Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

: we already remember, despite the red herring interrupting us as to confuse what’s the margin, what’s the leverage, what’s the center, what’s the fulcrum (to compound the possible confusion if not the possibilities, for the interrogator had tried to cut in, perhaps just to show he knew what’s gon’ on to ask, Do you mean that the diva’s giving her lover head while contemplating murdering him on one of the unwholesome nights during the degenerate run of the gay Hamlet opera-ette? and who, by the way, is doing the script?).

Already remember what’s so soon not here any more; remember at last what’s been here with us so long we had more’n enough time to see but now would seem to have been waiting to remember.

Oh that’s crap, all that regret crap, say James Mayn and Grace Kimball in unison at a distance so that curiously they hear each other but don’t know it, a distance that could be stereo if Jim chose to say it as loud and long as Grace; but less noise betokens often superior conviction, where here, Jim, in a Washington hotel bar, having described the mourning of Mel for Sarah, heard dry colleague Ted "agree" you don’t know what you had till it’s over, and described the love of a woman he had experienced only to find out upon her departure for Hawaii on a bird-study vacation that he had felt stifled by her attention, though granted it wasn’t yet quite over but her absence was like it being over, and only then did Ted see what he had been living inside of; and Mayga, quietly or, rather, patiently and strategically there with them at the bar waiting till she knew what she would say and had the right moment, seemed then to say we have the time to see but we rather let it go, you know? and then remember it, remember with rue, let the marriage go, then lament that, let the life go—

— but crap, the fact of the matter, broke in Jim, his hand belyingly gentle upon Mayga’s sleeve, and as near to the White House fence as a trip to a window would evince, and he’s albeit freshly shaved and facing the crystal cone of a martini that particular very late afternoon or earliest evening (recalling a daiquiri his mother sipped all by herself in the music room before Sunday lunch once) the fact of the matter (having been, he feels, succinct all day, he repeats the words but hears himself gabbing, hears himself from an interior angle, which maybe is just the bullshit-radar often birdlike or snakelike sweeping the area, so he starts to say) "Wind does curve," but only gets out the first two words and will improvise, "Wind does know which way it’s blowing," and while Ted does his theatrically hilarious coughing at this, Mayga holds on to the spirit of the word "crap" and Jim suddenly sees she meant slantingly what she said and doesn’t believe you have to look forward only to figuring things out after all the damage is done, and he wants to embrace her there and then, and then somewhat untogether he does embrace her, but it isn’t just because he sees what she meant, and later that night, oh yes it’s about time (quips the interrogator) that this relation was owned up to, Mayga persuades Jim that the real indirection was his own, oh I know you you see, I know you, I am proud to, you understand, but I do know you, it’s you on the contrary trying to tell yourself what you don’t much credit—

— and here I am letting my marriage go? he asked — which made her unhappy but not unintelligent because she will be at peace with him lying down or sitting at a bar or in a restaurant booth — with her going home to South America and "going home" with him tonight each has said to the other that this is the first time unfaithful to spouse:

: which Mel never could have been, and that’s all there is to it: and while his fidelity to Sarah, who hadn’t loved him, survived her presence in his everyday life, though he became capable of passion expressed (in volubility) to Margaret ("I could have made her like me—" "She did like you, Mel, she certainly did—" "At least I could have made her love me, there was something about the shape of my feet, the front end of them, she couldn’t take, it wasn’t my lack of music and she didn’t mind John Charles Thomas, at least I said what I liked, no, it was me, it was that I was on the ground trying to take off but knowing my limits, and she was in the air, trying to find the ground—" "She was not," said Jim to his grandmother, when told, "she was not up in the air," and Margaret to each of these males, the husband, the son, said the same thing, "It didn’t gel, so I guess it couldn’t"), Mel fell in love with Brad for a while, they comforted each other, Mel told him please not to feel he ought to work at the newspaper office, and got into the longest talks at the kitchen table with Brad so they took the consequent years of Brad’s growing-up, it seemed, and when Jim got back from a date, or, once, from the most terrible scare involving Bob’s pickup truck, and once got back from the whole summer away bartending at the shore, there they still were at the table and the only thing Mel wouldn’t discuss was Brad’s (to Jim, dumb) nightmare of her, of Sarah, coming close to him, drawing bow across string, marking time with a conductress’s finger, reaching for Brad in the most loving way whereupon, his fault, his fault, he awoke, fighting himself free of the sheets to find her not reaching for him any more, or the reach was there but not his mom — but still Brad had his Day (as Margaret said to Jim one day at the cemetery), and Mel insisted Brad take more piano, with Barcalow Bran-dywine’s sister-in-law who jabbed the keys as if to position them, smiling, and, when she served as accompanist, could keep up the pounding and still look away from the keys and up at Barcalow in his orange-and-maroon horse-blanket sport coat that excited him almost like college colors on felt pennants or football jerseys, he got taken to the Princeton-Harvard game by the bibulous doctor who was Dr. Range’s main competitor in town and whose house Jim had taken to visiting unannounced not hesitating to go on in and sit down even when often the doctor and wife and sometimes daughter looked interrupted in the middle of something not too good, and the wife and daughter shivered on their stone seats in Palmer Stadium and glanced but didn’t want to look at the program, while the doctor hollered somewhat embarrassingly to particular guys on the Harvard team, because he had gone to Harvard, to get cracking, which was a little like Barcalow Brandywine arriving at a gathering and beginning a little too soon to lead some singing and standing up with a glass in his hand to announce that he was still enamored of his wife after seventeen, eighteen years, nineteen wasn’t it? years of married love (which was the title of a book Jim got hold of from one of his friends who actually had gotten it off a girl in the eleventh grade) — and once, to Jim’s amusement and Mel’s discomfiture, the doctor got unwound enough in the midst of the singing (for he — and his wife at least — did attend more than once, though why was not clear in memory), so the doctor told Barcalow Brandywine he had never liked him, and now he was thinking that he still didn’t like him (he burst out laughing) and never could understand that family of his either. But then there was Brad, right there, saying hotly — aged eleven or more—"Then you’re not welcome here because my mother was Barcalow’s friend and played for him," upon which all laughed except Jim who could have brained or throttled Brad whichever was surer (forget "faster"), and Barcalow genially told Brad it wasn’t his house but his grandma’s.

But Sarah could do strange things all right, like in the drugstore insult her old long-unseen acquaintance Leona Stormer revisiting town who lived in Chicago (which she said was nothing like New Jersey), and Jim at the insult his mother spoke didn’t get embarrassed, did he? and she did things posthumously for if Brad’s Day a month or so after Sarah’s very own drowning — a Sarah special — had been Brad’s coming out into the open and grieving like an African, like an Italian, like a Jew, like a non-crazy old Indian speaking to the winds that cornered the world maybe, there still Sarah was, talking through Bob her one-time quite secret lover’s mouth and creating the swift, breathless hate of Brad when Bob put into his own mouth his own recollected remark re: winds, "What a lot of stuff—" he had told Sarah— "they ain’t curved."