Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"— you were thinking of?" she finishes, knowing, though, that he meant calling (phoning) not thinking, so who but his mouth inquires finely of the skin of hers, smiling she is certain, neither asking nor telling her, "Oh Ford North is not your friend in that sense, I think": so that both of them are in control, shared (less than two but for the moment more than one); and she’s for a second French, then for a second a grain of history, as Sayao’s emerging equal in Boheme (she won’t do Boheme, she prefers to avoid lingering coughs) or a gifted girl from a legendary hemisphere who heard the great American Iago in Buenos Aires and upon speaking to him later in Europe got invited to visit him and his wife in Greenwich, Connecticut, at his "South American house," paid for by tours through Rio and B. A. up until Evita banned American singers, from Iago on up or down: no, Luisa is Clara’s and yes definitely Clara’s husband’s friend, what would she give up for this? but she is being thought of at this instant, nor would she believe in living through others’ thoughts of her, yet has done it, she has been that priestess mother murderer, she could not otherwise have raised her acting hands so rarely through three hours of onstage carrying-on (she’ll look at hands always, she knows the hands of four heads of state, always looks); uses her own onstage so sparingly it has been noted in the press — could not have stood before her audience and on occasion turned her back to them all, stood so still in the flesh of that living "house," the mass, the masses who (of customers, that is) alone matter if they take her away with them so there can be still more value of her and more, multiplied, spread everywhere — so there, Father, and yet she will be to Clara, woman to woman, in this way more resonant, a friend even should she become so active a compatriot she’ll risk her skin, even her still clean Swiss passport, a risk worth being not less than a friend with Clara and her aloof husband who once recently had rather hear the opera at home, and Luisa here in her home, a vastish unused apartment with a duplex kitchen where you can get a balcony’d view of an egg frying, knows, too, that all this sea of rapture, this air winding out from her passion, her art, also gets shut off the minute the show stops and the curtain call smiles its (one) way into the eyes of a thousand people now standing to go elsewhere with or without her.

"You exist," comes the soft voice touched off by her fingers on the back of his neck, "in the hearts of so many people; have you ever thought about that?" and she laughs loud a simple laugh from her sex, from which then comes "Where are they now?" so she in her words can just think what it might be to be him, not so much with a slight (pretty unimaginable) erection in the dark — puce? prepuce? she must see! — as with his wide, taut chest about to meet hers, yes — and no notion amid the small sweep of his male but threatening propaganda that she has, through some new dependency (that’s banana-peeled between present and future), left him in this scented and odored bedroom (made larger not smaller by the bed) if not escaped him into an event, discovered her same old self in an event she didn’t order curtains for, for where would they hang? hence an event she couldn’t escape—

— oh she’s more real? ‘z that it? oh she’s reckoning a political or national conscience into the cost of her tax-relieved Alpine passport? (while hearing her father once call nationalism just another brand of competition which is death next to cooperation)—

— oh let no one call her more real now than when vicariously singing, singing all these years, but—

— is she then recklessly involving herself in the for-the-moment gratuitously naval intelligence officer’s pursuit of happiness, being authentic, plus some knowledge or intelligence of her apparent friend Clara’s exile-economist husband whom Luisa might in some womanly (or theatrical) way unveil to her lover: because there isn’t enough drama in her life — or in lieu of having a child? (her medicine man speaks within her like the trace of the expelled worm)—

— let no one call her less than friend to Clara now after how many months of the New York sojourn of Clara and her husband (who is or is not imperiled, for a lot of people seem not to know, yet): yet suddenly it’s would-bt friend, for Clara may hate her if she knows who she’s been sleeping weeth, or Clara might not want to understand what’s between Luisa and this man whose national employers’ planned violence has over it like a blinking sign the alternating hence moving words both of save Chilean business and Chile’s old families, yet words, too, of her own father’s house-arrested position which now she feels but also because she ought to feel it and in varying words which may be not how many thousand persons the conjurers in power like population controllers cause to disappear behind the very wall those about to vanish stood against a moment past, but how many millions the persons in power represent; and all the time there (for is she growing by necessity more intelligent?) alternately appears like a sign the mere fleshly face of a father who brought her and a brother and others, always others, sometimes quite silently along solemn (damn serious) mountain paths, casual precipices in her little hook-and-thong boots so she wondered if at the height of the hike they would find again a coterie of serious men smoking in a room talking hushed or angry (though the amount of smoke held constant) led, inspired, moderated by the man her father who expected possibly nothing of her, a mystery, she couldn’t tell, she’d seen him close those eyes of his listening to her sing at the age of seventeen, seen him close his eyes and frown as at some idea, while also he sent her a telegram here and there, or once upon a time and then again, like a bouquet of local flowers, Milan, Los Angeles (where she really ate), London, Vienna, "take it back to the birds and the bees and the Viennese" Momo’s pouf sang upon Momo’s piano one night in Momo’s apartment building which God help us is just where Clara goes to the women’s workshop, which couldn’t be any less helpful (at least, if one were thinking of taking it) than a very, very tall young American woman poet who did not know that she was pretty — from cheekbone to upper knee and all, she was secretly pretty (and her adored daddy had called her "giraffe" until the day he died! animals first, then habitat, for she’s) secretly pretty instructing Luisa that Luisa’s country equaled some (no doubt American-made) shadow: O.K., Chile is a long shadow, O.K., good (and why is she listening moist-eyed to this girl in a noisy, aromatic room? she knows all the ways to get away politely, and all the other ways), yet (And do you come from a line of poets?) she with a Swiss passport gotta wait for this long shadow spoken more from the secretly bruised eyelids, melancholy and self-swelled, than from the wonderfully wide (not wide open but wide-long) eyes of the young woman — a shadow (she’ll swear) "cast" (maybe out of one of her own poems) "by the lapping sea which is the overlapping silence of the world breaking upon the hemisphere, a ghost coast like a mapmaker’s lost lore" — Luisa’s homeland, Luisa’s country down there a million miles under New York, "a planet," the girl goes on, "a planet in essence long" (and does this description of Chile make the American poeta political? — heavens no! only nostalgic for a nation she has not yet visited for Christ’s sake): let that poeta help herself, O.K.?. . "what is in others…" (but these words… do they ask, do they interrogate? or do they tell you? or are they part of words to come?). . You asked if I came from a line of poets, senora? oh God no! — did you ever hear of a financier named Jay Gould and did you ever hear of the blizzard of 1881?—(she had heard of the blizzard, actually) — O.K. you heard of the blizzard, well it blew down the telegraph lines and Jay Gould had to keep sending his rapid-fire orders to his broker in the stock market — (was the poet descended, then, from Jay Gould?) — and his broker was doing O.K., too, you can be sure — (was the poet descended from Mr. Gould’s broker?) — No, senora, so Gould sent a messenger through the snow with his buy and sell orders, the fastest he could find and, well, the boy was kidnapped — (ah, you are descended from the messenger boy) — let me finish, senora, and Gould’s rivals put another boy who looked just like the kidnapped boy in his place who would tell them day to day what Gould was selling and what he was buying — (ah, you are descended from the lookalike) — No, from the boy who was kidnapped: he survived. .