Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— but the point was that now as a new contingent of five diners rather silent came into the restaurant, her unwillingness brought on a fellow feeling, but who was it with, who was it with? and she knew it was with the father who wrote to his beloved daughter (hoping incidentally that she wasn’t going to find herself high and dry when the funding for her job ran out, and could he do anything? he knew any number of people in Washington), wrote of the rock ship barreling through the once permeable (fluid) Earth and also of the numerically real couples, newly wed two by two but maybe really experiencing four states hand in hand become one for the future.

Until she half-loathed her life alone while sliding forth to meet not the waiter who approached and whom she momentarily slid through, but what lay well beyond, and it was as if the unwilling landscape man Mayn had actually told her this was what would happen: that two persons perhaps without even a vein of bias as to religious or sexual origin might one day disappear literally into one: but the point was not that this need happen each to each in their frequent troth but that under some latest utility dome two persons stood Indian file content because awaiting transport to another section of their future: there, having here been reduced to frequency and thus transmitted hence, they would reconstitute and see each other at once in their new home which would be an Earth-Moon-space colony with native-silica drapes, a lawn on top of the living room, altogether a new consumable life, running, say, a waterless fish-farm where beyond gravity gills won’t collapse, she understands (space spouse).

When in reality through the matter-scrambler utility dome the union of these forward-looking couples was to be sealed literally in a one-for-two eco-switch dreamed up by population-consolidation programmers who cover with the old romance of loved union a new unknown singlehood: that is, the Earthling couples demattered domeside turn out, when reconstituted thousands of miles forth in space in one of the colonies, to be one person now, no longer two.

O where was this coming from? Mariscada chemicals? Glamorous couple? (just exited — awesome; dangerous; partial, she had to feel). But more coming from herself, like wind within, drawing her out in all directions, she thinks grandly. To where? Away from that place in her that fired off messages home to friends beginning "I’m sitting on Al and Ginny Kaulilua’s balcony on Statehood Day overlooking the Pacific and somehow at peace listening to a Society Island canary sing in its swaying cage." Or toward the gist of two persons transpondered to an elsewhere of one, like shadow cast back from future. She didn’t carry it further; but she almost did (recalling her reply to a man she momentarily didn’t, because she couldn’t, name, when they were lying in bed in a hotel contemplating shadow shapes on the ceiling made by a sunset among nearby trees — which was "Bliss" — which he then called the highest compliment any gal had ever paid him but she didn’t tell him it wasn’t just that — and she didn’t because she was still touched by his question, which was, "What are you feeling right now?"). And as she did almost carry it further now, she heard the line in the letter Flick had read where the man, Flick’s dad, whom the correspondent-woman Lincoln decided she loved, had said, Look I’m no landscape man (she heard his voice coming down in his knowing who he was) and she asked how could she ever have taped the self-burning Buddhist monk whose peeling colors — dervish flames drying out the personal pockets of life in the still being of that after all non-renewable person who had had no fat on him, much less cellulite — who was news: and so she scraped onto her spoon’s oval blade all but a trace of smoky caramel dark from the flan whose mold stood once trembling upon her dessert plate; and, wanting that last trace, she might through that girl Flick have felt, through near-relations leaning toward her or toward becoming as human as she or toward becoming her, or her and Flick, have figured out that her play-by-play taped Statesward many months ago in Vietnam for a pool of reporters had included in its stored radius the very man Mayn, of whom had been said (by his grandmother) what had been said of the correspondent-woman Lincoln (by her late mother) from field-hockey days when the grass kept growing under her furious feet, to her last visits home from further and further away — that she must have a tapeworm inside her. But thinking her new mystery-beloved’s disclaimer when really he was a landscape man meant that he might want to become the landscape — spread, disperse himself into it, which was kind of threatening, especially to someone wanting to locate him and meet him; and contemplating the last dark molasses swipe from her creme caramel; and reminding herself that a good Buddhist stays put and plants a tree like her father who planted on the other hand thirty postwar Jap red pines all at once the year after he had given her her Christian name over her ma’s dead body — she had to see that after a given two people were reduced to frequency, matter-scrambled, and sent on like a message to a better way of doing things in that hibiscus-flavored diaphragmatically breathing space colony with timeless sunbaths that might make her impatient ("No one can make you impatient," came a voice seductive if you love being taught things) — and there was only just the one of you when you materialized again in the Earth-Moon-space colony, and you found your head half pillowed by inner gravity or aware of some god in you or an angel or the memory of one with a permanent reservation in some of your newly compounded gray matter if it was really gray — well, which one of you was it that wound up on your feet? (as your parents predicted, in spite of their anxiety, which was for themselves?) — and which sex (to get down to shared thighs)? and would you be meeting a new, well, lover soon who had been done likewise?

Fair questions. Did he want to be done that to? Did it mean our feelings would wind up even more mixed, our memories fuller, our sex still less plain (and what about the women-women pairs, and the men-men)? What happened to chromosomes when turned into frequency? Just another male idea, she heard a female group-consciousness verbalize. Yet Lincoln had some lightness or light in her — was it non-serious? So she imagined again these couples compacted and transmitted as a frequency and recreated in the promised land as one person not two, and thought, Did it mean each new person would be even more the song of its parts, but where would Jim Mayn be? would he be internalized in her and she would have to live with that fo’ th’ rest of her days in space? But what if…? But, seeing the waiter approach and seeing just why this hypothetical man Jim Mayn could be right here — look out! — is also anywhere but here, for she is thinking him — oh God she didn’t know the man and never would, unless Flick his dear daughter mentioned Lincoln by name, which could stick in Jim’s mind, a woman with such a name: she took hold of her dessert plate, it had a thin dark blue circle painted round its rim, and brought it up to her face like a comfortable mirror, and, protecting her handsome nose by the length of her tongue, she saved the last curve of caramel from a final meaninglessness of trace, from the dishwasher or the swift fingertip of the waiter, whom for a second of bliss she blotted out with this mirror too close for anything but taste.

Where was she? Where had metabolism left her? Beamed to this instant of her life, lowering her plate she found herself neither with the waiter, who’d seemed to be bearing down on her, nor not with him, for he had detoured to the table of five in the far corner and, except for a darting glance out of the corner of his eye, no one seemed to have seen her "getting it on" with her plate as Grace said to "get it on" with your fingers eating your salad greens, as in conversation, as in work (as in "-aholic") for Grace taught that work was addiction like past, like romance, like sugar, like love.