Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The doorbell rang and I went through the unlighted next room in this wing of the house that I was more or less familiar with. My host followed me.

I put my hand on the knob of the front door I usually used. We’d been in another room today with an audience. Except that that wasn’t it at all. I was the audience, but that wasn’t it either. My time was theirs. As simple as that. This was his family even more than last year, when his wife was alive.

"I had some good stuff for you," I said.

"Will it keep?" came the voice behind me—"because I don’t know about next week."

The three invaded faces had vanished into my head. They had never been there before.

I pulled open the front door.

The strange cabdriver with the powdery, wrinkled skin held out my shopping bag to me and nodded when I told him I was coming with him but. hadn’t phoned.

I shook hands with my host. The last step had been mine and so was the next.

"I’ll phone you," I said.

"Do that," he said.

This is the end of the story, except that I now see I should add that when I returned home much later my wife, whose sense of humor is unpredictable, asked me among many other things how it had gone with my man in Mamaroneck. I replied that we had had a good exchange, though somewhat abbreviated, and we had wished one another Merry Christmas, etcetera. But, thinking of her question, I kept an uneasy one to myself when I said, "I came up with a couple of things."

"Like what?" my wife asked.

"Like the gods," I said.

"Oh, them," said my wife.

"Have I ever told you about the gods?" I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if—"

"You never said that to him," said my wife.

"Wait," I said, but she went on, "You sit around and tell him stories on an informal basis as you say."

"I had competition today," I said.

"Well, that makes it more interesting for all concerned," said my wife. "Whatever happened to the gambler who bet his brother’s wife against a boat?"

"Hold on and let me say what I’m saying," I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if we will; but they have their lives — I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say."

My wife took a long look at me as if I were a way of seeing something. "That’s what you came up with today? That’s what you came up with in your abbreviated session during which you had competition?" She paused and tentatively continued: "You found out that he had his life — is that it?"

"But I’ve never entered into his life as much as I did today," I said.

My wife thought a moment. Then she said, "He wasn’t alone." She paused. "He had guests. He had people with him." She tilted her head, eyeing me. "It’s Christmas; there were people there."

My uneasy question burst out, "Well if you got the phone message, why the hell did you ask me how it went with him?"

But this was the funniest thing my wife had heard all day, and I was amused at myself to see her laugh. She said, "Believe it or not, I got myself together right after you left this morning, and I’ve been out until half an hour ago. Did he say someone answered the phone here?"

I didn’t remember.

"Maybe it was a burglar," my wife said.

What I recalled was that I had said that I would phone and he had said, "Do that."

I wondered when I would phone him again. It might be a long time. I said to my wife that the gods leave some things for you to figure out, and my wife nodded sagely, eyeing me, and observed that that was true, very true.

Very, very true, I told myself.

"He should have let me know," I said. "It would have saved me a trip out there and back."

"Did you tell him that?" my wife inquired.

"As a matter of fact, I did," I said. "What I didn’t tell him was that I felt your presence there with us."

"I always feel that, but thank you for telling me," said my wife. "By the way, who was with him?"

"His family," I said.

… so much for the Foley Plan to make of this or any prison a home some know exists already of all men’s skills, the closet priest, the born brewer; shirtmaker, teacher, lawyer, Indian; singer, woodworker, Houdini, machinist, interior decorator (the guard beat up for hanging a "hanging" across his cell’s pillared front), the printer and the plumber, postman, nurse, angel, mason, and their comrade green thumb and let’s not leave out the economic mind who got us here (smile) bartering equalities for a family so open-ended, Jim, that Maximum Security withers away like memory of a den of guards, while ploughing its way outward to market surplus fertilizer, knives-forks-spoons-plates, vibes, vintage, fabric, and ideas from such soil of Inside Energy that where we have builders we will have architecture, where lawyers arise judges will be needed, and where green thumbs, another land. And what is your story? someone interrupts. What did you do to end up in this endless community of minds? I sometimes hear angels talking talking talking nearby and all they want is to be like us and live only inside our limits, change their lives.

But so much for the Foley Economic Plan to best use this Maximum Security Facility: the walled garden unfortunately for the time being notwithstanding is outside the walls: while inside them, Jim, growing pain goes down with any beans, canned corn, rice pudding, any milk you had in mind to be thrown up if desired in reverse menu a la the raw diet guru woman one day visited from New York City with outlandish sex shit so that I have to forget I first heard of her from your fellow prison-visitor the generous South American gentleman whose wife knows her from women’s workshops I could see my Miriam attending once upon a time in order to help herself get over me. Tell me a story, George, she said, hey Foley tell me something, anything.

Or pain is messages (believe a well-known dentist, who should be exposed for practicing without Novocaine so as to prove pain is) "nothing but messages": or was it Novocaine he was drilling for? but the message I never got answered from the light of my life? — if she can’t get back to me it’s her choice though I am always with her (tough luck, dear Miriam; tough luck, Mir’): though not all inmates here know Getting Through is what this place is all about, getting not out but through to me and you (for James you too, give or take certain Cubans resident here, could be in danger) getting through at that special speed of Earth I learned and from no book — just the speed our light is slowed suddenly, bent by oil slick, blown glass, intriguing haze, eyeball, juice, gray matter, blood, sweat, or sea that that light falls into yet is not lost; or air: remember the grasshopper that landed on the biologist’s deck three hundred seventy miles from land? what air did it travel through?

Which isn’t your facts of prison life immortalized by girl sports writer that made research visit here to check out a black basketball joust in the yard and wound up giving us (surprise, surprise) the complete treatment: smells of clean steel and surplus soap, the hawk-song pigeon-voices, nutritional strategy, educational programs (if not the amazing chemistry that brought you here), license plates she had to touch like Braille, painting by the numbers on glass that some here learn, under-the-bunk postcard sales depicting our seldom-used sacrifice chapel, the individualized mail privileges too complicated for words, the resident writers, the guards’ blue blazers, the physical jeopardy step by step, the Rican family picnics (‘‘festivals"), the death-row chaplain’s safety-valve seminars but not the guru woman’s one-shot sex and diet rap, the Box Efrain did his farewell solo in for redecorating his cell — all data, from the dimensions of cells and inmates to rising cost per unit-con; all specifics from Anatomies of Anger in her top-dollar title, clear into dreams slept through by inmates then gladly given up to be published under this girl sports writer’s byline though her younger, chess-master house-husband did a downside rewrite and typed it for her — yet this latest exhaustive chapter on prison life is missing what /, Foley, had to tell: