Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— but Clara is talking some more and telling her she could use a Kimball workshop but where are her loyalties and who is she planning to get herself killed by or risking her neck for

(how’s the weather down there? we hear ourselves ask, having long since given up the idea we’re single)—

— and Clara’s not so friendly now and hangs up on that name again, that man’s name again with Luisa speaking it stupidly into the receiver (why? why? — so her lover can hear the name?)—

— oh we said it close to her neck, her thigh, her volcanic eyes, though to our erstwhile Interrogator, who knew it at once — the name Mayn. .

— while the diva, alone with her great self and her undeniable lover kneeling on maroon and white diamonds of linoleum that are black and white in the dark (ready naked for any type of attention) knows she never thought seriously of killing this man: how was it done? (Yet, easily, she sees!) She’s hurt by how Clara rang off. But it’s her own fault for phoning like this with this one lover, but a man who may have done nothing but pass through naval school. To murder him now — that asks too much of him! The soul goes elsewhere, the body stays. She would like him here with what she cannot swallow left out. But that is asking so much of him that he will have to die, but how has she gone this far, to fuck with a man who whatever he is in that regime knows too well what’s happened with her father — responsible as she for her career—

"I came in here, I couldn’t sleep, and—" she’s explaining too much. .

"I was thinking of Momo and this Hamlet musical, opera, whatever it is and like mind reading the phone goes and I caught it in mid-ring so you wouldn’t wake up—"

And as she moves reluctantly her thigh from his lips thinking she better get to the John — but wondering then what she would destroy him with —pour bleach down his ear, his nose — all one — the thought whets her for a simple kiss in bed. She hears him rise from the linoleum, asking if Momo sings any Spanish roles: to which she answers swiftly, too swiftly, that the city is bilingual: everyone knows some Spanish even if Ford North never rides the subway in his double-breasted camel’s-hair and his basso’s bowler — it’s more than she can handle — yet she will handle it and whether she kills him curtained behind a shower bath of blood or swallows him with a brand-new tapeworm, she cannot but be ready when, behind her, he wonders why that basso is getting Neruda from her in the middle of the night in English and Spanish when she said he only called to persuade her to participate in his degenerate send-up of a great though decadent work of Shakespeare: to which she rises in angry acceleration, turns upon the naked person who she can’t help knowing is about to love her even more: "Neruda was why — why I cannot get mixed up in that claptrap Hamlet, whatever it is — Neruda, ‘the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines’ " — " ‘petrels,’ " her bilingual companion continues, " ‘petrels and eagles,’ " comes back his voice equally in English, while—" ‘meadows and foam,’ " she says, and". . Tu me pre-guntas donde estoy?’ " (remembering the lines Clara has given her) and her naval officer with relentless complexity or culture replies, " ‘Te contare’— ‘I will tell you,’ ‘ but stops short of the next line he has heard Luisa quote to the friend she phoned — which is: "giving only (solo detalles) information useful to the authorities" — stops short, and she wouldn’t know why except maybe he’d rather not give away any threats; so many people she never met and never had to since she’s who she is, a dutiful daughter only in anxiety, in mind — while, fixed as he is, her dead or alive father (no longer with the telephone he so used, the many rooms of people he sat and talked with through the everlasting political moment, les urgences an ambulance entry sign reads upon a dark building near the Seine) would still have paper to type with, though type what? a man in history no less arrested in a house she has never seen—

— but she can’t control her thought which goes to the man who was sitting right there in one of Clara’s orchestra seats—

— and left her (though he stayed at "home") before she left him, which matters only if she turns toward it, which she will do if she turns back to her lover; yet doing so now means only the male bone and blood he turns into, over her shoulder, and more important is get to the John, save a friendship, find out why Clara feels her husband is in curious peril apart from his allegiance or his voice (though in his businesslike scholarly way he never was a speaker, a sound, like her father), as if his antagonists were making up their collective mind whether he knew about a certain thing or not, besides all the other things he knows; and she hears her now treasured friend Clara with her unfailing large dark blue eyes, wide pale mouth, deep heart waiting out all the trouble of grown children in danger beyond precise reach, husband in danger, nation beyond reach, a West Side apartment where she won’t let herself miss her interhemispherically abandoned belongings (while he with silent humor jogs thrice around the neighborhood) — an apartment where she and he still move each other — hears, Luisa hears, her treasured friend laugh and tell what these women in the workshop, these American women say to each other such as that wars and houses are made by men and understood by women. The women expecting Luisa’s life story. Free with the cost of the workshop. Complete with revelations as if the women there were from the newspapers. Turning the corner into her bedroom she wants a boy, a little son against her, and on the current of her own feet on the carpet can hear him in pyjamas someplace and can hear him, hear the fridge — watchfully watch him take his chances, just her and him, and the name on which Clara rang off abruptly comes back, with nothing now in front of Luisa and with a man behind: to whom she turns but not to him, he isn’t there, or she’s lookin’ through him in the dark; and by the way she looks good, too, and when the check came at her Mexican restaurant her fascist escort stared down at the total and murmured, "Una jovena al izquierda de mi y on your starboard quarter has been contemplating you for the last half hour" — aficionada doubtless; alone and small, with a box of foreign cigarettes beside her glass, big thin gold circles hanging down out of her hair on either side, no rings on her hands — who seemed to have eaten alone often.

— till, as cramped as her own personal tapeworm that flew in from the Minnesota territory and descended toward her gravitational center, and was flushed out of its own coils and crannies by a loving physician’s recommended dose of atabrine, she lets herself forget murder, forget the threatened bond with Clara, in order to know — as she knows when in her morning tub (so still) she lets a dream forget itself — that she hit upon that woman-in-the-restaurant’s profession for one second — but now what was it; what was it? (her very certainty had lost it): and with that, she sings a phrase with intervals so slight they are primitive, a cry, a thought — that still gets an echo far off in her apartment, for he is not behind her phrase. It takes her, while her twin sense that some half-conscious community rhymed this proposition to her lets her rest both with her abrupt decision (to sing two roles, the second Horatio, the ultimate friend) and her wish (which even Judith might have entertained could they have run a power line to Holofernes’ tent) to watch bedroom TV with her lover whose hand (yes) palms her belly pregnant (yes) and with shared peperoni pizza sent out for, and meanwhile she is reading in his mind places elsewhere where he thinks of her — yes, he thinks of her — even to the point of telling someone, a stranger to her, how much he likes her (it’s a man friend he’s having lunch with) yet she can’t get off the — the unavoidable phone call from her compatriot Clara that tells her in the guise of possible friendship that (whatever you call it, the chilly bowel below the Swiss bank vault or the prisons of acoustical foul-up suddenly offstage) this is it: she wants Clara’s friendship despite what her loneliness also hears in the long words of her father (thou shalt love, well, thy father) — she could hear the breakers like dreams of mountains stagger distantly down her father’s known words until, hearing her lover en route somewhere between here and the kitchen, she hears as if for the first time her father defending Karl Marx, a man real as her own father — lest we forget that the shortcomings in his thought are the shortcomings in our own — his history ours (she recalls) — and she, who gives pleasure and pleasure that begets pleasure to those who pay to come to Lincoln Center and to those who do not pay because she has given them free tickets whether they use them or not, would say this about "Marx" who comes back to her like her father as "The Moor," the dark-faced, the naked shape now rejoining her in (after all) her dark bedroom, she listens while her lover lubricates with the essence of her refrigerated Deaf Smith peanut butter du pays the softest of predictions — that’s "unknown," he grants, but "forced" upon him by what he cannot but infer — that in the near future she may forget what stage she is at home on and find herself before a small but far more risky audience: upon which she does not bridle (after all, she warms to him, if, granted, now with some cute irritant of fear, some additive that does not yet subtract though it could strike in the midst of anything, of love, like a woken tapeworm track), and handling the back of his neck, "Do you know Shakespeare?" she asks, "do you know Hamlet, do you know his loyal friend Horatio who is around at the end, isn’t he? to pick up the pieces? What’s it matter what small closet stage downtown, what auspices? — Momo is my friend and—" drawing her lover to her so that, of their four hands, only the fingers of her left upon the back of his neck come into play, breast to breast, leg to leg, she hears his breath intervene, "It was not Momo—"