Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Until, at the moment that his floor arrives and Lar’ knows Mayn on a floor just passed won’t be home at this hour and, conceiving parallel impacts of Mayn and Grace on his life as a son, he knows or has heard those two lines of Mayn and Grace may converge all they want and still not necessarily meet, Larry hears music the new super rigged somewhere in the ceiling of the elevator for his grand opening as if Jefferson with his interest in enslaved women and pursuit of happiness had invented the elevator while playing on his violin, so our thought may turn to aria set to the catchy beat Lar’ only now is aware of as its absence filled like the ultimate empty obstacle instantly with a warmly rapid-fire Spanish-speaking voice machine-gunning a commercial which Lar’s brain pick up the musical flow (‘n that’s an order): and what’s the difference what phone Mayn’s at, if any? — he’s Mayn twenty-five hours a day.

But stepping onto his own floor and willing to be Not Thought Of for the time being, Lar’ looks down the astringent-smelling gleam of the hall past one apartment door with a brown airedale-bristly Welcome mat and further on across from it a second door with a New York Times in front of it and has to step back into the elevator and press Mayn’s floor, and upon being there he looks out to Mayn’s place at the end and there’s an envelope showing under the door.

Then back up on his own floor Lar’ looks to his right "close to home" at his own apartment door close to the elevator; and he is then so between histories (his parents’ and Mayn’s and Amy’s and others’—and his own— between his own history) that, unknowing, he passes himself and his bike through, into his and his father’s apartment and vanishes past his threshold unto himself like any practiced apartment dweller (even if with the slightest fore-flicker not coming to him but darting from him to find evolutionary evidences of his mother here in this free space where history is the story of libertad, but whose?)

Until, turning (his head) upon the axis of his bike he finds an envelope just inside the door with a diagonal postmark on it and, watching it, as he carefully props his bike, he isn’t angry at all and visualizes the handwriting inside the envelope and the handwriting outside on the other side, and reaching for it he identifies the postmark as his own bike-tire tread and, turning the envelope, he sees only his name, "Larry," in block caps, and feels inside the envelope a stiff oblong the size of a ticket and a slight complicand of paper doubtless doubled about the ticket, and he puts the past behind him and, with the envelope from Jim Mayn in hand, disappears once again.

We knew perfectly well that curiosity isn’t caring, and who’s home and who isn’t matters less than Shakespearean syllables rolling and trembling from the basso rotondo’s unmistakable voice not so far away accompanied by absent-minded music: or so it seems to us as a body and suddenly unplugs our ear to the unrhythm’d height of (is it?) "to your/ather (father father), But-you must know (you-must know, know-know) your father lost a feather (father father) and that father lost, lost his, and the survivor (the survivor) bound—" the title escapes because a door down the hall has opened the music to us at the instant the singer lapsed out of the words into the horn of his great cavity’s plenteous colorabuffa; and a young male spark backs out of that doorway hauling one end of what appears to be a loveseat but getting longer and longer, laughing and jibbering to someone who has the other end apparently not the pianist or the singer unless the singer served as his own pianist? Is anyway deeper back in the apartment since he has not cast off from the words and is tuning up, hence not moving furniture until now he breaks off his wordless melody to holler, "Roslein, dumb ducat, stubborn boy, you can’t get that thing through there like that" — for, be it exile or home-going, the choice ‘tween Wittenberg and L.A., Elsinore and Off-Broadway, isn’t easy; but has the basso rotondo given his power to be used by a very young man who bosses him? and who is called by him Roslein after the Schubert song if these details mesh.

And as through the peephole of Larry’s front door (which Lar’ himself is not the type to tiptoe to if he hears action in the hall especially now, when he would not see too well!) we see young Roslein amid laughter and many-tongued abuse stop backing and move forward now, ushering the both wise and unsuspecting loveseat (or what we have seen of it) back where it just came from—

Is it angels of sympathy in us or our community’s own mere power of relation that questions what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

And is the mere question here a power? For hearing Larry feel, it’s like us he feels, as if he could just up and leave his father’s house and live outside in the community he has heard peacefully at work inside him, witnessing meanwhile the aria tidbit (God it’s Hamlet, sort of!) sung by that large, unseen singer who does not know the man named Mayn (Lar’s new friend) who recently moved back into this building, bringing knowledge of sky-high windmills on electronic Wyoming pylons or of whirlwind-induced sickness brought on among the Navajo that only the singer with his ceremonial chemistry may cure, but was only half sure one morning in the apartment-house mailroom off the lobby (one man coming, the other going) that the bronzed bust-of-a-man beside him trying with a stammerer’s persistence to trick his relocktant(!) postbox open was the priest in that opera the other night — but he was (and a quick check of house-phone list, yah yah, that’s the man all right) the one in the first act draped in a robe-thing out there on the stage telling the assembled sacred and military arms that the great gong (well, Jim conceded to Lar’ he’s not much on opera, y’know) marks the rising of the moon and so his daughter, the star priestess, will come — to cut the missiletoe(!) Mayn’s young companion of the evening Amy had pointed out: while here in the apartment-house mail-room, Oroveso, the priest (right?) was decked out for the day like a native tycoon on his way to work, a portly ship-of-a-man in double-breasted camel’s-hair overcoat and wide-brimmed brown fedora (Lar’s seen him) plus to Mayn’s mind a corn-pollen sort of glaze upon his tan that (well Larry has gone back to his desk and could care less and is suddenly lost and envisions a Place of His Own out in the city so /mpatiently that relations otherwise proud of him feel more comfortable in the old humdrum company of the journalist Mayn, in whose helpless head is now being carried a cabaret tune locus’d from "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" to "I’ll Be Around" (by the man who gave us the instrumental "Sea Fugue Mama") — plus a scent Mayn couldn’t place except that its freedom, like an obstacle he skis to both sides of (ouch!) with his son or daughter or wife once upon a time behind him, takes him to the end of the world:

Which end was supposed to be when the People forget the Blessing Way that positions the Earth and the Moon, the mountains and the sky, the He and She rains, and lose power over the winds and lightning and over the great wolf we had rather not see and the nuclear coyote den-bound its entire first year waiting to be fed by its parents but quite competent to bring disease in a dream: this threat doubled, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York (whose own depth cared not a whit for Indian lore as lore), if besides the coyote you discern the deer the coyote runs at, at night where the mountain relative to the long plateau stirs unfelt by those who move around upon it— but what is doubled, the disease or the dream? for the Hermit-Inventor of New York and his other appearances in the century in question has it both ways and doesn’t answer questions except those posed by himself in what is left of his railroad flat in Manhattan which Mayn, a conservative newsman, keeps separate from grandmotherly fables of some last century and this current Hermit-Inventor isn’t available for comment to interrogators or their delegates who don’t even know they would like to ask if Margaret Mayne found the East Far Eastern Princess glinting in the ingot of the vacationing New York hermit’s eye in 1893 or the Princess passing on her new horse found in that eyrie glint Margaret.