Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

which Mayn too did, in circles no doubt, until a day came, or he to it waiting, soon after the aforementioned renewed trial residency, when a nice, sometimes worried woman in the apartment house in question, whom he let befriend him without insisting on her husband materializing, told him of a person named Grace Kimball he thought he’d heard of, who said she had withdrawn from this world only to return with new powers, her own, her own extraordinary powers nonetheless very simple, you know, Mayn smiled sharply like a laugh.

Norma added that the withdrawal at least of Grace had been in marriage (in marriage, said Mayn, checking) (yes: in) while the powers found partly in stories told in Norma’s group of women seemed real — the people, the women and men that had become "family" to nonetheless send on their way at some point — forget the night gapped like Pentothal with all the interchangeable braceros translated into and out of the planetary labor force wide-loaded in convoys of super-semis cross-continent: two women technologists sit sipping mixed fresh-crushed juice, getting acquainted, that kind of thing, discussing they imagine two men when, by some small-world economy scrambling whatever used to be the matter, it’s in fact one guy they’re talking ‘bout for the longest time, the unknown medium through which they get acquainted: not to mention (for to Norma Mayn didn’t) the couple in Phalanx, New Jersey, a marriage that did and still may play (with revised dialogue) who ritually hitch him up like old Dobbin complete with the old vegetable man’s fedora with earholes (that is, for the horse) to a real imported rickshaw (brought it back themselves never thinking what they would do with it, just part of tax-write-off basic research) so he can pull her down the garden path with the blue ribbon on it and we’ll hitch old, yes, Dobbin to the shay: not to mention, but he does, to Norma and then independently to Norma’s husband, a couple of heavy-handed economists Gordon proves also to know even better, one from Metz in Alsace-Lorraine which is in France at the moment, the other an Irishman from Los Angeles, "old L.A. people," one (actually employed) cousin marched with Coxey’s Army of unemployed protesters in ‘94—well, took the train as far as Chicago, then walked to Washington — and both economists have red hair and beard (if you looked back and forth they could do with only one set of looks), and once when Mayn and they had a lunch that was a bit awkward at first, then too full of talk, Mayn had said he had thought of getting to know some more economics as a substitute for economists but economics seemed too hard (which made the red-haired economists laugh and say in unison, You and Max Planck), then later when the waiter got into an argument over the arithmetic of the tab with a man about Mayn’s build whom he’d been introduced to at the bar because the man, who was missing one little finger (though Mayn didn’t recall feeling it) and wore a well-cut blue pinstripe and a red pointed handkerchief and a dark-blue, tiny-red-emblemed club tie, was lunching with a doctor-friend of Mayn’s whose boat he’d been on, now just sold to the Xerox people in Stamford, Mayn had said to his tablemates that on the other hand economics was really too easy, which made the russet ecologues blush in concert and in concert choke on final swallows of their first Manhattans and say in hilarious unison, You and Bertrand Russell! upon which Mayn, who had the impression that he mumbled a lot but realized that this was internal and that his speech was normal, caused further hilarity by adding that he would stick to what he could see, like whether people listened when we talked, and seemed to say only what they knew, and whether they used their hands and what they looked like (—Their hands? the economists asked, but this time kept the joke private, as if it would be one too many):

they were way ahead of him, he told them, like Rogers and Rockefeller when they bought Anaconda Copper with a rubber check they covered by loan collateraled with fresh-printed stock in a non-company that existed to buy Anaconda, leaving them with, after they sold the fresh stock, a real copper company and thirty-six million dollars profit: the economists were eating their lunch through this transaction, they did not know those facts — maybe they weren’t the facts, said Mayn — seemed impossible, yet so easy; and, as usual, a bunch of people got stung — the economists nodded with mouths too full for what formulae formed higher in each head — the argument nearby with the waiter was over — and the man in the blue pinstripe was grinning at what the elder gent the doctor had said, who was (Mayn knew) "drinking a little" since his wife’s death but who was an easy chap, Mayn had played squash with him a few years back, a man who didn’t believe in making difficulties for himself, so that while, true, he had become a shrink, which is, hour after hour (facts supplanting facts), dealing with folk who make difficulties for themselves, and are made by them — and mostly, though you had matriculated and paid your dues, done training, etcetera, you might just tell them, Take some time for yourself, you know (—A breather? — ) That’s the ticket; and for him himself it was after thirty years of medicine and in order to retire into (at his wife’s suggestion) seraZ-retirement:

But breathers aren’t what they— or we — used to be: once marginal, the breather came to take up major space like a friend in need whom you have to listen to for weeks of personal crisis: once space, a breather has become a person like turning into yourself; witness even those doubtless workshop-trained adepts who hold their (if it is really only their) breath and have it too, and, within that body-hold, keep so deep self’s other intake/out-go that coming upon the phenomenon of breathless breathing less like the old tab-less tab men’s collar than the cordless unisexual (little) shaver, we children of the phenomenon may grasp only its idea yet feel its matrix quite absent, while we would drown in our own fresh-squeezed still pulpable information with built-in gaps as if it were the breath of life — not Jim, contemplating reported reincarnation of the noted Grace Kimball from one change stage to the next, from the Great Mother-Sun of forbidden Splinter-Inca lore along the Peru-Chile frontier, and from the Goddess who was Greek yet then a sister renegade who occupied the oracle Tree-Lith on a Mediterranean crag perilous yet organic in the lower Peloponnesian wilds of Mani, until she (still Grace) became the lorn Prince — what just would not blow Jim’s mind because "almost nothing surprises me" (he remarked to Norma and Gordon) — the reported lorn Prince (that Norma reported was of Nava-Choor in Kimball’s version) derived like revelation from a detailed account given Grace by a newsperson friend of a Prince or high-born brave who (news though ‘twas to Mayn on his own doorstep and beneath the lintel of his long past or at least as presently adjacent as Little Wind teaches the Hero Twins to throw their breath — for immortality purposes), (this Prince) on being destroyed by some "Princess" type he thought he adored surprised himself by self-resurrecting secretly as two people in the visible form of one, was it man and woman now? — according to all that’s recently been voiced — and not half one, half the other, but both — and since the evening when the news of him had passed from Lincoln (significantly, Grace thought, robed in saffron) to Grace, Grace had, she told Norma, who took some of this with a grain of salt, joked but with some secret rest-reserve of truth that she was this Prince reincarnate but that the extreme light like a tiny planet far back in each of the newsperson’s eyes which she did not know were one light told what she also did not know, that the reincarnation Grace had obviously been "ready for" was a new brand and—