Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He sees the Seiko clock and in the crowd there at the entrance to Penn Station two women appear at the head of the escalator and move forward with their suitcases. The young one sets hers down and is swayed by the people who must be coming from some sports event; then she takes up her case again to follow the older woman who, her arm raised, her finger pointing upward, is moving toward the line of parked cabs. Both women in white — what’s the difference between them?

But he doesn’t get the chance to think, since a Puerto Rican family’s right here on top of him; they come five, six abreast through him with their late-night shopping bags and small, striking children, tired, wide-eyed pirate marchers, long-haulers; and then two more kids slip around the curbside of the deserted newsstand and get back with the family and generously oblivious of him they make him step to the curb and he’s almost forced off— kaput.

Two pale-brown young men with Afros and army jackets step off the far curb and he grabs at his tweed cap and has trouble with the flap of his jacket pocket getting the cap in, and he steps off the curb and is almost hit by a cab, glaring yellow paint — but before he can jump back from it, the cab braked. The magic of the machine is in his stopping it. But he steps back up on the curb and sees behind the shadowed gleam of the windshield the driver looking back over his shoulder through his cage at the people in the back seat and the cab’s street-side door swings out. The driver is black, with a round, happy face.

People in clothes are crossing. What game were Americans playing at the Garden tonight? He steps off the curb. At the far corner he turns left and crosses downtown, turns around and, passing people who don’t look at him, crosses back to the second point where the fellows in army jackets stood when he first saw them. And now he glances at the corner on the other side of Seventh Avenue where he waited for ten minutes — having told Efrain he would be there. Efrain had some tickets to unload. To scalp?

What game?

Efrain explained and it was not clear. He was going to the game but apparently not attending. He didn’t quite say. But he picked the location because of the basketball game. Two people converge on one place, not a coincidence in this city. His assistant, the girl Amy from the office, talked basketball just yesterday. Nothing more definite than the game in general. The positions. Taking up a position so you could not be run into. A great American idea perhaps. What you could not do. She had been listening to a man who was taking her — and whom she had taken to the opera with free tickets from who else but dearest Clara.

People pass that corner, pass through it as if it were an imaginary point. No one stops but a heroic-faced derelict showing a pale thigh through ripped pants who stops, turns as people pass in four directions, and is turned by them. Almost full circle. Until he turns slowly back round and, a stubborn old mechanism made to last, he looks down upon the sidewalk at the point where a man with a tweed cap felt the West Side subway rumbling underfoot — and at last turns down Thirty-third past the trattoria’s side window, pauses to look through at the two young men in blue jump suits, moves on toward the cafeteria counters.

People pass through that point Efrain was to meet him at.

No one stops.

To occupy that position. The girl, his assistant Amy, with the sensual good manners, told him about occupying position in basketball, which she had picked up from the friend taking her to the game, it’s who gets there first can’t be run into—

Talk to someone; he has talked well for hours, days; has done so in nation after nation.

He withdraws the tweed cap from his jacket pocket and pats the pocket hanging smooth; stuffs the cap back in and feels a coin as cold beside the fabric as a hunk of glass and would like to have to say words but move only from light to light. (Until he reached Clara, that is, with whom the eternal excitement of not having to talk makes all the talk they have so full of light.)

Yet one might just talk in New York to anybody on a corner, a young heavyset fellow who looks as if he might not move for a year, a flash of a girl who was hardly there, then fleered away into the street. The hell with "dialogue." Some casual talk instead. Risking being thought a kook.

Efrain will be watching that corner from his angle. The man who is supposed to be on that corner is replaceable. A substitute would just wear a tweed cap. What more? But who would substitute for him? But to him and only him Efrain is bringing tonight a message he half made sound unmailable, from Foley, whom Efrain was with in that other world so recently, Foley— the one and only Foley — who bypasses normal converse because the phone is tapped and the routes between minds are full of parallels to find your own way. Foley conspiring with his own odd head and now a foreign national who can’t see Central Park’s roads and spinning bike steel except as a terrible comfort of failure in his own life. Life after Allende, Clara said. Why, though, let a prison inmate hide you?

"Thank you for taking the trouble to answer me," an early letter from Foley began, without humility; "you are not American, but your name is pretty weird for where I hear you are from (yet I’m a learner). What’s in a name? (smile)" — the parenthesis so the other words wouldn’t see. American habit? Uneducated?"… it’s your choice of words, not your accent, that sounds foreign."

So quietly reading Foley’s letter.

Everyone has trouble but not everyone is in danger. You sit years of intelligence, of awareness, as if it weren’t a risk, while danger is in the next room. But not here — here’s a woman in bed, she doesn’t look up at him taking off clothes he never thinks about, and she’s all the more intimate for not looking up from her book as if she shares her pleasure with him. She smiles — at a page — something has touched her, he puts one knee on the bed. But the next room is the danger — the traffic light changes — he recedes abruptly from New York, lifted away. He wants to talk only to her. Weak economist! My God, will marriage in a life like this in the long run get to be an exile? The next room is the danger. A groan broadens to a test scream, non-audible threats, the interrogatory stab, no scrape of chair leg, no shift of shoe sole, the action non-visible that the tortured sounds record. The screams aren’t quite shouts; for who can think of help or rescue, or a long haul, the upside-down-hung genitals (therefore this one is not a female) clamped by electrodes, yow yow, penis head pink to rose exposed, and refractory testicles autonomously retracting ceiling-wards, actually toward the ceiling light, big toes near a light fixture and already yanked out of joint plunging into the medium that waters pain to keep it live and/or optimum — as he thought the Japanese masseuse would do to his toes here in the great substitute place of them all New York, for which, therefore, there is no substitute when she made snapping sounds pulling them, those toes he never thought about normally, but it felt good. He isn’t particularly good at having things done to him. But you take up position and you hold it, isn’t that what was said?

Which way you going — home? A young voice, a young man’s, a boy’s.

Alone: it’s an alias, "alone." You’re not there unless you bump Another. Let an American mineral cartel exposed or unexposed be immortal, let people be parallel to people curving off into a distance which is optical marriage. Private existence with Clara is True Value, no substitution, small-scale units of book and pillow case and hand, clear and loving, where love might exist like disembodied angels in the upper reaches of an opera-house repertory but her dry-wrung washcloth laid on the sink like a Peruvian rug upon an iron balcony in the Chilean sun, to Saturday-morning piano music in a large dusky room — there is the true unit that someone was looking for.