Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Whereupon, confounded by what she has called forth — a snapshot of Clara’s husband with three of the staff at the foundation in whose sanctuary for the time being he keeps "a certain profile" (he says), a snapshot — a snapshot that she’s sure includes that very girl, as if the diva onstage were ever absolutely sure of who is in the house, her sight flowing over and ignoring them like things in her when she is singing. .

. . confounded by all this somewhat as we are confounded of whom she is a part by her wholehearted breathing that starts up a little light of blind relation, even to the diamond squint of the Ojibway tapeworm trapper now matriculating in his aeronautics program within shooting distance of Lake Superior but she knows she had not the pain in the head and the pain in the belly and the throw-up sweating behind her tongue after all, but then, glad he’s where he is, and glad she is not him and need not close her chamber door, for no one else besides the two of them is here — no children, no old folks — she feels him breathing like his shoulders are inside the flesh of her legs, which they are, and knows that beyond her closed eyes he looks at her, because he chuckles, and takes a little swipe, and chuckles ancora, and rests his ear lovingly ‘gainst her leg to say — with a first trace of bright blood on his mustachioed teeth? — and perhaps he is here (in New York) only to discuss acquiring from the United States a submarine that she has heard spouts (and she sees it along their lone coast) like a whale (beloved, patient coast long enough to berth that U.S. aircraft carrier our Allende was urged to invite for a visit and inspired then to announce publicly the invitation to the aircraft carrier only to have it declined by the U.S. President whom her friends in Paris used to strangely respect for his support of the NATO alliance) — Is that girl (he asks) therefore a friend of your friend Clara? I know you are asking the questions and that is hardly a question, but—

No, she stops him, I hardly think the girl is a friend of Clara’s (and the diva finds his question is about to turn her off, and her stiff answer too could turn her off — which then has an opposite effect, for by an oracular chance she has heard again by memory or tapeworm track or co-female unconscious Clara’s brave remark down the thread of this last, turning mouth, to wit that Clara’s elegant exile husband (who can sing "The Midnight Special") does have a friend or two here — one a girl at the foundation who is devoted to him — and another thing or two Clara said about what’s going on hangs back in the diva’s remembrance like a real thing she forgot to do, or a face not her own).

Therefore, her lover murmurs, her fascist argonaut, her other body, murmurs muffled somewhere— therefore (he says unseriously or drowsing, or half-dreaming of her), your friend Clara and her husband. . who likes music, and would have a box at the opera in another country… do not see this foundation girl Amy… are not in touch with her.

And the diva experiences a fixed shiver at these words of the man dreaming practically inside her. Well, her interrogation of him has brought them to a connection unforeseen, and saying, Amy? She is really feeling she may have endangered her friends — when all she wanted was to arrive at her father about whom she therefore now asks, What are you doing to him? tell me, what are you really doing to him?

She hears herself say not "they," which would mean the regime in general, but "you"; she might as well be proud she’s charged this naked man as part of it; she might as well, though all she will get from him is charm perhaps.

She rides the gentle shrug of his shoulders now in partial answer. She smells the vanilla smoke from his hair and she is nearly dispersed by some future feeding inside her but she smells dry, sharp unsmoked cigars, more acrid than their smoke, above the paternal hearth upon the mantel as many years ago as she once walked kilometres up a thorny, gravelly mountain behind a famous father who gave her a pair of black heavy hiking boots higher than the high shoes her anxious mother kept her in through the beginning years of her piano lessons though not a Sunday-afternoon song recital when she was no more than a child and her father nodded and smiled fifty feet away by a tall, ornate door, and later unseen by her disappeared leaving only a blank in her mind, disappeared with three tall men all about six inches taller than he, and handsome — one (it came back to her) a sewer architect and another a fiery-eyed, auburn-haired scientist, a Popular Front man of course who had been in the South when fifty thousand souls had perished in the earthquake, their heads emptied of the Front’s election slogan Bread, Roof, and Overcoat, so that, years later, though at this moment she, a goddess on a king-dolphin, can’t help seeing the great door ajar to the hallway that led to her father’s study, and finding an aroma of sweet cigar, and a door ajar where three men of her polite audience had been a moment ago — smoke rises from the vanilla of her present lover’s scalp and, in the midst of him with the violet of her own roof overhead meeting her vague, breathing eyes, she finds that whatever that unknown man in the orchestra at Norma (with the girl — Amy? — who works at Clara’s husband’s foundation sanctuary) means to the diva’s spiraling heart, she arrived at her hard-to-talk-about father only to see he was not the end of all her languidly irritable interrogation (no he was another obstacle sought, in the midst of these words of her naked admiral’s Your father is under house arrest and only he can hurt himself; he is fairly safe, he is a great man in his own way and he is, of course, old).

So she sees what she was about — though it too will change as she reaches it weightlessly, daughter, spy, counter-spy, counter-daughter, so totally at ease with her skin-and-bone-gripping arms and scrambling fingers and her neck and shoulder slopes as to prove the ease with which she does what she does so as to absorb the chambers of herself into one amorous whore just in time then to feel this role pass away with who but the broad-faced, broad-shouldered, unknown man in the orchestra who impressed her only upon his absence so that she thereupon became another woman whom the prostitute exploring some secret sign of her own celebrity inch by inch could never buy: and she suspected she might never tell this military man who was all over her like a boy overwhelming her in their joined breathing almost to the last, he was her other body known only for a couple of weeks growing two limbs onto her (his calves, she thinks, amused and clear) for her to plant the soles and heels of her bare feet on — of course they’re bare but what about that long-ago-felt "little swipe"? we remember we wanted to know and to be —never tell, never tell, never tell him that after their dementedly affectionate clasp ten days ago as naked inside as out, she was bound by bodily vow to miss her period and why the devil not?

Or telling him (for she has a reputation after all — and a trousseau beyond all need of a husband to go with it, yes telling) would be a thing she would think about when (and if!) she got to it among remembered phrases of his love — remembered, the way to a man’s stomach is through his heart rerouted via such doctored slick sea eggs as brunch is made for — for she doesn’t see him clearly in her future (not certainly as that We the young wife speaks for herself and her husband that takes on a wholeness sure enough to invade their dual humanity to appropriate it, is that it? have we approached the fact?)— no, she sees him only as "a blank that will be in the way if we could but find it," some reasonable invading voices, mysterious We, angel perhaps if there were angels anyplace but inside us, saying the words she hears.