Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Not right, you tell me in secret, Jim, as quick as Miriam’s father quite long before on that Sabbath at the playground fence when I was a bit old for that scene and Miriam had overslept and not come, but her father had.

In order to receive along that diagonal between my aging (smile) scene and the newspaper store of Mrs. Erhard, who I kidded warning her I might have to take her arsenal off her if she did not manage to get held up, a message from his beloved’s beloved that he couldn’t have received, but could not, if he had not been in me already, I give him credit I had reached him as if he and I had found that we knew the language of crows or of bloodhounds and always had known and he wanted to be reached, we sought each other and a billion particles had already joined in that encounter which is peaceful energy though not slow, believe me beyond speed, why the opposite of any lower speed, and the not exactly wordless message registered between us for me as for him, gelling and de-gelling with all that power meshed across our charged, multiplying surfaces (oh thanks Juan and Juan’s ancient book and all later confirmations of what, like the dual screens, was gift if not essentially needed), yet knowing what you’re doing is often best while centrally and at bottom none, Jim, is like the message that comes unforeseen from a meeting of suspecting minds: you want to control miriam to grow up to stay home WITH YOU AND IF THE LATEST YOU’LL LET HER BE OUT IS SO EARLY WE JUST HAVE TO OUT-EARLY YOU AND HAVE OUR PARTY WHERE THERE’S NO NEED TO come home (where we were, the only direction was Stay Put).

But Gonzalez is into his dribbling dialectic that lasted for ages and High Kool with the half-albino hands now gone from here except for Sundays, and gone from tenth grade to unload hosiery trucks in a high, echoing workday street in the West Twenties, not gone on to some all-black college "five" your TV imagines for you reaches around Gonzalez further, further, and Miriam’s dad is gone but not from my closed-circuit screen between which and its counterpart screen I’m your correspondent at a slambang Red Communist Mainland Chinese world Ping-Pong final, snap my head back and forth carrying nose, eyes, eardrums, and that jaw of mine which sustains its own separate but relative motion until it is once and for all fixed in immobility yet even then with the strap of totalitarian homogeneity across it the immobility of a ventriloquist whose power source is limitless: I see on one screen here a Friday sundown (for I was almost there) and with fish a needlessly costly offering to the day when no one in the house cared for it and when you could have sun-yellow rice, sizzling green peppers, hottest chorizo sausage, and ice cream to wash it far away and one candle because a fuse blew just as the phone rang, and at my end of the line I heard Iris say, "Forget it, I got a candle." "Forget it?" says Mir’s father. "Forget it until after dinner." "Well tell Miriam get off the phone, it’s time to eat." "You tell her." ("So what’s for supper, kid?" "I gotta go." "Come on, make my mouth water." "You know, for God’s sake, pork chops, rice, peppers." "How do I know?" "You know what I mean." "I’ll buy you an ice cream." "I got a gallon in already." "Can I have some, Mir’?" "How much? — oh shoot, I gotta go." "So I’ll see you later, Mir’?" "How much later?") The screen runneth over with— hard softening.

Old Testament or New, Jim? — oh you wouldn’t know.

Runneth to that other screen, there is no over- screen, and on that other is a Friday-night white tablecloth, white T-shirt, white mashed potatoes, white haddock on a large, white oval platter, one still-folded white paper napkin held down by an unconfessed knife pointing (a) between a dish of (raw) onion slices and a white saucepan of peas and diced carrots, (b) through a can of beer and the diamond ring on the hand holding the can lifting it, tilting it without a hitch as a voice not of the hand, a voice picked up silently by racing, bombarding particles swirling round until there is emptiness at the heart, says, "So where’s the tartar sauce? — and where’s Georgie? Who does he think he is, he can start paying room and board, that’s what he can do."

So where’s Miriam’s Friday-night Jewish father get off calling Catholic? On the day of rest where’s young George Foley but substituting world affairs for my mother’s beloved Mass prior to having a beer later with Mir’ or once on a blue afternoon, the sun pouring through the meshed bones of my uncertain head taking (as they say) a drive to see the animals ganging up on each other in Coney Island or to walk an early spring beach when perhaps I was at my best.

Round and round I’ve gone, you’re tossing the rich, dark-red tie material across once, twice, before casually but just-right drawing the long end through the big knot, and like some history I read you’re following me, although the questions have changed, though never like Barbara-Jean and Larry’s — oh what an evening that was! Do many guys get extra food from home? Anybody play chess? Do you get to go to trade school as soon as you arrive here (haven’t put it very well, she said)? Get any airlifts? — got a landing field next door—

and now you want (if that’s the word for you) to know how Mir’s old man (not too old, I confess; fifty-eight? a lifer ready to see parole board, trying not to miss any shadow of his shaver) was there to hear my New Israel comments (you’re quick for a guy who acts slow though drives like a demon), and what had my particle message to Miriam’s father to do with her unknowing one to me three, four years later?

Well, I might not be able to keep two former missionaries (in sweaters) straight, but I keep my two screens close and I know the street-dealer type that came with the Chilean economist who you stopped asking questions about (though truthfully you got me to speak of the Chilean and never asked me a direct question about him or his sidekick who had to be the one known to have speckled wrists who threatened to blow the Chilean’s cover because he sure as hell had speckled wrists: but that’s for spies and) the Chilean isn’t spying, is he? but wants privacy for himself and his wife (right?) who I hear did counter-intelligence of her own against this journalist who may be the same as the one with speckles I saw here in the Visitors Room who irritated this calm South American gentleman so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see violence on the far side of the Visitors Counter no doubt related to this husband’s fears for his lovely wife whom I have not met, while her fears are for her husband, as it should be no doubt, so it’s back and forth and round but you must know all you need to know in that quarter and still you communicate with me one way or another while the journalism rap session which is really what it’s gotten to be threatens to die out so you with your correspondent’s eye for a story — for history in the making though you said you take no view of history — ask, So how did the white T-shirt of a certain father who shall be nameless needing no further free advertising in this space react to a catapulted payload of lumpy real spuds right where there should have been decal’d a raunchy friendly joke or a picture of a President or a slogan to add a little life to this retirement compound and any other multiple dwelling you have in mind as a multi-center of commercially viable meditation, and now they’re putting under surveillance what has gone on too long though what key will ever open their hatred of themselves which is all part of an orbital merry-go-round opening to a numerous few a vacant center of peaceful communication known perhaps only to those who have found the Colloidal Unconscious but know that into its center, from that all but endless round touched for energy’s sake by the back-and-forth dual-screen speed, may come at any time a wild shot in the dark and I or you or, and he knows it, by chance a bigger man than you or I may be assassinated.