Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— Did he not broach these remembrances with his wife, asks the interrogator whose empty face has grown tender eyebrows and sprouts smallest tufts from shadow-erased nostrils, maybe he don’t got a nose—

— no mo’ (sang Barcalow Brandywine, upstaging the doctor in a warm, boisterous room at grandmother’s house)—

— I mean, adds interrogator, you have such friendships really in American Marriage or so our informants report—

— to Mayga, while she was available, Jim brought out the subtle blanks between the lines, explaining that the insight of South America moving beneath the glass above which he had been watching (thinking about, perhaps, wind and Earth) had been not utterly blown away by Coach Rocker calling the disgusting news of that girl apparently making a botch of the afternoon, the two of them too — but the insight had held to Jim, that is, without his havin’ to do anything, and it was that Bob, who had heard actually Sarah say that owlish junk ‘bout wind and all at the beach (—at the beach? asked Mel at the kitchen table and both Brad and Mel looked in wonder at this intruder Jim Mayn standing in the doorway, come home — When were they at the beach? — but Brad said, The day that old man came to see Gramma at the beach)—

— it was that Bob had needed to be part of Brad’s Day, well he’s a nelectrician ‘n has a pickup truck ‘n a dark red Ford sedan simonized like grandfather Alexander’s shoes, and a load of friends who say, Good old Bob, you have to watch him because only he knows where all them wires and cables are going — and he hardly belonged with the Mayns in Throckmorton Street or even in Sarah’s awful story but was in it no less and knew he would provoke by introducing that staggering fact of Sarah’s expressed opinion re: wind curves and re-provoke by citing his dismissal of her late view but it was where he was — where, Flick Mayn years later able to bring herself to say, where he was coming from, he wanted to be part of it and so—

— and yet as Jim raced through the uncaring halls of the high school, damn it, to the no doubt real location of that bashed-up pickup truck that was his responsibility when he had only a picture of it in his head, a blonde girl with lipstick (judge’s granddaughter) embracing the wheel of an endlessly rocking vehicle, a dark-haired girl without lipstick spilled, Catholic thigh by Catholic thigh, out of Bob’s stupid truck with her history notes bound in a notebook but adrift, Jim knew more, knew more than he knew, so he was minutes and minutes getting clear of that high school and a picture of a blackboard full of fond chalky shapes abandoned by human hand, but the very obstacles—

— read ob. (we recollect already)—

— very obstacles that kept him forever from getting out of this high school and down the street to stupidly hunt for the girls and the truck without asking directions though it was his hometown, wasn’t it? the very obstacles that seemed to make his run down those halls endless wonderfully let him see, let him see—

— not a principal and a journalism teacher in passionate dispute or a male math teacher with some solid on the board and his head on a desk evidently too tired to even think "n’est-ce pas" at the end of one of those loud challenging non-questions of his — but that something in Bob Yard had loved Jim’s mother, and Jim, who didn’t care for either man too much, might be a hair closer to Bob than to his own father Mel, but that was crap like everything else, and beside the point and one more obstacle while the world seemed to be rattling yer cage, you had two systems no matter what the truth and so on about Sarah turned out to be, and it was more than that, oh shit, she was right ‘bout wind and Earth, and Bob (yer uncle!)’s right too even if he didn’t honestly and truly say it to her, except Bob’s the one on Earth, where winds what with Earth’s easterly rotation do look like they curve, whereas he’s takin’ the view from out beyond the Earth that ought to be Sarah’s. They had their problems all right, that clung to them like this sight that came to Jim and stayed after Coach Rocker launched Jim outward with his scary words, and he felt denied by those goddamn girls the chance to hang on to the two systems but they held on to him and went on knowin’ him even when he left them, seemed like, to rush away to handle one of those well-isolated—

— incidents, the interrogator fills in, proud of idiom—

— incidents to be handled, dealt with, coped with, covered, etcetera, as if this up-to-now continuous world, one by one—

— taking it a day at a time, adds the interrogator—

— oh, were you divorced too we chime in? did you have your limb cut off and then regret it? did you lose a loved one by unforeseen overdrift and have a really hard row to hoe because of it coming out of left field where there was no warning track to tell you the guys off there on the firing line rattling the fences wasn’t just taking batting praptice (as Sammy pronounced 4’practice")?

— we do not have divorce any more, the interrogator intones, we sent all potential (joke) divorcers via matter-energy dome-trans (a mere pleasant buzzing in the temples is all they feel) so that—

— they arrive in Locus Libration translated, each couple, into one? —

— into one? but surely you have not the technology yet to do dat, have you? asks the interrogator in a new voice coming through him from elsewhere—

— never mind, we have enough trouble launching our new cars, we reply, feeling more American which may feel like an isolated incident—

— sensibly handled as such (of the two-girl accident in Bob Yard’s pickup borrowed semi-illegally by an underaged borrower of the first part who was absent mulling over South America under glass), concurred Ted, one’s fellow newspaperman (you couldn’t say "fellow colleague," ‘twould sound redundant ‘stead of the succinct that Mel espoused ad nauseam, favorite theme, witness Sarah’s obit written by the proud widower himself—

— and if it was a mystery why Brad went to pieces that day, Brad’s Day as it came to be called, never mind all its wrinkles, its whys and whys and various crap you can’t know, maybe he discovered jerking off the night or afternoon before but was too young surely; and who in the hell cares, comes a foghorn-strong voice both far and close, hard to tell, we almost miss the later James Mayn expressing good-(more-or-less)humored disdain for something or other, maybe family history:

and you come up to the present with a lot of interesting enough memories, no doubt about it, hearing your mother’s fugitive brief lover (who loved her but would never have called her "nice") tell of an argument they had about a piano being out of tune and he heard it, a foreign vibration, a separate if not isolated sound, and she didn’t: sharp-edged memories often become surrounded by a nothingness of what lay around them I mean the idea of all these never-to-be-known people who knew your folks and arrived with horse-drawn (in Windrow, horses could draw, you see) vanilla ice cream at twilight saying but once, You have a lot to live up to — she was the nicest woman. . and you hear them in the woodwork, then never more, such as the vanished voice that called the cemetery four, five days after Sarah disappeared and got Eukie Yard mad in his voluminous one-piecer to ask if interment had taken place and when Eukie retorted that the drowned lady hadn’t been recovered, the voice from New York re-retorted Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, which Eukie said he knew already, he thought; and somewhere before a trowel clanked under a porch but not before Lincoln’s wife was identified as an impossible woman, a voice with shoes on said to another heavily shod voice that Alexander had said the second voice ("you") had told him it ("you") had gotten opera tickets for a special road opera performance in Trenton, because it ("you") was afraid Sarah’s going crazy or something, and the other voice said, Yes it was Vurdee’s Ba[w]llo in Mascara (like a brilliant woman designer of revolutionary new men’s shoes with whom Mayn discussed South America all too briefly who insisted on pronouncing as Bore-guess a known Argentine storyteller and poet whom Mayn had never read and possibly never heard of) and what had been said to Alexander (who once observed that some Armenians are gypsies) who thought for Pete’s sake he’s going to start bawling on me, was that the lady in question might go crazy living with him, Mel —