Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And now the diva, swaying generously toward a duplex kitchen and the light in order to rustle up a dish of roe, can be again less than a story in herself and once more part of a greater Breather capable of accommodating implicitly not just her mind but her body with its memorial maps where at least one tapeworm left its narrowing track converging unknown to it or its bearer upon a future point of self removed as soon as reached, flushed atabriney from the scene to show a possessive, solicitous, though friendly physician a thing or two (yet give a body a chance, as even this knowledgeable auscultocrat of the brunch board believes) with all his pharmacopoeiac chemistry floating in his head for his old Boston idol to walk on or — for such is the power of the great American doctor Holmes — to ride across in his wonderful one-horse shay discoursing on Ricord, "the Voltaire of pelvic literature" and (not to be mixed up with Tussaud, who was a madame) Rousseau the therapeutist who professed medicine as an art (read experience) as much like making or like love as history’s obstacle quest where an American Indian tapeworm (or Indian- processed tapeworm) gives way to another blind appetite or two beyond being "with" tapeworm or with father along an always narrowing future which— like the thing or two told her by Clara that hung back in her friend the diva’s mind about what’s going on with them (all these people illuminated by us quite possibly and perchance engendered by them, which includes Clara and her economist husband), their stranded, witty life — was not at the forefront of Jim Mayn’s, on an afternoon in New York when (for he was always thrown back shadow-like by the future he’d been in and so he’d actually witnessed and felt its narrowing) he tried to interview an old loner maverick with a beat-up face who talked about everything almost except what Mayn had been drawn to visit him for. This was a new coastline meteorology this man had made up which had unfrocked or unemployed him, hermit that he almost is, here in a quiet, multi-room "railroad" in a pretty high-rent neighborhood in the lower Village. How could Mayn, e’en with his non-position on history, not wonder that a maverick pressure-front analyst across Mayn’s path could prove also a hermit of New York who had done his share of invention? Was it that we were always thinking — we have to help each other out — of the next thing, not this? — like what is in the next room or apartment? And so because Mayn kept losing the skinny beat-up polymath’s name in favor of adjacent data, substitute epithets, and because this loner with the inventive mind don’t like to be interrupted — distinctly not! — Mayn can’t shift gears and backpedal but is aware of being after not just the elements of, well not just a new meteorology but a new weather new enough to have unfrocked this hermit crab when, as a weather specialist with a national service, he began introducing his own thing into reports and surprisingly was not picked up by the wire services, but stays busy and alive among the red-and-black diagrams drawn on areas of brown paper, split-open supermarket bags taped together on the wall of the final room of the railroad flat, diagrams of weather levels like coastlines and he’s talking about what came out (or went in) as, Mayn later told himself, "obstacle"(!) geometry but Mayn didn’t register it until hours later, having groped for a name he was renaming this old man as mottled and chipped as the fortified walls of his railroad flat until, with another word coming in his mind instead of "obstacle," he nonetheless voiced the term "obstacle geometry" to his phone mate this good crazy overintellectual kid Larry who is coping, he really is, at this transitional juncture of his life (though Jim Mayn hasn’t got the full story) coping with the busted-up marriage of his parents which he really as he says feels won’t last — that is, the bust-up — though he didn’t say where his mother was up to whatever she is up to, and Larry (all ten of him) was on the point of telling what felt like "all" (though Mayn isn’t receiving dossiers of that luridly commonplace sort because he knows enough about contemporary marriage to forget a great deal and still have a rich backlog and standing reserve), and so Larry at once picked up (before Mayn could find the word to replace "obstacle") the term "obstacle geometry." And Larry said he’d never heard of "obstacle geometry." "Oh well if you haven’t heard of it—" "I mean I can figure what it is, Jim, I can figure what it is—" " — //that’s what the man said" said Jim. "Who?" said Larry. "The old genius." "What’s his name?" "Is it the Hermit-Inventor of New York?" Mayn asks, but of whom?

But he hardly had time to be startled at that old monicker from grandma Margaret’s talk, it isn’t as if Mayn don’t know from his grandmother Margaret the Hermit-Inventor’s name — that is, the H.I. of N.Y. — still he is a hermit and he is an inventor, and "of New York," no getting around it, plus Mayn hardly thinks about his instinctive nickname for the frugal meteorologist whose unified-field weather got him tossed out of the government-funded concern that had put up with him for just so long, and when next Larry spoke to Mayn, Mayn found that obstacle geometry—"optical geometry?" Mayn hesitantly asked his young friend— " — well it would include optical," said Lar\ "which I have heard of, but it’s ‘obstacle’—" "Well, did you make it up since I last talked to you?" — "No sir, it was there in what you said," said Larry.

The kid’s in his own world, hermit of the pay phone booth, private even from his apartment when his folks aren’t there —but Obstacle Geometry, misheard from optical geometry, can find its own way from day to day and call to call. And it warn’t why Lar’ exited laterally rather than through the roof of the booth, gently taking and shaking the surprised hand of the amused young blonde woman, while she feels that his gentleness seems overconfident though all Lar’ can get through is the words "You were waiting for me?" to her "You want to come home with me? I live four blocks down—" to which he, still one line from what his offered hand had meant, replied, "You probably live in my building. . four blocks?" But she laughs, shakes her head with very friendly authority; has a shopping bag in which he can see a bottle of wine with a red cap (of vino, his father would say) and a bunch of celery, leaves greener at the top, and the darker shoulder of an avocado — so she is not a prostitute; her clothes are a little mussed, she’s been working; she’s not a prostitute, he repeats to himself waiting for something to happen, for Larry then regretfully smiles friendly to the blonde whose bra shoulder strap under the loose knit of her dark sweater passes palely on its way — sweater or blouse or whatever it is, and says, "Really, thanks — I’ve got a girl and" — he shrugs with aeons of masculine understanding in his sensitive mouth but she says, "Oh," so softly, "whaddayameaj??" as if she uncannily knew that that other "older woman" (Amy) isn’t his girl but only would-bz.

As she surely won’t be if she hears Mayn mention that Larry cut short his call because of a ladyfriend, though, once more home at his desk amid the empty apartment because his father’s at a men’s group tonight over at Hudson Guild where they get info on loving their bodies and (Marv smiles) brushing their teeth, Larry thinks of the loaf of French bread sticking out of that girl-who-tried-to-pick-him-up’s shopping bag and he should laugh at this but all he can do is leave his mother-bought roll-top desk that he rolls down roughly every other night to cover up the neatness with which he leaves his books, pads, and a diary he hardly keeps and his father would never think of getting into — and wander to the phone to ring Amy’s ringing ringing ringing phone thinking Grace Kimball is entitled to her views and Larry is the last person to damn her new Open Marriage law that has had such consequences in his life, whether or not he would point out that she herself having first closed out her marriage never got engaged in Open Marriage except as extended sexual partner (ESP) no longer called Other Woman. But as for Larry, it’s the whole works or nothing, and, listening to not even a provocative busy signal off there at Amy’s number, he visualizes the blonde girl smoothly two-handing a record down onto her turntable and then removing from her shopping bag with those friendly hands of hers one avocado, one crisp loaf of bread, one long bunch of celery, one dark bottle with red cap, and he can’t think what except he is convinced with a rising mist of intense interest that there was a chicken in there, yah he is so clairvoyantly certain a roaster was waiting down in ye bottom of ye bag that he dials for a moment his mother’s new number on the Island and hangs up in mid-ring and dials Mayn’s and a woman answers with something heavy in her hand, he’s sure, and Lar’ presses his finger down on the cradle-bar rather than let her hear.