Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Yet no power from the next century’s L5 libration settlements to imagine into life the mid-twentieth (hardly the first to see itself the last) can deny to Jim

who knows at times himself to be in that awful two-to-one population-limited civilization where nothing too much has changed to be honest except the swimming pools where you dive upward into water as well as outward into margins of sufficient wetness, and the wide loads and looseness of structure that from the outset failed to be designed and accommodated into the secure torus whose doughnut shape no more shows itself to our everyday attention than the whole porch of the weatherless sky with its spectrum of sound now only visible in the deep screens we have internalized two to each hopefully stereoid customer-soul, do not bobsled their way through, and marriages account for new peace as being paired of pairs, since each partner came out to L5 transmuted from an original two half-suspecting the emigration wasn’t only on the up and up but locused of willingness contained by, yet containing too, some thrust of inner wilderness

a lost dream such as Jim’s one rainy night when he woke and exited from bed sweating to open his door and saw his mother in her nightgown of course heading downstairs so slowly she seemed sleepwalking until she turned to look back up at him, her hair across one side of her face and he saw she was "readwalking" — a book in her hand, no common word of "It’s late" in her eyes that seemed protective for a change but he didn’t know of what — and he asked her what it was, and didn’t mean to though the act produced an effect, which was that as she told him he forgot his lost nightmare: "The Marble Faun," she said, "and I’ve almost put my eyes out staying up reading — and what have you been up to, my darling?"

He didn’t know, and could only say, "What are you doing?" to which she softly replied as if her heart were in it, turning away and proceeding downstairs, "Just reading." But he remembered going back to bed and later starting up awake convinced he was plunged into a future where people had been at once combined and sent away to settle another world.

Larry didn’t ask Jim to elaborate on that combining of people. Did he know it without asking? He said that a succession of obstacles had been reciprocally substituted for the vision and he advanced his system which Jim passed on to Gordon once in a moment when he could think of nothing to say yet was disagreeably surprised to be able to report Larry’s recently hatched system which Larry we know ascribed to Mayn’s inspiring.

What need had Mayn of formulae? Larry was passing through a difficult time. How could Mayn live in his old, now quietly owned apartment. (Owned secretly.) Weren’t old scenes moving in and out — oh, the children of his former wife! Each time he felt it coming, he had substitutes? Why was he in this apartment? Wasn’t he really someplace else? He was no speculator waiting to jump when they discovered which way gravity was really moving, that is, in general. Mayga took away to her death that alarming willingness not to doubt his delusion that he was in the future specifically traveling to and from a libration settlement between here and the Moon imagining what was else the only apparently actual present time—

— if you’ll buy that —

(—she didn’t have to, she’d been given it: and had she, then, taken it away with her to or from that ledge near Valparaiso bay from which she had vanished into death which was a kind of ignorance?)

— he wouldn’t try it on Larry, lest Larry believe it, too, and now Mayn had to admit delusion in 1977, he had the firm scenes of the many people he had met in crisis, their own minor dangers and opportunities, their awful "we" voice on occasion exploding about him like the one that is the sum of two; and he didn’t need Larry’s Obstacle Geometry formulae to get from one chamber of tensions and human warmth to another, though he would grant Larry’s Modulus a humoring power to get you from one isolated incident to another without undue connection—

What was the point we missed about the Moon?—

until the coincidences between what he had witnessed of women and men at home and in the park and in their mutual media coming with such self-containing accuracy from Norma who reported to Jim what Gordon could not listen to of the women’s stories many told to Norma not in Grace’s workshop but in pretty private midnight raps with Grace alone, caused Jim regularly in the world who would always hold the door for a woman but a bit too semi-retired from combat to seem (he thought) male supremacist (having been, it seemed to him, caught carrying the membership card of every targeted power minority of the past twenty years — white, male, middle-aged, lapsed agnostic, middle-class routinely-married-then-sleazily-single newsman-oid) to want so much (on a gray day when Red Smith’s column had failed to appear in the sport pages) to tell Mayga his fresh suspicions that he nearly phoned (as he sometimes did at times of sentimental panic, or even horror at his life, or love for her) his quondam wife, but instead found his young friend Larry, Larry in a sad mood, his mother largely unmentioned gone to live "temporarily" with a "chum" (not a word of Larry’s generation but he was able to do that) but not launching a stratosphere of theory as he often did with Jim but complaining about his neighbor that Jim had dimly known of, having seen him, yet understood that the fairly famous singer-man was moving house — yet more notable than Larry’s news of strife in the hallway

between the singer North who was wringing his hands like he was singing a scene and the two in truth costumed creatures (male or female, who knew?) whom the older man tried madly to separate (oh shit, they were guys I guess) whom he was fantastically upset about just at the instant when the elevator flung open and this woman Larry didn’t know in a large white fur coat burst out and started bitching Ford North the opera singer (I know who he is, said Mayn) who was wringing his hands like he was on stage and she sweeps him angrily into his apartment leaving the flower boys to work each other over in the hall at which point they disappeared. .

was his unsurprised acceptance of Jim’s theory so mildly slipped into talk that Jim thought maybe Larry hadn’t understood, except Larry did say with equal gentleness almost inaudibly a thing remarkable enough to show he had heard — that these little life stories Jim was hearing through Norma from the Paying World of Grace Kimball, mainly Grace herself, were quite congruent with only the slightest blurring at the borders with scenes Mayn knew of, that Mayn joked that he’d decided while playing squash no less, in that white theater-in-the-round of the boxed-in ultimate barrage-escape or court, that this Grace Kimball person and he were some same person perhaps in life right now as an ant community he’d heard was one organism in effect but he and she probably not larger than the sum of themselves and since both right now alive to tenant some same articulate structure that accommodates a multiplicity of small-scale units (Larry nodding rapidly recalling the lingo of "your" red-haired economist whom Mayn had listened to in an auditorium press conference) why Mayn conceives (perhaps through Larry) of reincarnation that’s somehow all here and now, with no past (recalling also someone asking him in the midst of a four-way rap what was the point we had missed about the Moon).

‘The haunting of America," said casually the younger sage though troubled in a yellow sweater purchased for him by his father, "reincarnation that is simultaneous, the haunting of the world maybe since there is where America came from, all the uglypipedreams tradewinded over here from Europe at the founding that later they pretended they didn’t want back.