Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— three interruptions converge on poor Norma — first, as is only proper, from her husband Gordon ("Well Grace would like to think that every man wants to get himself up in black lace pants and a garter belt"); second, from Jim, politely entering only as if in part to divide the husband’s roughshod wedge (Puts me in mind of the Krakatoa easterlies above and the Berson westerlies below: they were supposed to be parts of a single zonal current— How do you show a thing like that? asked Gordon — with an unusually mean cycle of twenty-six months — hey Norma, who was that newshen-person-lady-woman, and who was her source?) (Gordon, like a lost voice, "They don’t know that man as in chairman comes from German Man, i.e., "one, nonsexual" — "Unisex," retorts Norma, surprising Gordon into softness: "Not unisex at all," he says too quietly); third, we, whom proposition for proposition Grace knows less well than she ever will how she uses us, for we —as she and such trammeled husbands as Gordon say as if it will all go away if said or, humid lights of breath thrown outward or away, compound with quick noises of sense the atmosphere they mean like walking newspapers when they say, "It’s in the air," — we are each a change in life too personal not to be grouped, too shared to be all shared; while Grace, who for Woman would become a man as mortal as that general He who called the "true security problem. . man against war," on behalf of one woman that she is has found, in her one-sixteenth Pawnee root (and touched with her fingers whose prints are arches becoming whorls and back again?) a faith that man the hunter brought back with him not just the fiber and juice of meat but guilt for killing time away from home as real as the opiate receptor molecules (Grace heard of from a delegate to a rolfing conference who had become an inch longer yet now said next to nothing) that are one part our history and future waiting only to be activated for romance, dependence, twilight aperitif, any key habit deepening into those that like the key melted into the short-circuited ignition Mayn knows of as facts isolated by the million kept by us addicts as close as out of sight within the tumblers they’ll always make fall into place: which Mayn half-hearing interrupts — what also will not be interrupted like the ongoing time of his computer-wristwatch timing turnovers at a basketball game with Larry and Amy, the same Amy with whom he occupied opera seats in which the Chilean diva expected to see an endangered economist and his wife Clara, who was herself present when the correspondent-woman told the Na-vachoor Prince’s fate and the first and last name of her source, a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter named Flick, though Clara was unable to connect this with a journalist named Mayn she feared.

"Prince? Prince? would that be the Nava/0 (not — choor) Prince who one night along a river dolloped into his lungs a festoon of glowing cloud above him? that rarest of radiances a pseudonoctilucent which looks like your true noctilucent cloud fifty and more miles above Earth that in summer twilights in the better latitudes may become visible with the stars—"

— "You’re — what are you?" interjected Gordon. "You never—"

"Oh sure," said Mayn, "and that pseudonoctilucent in question was really a late-departed medicine man, old story, got it from my grandmother, passed it on to my daughter Flick who’s an honest half-breed like the rest of us and wouldn’t swallow it and as I recall embroidered upon it — and my estranged son Andrew, who seemed to believe the stuff but always went to sleep."

"— but when you all interrupted me," said Norma, "I wanted to finish that Grace perceived what she says this woman Lincoln didn’t understand: that this is a new type of reincarnation, sort of parallel—"

"What egocentric garbage," said Gordon.

"She heard it from someone who heard it from someone else," said Norma looking into Mayn’s face intensely curious.

"It’s more likely than the usual kind of reincarnation," he hears himself saying, thinking he likes these people because they have children; knowing as if he were in Norma’s mind that she’s thinking, "You speak of these others, your daughter and son, but what about your wife? — What is her name? is she a former wife?"

— and he gets away with answering Norma in the same way — in his head and here, "I love her more now than ever" (picking her out among the corps of undivorced but separated wives or is she, illegally speaking, divorced yet wttseparated?)—

— wondering if Flick can believe such returning history (Well why didn’t you do something about it?) who cares for both her father and current history, whichever is obstacle for the other (as Mayn wonders if this kid Larry with his split family and his Obstacle Geometry system he claim him got from Jim of all people knows, who goes in for fact not formulas, that’s Jim, and, when not on the job, scenes of fact, which make a hell of a family history not to be told easily — the scientist whose baby died while she was at work in her lab {the lab); the black model studying to be an actress taking her son to the park and telling him go on and ride that bike if he’s going to learn; these people he instantly knows as other people are known to their locksmiths, supers, former and future girlfriends and boyfriends, and he wonders now, against the presence of Norma’s loving voice still in his head after she and her husband exit at last, who the long-despised man Spence is— who he is — aside from a deal about transcontinental trucking here, a deal for information regarding the future of obscure federal-agency handling of the trucking of transcontinental waste, a sequence of surely expensive, unauthorized, and uncredited stills of a multilingually intelligent young chief-of-state who’s cleaned up most of the foreign-run casinos where he lives dealing Russian roulette click by click to a political opponent — how come you got it in for Spence? he never got caught, did he? — a presence, Spence, attentive and sleazy in a bar as far back as Mayga, and as recently and malleably close as some history in his grandfather Alexander’s inner ear or fiction this new friend-son Larry makes into an irritating geometry— who Spence is, to have phoned a new friend of Flick’s to ask out of nowhere if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter, her friend, had lived in the very apartment house where Flick’s friend (who’s calling her, having been called by this Spence) had been attending a woman’s workshop attended also by (oh gee) a (whew) woman momentarily involved in springing from a New York State prison a supposed anti-Castro nationalist who, it is planned, will find sanctuary in a narrow but lengthy nation run on an economy imported from the shores of a Great Lake of which school of economics much actual knowledge in that Hispanic nationalist inspires not love but its tactical facsimile to cloak his real mission to kill a high officer and abduct a charismatic old Masonic socialist now under house arrest.

It is already too late, a terminally optimistic sometime-interrogee offers, to speak of women and men; for aren’t they at the barricades working out together, watching together (between amplified aerobics) the old organic plume mushroom? So from weekly formula to current form one’s last name turns to ash in the heat of some race to inflate currency by finding the unsplittable seam to make it from? — while Larry’s Modulus will get one from here to there if one wants it to, and the new marriage contracts just out and not to be confused with the earlier, mutual dowers of the very beginning of the decade seem already a thing of the quantum, though some casualties of that Open Marriage cruelly less easy than its Masonic abbreviation O.M. in wanton rooms of rising rent and energy levels devise new home weddings and new faiths painfully reviewed.