Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"20/20" the prison inmate Foley ranks his own insight into life and the world, and seems to expect his correspondent the economist to think constantly like an economist — which is how? But one was moved by Foley. He got to one. There in some margin of life where life occurred and political acts aimed at stabilizing things instead doubled or locused that great margin where NATO Nixon thinks of Einstein as just home folks playing classical violin and Einstein while thinking only of his own vast difference from God descales his model universe and, at a stroke, decreeing this Far to be equal to that Near, sees it whole, we are told.

On this side of the street the enclosed subway stairs into the ground generate people — that’s what they do — to eat the cardboard-contained fast-fodder at the adjacent chrome door in order then to be seen by family groups in pastel-colored ready-to-wear (already-/?^mg-worn!) garments slowly issuing out of the hotel under lights of a rehearsal they are self-consciously half aware of. Across the street a hundred functions housed all under the massive complex: mainly, though, the sports arena and the railway terminal you would not know by sight — all seen through signs that say nothing of a mighty athlete, a discus thrower, an ancient pugilist, and now an African giant bombing a net-skirted rim Americans call a basket — signs that also tell nothing of a night sleeping-train smelling of comfortably used steel and carbon afloat in the dreams of passengers upon steam buoying out under the platform — all hidden by the complex — taken for granted, like home.

Solid people are cutting through three, four lanes of Sunday-evening cabs and cars, ruling out risk like hunters, daring the world’s in all probability mad reflexes, occupying sudden positions against the will of yellow horsepower southward.

He has the tweed cap on, he’s exposed, and he’s at the northeast curb as agreed — where the voice on the phone said to stand. Tweed cap, his idea, English. As he sometimes in the past has quite been. Though never to look at. Though you do get English who’re Latin-looking, tall, moustached, because he’s seen them. Walking the fields, from a train. Dangerously private. Walking streets in black suits and capped, bird-crest fashion, by black knobs of bowlers.

Folding his arms he surveys whatever could be watching him wait, his consciousness strolling on and on yet lingering, worded. But this is no such place. He can just about feel the slide of home fingers after dollar bills in his trouser pocket, his Clara against him telling him to pick up a stick of butter if anything’s open on his way home, and did she wonder tonight if it was just their neighborhood he was heading for? Tonight she is further away from him than she would wish. Younger than he, slightly and magically; less foreign to New York — is it because she’s a woman? — though half-English, which is also foreign, yet not like Chilean.

So fresh and trustworthy: oh, he wants to phone her and say so.

He found her this afternoon half-dressed posed in the mirror. He came back from nowhere, alone on a Sunday — feeling official and uneasily at home but especially childless, walking with the river, sitting on a bench. Two little girls were hugging and hugging each other, giggling, and those gross apartment towers across on the New Jersey palisades are the "settlements" you get today.

Inland to Broadway, he had found the pay phone free that he had been directed to in a previous letter by Foley’s in all probability gratuitous code which was just close enough to real thoughts so you must pay heed to it, though it seemed to invent life when we had discovered enough to work on already surely: and then received the call right on time from a man called Efrain. And then went home to Clara feeling technically unfaithful.

To find her half-unclothed before the bedroom mirror.

"Thinking of changing your life," she said, as if she might be the one— ‘7 know," but did not ask where he was now emerging from.

"Our life," he said, which they both knew was true all around, for they were in love and had no internal passport restrictions and could go anywhere in the States where he was invited.

So full-length, she was: skirt off (or not yet on); gartered stockings on, he was glad to see; no slip; stocking feet with silken insteps. Not those gymnastic tights revolvingly displayed in supermarkets (like postcards) next to tall cans of pineapple juice on sale or in drugstores next to a stack of painkillers. And after years of essentially the same body in roughly the same full-length reflection, itself a place they took with them into the countries they lived in, he didn’t know entering the bedroom of a rented sanctuary in New York whether she was half -dressed or half- un dressed. So they soon found out. Oh, the Kimball women’s group she went to which did a lot with mirrors, pelvis rolls, "love-your-body" techniques (that doubtless he could use) began in the mystery (for him) of why Clara went at all, and has turned two degrees to what was always there: Clara herself. A woman who had only those secrets from him that made them more intimate and said of the workshop, "Consciousness doth make garbage of us all."

She had not found out until the dark green candles were lit and supper was on the table that he had to meet someone this evening, this night. He and she are so allied by good humor, by potential disaster, that she may have felt the public facts of oppressed female life here on New York’s famed battleground bending her own private but political exile toward some fresh distance she wasn’t telling him about. But she had no need to be that species of feminist with such real risks nearby and the tragedy of their country as near as their very bodies remembering what they had escaped suffering.

He hears her being tortured for a second; hearing is all he can bear. They were lucky. His luck spins again for a moment. A French disease a presumably good doctor said. Meniere’s Syndrome. Stress, ear buzz, counter-clockwise spin, look out. The sidewalk trembles, someone sidesteps him, and a block or two down across Seventh Avenue (which the dark blue-and-white sign names Fashion Avenue — which is news to him, as they say here) the no-numbers clock above the entrance to Penn Station gives him in its passing design the message that he’s ten minutes early. A bicycle floats before his eyes, it goes with the Jap clock, the black boy in his lane at the edge of the packed, three- or four-lane traffic takes his hands off the handlebars and smooths his wondrous long face and crosses his arms in front of him, patting his bike handlebars on automatic, his sneaker laces tied. The sidewalk trembles, and nowhere is there a tweed cap like the one that the young man Efrain was told he would wear. Through the music and the motors and the wheels he hears the traffic-light control-box an arm’s length away run its cycle of two double clicks. He is exposed. But to others’ vengeance?

But this is New York, not Switzerland with its passports, yet not Sicily, not a pueblo in Chile, not Ireland where the village grocer expects you to have a local girl to do your shopping for you; and not a Kansas farming town like twenty other grain-elevator towns at eight-mile intervals where they might know no more about you than Indians in Brazil measure how far a brainy anthropologist has come from his Paris desk; not the large Kansas college town he actually had received an "invite" from to make an appearance at and had been tempted; and not an Andean village where dark Asiatic faces watch and watch and drink corn until they don’t see much of anything, except mountains rearing in the mind; nor is it the mineral cartel that would not go away even after finding an inter-American association reciprocally funding and funded by his own foundation to be drawing on a D.C. bank account in the name of an agency which his photographer-journalist slave/master Spence happens to know is brother to one of the CIA’s sister laundries, and so it goes, the foundation seems conclusively as free of CIA as CIA is free of all ties by virtue of such reciprocal trade-offs as ensure that private life has a future, the only future. Which is not much more private than Asiatic faces reflecting the natural light of some landbridge long lost and invested in their bones and music and autonomic poverty system, looking, looking, deaf to a secret radio rebroadcast of Allende’s ultimate "History is ours, and the people will make it" speech from La Moneda.