Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Oh the ancient apartment houses, continued Mayn, a day later face to face, they spread south from Utah but in Jones’s time the Anasazi cliff houses, not to be confused with the Pueblo co-ops, had long fallen vacant but for a hermit occupying one unit six months of the year in northern New Mexico; it was a multi-year summer plan he had, I mean a hermit from the City of the East, remarkable man whether real or made-up. Unusual, no doubt, but your hermit needs a break once in a while too, though not necessarily in terms of seeing a whole lot of people (You mean, said Larry, not necessarily a vacation from himself? — Yeah, that’s it exactly).

But Larry’s not sure if Mayn said this line of hermits included this Hermit-Inventor of New York. But could Lar have made it up? lately he thinks of invaders in his bloodstream (maybe they’re good) but then they aren’t the We his mother Sue’s always speaking in — (We feel that only through money can we achieve power) but (God, maybe) his own We, but does that make him wacko or a vehicle for these bloodstream visitors to (what? "get real," as his own mother puts it, even when she tells him he lives in his head and ought to—) feel, not think. Yet this hermit is into quite threatening meteorological thinking and it has made Jim Mayn reflect upon a certain Hermit ®f New York who befriended Jim’s own grandmother not quite a century ago when she came down through canyonland a timeless Victorian girl-explorer with a box camera and on a horse brimful of locoweed at one point so it leaked (and beamed and radiated into her legs and eyes) full filtered through the bliss of her temporarily insane horse and, as a consequence, Jim told Larry one evening meeting at a newsstand beside the cafeteria where half a dozen cabs were pulled up, she could see just what she wanted though with the help of a fine young Indian who had given her her skin-and-dyed-wool saddle and her horse and some high-class guided companionship to boot (though Jim deep down felt this Navajo princeling had come to a bad end because of her eventually) — he was sort of a brother and perhaps husband-at-first-sight and Jim wished he had asked his grandmother more about him though he had gotten the impression that the Hermit of New York had kept an eye on her: so Lar’, who’s thinking Why’s this old guy (well, not that old) kidding like this in the middle of well what else? until Lar’ feels, yes feels, that this young woman of the last century, Jim’s grandmother or person beyond her, could see in the high-up and far-targeted reflection of the cliff-vacationing hermit (whom she couldn’t see except for his eyes like one eye, one platinum ingot) someone else entirely, astride this Indian pony (God, thought Larry, looking into the window of a furniture store all alone the following morning on the way to the subway to go to college, this stuff is driving me loco and all I get from Jim Mayn is this sense that he’s a down-to-earth not very intellectual regular guy, divorced, yes, he did speak of that as if we’re — what? — equals? like Grace said, speak to everyone as an equal) — till Larry’s telling this ancient story himself, Guess whose reflection the visiting Princess made out in the pin-glint of platinum light from the hundred-foot-high tier of cliff caves of that centuries-old multiple dwelling of the departed people who had once had a sterling culture of pots and cloth, and larders stapled with corn that some said had been transplanted hundreds and even thousands of miles from the original southeastern soils long gone of this continent the Princess was discovering, plus dry-country native seeds help save Africa from famine, a woman friend of Mayn’s is seriously thinking of giving up her career as a journalist to work on this — but guess whose reflection the Princess made out.

Oh, why it was your grandmother’s obviously, said Lar\

How did you know? called Mayn, laughing elevator door closed. It just came to me, said Larry, who saw Jim for an instant as a family man coming home, though Lar’ knew there’s nobody upstairs. (Or was there?)

Platinum don’t come in ingots, is that what you’re thinking?

Somewhere through these days and mostly phone talks after the two had met when Lar’ had by chance heard Mayn discussing basketball in the lobby with the doorman in Spanish and had joined in, Larry became attached to Mayn, maybe because he had been places and was cool. Until Mayn was in Larry’s head often, like opinions, and Larry, who did not ask Mayn about himself, saw the fact, one night, hearing his father come in, and could not imagine why Mayn’s college-age son didn’t want to be in touch with Mayn, because while Jim did not think at all the same way as Grace Kimball, he was funny, like her, and heard what you said, though she maybe made up what she said (though out of what?), did she really think her kidneys spoke to her brain and generated dreams? but the man whom one of the women in her workshop reported had never dreamed must exist, though when Lar’ was going to raise the question of whether it was possible not to dream, Grace told how the woman was ready to be in love with that undreaming man sight unseen, which was a perfect example of love addiction. This relationship with Mayn was easier, though Larry woke up in the middle of one night, hearing his father come in, and remembering soft joking in the next room long ago between his father and his mother — and now recalled Jim Mayn just now saying in this dream Lar’ had been having, "Get out of there, Larry," Larry driving through a three-sided bowl of rocky mountains, desert deserted for days of a poor man’s travel, "Forget it all, Larry, forget the family and try thinking something new," whereupon Larry asked something, and Mayn said, "Never dream": until Larry at once grasps the light where some modulus of the dream has vanished but leastways it’s light and has come to rest and is what’s between the two men, and Larry knows he’s Mayn in the dream, so maybe dreaming for his friend — has become this other person while simultaneously being, well, almost-Larry, but he is certainly not the women who arrived as the dream was curving away around a tree trunk or down the Earth just barely held by gravity to the surface: they were his mother and a band of others like her: he was in his clothes on the bed, but his father wasn’t about to open the door, and dreams thank God were garbage, all these angels and his mother were pleading with him, "Let’s be real, let’s be human," as if it’s up to him, when it’s no more up to him in some dream than when his mother said those very words out loud in the next room to her friend Evelyn so Larry heard. At least not talking about him. Or telling him he thought too much, which was a hard one to answer, he was working on it.

Yet he was talking to Jim Mayn days afterward only to know that on the night of that garbage dream he had had a theory as clear as if he could say it: it was a reincarnation theory that was true this time but must find itself in Larry before it could be clear.

Larry wanted to ask Mayn a direct question about escorting Amy to the opera when Mayn said he don’ like opera.

All very poor out there, says Lar’ from a phone booth and digs for a nickel, comes up with a quarter, all he’s got, then remembers Mayn called him back from Mayn’s home, did Lar’ pick up a signal? — responding anyway to Mayn’s claim that certain Indians of the Southwest come all the way home hundreds of miles from boarding school for the weekend and nobody knows how they make the trip, they disappear into it and materialize hundreds of miles later.

Mayn had a relative who went out there before the turn of the century and stayed almost too long and when she came back an Indian she was mixed up with followed her clear across the continent.