Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And hearing his grandmother Margaret call his name down the street, for he was almost home now, he kept walking and didn’t turn back toward her and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, never guessing then that his father had phoned Margaret but assuming rather that the Hermit-Inventor had seen him at the window and Margaret had come out on the porch.

So that, understanding what had first woken him up, Jim said out loud the words that were trying to forget their utterer: his mother had said, and said to him who was the son she could depend on to look out for himself she said and whom she loved, and loved maybe more but not the way she loved Brad, her only other child: "I have to get out of all this. I just want to die sometimes. I could just disappear into the sea. You look at me as if you could kill me. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault; it’s not your responsibility; it’s not your life."

"What do you mean?" the boy asked. "Oh your grandmother said she had to talk to me tomorrow," said Sarah. "So what?" replied Jim. "You’re right," said his mother.

But the dashing, languid interrogator lest those words of a generation ago forget themselves if not their utterer asks, What wasn’t his "responsibility"? — to kill her or to keep her alive? — the words let’s make no bones about it cut two ways if we should wish to implement them, the interrogator adds with the century’s signal neutrality at his fingernails knowing that the torture he can give for fucking around in the words that we use to answer him gon’ hurt us more than him.

So that, on an evening with two young people still young enough to be "his own," Mayn spots at a resounding city intersection a foreign face that tells him what it could never guess it bore; for, a generation ago, on that night so many months before Jim’s mother did disappear into the future of the sea, the father who phoned Jim’s grandma Margaret downstreet to check that the boy racing whitely across the lawn and down West Throckmorton Street like some thief (but which one?) was headed her venerable way, had been in his slow-moving, only apparently hard-working (right?) march toward the void (not like me or any of my family, was Sarah’s line) so unlike his son Jim in Jim’s sharp eyes that Jim imagined some alter paternity; but then the returning walker saw his father watching from the porch and understood that his father had come home, as usual late, and was no doubt taking a pleasant breather thinking about things, maybe concisely separate news of other people’s lives, before penetrating the awful suspension of his own house — a reliable person, "kind of like a brother to me," Jim’s mother said; and Jim felt (though it then got thrown away — a shadow — into the future of a New York intersection and beyond) that if between two dimly lighted silent porch fronts he himself had no alternative parentage, he must have something in common with that impassive father.

On this noisy night corner of New York he would say her name out loud almost, but to whom? Did not Chekhov the doctor say a He and She is what you need? How well he knew love’s labor.

Clara, the mind calls, so clear it’s felt inside the mouth. Clara. Without his wife, he grows specific here on this giant night corner of New York in a fashion that could put her in still more danger were she here. The equal, his Clara, of some Shakespeare lady stronger than all the others if the mysterious stagehand had lived to write her down out of the light in his eye. Clara, he hears Shakespeare call, as if to offer them help here in New York City, or (chuck the husband) help only the brave dame. He had seen it all by the time he passed fifty, fifty-one, more scenes than one might slake a shtick at: yet if he could steep the globe of his teapot to dimaxial Carib tempests, why not a pastoral history of some Chilean kingdom by the sea? Used Verona, Venice, Vienna — a very used Vien indeed (and wasn’t there a Polack in there somewhere?) — so why not The Damsel of New Netherland, why not Fluellen of New Yorkl The great stagehand, spurred by a moment’s clairvoyance or by his own warlike name, Shakespeare, replies that, Ay, he has visited New York some time after Hotspur’s rejuvenation and while composing simultaneously those "Co-supremes" the Phoenix and Turtle-dove and a major work Gertrude s Revenge and in fact had named that small island village of Canarsie Indians New Ork (a few short years later mispronounced by Hal Hudson as New York but in any case ignored by his Dutch employers just as the Florentine John Verrazano’s "New Vera" had been ignored by his French employers) but anyhoo has visited New York but does not know it well, his time was limited and he desired to visit the Painted Desert, the Mesas, and those terrible Mines that when you’re not looking move their mountains from place to place not with kettledrum or bray of traffic but by rumor and dangerous richness of vein, and on returning a few short weeks later to that strangely crenellated East Coast had had to get back to London for rehearsals, though America was a great place to visit. .

Clara: he wants her here with him on this street corner across from Penn Station. So he could nod west toward the glimmer-glass colony escalator’d like some insect civilization and cylindering in light the sports-arena complex: and say to Clara who holds his whole history in her heart collapsing or extending time at will, "Scale model"… or "Do insects play?" So she, a citizen of his exile very watchful lately, answers whatever will bring what he drily sees more to life.

But she should not be here. Not tonight. Not right here, where it is unclear. Unclear if something superfluous or terribly risky wants something of him — help, even. He would like to speak to someone and fears the dizziness as if it comes to lone tourists endlessly self-conscious in foreign parts. Silence is the real crime against humanity. "Here the Earth still shakes from the old battle—" oh, that Russian lady Akhmatova and her friends they really had it bad, dizzy inside the stomach of the monster capable of accommodating even them, or dizzy just from hunger. Phone Clara to tell her that. But no; make not a phone call.

He takes up position alone out among the night lights of New York City, never in all his visits only a tourist; and now a resident for — four years, is it? years measurable even as minerals are measured whose sale might (as the Americans say) "fund" the noble Doctor Allende’s posthumous terrorism or so thinks its putative recipient Pinochet whose name Clara plays on, on and on, her only tedious habit.

Now tonight a tourist again, when anyone you run into tonight might be a visiting limb of your lamented nation’s intelligence that’s changing its name — going through Changes, as they say here in New York — so even the Chilean navy is getting into the act tracking down the doctor’s son Pascal.

He takes up position to receive a letter from a man in a New York State prison: Foley, who always has a thing or two to say but this time is passing it through a private mail service.

Not the one he has conceived that would compete favorably with the U.S. Mail. But one that’s operating now just for privacy, or so this privileged (foreign) correspondent here on the outside figures, standing steady 20/20 but, on this huge avenue corner, always looking out for a dizziness inside himself he would rather leave in the doctor’s office diagnosed by its French name, a distinguished dizziness if the doctor’s right.

Standing like a domestic tourist from Akron or Tulsa, or a scholar from San Antonio surveying river cities of the world, now on a Sunday night in the nation of New York having taken up position where agreed, he commands Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street. This is it. He wishes he were in Boston, in Cambridge, for a moment in a Chilean friend’s house discussing skiing. Why did he permit this mail drop to be private to the point of clandestine? It might tell the wrong people if they are watching that he communicates secretly with a prison where in turn there is someone they are interested in, though not this merely "interesting" Foley.