Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

As down the wormhole’s wind-tunnel evolving we recede from correspondent-woman, too, as she has glimpsed relations looking at her the way life holds you if you let it care, though looking back at her at the last second we couldn’t help it between bodies, we just could not. And we see her looking right at us but she doesn’t know us from Mayn, whom she is really looking at but doesn’t know it’s him there in the restaurant with the party of five others, and we who can’t help being angels, strive though we do these days toward human, had best leave her for this tunnel opening not inward tubewise like being de-born or digested but opening out from an endless circumference of where we’ve been. We "can’t" say, because, looking back at her who helped us get where we are, we relations touch an independence there as if although we have seen her off going hopefully on terms of Mayn, why what group of angels striving to evolve toward human can surely know what that "gal" (as her mother in St. Louis called her own oldest woman friend) is thinking while waiting for the waiter to bring the check? newly wondering where she’s coming from; yet breathes, breathes, and calmly like the diva who saw Jim Mayn in the flesh in an orchestra seat at Norma but knew him no more than she knew his name or than she knew here the softly sinister, fluffy-haired tiny woman wearing, we already remember, one simple unsewn length of saffron (acetate), her sleeveless arms free to beckon the waiter, who in the course of appetizer and entree has looked at the cloth often to dema-terialize it but could not know that her name she has lately come to accept and even (instead of the mere initial L) use in a by-line is her first, or Christian, name provided her by her father who scarcely knew what he wanted for a daughter of his loins but in the void of this he had her christened Lincoln, hoping, we’re now in a position to say, that she would never wed, but intrigued by the prospect of her unfettered and professional independence so much that Dad’s void or concept became that of his daughter. She, though, went so far beyond him as to aid a Hindu lover in graduate school, her first on all scores, grow quickly out of what she didn’t know till later was called "prematurity." And now, to get beyond the three stars on the framed, enlarged restaurant review out front in the window beside the menu, in a joint where the refried beans are good at gluing the expansible corridors of our r’evolutionary intestine, she has got her own void in hand. And not a hell of a lot to do for the next few minutes, the no-man’s gap where she ensures herself, and the dear link she has divined between her and the man on whom she meditates even to the extent of asking the waiter not for the check which he’s about to give her anyhow but for a third Mexican coffee: thinking upon this man Jim Mayn she imagines she has never seen except in essence and now so close to her (can’t explain) so close she liplessly mouths syllables like digestive grace so they can seem kinda beautiful: special, desert, creativity, reincarnation, relativity. And the coffee comes — a new cup which before it lands is but a cup whose liquid weight a waiter mimes, bearing it ever toward us, an obstacle that contains openly our belief, and she knows in the back of her mouth and in a chill down one thigh that she doesn’t want it after all, it’s the obstacle she couldn’t help asking for but at least now she knows she don’t want it: and she opens her mouth, her whole face, to ask for the check, but the waiter makes it out then-and-there with a wrinkled forehead (though that’s all she can see), we don’t know any more than he and should not have looked back but she made us.

But no one can make you do anything, not even relate. But these words we thought had come from us came from the interrogator, a real learner, whom we in any event ignore in order to concentrate on the spurt of juice he has given the funny bone in our groin with his ‘lectric button ostensibly for having either answered a non-question or having said two things at once which make no sense over the short run but across the long curve of our possibilities prove absolutely exact.

This we already remember. As if we hadn’t been told. Listen, what we remember is important, it’s all there is.

Her presence has drawn things to converge upon her, as witness the threesome (for two of the starting five, two women, just got up and left) at the corner table (and now a young fellow leaves the table to make a phone call by the service bar), so we’ll return to her along some track less smooth than the levity of a tapeworm’s nostalgic footholds in the diva’s aborted weight-loss project. And through spiraled circumference spinning our wind-tunnel ‘tween histories, we’ll see the correspondent-woman now without looking back and share with her the state of being between Mayn, no sweat.

A sage said all troubles arise from trying to broadjump inside a telephone booth. Oh well, the multiple youth Larry, like the economist his godly madness turned him into, forgot that a great leap upwards within the booth, even of joy (that is, after hanging up after a call during which he received kind words from the older, four-or-five-year-older woman Amy) might shortly hit a ceiling. Which returned Larry to the floor of the booth or to his feet (whichever came first) and made him wonder again if old Mayn was his rival or his adopted friend, not to say back-up father function/media connection. He’s had this trouble before, the two-on-one he calls it for safekeeping cum portability, it’s where the Dreaded Modulus comes in and expresses one system in terms of another like he knows chez Brain that Mom/Sue didn’t literally mean "Larry should get laid," because mothers don’t talk like that even in the future and Sue’s expressing one shitload in terms of another, and yet even his oF Brain will tell him you got to sometimes give Modulus oon rest and feel that both given shitloads are your given life and it’s all the same ballgame. (Right on, Larry, right on, sweetie, he hears Grace once say to him in another context.) But should he pack a backpack and go to Europe for a few years? but where would Amy be when he came back? living with oF Jim? of course not, probably in Europe herself! but where will Jim be? Is this the two-on-one trouble again? It’s a shitload faster coming at him than an unresigned end-game with a bishop and a knight against just a knight (which Larry’s given up with chess itself at eighteen); is it more the lone guard against a forward and a sudden substitute you don’t recognize tearing-ass downcourt? Got to make your move because if he doesn’t the one with the ball will go all the way and up for the shot which for greed’s sake he may do anyway: but it’s all also inside Larry and he would talk to his father if his father didn’t have enough on his plate already and to his mother if she had not once recently reduced his life, telling a friend that Larry has to get laid: and while in the corners of his eyes the two enemy players divide their distances to the basket so he would prefer switching to instant-replay mode to put it mildly, he figures he’s divided his talk option between Father and Mother, next between yes-Mother and no-Mother (opting for the no-don 7-discuss-the-two-on-one-with-her), then between no-Mother-One (which is no discussion but no hard feelings) and no-Mother-Two (which is You’re so one-track-minded nowadays you’re a jammed terminal, Ma, it isn’t funny, we can’t get a decent discussion going about this two-on-one thing of mine until we get past the sex gate which can be jumped only with the correct Yes or No response, that is we have all first got to be sexed like little kittens and then our eyes can be looked into). Yet as the no-Mother-Two option gets branched, Larry can see his mother Susan gain perspective through distance but is it hers or his he’s pinning down? all he knows is she gets smaller with these divisions yet doesn’t bug him less.