Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

For, figure it out, you’ve had more than enough time to take responsibility for what you see, even if you now think all you’ve been doing is waiting to remember. For see the diva’s (the lovely songstress’s, the recently officially Swiss-passportable transplant’s) painful if prolific, faintly lyrical, divisions of heart and head: think of it, there was the infamously gifted general officer of a South American navy whose regime’s unspeakable intelligence arm — to its own music — endangers her loved, outspoken father; and here was (in mufti) the graceful man who touched her even with a Japanese ballpoint which left its impress with code-like interruptions upon her satin thigh backstage the night of Rosenkavalier; yes and, to go on, by the same dual but separate-scoped oscillation, there thousands of miles south was her broad-faced, silver-mustached widower father guarded by that navy like an electrified coast to the point of apartment-house-arrest; whereas here, in New York, which is an articulate structure accommodating for her a multiplicity of grand commutes to Munich, Vienna, La Scala, Covent Garden, Adelaide or Sydney-Melbourne (anyway Australia) where Lohengrin and Otello are housed by two turtles copulating if you’ve ever looked at that opera house above the water and if they even bred above water — here in New York, she grants that her operatic life and body fill to bursting with small-scale honesties accommodating her career, her flow of breath — of blood — the breathing of her thought, the honest ungated thinking of. . of — but, to enlist the lyric of that American wartime hit, is it all of her? — of all the range of lusts even to the faintest infidelity of plot-twisting thrill in sauteing for her naked Chilean visitor in her seldom-used kitchen, which is duplex and balconied, the pink, dense shad roe her old friend the Boston-born Manhattan physician had brought her earlier hoping to tempt her for brunch, her own family G.P. if she had a family.

And what is the yes or no answer in question? Do we take all of her or don’t you? It sounds like rape, we mean a little light rape, rape in hopes of romance — but wait a minute, we said nothing about a yes or no answer to that song?

For we move if not exactly from war to peace to war, still from question to question, through long or brief the light makes equal, we move well together, you are magnetic. Yet if meaning something is (really) like goin’ up to someone, as the philosopher saith (to unquote the lisp of some grownup who, hearing the wind the far side of an obstacle drawing us toward the obstacle, hears not the noise of the wind but a song because leave it to a grownup to hear a song in the wind), we now know how to lighten that wide load of going up to someone: what you do is answer a question with a question, a trick used by endangered peoples under interrogation (older far than the manipulative modern Can I ask you a personal question?) but you talk to the question, point to it, and you promise it all the feedback it can hold of questions that readily come to mind, like would any Us worth its self settle for being relations?

Which turns her stomach — though she doesn’t catch on at first why — toward her lover where — this third visit to her well-loved apartment — he stares softly at her bedchamber’s birthday-cake ornate whipped-cream ceiling considering her much more than she thinks amid her post-coital wonder (that the tryst goes on) and a premenstrual void that feels like a dressing room that keeps out a dozen people she’s got to see in short order, which is not now but tomorrow when her week begins, not now in the cushioned interstices of this fantastic love meeting, her stomach against his arm, her mind upon his which she can’t quite hear until he speaks: and then what she hears in his idling question upon question may be not some hunt for information but a funny comfort with her, in her, for her.

The war between the women and the men, was his New York tourist question out of the corner of his supine eye while against her the rest of his arm comes into being — yes, this much-advertised war, was his question, does it really go on here in 1977 in this advanced city? And she softly, huskily answered in the twilit room where colors like the force of his eyes hold some reserve of precision, "Well I suppose that by temperament and by professional independence I am hors de combat."

"Because," he went on, "I sat near an older man and a young girl who I’m sure were not related last night, there is much of this in this city, I think, or is it like arranged marriage," he quips, "without the arrangement?" (Is the demufti’d officer making talk? His murmur passes on relaxed to whatever the smell and gentleness of her yields in his happy spirit at six in the afternoon) "… do you see people in the audience or just see the mass?"

She hardly answered, "I see friends sometimes if I know where to look." Is he probing her relation with Clara and her husband?

But the next question leans over against her. His far arm runs along her shoulder and for the moment triggers nothing. She recalls well his question ten days ago (hours after Rosenkavalier, two in the morning, three in the morning), How is your father? — which was the question she wanted to ask him, about her father, for he’s the one who’s just come from the padreland, the madre-earth, the nation that’s in the news, the long place she’s never really toured, never seen the ice, the desert, though as a child she visited the primitive Indians, the mapuche prehistory, the villages with the one abandoned house vacated for the use of las dnimas, "souls" you say — and she sensed that her lover’s question How is your father? meant she could get no answer to her question How is my father? and she answered, He is in a smaller place; he is himself. Perhaps you know him? No? I guess he is O.K. (She would not ask this man; why’s she lying here with him? to inquire for her father?)

And now ten days later when she’s let herself be interested in this young Fascist admiral if the navy isn’t only a cover for whatever he’s doing here in New York, his next question, "Were you looking at me the first night? it seemed to me you were, and yet we had met only at the consulate I think," brought out of her with languid clarity just a hair too soon — so she regretted saying—"No, there were two friends of mine near you, I didn’t know you were there" ("my dear," she adds) remembering already that at the next performance {Norma) those two friends of hers Clara and her exile-economist husband had changed their seats (which they had insisted on paying for at Rosenkavalier but were the diva’s gift at Norma) because the wife Clara, her particular friend, had asked for the change; and they were better seats; but then they had not come.

And why, she murmurs — moving one thigh off the other so he on his back staring at the symmetrically swollen raised plaster design on the ceiling — a free clock of space, she wonderingly heard him call it with some casual touch of intelligence she warmly adores — floats his fingertips over to her nearer thigh — why, she murmurs, or how, did a man of good family find himself posted to the naval base at Navarino, the end of the world?

The southernmost inhabited place if you don’t count weather stations, he informs her softly. Oh, it was seven years ago, he now whispers, everything’s changed; whispers so very privately: the South Pole is indeed hollow, the stories were right, but the lingo of the Fiery Landers down there is not hollow: They have a verb for kneeling in a bark canoe with a hunting spear poised to launch at a sea otter who is especially elusive so they stay poised ready for minutes at a time to make their move — one verb for all of that.