Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Are these words that ask, that interrogate, are they part of words to come?… as in this same noisy room one man, two men, three men, all (though she’ll guess their occupations) unknown to Luisa who is so gloriously known to them at this reception on a Sunday before the new production, a different magic lantern in each set of season-subscribing eyes, all with attentive mouths (and noses!) each with raw carrot stick and glass of urine-tinted wine, approaching made the literary girl in the midst of further utterance perhaps fade proudly away into the rest of the room with a chandelier, two chandeliers more heavy with glass than light, and a large bell on a leather-and-mahogany bar that the Australian consul will pick up and ring in a moment — fade proudly away and toward no one special when she could have been talking to Luisa the diva, the opera singeuse (joke, we get gladly from her and she throws back to us half knowin’ we’z there only as {qua) need for change as we’z individuals being we’z race and we didn’t get wise to this overnight and haven’t even yet, which is why we’z currently angel-human alternant, you mayba gon’ not like this — halva takah chances — truth be maybe not so true as ye made up) so that to adapt to Manon’s or Piaf ‘s language (not Bidu’s or Luisa’s) Luisa’s own adoptable New York accent (turnoffable, turnonable depending you pay the bill) in order to double or treble or make her ever-various self even more many in the also still singular (if pidgin) French of singeuse, which does not in French exist, gave her a kick, hence some precious sense of entertaining herself, a solitary pay for those who are incorporated and much in demand, and, not wanting these three men whose lives might be waiting to become hers, nor anyone she can think of except Clara maybe, nor quite wanting the twenty-two (odd)-year-old poeta (who’d understand Luisa probably much better than Chile) to come back to confirm from just what collaboration there has come to Luisa’s brain through her ears — or (!) vice versa! — the words What is in others yet has others in it? and she is having help, she knows it, to hear those words and to know that it doesn’t matter if these people, the "others," are part of a statement or of an interrogative, she’s having help from somewhere, inspiration from the foothills (thank you), or from a dreaming person possibly whom she has never listened to, a mother in her (say) that she wished to be to her own father — the poeta would understand this of all things — when in 1950 or so he opened the great door to look at her standing fifty feet away beside a grand piano that was an intelligence in itself, with a tall window bright with a sky like sea beyond her singing voice upon which he shut that door again as if to say, You are here and I am elsewhere — he was then himself moving someplace: while she, with whatever back-straightening and shoulder-yearning, stayed where she was unless interrupted by herself or her teacher or the thought that her father had poked his nose through that door to look beyond her to the sea view out that nineteenth-century window: while the heavens knew we’z content to be foothills or her own mother herself, since we in never staying still might, since the sea becomes us, shrug seaward albeit thus yielding Easter or other half-known isles, or fault our half-known funking ways upward to Andes we may have felt we had to try being for ourselves however many (granted, temporarily) missing per-sonae would tell us convincingly what it was (you know) like to be ye Andes when not even her former resident tapeworm could tell (apart from living the — take it day by day — reality of) what it was like to be her or at least a parceled part of her team: but relation as we but are of her we found it not easy to swing away from her of late, since her vicarious habits kinda worked both directions, so, in process of getting suddenly real, she was living us, and only the sternest kind of asshole talk was going to keep her from going kind of crazy upon the creation of the distance necessary to move on, which us had to do constantly anyhow, being ourself as essentially relations as the coast of that ghost country is that country so long as its length is long: yet even then, our semi-amorphous, multicellular shrug-forth that draws along from behind our lengthening, contracting proposition, which will seem at times a century in question, at other places a curve of something like land, and at others a conclusion we drew that then drew us: and so, to get that distance from her, we were all (be quiet, be quiet) hearing us say, quote, "She is, but now we see always was, in a dependency structured to cope better than it knew with a multiplicity of small-scale" yow-knows, say ongoing kinship not to be either totaled (qua dependency) or—

But Luisa holds on to those words What is in others yet has others in it: which later she’s not sure belonged only to the bend of the tall poet-girl’s retreat, but stayed in Luisa’s mind (in her, she-sees-now, doomed, though naked, lover’s presence coming to her which might surprise her or pass her by, acoustically adorned with his "You exist in the hearts of so many people" — that is, Don’t get mixed up in the troubles of exile-economists; think of the life you make for yourself though no one’s saying singers are dumb, "we" know how well you’ve personally managed your household finances long distance to Zurich where the portfolio info if not the buck stops; but also the way this gifted scholar-compatriot of yours, the husband of your friend, trots in the park, he is drawing some attention to himself and did you happen to know — which comes through as his quietly interrogating Do you happen to know—)

"What is in others," she breaks her lover’s silence (hearing again Clara’s last insinuating word "Mayn," a name, Luisa is sure, interrupting barely her lover’s silence), his approach, his amazing gravity flavored with her refrigerated peanut butter and as male as it is more hooded than blind, more blind than false — so her breath becomes "What is in others" (her breasts softened each upon his chest then gently filling at the rub of fur — as she continues "yet has others in it?"—

— for we, with her in us, stand ready if always on the move like her father even when he’s (as now, if not defunct by someone else’s game plan) under house arrest, stand ready, being but relations in the vale we genuinely rent though it gets smaller contrarily the closer we get to it— constipado we try out with the o ending, for the universe is now allowed to be too-badly male, and the female principle is considering having nothing to do with this pustulated uniwurst before it disappears into its own core-needs—

— meanwhile, Luisa’s real; she’s no longer the vehicle for tapeworm tracks to get us from there to here in or out of the persons of a diamond-squint Ojibway medicine man operating just a stone’s throw from the Great Lakes system, or his New York contact in this inter-worm arrangement the sometime fisher-friend guidee the Park Avenue doctor who swears by wood fires and reads by them to drive off winter spirits while thinking often of beloved Luisa, now still more real: her that does not — in her lover’s mind, say — quite add up. . this just plain naked lover adds to all else he is half half-feeling, for he thinks pretty well without clothes on, though never has been obliged to as it were kill naked, and wonders if we had here (in others, others in it) some mere fresh citation from Hamlet —could be Horatio herself speaking — until it crosses his mind bound elsewhere unto the unknown that naked he might be obliged to undergo death, and cannot tell where that thought came from or comes to, for he is not given to whim—