Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The friends of mine who sat near you? she murmurs, you knew them? you recognized them?

He makes a sound — or is it a touch — upon her leg — that’s all.

At Norma, she adds.

At Norma?

You obviously knew them, the man and the woman.

At which performance was this? he asks with the soft humility of a killer who knows what he may be called on to do, and he specifically does not say Rosenkavalier, which they both know Clara and her husband were at.

Oh at both, she lies (and nothing happens, unless the tapeworm track way above the thigh his ear’s to reenacts the ghost worm itself in some notion that gives her away).

Which friends? he asks.

The only ones I know were there, she lies — near you at Norma, where do you know them from?

Norma is the opera, he mutters as if he is under a pillow of many years of marriage, Norma is the opera about the Druid priestess and the Roman soldier, with a modicum of suicide at the end, I think, he murmurs, jokingly double-checking that it wasn’t Rosenkavalier and the silver rose, and the satin breeches weren’t the sacred wood, the threatened kids, the funeral pyre, the hated Roman occupation.

The ones you mentioned, she persists — the man and the girl.

They were a mere socio-sexual phenomenon of older-younger seen in New York quite a lot, last season and this, comes the reply from his mouth but apparently from his ear into her thigh’s live bloodstream, and what she thinks of herself at this instant she would rather not think, and not even "lest he pick it up" down there against her.

And so he moves upward like waking, like remembering, seeking her up here where she’s a soft eye to kiss and a long, warm surface of neck, while she, a good She, gazes over his shoulder. And, blocking the thought of this as a political scene, she finds and describes better than she knew the man with the girl, though not the half-observed movements to and from seats, nor that the man’s bold, squarish, weighty face turning, with an older courtesy more than once to, she remembered now, the girl beside him, hove forth into mind emerging right out of the blank obstacle which is her refusal to think what the present scene with this Pinochet officer makes her, and she can’t think how she saw him that square-faced man in the orchestra so well, she didn’t know she was looking that hard — because she wasn’t.

Socio-sexual, she softly scoffs out of Spanish now into English — you know who I mean: the man with the heavy head of Spanish-gray hair, and heavy, broad shoulders, who seemed to look off over the audience.

I know only, says the man at her neck, that the two vacant seats near me were occupied only during the second act, and not by this man and the girl you are. .

She sees those seats during Act One vacant of Clara and her husband, who after all didn’t use them; whereas in Act Two some seats are full of other vacancy. .: two women?

Two young ladies with goggles.

Goggles? Surely not goggles.

Policeman’s smoked sunglasses, a bit big for their fine faces, maybe they had standing room for Act One.

But, she says insistently, her powerful lips at his ear, her eyes way past it, but she doesn’t see what she’s looking at for a second on the wall. Those two, the man and the girl, she begins again, they left after the first act: you made a point of asking about them: what do you want with them? I don’t know their names. I don’t even know their faces.

What would I want with people I don’t know? he sighs.

To know about them? continues the interrogatress.

You are making something up, he sighs; I thought you felt good.

But as she notes the poster, her poster with concentric squares that she was looking at over his shoulder, and actually bites into the upper rim of his ear, he cries out, and then he says, All right, then, they are important if you want, they are probably key figures in a master plot to infiltrate the opera.

And his interrogatress is so ready with her next question, But what do you want? that he lets her hear him think (and say), Not them, and adjusts his ear to her shoulder, dear that he’s willing to seem.

So she wonders what her relaxed neck and shoulders betray to his listening instinct when, fearing for Clara and her important husband and fearing for her own father (whose imported sweet cigars she can smell from here), she finds in the framed poster on the shadow-like wall only that same man — or his face — the man who was with the girl for Act One and left for some reason which is probably as plausible as she to herself (upset plus pre-menstrual interrogator of her suspect, close-up) is not plausible, and she must know why that man at the opera is behind each idling query of her breath against the blurred, gorgeous, close-up demufti’d young fascist admiral who’s less bent on landing a nuclear submarine for his country than in adding to the bank of its intelligence, which is not adding to him — and the sum of its vile subtractions (she works herself up), and has she dozed off into his ear for an instant? — she has — in order to needlessly say, I’m asking the questions — but he, at rest yet drawn by her words, asks (and it could have preceded her own words), How am I supposed to know these friends of yours? what are their names? maybe that will shed light.

Their names are no concern of yours. Or mine, for that matter.

Easy enough to find out, he says.

I’m sure it was, she says, but feels the exchange turning awful.

Can’t we be in love? he says.

I am asking the questions, she says with soft daring.

If not their names and faces, which I do not know, he insists, their connections —is that it?

That’s why you singled them out?

You, not I — and why did they walk out of Norma? Opera is the most democratic of art forms, he adds.

Rosenkavalier? she asks: personal preference, perhaps, she answers— and has made a mistake, forgetting to be true to her lie.

That was what you said. Therefore, it was my presence that drove them away from Norma after the first act — is that it? is that what you are suggesting?

But he doesn’t care; he draws his hands down her back and she is confused, not hopelessly, not hopefully, and what is democratic about opera here? the opera house is right smack in the Puerto Rican tenements you might say. She can’t ask him to arrange for her father to leave his home and come here because, even if the regime agreed, her father would prefer to stay and the regime would not agree, because her father would speak louder than any act except his silent murder some night here in the free world. And thinking of anything but this, she contemplates the absence of everyone, of the middle-aged man and the girl from the second act of Norma, the absence of Clara and her husband from Norma altogether, the absence during Act One of Norma in the two seats she’d given Clara and her husband, into which the two young women with glasses had moved for the second act: until, as he moves down her, letting go of her shoulders and she finds behind her closed eyes the bristle of his mustache on her hip, her rib, along her stomach until his mustache disappears, she finds emerging the face and long hair of the mere girl whom that broad-faced, middle-aged man with the rather harshly striking thick gray hair sat with and leaned toward, in the seats she left for her friend Clara and Clara’s husband — the girl who hadn’t mattered before with her broad forehead and fine cat face coming back to mind having never till now been seriously present, and the diva, left alone with her own abandoned neck, lips, ears while her lover nuzzles her, and softens his own aim gently to a fault where she is wet so that, pre-menstrual for what her desire might not hold back, she starts to say, "I wouldn’t if I were you," but supplies instead of the last four words that would warn him of blood the other words "be surprised if it was the girl you were after."