Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

A streetwalker stands. A taxi joins her, and she looks around her.

He is out here but in hiding. Maybe he has stopped fighting until he finds himself in a fight again. It could be anywhere. Suddenly at a taxi stand. He did what he expected of himself once and did not lose his life, not even his livelihood if in another country; and now has for his trouble and study a counter-clockwise buzzing in his ears and brain and the painful power to think about his country and his grown children; and how they may have accepted the government — what fascist promotions advertise as a renewed nationality: while ancient property that’s no more than breeding thought its way to good sense and good sense to protein programs for undernourished children’s brains and to negotiations with the American mineral mind that led to southern workers taking over factories, but a good doctor when he becomes President needs more than medicine, more than character — until now he weighs earth inside him against property that in his own country is haunted like immense charcoal beaches by the absent owner of America who can be abstract and a man. Meanwhile breeding leads to music, to routine, to thought, to light if only light cast by the wit of love, or, beyond exchanges among prisoners outside and inside, to the courage to be only here. In the long run he is exposed, while danger heard in the next room — if only of his brain — corners him here but only the danger on this corner he came up onto from the IRT subway that he now finds again moving under the sidewalk of his shoes while pop lyrics grind and pass as deeply as the dizziness that pivots taking him with it and its French name to remind him that the stage he is on is perilous to the health. Yet has he planted the flag of Chile in these straits? On this corner he stands between a yellow control box for the traffic light and, on his right, a newsstand sealed for the night, a stained, dull-silver container containing unsold early editions and lurid weeklies, the real news. He has become a Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

A fine woman in paint-stained bluejeans coasts past on a bike, staring— an advert for Join the CIA and be a model; work for a foundation, ride a really good bike.

Some of the music stays still; some passes; and he turns to look behind him, he doesn’t get the words, he understands the cello, but not this, he understands viola, French horn, the Chilean gut guitar even when his beloved cousin played Broqua, stranded each Broqua mystery like minimal song of the understanding to affront the understanding at least of those who in the last century sat through an Alfonso Broqua piece that retimed and so puzzled their own expectations that the mystery was over before outrage told them to get up and leave — and his cousin with the downcast eyes and small hands could play Broqua, some said they did not know how, he sees or feels her fingers cut off, wafted through sounds of silence and agony in a stadium, no Olympic marks in sight, while here along Seventh Avenue in New York the recorded singers are either nuts or having their entrails drawn out to be fingernailed by bare nerves of concentrated electronic juice. Well, did he get here early in order to back out?

At this hour, two tall boys in blue running suits which are called "exercise suits": window-shopping outside a restaurant: blue figures in a whole block of aroma-to-go conglomerated: from trattoria tomato crimson to national blue-and-white of Greek open to the sidewalk so he smells in the walls of his stomach tight spits of half-grilled, grease-dried souvlaki waiting piled like it’s already inside the people; then the sedate break of an awning (Chinese) and beyond it a fisheria, and on the corner where a Puerto Rican (a Cuban?) trying to give out handbills reaches to one side and then the other, there’s a white-fronted hot-dog stop. Suddenly, as one, the tall boys in blue are running, but for the fun of it; and now a black man poses in front of the Greek place offering a towering white girl in a skirt like a rim of white ribbon the flame of his lighter. But he’s caught in the act of walking, lankily at large, swinging one arm back, the other (with lighter) forward, a soft-seeming black hat high-crowned with a yellow band, a shirt shiny for a racehorse, brighter than yellow, silver pants with a split-seam down the leg flashing black spangles in there. What would one have to give for an outfit like that? But what would it cost this black to get out of this circus? The girl’s price goes up; so do her clothes. A skirt to ice skate in. She’s ambling on her long, rather grand legs toward Macy’s department store, but how far can she go?

It’s almost time. He had to come. The name Efrain is Spanish. Everywhere he’s seeing Hispanics, same as the area north of where he and Clara, his half-English Clara, live so close that they might never try to return to the England of the Andes. Take up position, and the newsstand is in the way. He steps back to see the girl in the high skirt bend toward a car stopped beyond the Chinese awning.

Down the other way across Seventh Avenue, Penn Plaza fills up but the people do not seem to be traveling. He gets the dizziness again. Sixty blocks north of here someone is reading in a high window down by Riverside Drive, and he knows it is Clara; the cigarette goes from hand to hand, she holds it in her lips attentively turning the page. Or, no, she has no cigarette; she is wondering when this can end, when she can at least write letters to her aging children, who may not wholeheartedly want to receive them. He must be with her and not in mere sympathy, mere telepathy the plain truth of which is worth so very little that Let us act out some terrible consequences so we’ll have messages for each other that are important; and in his dizziness the southbound traffic bends eastward like a London circus bending his eyeballs, not knowing what its bonded recipient is going through.

Why can’t someone take his place? For he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for — he doesn’t know why he let himself get into correspondence with an inmate who was not the one he went to visit originally, except because maybe this inmate with a kindred Irish name (who perhaps dreams of escape to Chile twenty years ago into a new identity beyond extradition) wants no link with the man he did go originally to visit, not to mention a known Cuban anti-Castroid incendiary also inmate there, and so Foley becomes a cover if one was needed, but if you start thinking "cover" you lose it, exile survivor of a vision if it can be brought about again, though he here, on a street corner of New York waiting for a letter, is a cultivated man who tried, who happened to be out of the country in the Chilean spring of ‘73 to see leaves yellowing here in an American fall, who himself might now be spent by touring thugs, and who investigates curves of infant mortality and of unemployment recorded "within shooting distance" (as the shy sportsman physician of Clara’s opera singer put it one night evoking a Great Lake where he fished with an Indian) of Santiago where the low, low peso and low low customs duties bring piranhas within easy reach of any poor family’s budget — statistical curves scanned since 1975 in a New York foundation office with stereo and with sensitive research assistants with good manners and often only a first name, Amy, and such bleaching of the withered leaves of world money that like the new head General Mena of our proud secret police those who doubtless watch over him here on a giant street corner of New York might conclude that he has taken to heart a compatriot military lord with a pied a terre in Virginia who rather than liquidate this resident economist of a (late) mere medical doctor named Allende, says, "You have betrayed your class," and lets it go at that.