Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The one visual interruption high, white, steaming on the face of Florida’s eastward-empty beach-coast lifted off above the fires that it and its voyage were based in and turned away toward that horizon that only instruments made manifold; and he had felt not at the outer top of the turning Earth as earlier that warm December evening but at a deepening bottom urged further by the presence by then beside him, on the infield at the Press Site (like a dig) looking off over the silhouetted heads of photographers and, across the inlet-river, of a man so unlike Mayn when it came he knew, he had predicted this other man, this journalist-operator Spence (who would be more threat than help before they finished because his proposition was important as well as an intrigue, and yet he seemed paired further with Mayn, this Spence: were they brothers in arms? for one didn’t know or want to, but Spence had concluded he a mere marginal economist with Allende’s precarious regime was knowingly in the employ of a foundation marginally central to the ongoing American war effort hence must know much more about a certain Santiago junta’s life-support system, spring-loaded to — upon re-entry — course-correct for target arrival, but Spence would find out even what one did not know one knew), would warn him against the agreeable, inquiring Mayn whom Spence had seen him in conversation with by the Voice of America table, for the old microphone was a finer power than all incendiary ignitions banging and cracking each other into a disappearing century’s nucleus. But that finer power of wave and vocal cord dissolves too in all the words using it, and many mouths mouth People Power but Clara laughs and he grazes her hand, and they talk, they have always talked.

Efrain looks across Seventh Avenue and with his shoulders and hands is telling Mayn and Mayn’s friends that a person was not here who was supposed to be here, but Amy won’t recognize Efrain’s name for him (if sounded), because it’s another alias, the name Foley knows. Her eyes were bright once — it was this week surely — when she took a messenger’s manila envelope, brought it to his office, and explained basketball to him. Setting a pick, charging, traveling, occupying a position before an opposing player charged into you, all most logical. He himself was once a footballer, he found himself discussing with her his assistant the fine art of centering the white ball from the corner so far away it was almost not on the field or in the game, curving the ball softly back into the heads and legs in the goal mouth, the whole mind of the goal mouth. An old woman on this new corner of his touches the immigrant elbow, a striking person, white-haired with a mole on her jaw, hand in hand with a tall, thin, glowering elderly man not as old as she but lined and stretched by the long haul and preserved in vinegar and by some long, possibly original, preoccupation, who steps away from her as she says, "What is your name?" A random man, asked what his name is, a verbal promontory who reads books from cover to cover all week in the midst of a life that feels like an interruption, he has Some answer or other for her, while her escort stands away, irritated, and the answer seems to please her: "Alias. . Alias is my name." She sidles off amused, saying, "Alias, Alias" — a well-known and interesting name (not "Mayn," which he had almost said in the night light) and she’s nodding in recognition, and then the elderly man, compelled by community or by love’s hermitage, explains, " Her concentration span isn’t much now, you know."

As if he would know — and she goes off, taking away with her some message or glancing light from him, this random man. There are no random events, which could be as sad as our ideas of them. In New Jersey a group of Cubans stand in unison and snap into flame their thunderbolt-emblem cigarette lighters in honor of Pinochet.

While over there across the street, Efrain is charming those three. He’s recently released. Maybe he is the Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

The wait has upped the noise, the noise level’s a hood coming down over the skull and lowering over forehead and eyes to the bridge of the nose and tickling the rims of the nostrils until dizziness can be relieved only with something to eat or drink or some talk, but the four people across in the fast-souvlakia are not eating, and the boy is looking at Amy, who glances more cool than calm at her watch, she wants to go, but is this because she’s figured out who Efrain was meeting and planning to introduce to Mayn and has thought fit to miss the meeting? Mayn is the trouble, but how about Efrain, you don’t need talk to tell you that Efrain made the arrangement to meet Mayn. Efrain takes in all three, while the boy looks at Amy and she keeps looking at Mayn but not wanting anything. Efrain’s eyes see the street too, the far sidewalk far as the corner where a bald man with a distinguished mustache pushes his right hand into a bunched-up cloth cap in his pocket.

A man who now moves toward Efrain but out of his sight, moving east toward Efrain’s side of the avenue, moving across Seventh in a mob of basketball fans jostling each other quite dangerously, perhaps thirty percent returning to New Jersey. Amy and Mayn and the boy have come out of the restaurant. They have turned away toward Thirty-fourth Street, and the unknown or unseen fifth person moves without having decided what to do, moving with a crowd of shouting fans, young, strong, drunk, elbowing each other so that the tweed cap somehow comes half out of the pocket as they all make the corner where half an hour and more ago he was to have met Efrain.

Efrain now has turned left out of the restaurant toward him, toward this corner of Thirty-third; and what seemed in the mineral glare of the souvlaki place the one detail not khaki is right there in the pocket of his loose military jacket. But, perhaps under Amy’s backward gaze, a decision has been taken as five fans veer up the block and he with them as Efrain has to stop to let them pass and is so close that Efrain as they pass does not feel the long white business envelope lifted from his pocket nor begin (as yet) to imagine what the tall blonde girl he’s just met with Mayn and this highly alert youth deduces as she looks back again to see a man she knows in confidence to be a distinguished foreign economist pick a pocket — or worse — while the potential light of her sharp gaze is followed, even after she turns again and sees Mayn flag a crosstown cab, by the eyes of the boy, slight of limb though tall enough, eighteen or twenty with a load of cared-for, wavy dark hair, who thinks he knows what her cool eyes have seen and seems then to absorb her light and forget her in contemplation of a visiting tall, bald man with a known mustache, who meets his eyes reflectively — which is the most signal thing that has emerged in these glancing turns of event — and bends into a downtown taxi that materialized at the curb, the avenue is downtown, all taxis therefore.

He has felt at once the boy-man’s eyes seeing what there is of him through the cab’s back window, homing on his brain (though Clara would laugh at such imagination from him) and was glad of the round-faced black man in the driver’s seat, and has given the address uptown, thinking he didn’t mean to take a cab.

Foley’s envelope has the five-day return-address box number instead of " — Prison," or "Correctional Facility" the Americans say, though how many know they do? The envelope comes unsealed too easily. He will explode the taxi if the driver is his personal DIN A agent. The letter hangs fire. Is it the margin narrowing his private personal life to one last light that will not escape him even into the heart of his life’s companion and must turn toward political anger to see if it is in him?