Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Which was that she had reached this awful point before, like stalled full circle, nor very full, at least of love, like knowing all the souls in the world who had had this sentiment, but not knowing any of them as friends — for "full circle" (we recall In Jim) said Sarah once, and took her long hand off the lower keyboard of the piano bringing it to join her right hand in her lap, when her son, her older son who took his life as it came and didn’t need as much as little Brad, pushed open the door long after midnight. "You woke me," he said in a friendly way as if she had given him some help.

She was playing, she said — had broken into song — come full circle, Jimmy, singing to myself again.

"You…" said Ted in the bar of the Washington hotel, "let’s see— you knew—?"

"That Brad was my half-brother?" said Jim. "I don’t think I knew."

Does Bob Yard love you? asked the son like a soft pistol shot, that kept going.

Bob probably did, said the mother.

You didn’t love him, though, said Jim as in a normal talk.

Not today, came the answer challenging the boy to go on, and that further point was exactly where he directed his sense that "it" was not full circle she had come; and she seemed to decide he wasn’t saying anything else and without warmth yet in a friendly fashion not saying the obvious which was go on back to bed, she gently raised her hands from her lap — she had a very prominent beautiful nose, so she was always "created," "drawn," and she dropped her fingers upon the keyboard giving them life to play into the large Chickering piano a thing he’d heard often — his little brother would know the name of it! but well maybe he wouldn’t!

"Well, you got away," said Ted ("Clean away," said his friend), and Ted finished his highball as if by "you" he had meant "we," and she hadn’t done what she had done, which few mothers did.

But then as Ted left Jim in the Washington bar a decade and a half ago (and Jim couldn’t later recall if Spence had been in, that night, for he could be a couple places at once besides Mayn’s mind, live in a burrow economizing on oxygen while he made a few phone calls) the South American lady came in. Jim hadn’t seen her in a while. She had a son and had a snapshot of him in his scout outfit far away. He stood at parade rest, squinting, smiling up from the southern hemisphere. He wore his neckerchief tightly furled into more a tie, so it showed striped red and blue hanging down through the neckerchief holder, and he had blue tassels on his high socks. Pretty tough-looking kid. She was going back home to work in the national airline; her husband was expanding the airline’s operations and wanted her to stop being on the move all the time. Away, more than on the move.

And this time she didn’t ask Jim about the practical successes of the dream colony — the opiate-receptor molecules chemically tranced so that old ingestive habits were erased — curious enzymatic persuasions between brain and belly so that a colon ate only what he/she needed and gradually might achieve through mental concentration like a springboard diver’s single act the elimination of all waste or residues which one day would ironically reduce the water supply which had relied on recycled human waste which had itself grown such a pale tan as to be transparent like your jellyfish that’s had its sting bred out of it—

— but instead she asked if there were other space-station shapes besides this spoked life ring, this torus in the great lake of nearby space, this doughnut generated by a circle, and were there compartmentary sealer-walls — they’d have to be vast — that would drop down, that. . (she drew it in her little notebook) well, what would happen, asked the South American woman, if the pie een the sky came with its own slicer and one day it swung through the libration point in question and cut right through the life-ring torus. .?

Oh, the trouble with compartmenting (said Mayn reacting how?) is it interrupted the passage of daily life through the torus wheel but you know the doughnut’s is not going to separate into two pieces if in the event of a break you could equalize the gravity-pressure differential between outside and inside but surely the shell would crumple. But it had never happened; and anyhow, the real heavy traffic was in those equator orbits where they put the weather and earth-resources satellites.

However, when he began to speak of other shapes — the cylindrical and (on the dark side — of Earth) the boomerang that bent light and made it lurch toward it — her question got between them and he saw his mother’s so self-sufficient eyes, the musical mind of her queenly nose down which she looked upon the neck of her violin until one day Margaret his grandmother became his shield in the absence of his mother who was the shield in the Indian custom his very Margaret told him of: a shield, a painted buffalo-skin shield that he had, it seemed, against taboo heinously let touch the earth on the way to the horizon notwithstanding — the shield with deerskin cover and green turtle depicted there. But this earlier shield of his mother had seemingly left him, not he it. So you look after your mother particularly if she has left you with a leeward conundrum that takes ya breath away and is beyond you and so you set out to obtain information to outweigh your absent breath, not having seen that you had the message upon your person all the time until, having found the barside woman’s question an obstacle leading to that other woman Cleopatra’s historic nose—

But then Ted — in the thick of his idea that history lurches from one womb to the next womb by small talk and hence is written with the left hand since the right is busy handling hidden impulses which nonetheless is how you Jim partway levitated above your brother prone upon the sands of the Jersey shore, the sun casting you—

— upon the place beneath—

— beneath you where your brother lay—

Mayn saw he had had pity on his brother Brad and could not have hung at peace with gravity if he had known the pity: so he said to his friend Ted — in ‘63; no, ‘64—wishing to get on to something else, for Spence, the only other occupant, was at bar’s end watching with his ears—"I threw my shadow on him, that little bastard, instead of strangling him in person." Why was there no one else in that bar? An answer was somewhere on the way.

"But it wasn’t your responsibility to kill him," quirked Ted.

"What year?" called the vagrant tag of a man Spence from around his glassless beer bottle, missing Ted’s humor, until Spence looked older than he had ever looked — made up, perhaps, with the herb and pulverized-mineral hues of the earth down where he had his moldy little hole.

"If we knew the exact direction Brad was lying in," said Ted, "we could know the hour, given the day — or the day, given the hour."

Jim knew the day but a cold weight in his stomach worming through his brain like his brain was everywhere in his body made him know that Spence was listening with his eyes now, as if Mayn and his family were promising news.

Jim said instead that that had been the day Mel Mayn, his father, with a fresh gray brush cut, had come palely, plumply home to find them arriving from the Mantoloking shore and had proceeded to the kitchen to make himself some iced tea and a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich and soon afterward addressed his sun-blushed wife Sarah (whom he would rarely and rather gently yet with faintest insult call "Sorry," which was not her middle name) on the subject of Franklin Roosevelt’s new pay-as-you-go tax plan, concluding with the curious surprise that the newspaper would have to cease publication within the next year or even few months.

Sarah for her part told her husband not to worry and to take it up with Margaret, she was the one who cared about the paper, though of course she had preferred running a family to running it.