Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

There’s hardly anything to fill this break between the hard facts he speaks of (such as water, and the litigation over it against heavyweight Anglo lawyers talking water so that Indian irrigation plans, their own and those of others for them, go only partway, everlastingly partway, poverty and water) — this break between the hard facts and such allusions to that relative often a grandmother but then allusions to lore that feels true like dug-up-bits, including a Princess from elsewhere who had a protector in a hermit who sat up in high tiers of wind-hollowed niches (also believed to have been the result of the actual rock’s thought) and she would catch him far far away and high above her watching her and recognize in his platinum hermit-eye the grandmother Mayn recalled so fondly.

"I mean," Mayn went on, "you can make hunger dramatic, it’s got good bone definition, cheek, chin, ribs, for those who don’t share it you know, and so when the Princess turned into her reflection at a later time," but as Larry put it together still later, the grandmother must have been really someone, whoever the Princess was, because she criticized her Navajo "protector" and his people, who weren’t too well off themselves, for having driven the Anasazi people out six hundred years before (though it may have been that the river had cut so deep down into the earth that the irrigation ditches were amputated high and dry like reverse waterfalls that can’t draw water up any more).

Larry later felt Mayn had been entertaining him.

Apartment tiers as vacant as the sunlight: when she looked again, she thought she saw one hundred, two hundred scrawny physiognomies with blanketed shoulders, blanket-hooded heads, looking out of that cliff dwelling answering like tidal creatures coming out of the shadows that lined the fingers of sun bent and crooked because of the openings.

She looked again and saw but one hundred. But arriving at the ceremonial sing where the Prince’s people tried to find a way into the Prince’s mother’s trouble through a hole in her forehead plain as could be but full up with demons that left little extra space but didn’t leak, the East Far Eastern Princess asked how the two hundred had become one hundred — those impoverished, derelict Indians back in the "apartment house," did they have a way of making people and things fewer, like the one used in her father’s East Far Eastern land of Manchoor? There, far away, her father had taught her to ride on the worst giant hill-sheep of the Manchoor Mountains he owned, when he was not gathering information about other countries. She would never ride like a Navajo sheepherd no matter how long her fact-gathering visit. Contemplating the two hundred or the one hundred, she asked herself, What of excrement? But Rivertalk, who was the Navajo Prince’s second mother, was surprised, for didn’t this fluctuation of numbers just happen? It was either death, a natural result of living among the unseen presences; or it was that when you weren’t looking, half the people went back into their cliff apartments; or it was that two became one just as one became two in many ways, hadn’t the Princess seen one hundred before she saw two?

Larry was happier for having spoken to Mayn — and catching the eye of a tall blonde girl in a locoweed-purple outfit passing, so she leaned back and stopped, friendly, reminded by someone in the mid-City using the booth that it was there and she needed to put in a phone call. Larry, by now possessed not only by interest in the dual histories of this man who wrote news but didn’t believe in anything you’d be ready to call history, but also by the need to speak what he had called Mayn in the first place to say but had not been able to, along these last mutual minutes curving by swiftest increment away from Lar’s prepared question to nonetheless keep faith with the undeniably parallel tracks either side which happy parallels sloping off into the sunset over the Jersey cliffs he is moved in his abstracted heart to see behind these darker people going to the subway outside his booth, finds all turned now into the face of the blonde who’s waiting.

There’s someone waiting for this phone, and all I wanted to know, though thanks I would like to go to the game, is—

Listen, Larry, hang in there, you’re a good playground talker yourself, the formulas (was that economics or physics?) I probably couldn’t keep up with you, though that’s fun sometimes, but when you said you’re a good playground talker backpedaling one-on-two waiting to make your move—

I said that? asks Larry, as the blonde looks at her knuckles. He had thought he had only thought it.

Well, all I called about — oh gee I got to get off the line, there’s someone waiting — was, well obviously Amy is into work that connects with your work, right? and it isn’t the right-brain video research for the handicapped, I know that, and she phoned me once to ask for your number which didn’t make any sense; so is she in some kind of trouble?

In Mayn’s mind, Larry knows, come answers unspoken to Larry’s unspoken question Was there anything between him and Amy? Mayn is saying "We" about when they are going to meet for the game, and Larry is saying "We" about a couple of events scheduled between his father and him, like going out to dinner tonight and maybe going to swim at a pool they have a family membership at and they haven’t gone in a while. Mayn has said, Well, Amy’s a real pretty girl. But he has balked, Lar’ knows, at the bottom-line negative, adding, You say you got a lady waiting there? Jim’s saying, Between us, that Chilean exile I mentioned to you who’s. . modestly shrouded in the folds and folders of the foundation Amy works for as a research assistant, Larry understands, and that Jim prefers not to say more — so that, realizing that Mayn don’ wanna reassure him that there’s nothing of a sexual nature between him and Amy, nor ask him to keep under his hat these mentions of the Chilean exile-economist, Larry separates the perhaps nothing political implications of his present rush and concludes that, O.K., maybe he is being used by some higher power (as Grace Kimball said once, using the Alcoholics Anonymous formula) and if the higher power someway equals his new sharing with Jim (or anyone else maybe), then try to flow along the curve of this whatever it is, because it is more than relationship softly resounding words like "We" through Lar’—it’s another type of being using him toward — what?

Hanging up, Larry, tall within the booth whose roof he once hit his tender fontanel upon concluding oon call with Amy, understands that the blonde girl’s eyes are on him alone when she says, Well I almost gave up on you (though making no move for the booth) — when he doubly realized (having not till now guessed) that she is — but no, she is not a hooker, definitely not (she is wonderful, maybe) and much as (what with the gate swinging open, gate beep gate beep) he wants to get started at once exercising the dreaded Modulus upon matters shared through Mayn that are falling into place, still he toys with the idea that this girl and him met once, she’s a friend of a friend of his father’s, or of Grace Kimball’s, or she was seen doing water polo in an Olympic pool at Port Adams, Long Island, or she was profiled lovely against a sludgy oil on the second floor of New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art where the gross ornate gilt frames were once gifts to some potentate or are the sculpted coastlines of some old rich room’s ceiling Larry would like to lie down in at twilight. But no, the answer is easy: Larry and she Have Not Met; she is just plain here, plus it’s late afternoon of a day when Lar’s father’s been working at home at home at home, but will be going out presently to his group that he’s always on the verge of telling his son about (which suddenly now means to Larry that Marv has talked to the group about Larry —but that’s O.K., his father has lost love but not heart, but for cool feedback cum companionship you gotta go elsewhere).