Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So what’s Lar’ going to do? suspects he’s lucking out, for a second hallucinates Mayn kept him phonebound so long, exposed to your curbside traffic and to self-preoccupied yet happy homeward (but of course it’s quitting time, they have punched out) wage earners for as long as he did because Mayn was sending this girl.

But Lar’ has heard us, and (confirmed by the converging difference between the speech of a skimpily shorted jogger passing mid-Manhattan gridlock traffic-stall and behind and then ahead of him a high-stepping blackish sprinter in jeans who tears by and nearly runs down a bike that’s running a red light) Larry must cut out from the phone booth at once in defense of his own privacy, he’s got to make himself scarce from that booth, has heard us relations before we actually say in the voice of the Dreaded Modulus or we take the form of the resident child that reminds Lar’ of his youth, O.K., let R (for rotation) equal any number; having found that R may be positioned between two things in order to (through turning, looking, and merging through converging) make them equal, we suspect that R means "equals": hence we have the child’s R neatly inscribed between the two terms people and matter, which together the child has heard from his immediate ancestors and seen in the culture so often as to mate the two terms and identify them: which the child therefore calls R (Lar’ recalls from a dream he had of working in a moving house): hence People R Matter, which might muddle itself slightly if the R be merely heard and not seen, since then it might come out as wr, or some like speech d’effect (not to be confused with "Drive-Ur-Self"), whereas sounding just like the word "are," the letter "R" works O.K. to mean "equals." But what bugs Larry is some half-received words themselves or emotion afoot in Mayn’s friendly chat, that the way Mayn’s diverse informations have been given is telling Lar’ two things at once on separate but equal machines-like, you cain’t luck into both at once ‘cept by a mode he has only dreamed of, and the two things are: people matter; and people equal MATTER.

Larry feels one of these people disintegrate around him, it’s his too-young-acting mom, while around him in the terminal that he doesn’t travel through much nowadays living not on the Island but here in Manhattan, people hasten to get their train, and Lar’s humming of course at the premise that beyond this gone-to-pieces capability they will put themselves back together later. If Lar’s mom Sue one-on-one with or without possession took the court now, she might find the classic one-on-one upped by all the don’t know about her son Larry (though Secretly Can Come To Love) who like all the rest sees Life, does Larry, as backpedaling, backpedaling, and couldn’t Larry be seen by Susan as a divided and conquering Ewe-man Be-in not one but two sons to babysit (to diaper, to lift, to look into, to hear yelling clearing yare iddle lung, haroong harangue, to suckle mebbe two on two but maybe not) when by contrast she had been all but certain the unknown kid she looked forward down her front to seeing shoulder its way out of her, slow-diving ‘thout benefit of arms (don’t worry, it’s got arms, don’t you worry, they’ll come, they’re there below the tiny shoulders I thought; they’ll come, they’re there), was the one baby that she wanted and the only one, she said.

Yet a Wide Load — to pick up Mayn’s words — a Wide Load coming out is what Larry believes he was: because, though no hysterect Sue (unlike her friend Lucille who, perhaps since she rec’d her hysterectomy right after an abortion, never blamed her hysterectomy on the size of her by then eleven-year-old red-haired son’s given head at birth), Lar’ sure got the idea somewhere along the line that the parameters of his own capital (though maybe all that was inside his head) split his mother sorely enough to sever a faith years later acquired by her through a book, to wit that the mother ape (read baboon), while readily losing interest in a babe of hers if it die, loves and tends ye a live one for all the world by instinct to not remember the pain of childbirth as soon as it’s over yet as if that pain through some semen of amnesia remembers to beget mother love like an opposite of the pain, and so the Earth grows more rational.

Yet did she feel mother love just in order to neglect (read forget) the kill of Larry tearing headstrong through her? (We can’t blot out a sex flick of the late century in question, and the star stud’s creamy baritone advancing his own original pleasure-pain theory to the featured lady above him slowly centering down around his disappearing X-erected membership also baritone-arm cartridge.) For then Susan, if we now are even still with Susan alone, might after all not have felt truly mother love but only that the obstacle-pain was a presence to get past until she was sheets to the wind yonder and knew oh that she still loved her husband after all: but then only if she was still really she, like the century in question, there within our accommodating Us where many women prove to be like her with her very same problems to her relief at Grace’s Body-Self Workshops — and they prove to be like, but prove as well to like —for it’s Important, it’s Important, she found out and cried out after years of needing mothering more than to be liked by men, which was what she had thought it was all about, namely what she fell out of bed into each tense, dream-rewired morning of her one-time life, namely that ‘twas men she must needs be liked by, she had thought. And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world until some sweeter obstacle dropped away leaving her in another female presence and her within ours among other women she felt herself among, who had not seen the porn film aforementioned except for — in this wall-to-wall Body Room — the room’s "owner," proprietor, and presiding spirit Grace Kimball, who had, with her young, delicate, stern friend Maureen, who went with Grace to the film with a small party of Grace’s friends so that later Maureen and Grace in unison in Grace’s Body Room during a session of the women’s Body-Self Workshop in unison like an octave had the same things to say about the film — the absence in it of authentic one-on-one masturbation but in all fairness the goodly stress or indication through close-shot focus on her requests that a woman might Run the Fuck, though granted directorial close-shot she-focus isn’t necessarily acknowledging the goddess nor is it any substitute for, though also no obstacle to, that adjacent ideal of directorial play, and when you come down to it sex was viewed as bounty kindly deigned by the male.

Viewed upon the permanent screen also of a Manhattan movie theater at differing times by such others among us as further universalize our Sue, who is Larry’s mother but has or had the abundant dark hair of more than one other of ours changing from angel to human and had the occasional though not so lyric or so satin ("onstage") inclination of a known singer to dress now and again in men’s clothes: viewed, as has been said, on one screen at differing times, the now syntactically (tapeworm-?) digested anatomical film above mentioned lived a little in the minds of some of the current women we have bothered to respectfully discern within us, as if we were each of them looking back and forth multiplied by unresolved dreams between let’s say the inner, many-factd screen and the moving color cinema screen in the dark movie house of afternoon couples equal we see in number exactly to (two for one) the slouched, sporadic single men (no female singles) and all like communicants with the light they’re shadowed by, which is also the woman on the screen, a Miss "Jones," making up for (we’re asked to believe) her long-lost time and multiplying it with the support of a small cast of players coupling or even trebling always into her one.