Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The diva saw it with her lone physician one afternoon long before the naval mufti put in; and she dressed up for her escort in longish gray silk, her giant supply of hair up, her mother’s lace mantilla drawn across a high comb like a veil chaperoning her girlhood, and her annually leased amber Porsche glowing in the garage waiting to be driven to Connecticut for dinner at an inn (by her there, by her escort home). She was having an afternoon off apparently from some articulate structure such as Norma or Rosenddmmerung able to accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale acts but comfortable in another such accommodating structure, her relation with the doctor. This relation she suddenly risked later in the self-same eighth decade of the century in question. For, having always, in and out of costume/role/voice, seen herself rather comfortably as many women — not excluding the patient who treats her doctor to a feast of stethoscopic auscultation, she came one day to risk all that and without a supporting cast: pinned herself down to two, all by herself — though she was in bed with her officer (i.e., pinned down now to two women): the one who casts a quiet hand upon the military man-in-question’s tough and interesting inner thigh whose mufti lies otherwise draped upon a chaise as fealty to this woman who would later contemplate sauteing him the slick, pink, gland-like sea roe left by her brunchen-hearted physician of the brioche chamber the medicine man where medicine is the man who, like the French physician Piorry whom the diva’s doctor’s own idol Oliver Wendell Holmes extolled as poet and percussionist expert alike in rhymes and in the chest-tapped "resonances of the thoracic cavity," unites the dual languages of his love (does the diva’s doctor) in listening ever and ever for the breath of his diva’s heart in all its grown chambers now reduced or maybe grown (half-beknownst to him her friend who really cares for her) to two chambers— which are threatening to be (equally): the One who casts her fingertips upon the sense of his chamois-soft sac easier to know than what floats so unknown within it while the self-same sac she will presently use her very sex to find lightly arriving and kissing regularly and softly the edge of her love, his against her, sealing each time the lip of her; yet also be the other woman of her new two, who turns interrogator as if only that way can she ask what on earth she means taking up with an officer of the motherland regime that casts her father as a danger man and does his grocery shopping for him once a week so he must miss that flower honey he loves.

But what good could her presence do her old father? She’s a Swiss citizen, imagine! If she flew home to Chile and they let her in, it would be on condition she sing:

sing near the harbor that her voice teacher’s piano once reflected through a high casement window and, facing it across the old room, a single round mirror which was the pivotal depth turning the coastal brilliance to a sound of sweetest history upon the grand piano’s shaped black top large as Brazil, as the whole continent, or inanimate as the future and firm as the Latin her teacher had her study.

She could imagine her shoulder blades where his hands gripped her coming up along her back and over the top for a while, and, dislodging the flow, thinking of him for a moment where he now was, down below the deep breaths of her breasts to which his one blind hand goes passing back and forth — and with a delicacy of blindness brushes across. She thinks of him at her mercy, too — or of him being asked questions he could not but answer though he had heard if not them, something already, listening in on her thigh (what? some political infidelity) — she would then entirely take in this crossed cadence and the flow which after all hadn’t lessened! so that she knew she had it in her power to be made to come: until, having once again hugged this power of hers with all of her legs and a brain in her belly that clapped its high slick pillows, she lay rolled now on her side, happy, and heard herself monstrously try him with questions. Power she all but handled while she swept aside her ignorance of facts that whispered with dangerous constancy while she it was who now asked and he answered, and all the time she feared and proudly feared what he might hear of what she’s thinking coming from inside her thigh.

Which is no more political than dear Clara’s exile-economist husband, just as English as a Chilean of his class can be, quoting Chaucer or Shakespeare, or the American Emily Dickinson who has music but frets so — that one might Waste— what? those Days we thought unwisely we could spare; or the dark kindness of the Scotsman Hume candled by love and such excellent amiability that that depth might some evenings find itself all alone emptying within covers of a small and economical tome, quoting others of that island and time from some vast anthology of English sound, so that one would never have thought Clara’s love an economist laughing his tall way through exile private more than incognito (and "I would I were a weaver," he was heard to say, with Falstaff, and Clara said, "I would you were, my love," because she knew he said a lot of things to entertain her: to which he retorted, "I am your love, my love, ‘And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, / When all the breathers of this world are dead,’ " upon which Clara laughed, no only smiled beyond laughter, thinking how far her children were from her upon a globe you might nowadays just fall off of — upon which her husband the exile-economist sang some American songs in a Hispanic-Oxford accent more poignant than authentic, more close to her than foreign—"Love O Love O Foolish Love," "False-Hearted Lover," "Irene" — that seemed no more out of place than English rock groups with the drive-shaft twang of the Bluegrass in their coke-cooled nose or the drawl of northwest Carobama or new Arkansoma.

Yet proudly the diva feared still more that her officer would hear some price upon his head in her soft interrogations of him, post-ecstatic, pre-prandial, so at ease in (as her widower father would say of her mother’s long convalescence) "a darkened room" that, asking the demufti’d paramour a fine thread of questions like Clio of all her Antonys floating past the Moon-implanted pyramids, the Manchoor Mountains, the roof tiles of Florence and Paris, and over the Nine Ten Eleven Bridges of Nueva York, Where were you a minute ago? — and where an hour ago? I have won you naked and dressed, have made you my body and made for you each charming accident and endearing blunder the art of love hath care of, and still what are you thinking? — if you don’t love me I will not love myself, she hears some other voice of powerful relations seeking at our expense improvement, say, and she repeats it dismayed that she is some kind of angel if he says so, but she knows, troubled, that her lover does love her and did ten days ago with lust and admiration when he was principally at that time in her view an officer of that regime that broke Victor Jara’s guitar hands so he could no longer accompany himself except down the runways of the sport stadium where Neruda had read poems in 1972—regime-officer-someone this young opera goer who might hurt or help her father. But now ten days later she’s flirting with one answer to two wants (how did any man ever kill two birds with one stone?), felt in the devious track coming out of her some evidence that she didn’t know after all this very body of hers she was so happy with here, pre-menstrual; so close with and so happy with that it and its cosmic environs of bed and chamber had forgotten each other easily for minutes and minutes upwards of an hour-and-three-quarters of such love!