Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The neighborhood problem (comes a voice we don’t buy or, having bought, don’t use) is potentially statistical, therefore reassuring. And it may be stated: What is the ratio of prostitutes on the job to potential prostitutes?

Let’s stay here and clean up the neighborhood.

There are more things than are dreamt of in your whore-ratio!

The moment or phenomenon of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-old Jim’s sudden sticking in the sand on the point of falling upon and perhaps doing away with his half-breed little lust-bred bro assumed by most to be his real—

— baked meat, dear ducat, bawls the basso who incognito rotondo is to sing two and only two performances, as a favor to his ducat, of an unheard-of newly resurfaced Hamlet opera in originally envisioned former bank branch converted to a darkly echoing Baths tiled with abandoned Coney Island landmark ceramics in which Hamlet Senior (father of the good news) comes back to life for love of his brother Claudius, and Hamlet-son (whose madness is supportively encouraged to work withm the system of Shakespeare’s mere working original) is reunited for whatever it is worth with his mother Gertrude both settled in Wittenberg for a season—

He heard music late that night as if his mother sang to someone. Brad had been sick on Alexander’s chowder, frowning from spoonful number one. Alexander, free as a cook after hours, did not drive home to Windrow with them but remained reading and dozing in the Mantoloking cottage as on an island content that a boat would come back, though missing his cribbage game. It hung — the music — the song — Jim’s mother’s — at the margin of Jim’s remarks to his old pal Ted in ‘63 and later they discussed the possible explanation of young Jim’s sudden down-rooting in the Mantoloking sand arresting his fall all but his shadow upon his little brother, Brad, the good little son of a bitch: it could have been psychic hesitation, you did not really want to kill him and your brain bone connected to your stomach bone and thus held you poised out there above him; it could have been sheer convergent accident, your foot found a shelf in that no-man’s land to brace your ankle, an ancient spar weighty as your all-purpose iron I-beam; it could have been a miracle, Jim—

Let’s exhaust other explanations first. He got sunstroke later in the afternoon.

I believe you, the South American woman had said in ‘62 at this same Washington bar that the creeping, odorless, lank-haired, would-be hip-Western photographer info-scavenger Spence had just appeared at the lower end of, for the place had a higher ground where Jim and Ted were, that after many drinks you might start to slide from, don’t you know: I believe you, she had said the preceding year, I’m more interested in what the place is like or is to be like than how you get to be telling me the truth about elsewhere, if you see what I mean: all right, you have come back like a cast shadow of light, she had said — and he had known that that was it — but is it that you are warning us about that future from which you are maybe a reverse reincarnation, Jeem, or are you really telling me of a place that’s fascinating, where—

for with charm to spare, he had expounded an actually wet oxidation process that heats wastes to 500 degrees at 100 times atmospheric pressure for 90 minutes to yield rich water yet a purified gas as well whose carbon dioxide will feed the space-farm plants to supplement what our compound colonists breathe out.

And the song Jim at fourteen heard late the night of the Hermit-Inventor’s last words with Margaret on the beach (if it was the Hermit) was "I Hear Music When I Think of You" as an unfettered sweeping, and as professional as on the radio Sunday night, only this was piano: and it was his mother and she might be singing to someone and so, as we say, he "stole" downstairs past the great real-copper Indian-head calendar, past the yellow sweater with the buttons, folded at the bottom of the bannister, and stood at the closed music-room door, his brother asleep, his father downtown at the paper, a sweet scent of tea-biscuit crumbs and, he could swear, iced tea — and he didn’t know what kept him from falling into the white-painted wood of the door he stared at and listened through, as if its oblong within oblong of molding directed him to his mother’s meaning; for she was alone, she had to be: until Jim, not wishing to disturb her with a knock, took hold of the doorknob and slowly turned it and let the door open, and let the knob all but silently return, until he could see her, and later knew he’d had a message for her retarded because it was inside him and could only be gotten by her not given by him, he didn’t know enough. Well, he didn’t really know at that time that she had been loving Bob Yard, who was comic and rough, but nobody (wasn’t he?)—

— maybe loved only once, because that’s all it takes—

— and the rest of the times they were. . what?. . lying side by side under the midnight sun communicating by profile—

— until she said to Jim breaking off the song alone there at one in the morning unsurprised in the music room, Are you a fox with your hair all up in the air? (for he had been sleeping) your hair’s been dreaming! so he suddenly knew all over again that, unlike other people he knew, he did not have dreams of the night variety as if knowing replaced remembering — or are you a bear standing on your hind feet? — you better go away and find out what animal you are. Jim recalled the funny small moment as making him a little too young, as if he had skipped that state or she had leaned away into another.

Which leaves room for growth. Which we know through him, but know through others. For from our own words when asked and even when not asked, we learned that we were as many things, live and other, as we were willing to divide into and be partial and patient through; be sometimes overriding yet only through leaning upon what moment’s Body-Self we could be like; or contenting us with being the marine varnish that brings up the amber grained in a plywood slab; in short we were relations, that was all, or the fork a baby playing with it above a rimmed dish of pancakes finds a use for, and upon raising a piece of pancake is praised by the whole family, oh they are all wonderfully there, and thereupon baby eschews the achievement, waves the implement above his head beaming and takes the cake off the prongs and flings it on the floor, the wide oak planks where a circle of milk stands near a toe print of banana: and these would word our presence if we needed to tell that we found being in the fork, the praise, the act of giving away the achievement which may be digesting it, assimilating it, divided by the name of the floor (which equals home) and the brown, cast shadow of the small puddle of milk-white telling us in turn all the co-laborings that gave this child room to breathe, some actual abstract, angelic disappearances into the body of a universe even Einstein plus or minus Euclid would calmly grant to be flat for purposes of love: while we, in or out of such words, knew only by being known, and became in our very own absence the tree in Central Park growing out of our thereupon absent eye or via our ear when its potential pollutions waxed shapely enough to make a tree, unless that destiny came out of us, an interrogator internalized off duty dreaming of the diva’s desert succulents and sugarless polio sundae under the eye of a woman at an adjacent table who must have known who the diva was but might well be a what-you-call-it, a tail, following them: and yet the diva feels she had been waiting for them, she for them, which the diva, if not the still green memory of her dream-tapeworm, far sidewinder gobbling where it went, great as a winter whale blowing the Chile coast, can’t understand quite, except to hang on to like a new stateless passport because she has to get through the wings of a theater that’s putting on an opera she is supposed to agree is unknown — Verdi daydreamed of it and may have felt it in his angry hand but hardly wrote it down — until if she can’t ask the internalized interrogator (for he had been that in her and he is breathing, we hear him, feel it on our silent voice) and she can’t sing, because he is dozing against her throat and they two are to be mentioned in the same breath so she can’t kill him quite, though he is what he is and his superiors or he himself may have asked her lone father far off in Chile questions that answer not words but body language such as shortened fingers or temporarily separated testicles: and so she disengages herself from his breath together with his cheek and chin, and gives in to the desire of her life and, as normally as if she were going to the bathroom to sit upon the John (though not like the new acquaintance of Clara’s at that workshop who according to Clara squats with her feet on the seat!) and as normally as if she the diva (daughter, priestess, lover, unborn mother) might "light" the refrigerator to pour herself some orange blood, instead with an art evolved by long unconscious history of need, of human hope to find the bit of courage to take the next barefoot step—