Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— this stuff that’s going to revolutionize acne, quietly calls Spence from his position, I gather it thrives on no rain, right? (and no doubt he has gathered the name of the magic bush, plus a way to peddle news of the bean though Mayn won’t give him the time of day, he and Spence are so different) so why don’t we grow the bush—

— "Only God can create a cleft palate," the father wrote the daughter in reply to her account of the chemical plant written to him from a campsite on yet another Chippewa River, this one in Wisconsin, the lights of the motel over the water promising rest right here where they were, with their green Coleman stove open for business: and the trees and the stars and a hundred and fifty miles to go to a region of a thousand lakes but, for now, free of the wide highway where we cannot add to that loved campsite a Wide Load’s tracks free and full of cash on delivery.

Which same chemical-related "cleft palate" the little woman named Lincoln recalled as she sipped a new cup of Mexican coffee, the forgotten woman perhaps, contemplating the new "table," since the glamorous Latin couple, the woman of the marvelous piled auburn hair, the elegant, hard foreign man in gray flannel, have gone away leaving still the small bell of recognition in the correspondent-woman’s memory which is then only the dull disappointment when the woman Clara kind of snubbed her at the Body-Self Workshop saying that this restaurant was recommended by a singer she knew: until now the group of five impending diners before her became a group of three, a heavy set man, a tall young woman, and a dark-haired boy-man talking intensely to the man but for the girl; and Lincoln, watching them over her coffee cup, found the singer in Clara’s comment yielding to the thought that things were summoned in order to be cleared away (or us from their presence), like of the original fivesome the two somewhat older — the smaller, dark; the taller, flaxen-fair — they quietly detached themselves from the other three (who had been a group to themselves coming in like they’d been doing something together other than what the two women had), and when they three had come they had first signaled, more by a contented not- talking than by, then, a burst of intense comment from the dark-haired youth, that they (the broad-shouldered man with the gray hair and the girl and boy, both around twenty) brought into the place a fun that was like gossip: though now that the two women had gone (the dark one having given the boy a kiss he didn’t expect though didn’t not), the man and his young people weren’t talking much again, and the correspondent-woman watching them in her unused extra spoon felt that one of the young ones was "his," though who was it? it shifted, and he was father to neither.

So that the correspondent-woman found the Chilean economist’s wife Clara blocking her — not with that snub but with her elect authority picturing for them all during workshop a magical area of "Cambodian" Vietnam where secret societies flourished like the crops which earlier colonists had striven to establish, all as if to enable her to cite the Cochin sage who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers. So that the correspondent-woman wished to be at the other table sharing with the man the company of those nice kids and not to part with her own senseless memories of Mister Guerrilla Prisoner-san, barefoot flying twice in twos neatly bound, down from the sky into the land-like dark cushion of tree-crowns and out of the blare of choppers noisy as creation’s opening day and out of the experience of their pilots.

But, the South American woman asks, two days after Mayn’s son’s first birthday, in 1961, it is quiet in these libration colonies fixed between Us and the moon? because it feels quiet — the great torus sealed up, the cows safely grazing down the spokes of the wheel, individuals fathoming their origins in couples that were dissolved on earth.

They chuckle with reciprocal memories.

Why hasn’t she ever questioned his sincerity in all this? begins Mayn with a seven p.m. grin, he’s been telling her he’s actually in that future whatever he’s doing here, and the colonists will be doing their future farming under ideal conditions getting eight hundred and fifty pounds of grain per acre per day and just like the desert greenhouses on the southeast shore of the Persian Gulf speed-picking tons of potatoes grown with unsupported roots — vegetables prospering on Styrofoam boards and spin-off colors spraying the roots that hang down below. We’re maximizing milk production using tomato-vine-fed goats that weigh a tenth what a cow weighs but give a quarter as much milk which will be all the sweeter if you keep the billies back on Earth and inseminate by space shuttle.

Why not scrambled messenger?

The matter-energy transit works better with two.

The two messengers.

Not to mention fish. In a weightless farm where gravity wouldn’t collapse their gills out of water, they could be raised without water. Yet since we’ve got artificial gravity, they’re raised in phosphate ponds that recreate the food chains we’ve snafu’d down here.

It all sounds possible, the woman said. And your place in it?

Mayn had to shake his head that she believed his basic report. Fantastic as his mother’s presence, that fantastically had never felt (whatever else it was) skeptical to her son.

And we in turn, like the diva, have to ask the interrogator (right back through our newly violated ear), Do you question the whereabouts of Mayn’s mother Sarah?

— and we get back not even pain through this torture device.

Do you question, we add, that she looked at him that day on the beach also to look over his shoulder at the horizon of the sea?

From a distance the interrogator does answer now, like he’s at home or at some other end of our body and he is murmuring with a lover’s assurance, a superior’s shrug: Was there ever any doubt that he turned and followed her look out to sea? knowing that come hell or high water that was the nothing she was bound to, irritated, caustic, and anemic, deeply watchful of the boys they always felt, and there on the beach that day setting sail for where her sense of humor wouldn’t have a chance to—

— You mean this came through? but to even speak of her we need more of a handle on what she’s like, I mean wasn’t she involved in the War effort? the War was going to end soon. (Yes, she played with a Coast Guard pianist at the Coast Guard station at Manasquan, some violin sonatas and some old favorites.)

So that to see what she was looking at, he had to look away from her, the younger Jim had to turn at least his head if not his sporting body one hundred eighty degrees around to look and see for himself.

So must we resist the temptation to be judgmental?

Yes, but mental even more.

Yes, our body-selves will sing to one another if we let ‘em.

So let’s stay here and see if help comes.

What if she was waiting for a fugitive submarine to come and take her south?

— trouble was that very soon afterward Sarah the mother sent — or told one she was sending — her two sons away, one to be human, one to be an animal (were these the same? the same-san?). But has a woman the right to talk like that when she won’t come right out and have a fight with her husband?

Why must to be good mean to be angry, however, dear ducat, oh why not keep your opera light and save our steam for cleaning up the neighborhood? Pursue the provenance of your text and you damn well will find yourself in some Chilean household of the last century but who cares. Are you — dee dee dee dee — inspiring me to stammer more, damned ducat, oh! — sein oder nicht sein, stubborn boy, designing boy, your music comes from my heart strangely, too — unpack my heart, Roslein, design or not design — you’ll have your Hamlet opera in your warehouse with one great voice if not the two, but I’ll keep trying. Oh it’s the neighborhoods we have to clean up, you dum-dum ducat you, blares the basso rotondo, not the true source of your stolen light masterpiece, ya little bitch, that’s why I’m moving out of the apartment. Hookers on every corner. I ask you, Roslein, asking me if I’m going out tonight, of course I am — with you —though I know they are goodhearted, those women in their hot pants, if you could scratch them. And please don’t get depressed because your opera’s sorely needed and don’t ask about One More Hamlet opera when the real question is, Let’s Have At Last a Good Hamlet opera, wherever it comes from.