Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"No, that’s you," said Lincoln.

"Oh is that all," Flick had said, but the correspondent-woman, who had wondered if Flick’s father was available, had read the mind of the letter and held it to her mind’s eye as, now, days and nights later, the glamorous couple got up from the table across from Lincoln, arose grandly, and from one look into each other’s eyes turned as one to look at the irrelevant correspondent-woman, whose lips puckered with the remembered words "The Future," which was how the letter from Jim Mayn, transient in Farmington, New Mexico, to his daughter Flick in Washington, D.C., was headed, which meant maybe the strip mining and the process of turning coal into natural gas to be piped to California and which meant the Four Corners plant, O.K.

It had meant also, Lincoln was sure, some profoundly previous other thing. Oh she lost it, as two stories slid together, complementary scopes, the Rock that absorbs, versus the Ship that transits you plus all those immigrant Indians on the escape — the Rock, if you’re some stolid, lunatic being, knew this like a new country propelled into being by the force of meditation, thus the Rock’s an obstacle to going on versus (because she was thinking this way) an obstacle in turn to the Rock, the two people who drove miles out to the Rock in order to, in the middle of extreme northwest New Mexican nowhere, lobby against the mine’s peeling of the landscape and the Four Corners plant’s alternative ozone if we may so call it because we’re hastening to say, through the person of the correspondent-woman who has of late a new reason for cooperating, that for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new us, that is to breathe it. But obstacle supplanting obstacle, it’s more than the dark view and the bright view of things held in one eye, O.K., it’s more than that old dust of existence itself measured with and against the advanced production of sulfur dioxide shared by volcanoes and coal-burning operations which is, as sulfur dioxide alone, curious enough when it hooks up with the particles in all our smokes of unburned fuel to go on a killing spree in 1930 in Belgium’s famed Meuse River valley to name but one — but with ye old water vapor and sunny-sun-sun it becomes distinctly gamy sulfuric acid which can (we bleep thee not) give you a new set of (not to mention inflamed) lungs, even in signal instances make ‘em burst with or into flame, while yet more lasting damage— Que lastima, murmurs a tourist catching up with the marbles of Florence, Paris, Prague, Toledo, Ohio, Argentina — slowly wears thin the fabrics of great cities submerged in solution. It’s — she sensed — more than this alternation between apparently exclusive views, it’s also — forgive vagueness — one thing after another: so that while we seem to lose what we had a moment ago, we already remember what’s so soon not here any more. The correspondent-woman, recalling her godawful tape of the monk burning himself up, has fallen in love with the man who wrote the letter to the daughter Flick like thinking out loud. The correspondent-woman was a mere means to a greater end (which was what she suddenly saw her years in Vietnam to have been, incidentally informing her about Buddhism, about fathers, family, children, and taking notes, some mental) when she sat with legs crossed naked at Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop among her New York if not sisters surely kin who kindly exclaimed at her God-given first name Lincoln. President’s name! But like the diminutive correspondent-woman, we see only the immediate means by which she (we still can’t help predicting by old habit actually less angelic than human) will recall at last what’s been here with us so long we had more than a chance to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember, whereas we don’t hate birth, do we?

Not birth of relations, comes the answer but from where? from us or others conceivably not angel but likewise evolving toward human, though if an angel is trying to change, it must have a long way to go — light years, some informed soul says.

Yet as the auburn-haired woman and the wonderful Latin man moved around their table and rejoined on the far side and touched arms, he speaking into her ear, she raising her shoulder and snuggling her head to it like he’s tickling her, the correspondent-woman on the point of salvaging the thing she needed in the selection read her from Jim Mayn’s letter found one more intervention in the person of two or more scope-size stories sliding slow toward each other and toward her, unless one was the waiter coming to rescue her oval mariscada dish before this highly metabolized and busy customer bread-polished it "licking-clean" enough to fool the waiter into lightly laying down upon its white mirror a jiggly dessert, but not before she knew more than she was able to know: that the father Jim’s letter had drawled its way into taking the Ship Rock literally, so it’s sliding through the Earth, masts breaking the horizon; so the Earth — this man reasoned like telling a story to his little girl now grown to irony — was softer, kind of fluid in those days — make sense? — so that when he told of lovers going up the Rock together and coming down separately at accelerated velocity, and reported the volume of American new-lyweds visiting the actual Four Corners twenty miles or so from Ship Rock to stand on an ugly metal plate that she did not like one bit where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico met, he seemed to have an easy grip holding that earlier, fluid Earth together for such newlyweds as held on to each other standing on the plate to be in four states at once but were by some design of theirs in collusion with their future and with the literalness of this man who seemed not the type to think himself "between histories." Was the joke some new mixed-blood religion? For was he preaching layer by geofirm layer down to each seashell in its thousand-mile-deep coast where the current of the sea of the gods listens to itself in the dry fires of the plateau? This man will take legend and geologic report, and, as she understands it, it’s history as common in the invisibly slow violence of the land’s change as in the cities of the sky invented upon high mesas by the four-dimensional grid of mind with which the People lived their respect for the forces that made the Encircled Mountain a four-petaled flower or told a singer when he was strong enough to sing a healing and when he’d better not. Well, she had put aside what she hardly knew, to find there were many paths all in her from one uninterrupted breath to the next and many even the face of the Earth was consuming. This all came to her, as the woman with the abundant auburn hair leaning into the embracing form of the Latin man she was with, cast back upon the correspondent-woman such a look of tension it darkened the prospect of dessert, but the waiter came between them. And as she ordered her dessert and saw her shiny mariscada dish pass away, the correspondent-woman heard her own frank voice questioning her profession. Didn’t newspeople just multiply wants? The preceding week, looking across the semicircle of naked women at the woman Clara who had not really rebuffed her but seemed to prefer not to carry "it" beyond the (naked) workshop, her voice was saying right out as if her whole body-self made her understand, that she had stayed single because she did not want that trip, it was stubborn of her, she knew, it was uncooperative and over-metabolized, it was unwilling: but two people boring into each other? slipping closer into unmentioned disaster she couldn’t put her finger on, her fault no doubt—

No, said one woman; and, not at all, said the woman named Clara; and stick to your own body feelings, Line, said Grace.