Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Miriam had foretold that he would appear one Sunday I was there. He had had scarcely a word for me ever, but here and now was willing I should have words that happened to apply to him.

He never spoke afterward of my plan for resettling Jews in the Pacific, but he almost never spoke to me anyhow. Miriam slept late that Sunday, later even than this dreamer. Two little girls with little white hats led my eye down the block to two double-parked cars bumper to bumper and when I caught sight of Miriam’s father who never got his Sunday News at Erhard’s, I didn’t know where Mir’ was. I was seeing screens even then but when you’re ahead of your time (smile), how you going to know it’s O.K. what you’re doing, it’s natural?

Eric was a black kid who squinted and concentrated when he talked and the only black kid I ever knew who did squint, said they had to get high up in the unions to get power in City Hall, but his father made good money rewiring people’s apartments, he just knock a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling, wiggle his cable up inside the wall and along inside the ceiling, never know it’s there — Joey, an Italian kid who was always saying he was giving a big party at Easter, at Christmas, you name it, and there was always a hitch (I’m going off the screen), this Joey said, "Georgie, you can start any car, so come over my house, my brother got carburetor problems, he got to go to my cousin’s wedding in Jersey," this was what I had to put up with. But when Hector Ramirez — whose brother is a super but he races his car every weekend — was watching the game, says, "What if the Jews don’t want to go to Australia? they got a desert there too," little Gonzalez, he’s the only Jew listening besides Miriam’s father (who’s ten miles or ten millimeters away and don’t want to get into a shouting match but my name is mud now), little G.’s dribbling round and round the back court, they’re all after him only he sticks his ass in High Kool’s face and dribbles right away from the basket, fakes his ICBM right back over his head then looks left and fakes a dribble right and just starts backing in toward the basket, two, three guys faked out, right and left, and all the time Gonzalez is talking, talking, "Jews willing to share City Hall, that’s the way, it ain’t who’s commissioner but whose pocket is he in," while High Kool’s bending over Gonzalez’s shoulder, those half-albino speckled hands, it’s only a matter of time, and Gonzalez can’t last and at this moment, Jim — like I know in the beginning of your trips here you said you didn’t know why you were here but at that time really you thought you did, so now when you wouldn’t say it, you maybe truly don’t know, but only because of the two-screen system, am I right? — little Gonzalez about to be wiped out calls over one shoulder, "What’s the southernmost state in the Union?" and during the second that High Kool’s body awash with colloidal fluids counts one-two and High Kool calls out, "Hawaii, man, Hawaii," Gonzalez with double-wrist snap topspin like gravity, man, like a tough pitcher’s sinker ball, two-hands the ball blind back up over his shoulder and everyone except H. K. and little G. turn and watch the mother go in.

But what, then, Jim, is it you are watching wherever you are? Miriam’s father disappear? Mrs. Erhard’s little pistol under the candy-and-cigarette counter with the lottery tickets? The whereabouts of a known Chilean economist living quietly in a great American city? But you know by now where. But you know, otherwise I couldn’t communicate it to you, that you got to follow both screens, they’ll always overlap not too much. So Jim once I was someone that knew the Chilean economist, while now I am just someone, am I right? And sometimes kidded dreamlike by these queries of yours — like, you sure the forkful of mashed wasn’t a spoonful? — you know, inertia between the tines? no matter how gluey the missile.

And you are a guy who comes here to do when you get down to it what we want: talk about our travels (smile) and the effect on our magic armchairs of the energy crisis, we being ahead of our times; talk about our trials and travels (smile), swap news; and where you position a photo, and while the colloidal particles with billions of unseeable faces and more all the time if we could only economize and move at random unless you commence the centrifugal, which is only in emergency unless you can make yourself either do it unconscious or find the neighborhood of messages that’s meant for you and for you to grain in on ‘cause it’s impossible not to give when you receive, you might lend your ears but there’s no lending there’s only giving, and you better live with your particles so you know how to work with them and their feeling for all other particles and so send what you want to send and only to whom it may concern and wherever my ma is in all this, her mashed potatoes ain’t gluey, Jim, but wherever the Chilean economist and wife live, she, he tells me, in her independent tailing of the journalist who has been after her husband, met a feminist leader named Grace Kimball and through her a woman named Sue, who left her son and husband and talks about nothing but sex and the mirrored candlelighting ceremonies of the sisterhood, which makes the Chilean economist think himself in a new world with customs strange as some early language — but makes me, Jim, think, Isn’t Larry’s mother named Sue?

Sometimes the gap between screens is so great, Jim, it’s hard I have to say from personal experience (which may not be news, pal, but—) like between that Sunday (remember?) and three going on four years later like nothing in between, although the apartment that came vacant in Mir’s building can’t have been the first in all that time but was only the second that she and I had ever used.

And you go back and forth between that Sunday when Miriam’s dad got my unconscious message as I did, just before he disappeared either up the block or into Mrs. Erhard’s, and all those months that there’s no calendar for later when I got Mir’s message unknown to herself as one, which by then I was advanced enough to know she only thought she was holding back from me, covered as it was by the irrelevant, immaterial News — conveyed to me when I visited her at her part-time full-time office that shall be nameless and probably hires out its own huge return like a dentist his own teeth ("To whom am I speaking?" she says when she before I hardly said Hello excuses herself and picks up the phone and names her employer whom I will not give free advertising to and listens to some doubtless lunatic for a moment — oh, "to whom am I speaking?" was message of herself enough but not the aforementioned News when she gets back to me to the effect that (if Jim you are really there) she thought her father didn’t like her seeing me, my family Catholic, this after how many years, oh what a memorized speech, yet then plus an unrehearsed He thinks you’re anti-Semitic. Well, did I let her have it, oh yes. But I was reacting to her unsaid message my particles had taken on their collective kissers and gotten together (without telling me so I knew what’s happening to me).

Later I have more words for it. Oh coarse as a suspension of undrinkable water, unpalatable air, slippery as emulsion of milk, pure as a solution of salt water do with it what you will, ladies have been known to douche with it, lovely Chilean llamas lap it up, great men not realizing others of their era have come upon the same discovery independently gargle on it while once in a century a grasshopper will sail three hundred seventy nautical miles over it without wetting a knee like psychopaths who get from one place to the next without concern for route or their shadow cast along it — no wonder the message hit the colloid stuff and population of my brain and body as it did carrying its sender with it though she would never be advanced enough to tell why she then felt so clutched and intruded on in all her little folds and joints, oh I knew her, Jim, this beloved that I had to go to since she wasn’t coming to me, right?