Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— which Jim and we unconsciously fast-track (O.K.) inward, past a not quite totally unloving remark by Sarah that Mel was the only man she could conceive waterproofing his carpet slippers; inward to Dr. Range’s ex post acto word that Sarah at the time of her vanishing into our coastal waters hadn’t had anything incapacitating or incurable, just anemia plus periodic blues which he for one (with a gentle shrug) could not track down but did associate somewhat with the fluctuation of her musical activity, for things might take a downturn right after a chamber recital at the church, for instance, but there was — or had been —little organically the matter (in those days when antibiotics had not yet priced house calls out of the market)

— inward to little Brad’s dream — no nightmare — of Sarah standing in his room making her own dark moonlight waving her pale fingers through the air like the conductor of the Philharmonic in New York and told him she would wait for him till he came back but where she was he could not remember, though she had less burn than tan for once and the black towel draped over her until she swung it off her to reveal grandly, like terribly peeled areas, skin that did not have the beautiful tan, and he wanted to give her some clothes — woke up (for a dream of Sarah would never be long-winded) and went back to sleep but told the dream at breakfast, and started crying, and when Mel said she was in heaven, Jim reached and touched his half-brother’s shoulder: "You thought she was cold and needed her clothes; she’s O.K., Brad, no kidding, she’s O.K."

— so swiftly inward to that time "done" under the porch, inward through the dull clank of a trowel against the upended iron teeth of a dark rake under a front porch (the dark side of the porch), and Mel’s unwillingness to say, "for the record," whether his visitor was right that Lincoln was married to an impossible woman; upon which the other voice, which was Bob Yard’s, swiftly and softly observed, "Lost the battle, but won the war," only to hear Mel react with a violently amplified scraping on the porch boards above: " What war?" and moments afterward he came after the boy who, just happening to be there in the course of a day, seemed to be eavesdropping upward from underneath

— so swiftly inward through cloud and clear, through moons that stretched from a dismembered Statue of Liberty past reflections in Pennsylvania’s Juniata River where the Navajo Prince camped on his way east, to great plains and basins not even an Eiffel could cantilever out to view beyond, and through dawning hailstorms to the wake of a very large bird, too large to have gotten clean away inward so swiftly through such fact as that when Margaret was in New York a couple months after Sarah embarked upon her ultimately boatless voyage Eukie Yard told Jim a phone call had come to the cemetery inquiring if interment had taken place, and when Eukie, with the receiver up against his ear on that day, four or five days at least after "your mom was drowned," wanted to know who he was talking to, the fellow in New York instead said he knew the mother and had seen the daughter Sarah but once, and when Eukie said the lady had drowned off the Jersey shore and they had not recovered her so of course there hadn’t been no interment, the loud voice at the far end of the phone line said, Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, and hung up "‘z if he’d told me something I didn’t know"

— inward swiftly and (like orbits th’t git smaller but faster) with a speed capable of accommodating inversely a multiplicity of small-scale units kept in mind by the wind whose convenient passive/cheap fuel though we don’t actually see it we’re glad to use as a means to an end though bypassing the question that — as he lived his own life in years to come — Jim couldn’t have cared less about namely our need of him, his largely unacknowledged use of us to whom he has certainly been a good and loyal part, like Grace Kimball but also countless others who’ll always be less here than she, whether in that multiple dwelling in New York or moved-out—

— inward in short so fast Jim conks out cum schlafing off the d’effects of a (neither war nor battle) heartfelt marriage that he abandoned (since institutions can take rejection easier than folk — or federal agencies) to leave us, actually in his vicinity, within the controlled weather of the tapeworm track which sans loop takes We to pauses where we have always been before: to hear a woman help a man hear what he heard before but didn’t know; to have a woman being helped recall love by hearing but despite hearing her lover joke about having shared freely her labor, her agony, her joy (almost for free); to hear a wife with the education of a specialist guess or mind-read what happened at a distance to her husband for whatever it was worth; to listen while two women, one still very young though, paired, of convergent ages, review men as if it’s all for one and talk so intimately in a large window as to transcend the chances of female friendship as if some male Fate sets us back three decades to early post-War rent control before vacancy became by law the lode the landlord waited patiently to strike, while the tapeworm track literally lets us hear a fashionable physician originally from Boston now secretly in therapy remind his famous childless patient (who varies her delightful English foreignly and with elan) that "using" a tapeworm to effect dramatic weight loss might shift the. . onus, and be a form of avoidance — through which no doubt she would learn, but. . but learn what? she asks in sync exactly with her medic’s same thought sensing the tapeworm track still there a semi-permanent trail or scar through the very thought of American peanut butter, while she half-knows she doesn’t need to lose weight no matter what a friend of an acquaintance has done to herself through some old or new regime, there’s so many ways by 1977 that if you don’t feel you’re in the worming tape tunnel ‘stead of it in you, you got to feel that it opens outward like a lip growing and rolling from every moist glim of its circum, and you are it and might’s well look back down the narrowing wind-tunnel as when you could — we all could — indulge in the uncontrolled controllability of nostalgia’s splicing and slimming of events to recombine or reconstitute them, as in "constitution" at some later libration point which Jim, addressing gentle Mayga in a Washington bar early in the 1960s describes as a balance point of pulls, hence a good spot to settle down or out ‘tween Earth and her-or-its primary Moon, that is for an in-space settlement, so they contemplate each other with affection giving diplomatic recognition to that great area of gap between their socially stooled thighs, which is a gap of experience, if we will but let it in: and the diva Luisa years later finds in her a track left by some grace of the divine, like experience to be traveled, again if she will, and again she can’t tell her loving physician of hands upon her thigh (two hands belonging to the same person) or of how she let herself learn to love him even in the dark of night in her duplex balconied kitchen for hearing her lover’s bare foot near the threshold, she had resumed her phone recital in the English in case he may not know that the poetry’s Neruda but at least prior to her covering explanation when she hangs up (which his surveillance has decided her against lest it seem guilty), he can kiss her skin, on his knees on the linoleum, one of those thigh listeners but listening with his lips for any clue from the subtle anatomy of her experience — a clue to whoo shee’s talkin’ to — at a moment when, for very love as well as ultimate hygiene, she considers flushing him out of her "life" and off the planet as simply as some gently acting bacteria suggested by your family G.P. much less our intrahemispheric tapeworm and teach the ecstasy of middle-class hunger excruciatingly prolonged for a future of weight loss and healing — until Luisa, hearing from Clara how surprising and warm(yes)-hearted are the Kimball workshops, Luisa now beyond danger which is fear abruptly concludes "Momo, it’s late" into the phone to her friend Clara, who, knowing whose nickname "Momo" is, intuits by the magic of near-disaster who Luisa’s with ("Momo" being Ford North, basso profundo and gourmand silly genius with stammer in his wings), "Momo, for the last time please I would love to oblige you but—" (she has to pause to hear Clara’s own real conclusion as if Clara on her own imagines Luisa’s lover padding back to the bedroom extension phone to hear no basso but the voice of the well-known Allende economist’s wife)—"Momo, that warehouse isn’t the—" (she breaks off as if Momo at the other end has interrupted her)—"isn’t the place for either of us, and I am no Bernhardt and anyway she wouldn’t have doubled as Horatio, and there has never been a good Hamlet opera or we would have heard of it (I don’t care if there have been two dozen), the only chance was Verdi and he abandoned—"