again until it is barely visible. She is not one’s mujer. Is she indifferent? One senses the curve of her attention, and one finds one has forgotten why indifference curves can’t intersect because this would contradict preferring more of a commodity to less. But she smiles — she is amused! divertida! The hair so different from one’s mother’s. The starts she’s had, too. At least from what one knows of Amy, who, already older than one’s mother when she fell into marriage, has a chance to live from month to month now without that half-visible arc of outside control one heard of like an Invisible future-Hand when one was young, writing on the wall Little Wife, Little Mother, Little Woman, be faithful, be fruitful — and which Susan, one’s mother, speaks of — and which angered her for years and years.

The front door is heard. Open and shut. One is at times like one who has been deconstituted to a scatter of frequencies to be flash-transferred to another place — which once seemed to be one of all those places the older man the journalist James Mayn had been to so that when one spoke of that deconstitution into a scatter of frequencies he shook his head until one said, "Wait, Jim, I think I got the idea from you, didn’t I?" and then he stopped shaking his head and stared through one, as if he knew what came next — for, the scatter of frequencies having been flash-transferred to another place, lo there is no receiver there, or it’s there but, like some Third World depot waiting very lazy for sophisticated lezie and fairey technicians to come to operate it, they haven’t installed it, they haven’t even ordered it — or wait, its concept is there waiting, which is all that’s needed to take delivery.

One hears one’s father sigh. At this point one’s father no doubt thinks Larry is less valuable than Susan, but by a corollary of the law of substitution Larry is cheaper and more plentiful. One contemplates what the Eco class isn’t up to or probably even going to cover — the Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity! The phone might ring. White parents still wait at the airport of an advanced economy. (Did you mean, one’s audience in a class by herself has asked, that some of those adopting parents were having trouble with their marriages?) One moves between two homes that are becoming one— this one in Manhattan, where one’s father is.

Disaster forestalled. Headed off, yeah. But where did these events come from? Far back. One becomes the system for a long second, one finds the Chief Executive’s uncertain wife, his mujer, sitting in a New York health-food restaurant incognita, thinking of broccoli and the smell of a certain face, only to be handed a note as she reads her menu that the young meteorologist she would love to help has been pre-empted by an unforeseen future-emergency. Rising angrily, she leaves the table; she elbows someone in order to flag a cab; she takes the cab two blocks to a phone booth where she dials a distant golf course collect wondering if carob is an adequate chocolate substitute, while the driver knows he’s seen her somewhere. But one steps now outside of the system and into the beautiful face of one’s potential girlfriend, Amy, who is asking a question which one cannot hear through all the outlinings she has made over one’s name and through the sound of that now silent telephone containing the voice of one’s mother’s date. And so one is thrust between some echoing openness of fucking minds and, on another hand, a taxing institution with a capital M one cannot get away from — while through the traffic and smoke of one’s name is asked, "Are you saying that these three events are linked by something like marriage or the breakdown of marriage?" while one substitutes an Amy for oneself asking — but one can’t make the words — asking — one can’t say them — while, ah, for that weird equation between Volume-Receiving-Stress in physics and Velocity-Conceived-Under-Stress in economics, substituting another equation between Lorenz curves that correlate income distributions in economics and the (note the Lorentz, with a t for) transformation by which space and time in physics may be coordinated between two frames of reference at relative velocities.

So that — the bell will ring — so that — the bell will ring and the audience disperse, the class disperse — so Eco can be transformed into Physics in another space or in another space translated into English where another maniac wielding a borrowed ax by Walden Pond can huff and puff, "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools" — so one’s father can enter one’s room and one can ask, "Who was that on the phone?" to which he answers, "You don’t know the half of it," but he has entered one’s relatively new room to ask if one would like to go out to eat at the Middle Eastern restaurant — so one’s family curve adds to the National Net — so the bell can ring in one’s absent mind, the vacuum between Openness and Marriage, two possibilities locused at the phone bell which may ring from Amy in one’s absence if one goes out to dinner now with one’s father who is not happy but is being reasonable, cool, yea scientific — about being open and married. So one makes an effort when he says, "What may I ask is this Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity?" And one answers that it’s the arithmetical relation, see, between a percentage change in the sales of a substitute like tea, yes? — while at the bell which in the silence of one’s vacuum has saved one for the higher cross of Rail’s science and his curves, one knows one must not be saved, even from the crazy tale one admits to an Amy who has not phoned except this morning to ask for James Mayn’s name-and-address (when she must already know — though maybe not enough about mineral cartels, Mayn’s interest in) — to an Amy who is not present in one’s room at one’s roll-top escritorio bought by one’s mother — not present, not here, as one’s father looks down at one’s textbook graphs and says, "Well maybe the bookkeeping stuff will help, but if you get a job in business you’ll have to forget all this and learn some real economics" — to an Amy to whom one says almost but no longer with the scientific fiction of the impersonal "one" which one can’t maintain any more than one is Rail or would wish one’s first name to be Lawrence, "I think I am the reason my folks stuck together."