Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Dual fatality leaving us where we were, I said.

That way I hold between screens of her which is just my speed back and forth between screens. While life goes on somewhere else, in Chile, in Manhattan, and here, and names do double duty in, say, a room I would aspire to be in in person one day so real you made it for me, the apartment Larry and his father’s, and there was a man whose wife had just had her baby and she was contemplating a chair where she stood by the stereo when a short man with a beard came over and poured her another drink, looking you were sure right through her dress as her husband across the room was too pointedly asking you what you’d do if you learned later that someone else was the father, and you know this guy talking was letting go a little and you looked at his wife who caught your eye so that though she smiled at the guy with the beard she let you know she was uncomfortable and looked from the bearded guy to the chair through you as if a glance at you was the real reason (remember you told me this?) though later she sat down tired but at this moment Larry’s mother walked in the front door which must have been open and Larry’s father said, having forgotten the new father’s dumb question to you, called out, "Sue!" — because he hadn’t expected her, and the guy whose wife had the baby took it as the answer to his question and clapped you on the shoulder, you don’t like him — freeze — cut — frost on the family window but there’s the music, grandpa singing "Your old blue bonnet," Ruth M. Heard disliked singing because she said she couldn’t sing and she thought it was always an excuse not to talk and think, which was why she preferred Scots to Irelanders as drinking companions, but someone is thinking in that New Jersey living room far from current events because a bigger and bigger hole’s being breathed in the frost and there’s your granddad finishing up to applause and the accompanist (it’s your mother, oh yes she played piano too) rising and stepping out of the picture so I feel guilty for hardly seeing she was there, but listen, Jim, I like her, but who cares what I think, I mean in an odd way she’s not there but very much alive, you never got into your family much and I didn’t ask, but it’s definitely a blue-ribbon window, man, I’ll leave them where they are unless they got any objections, like you did a kindness to the woman you know who you spotted crying in the street and stopping by the liquor store and then she went in the phone booth like it was an emergency, it was cool not to offer assistance though you know her though you said so much happening in New York your attention got distracted by three guys on strike in front of the restaurant, I’d like to step into a phone booth, make a call like I used to, though now only to a guy in another block, can’t stay put, know what you mean two places at once, maybe that time you’re in the shower you thought you were in New Mexico because they haven’t got the water out there (no joke if you got arthritis like Aunt Iris have to take three hot baths a day), who’s laughing? someone’s laughing in the shower, you tell me your dream I’ll tell you mine, my uncle’s bar song, oh it’s Miriam, the two of us shivering in our boots a week before St. Pat’s standing like in a phone booth together while she calls home but in a shower stall in a beach house waiting for the water to come on — no, it’s not raining outside, I’m telling a true story — and both of us knowing at the same instant why of course the fuckin’ water’s been turned off for the winter but a shower wasn’t what we needed as much as a good laugh.

Which was what you had more with Ruth M. Heard (for I’m reminded by one of your queries, Jim, Did little Gonzalez make that back-over-the-head shot before High Kool left the tenth grade or after?).

R. M. Heard had friends, at least the day she walked in and not quite all of us cheered and she said we were going on an educational trip, which substitutes never did, and she had to laugh at that — get out of the classroom situation fast as we can. The friends, three guys, were parked by the playground fence in three Volkswagen vans, no one in authority impeded our descent to the first floor, though at first three girls got together and said they needed permission, they didn’t like this trip obviously, and Ruth Heard said they’d got it the wrong way round, they’d need permission not to go, and then she laughed and said they had permission to go to the lavatory. . no, the water fountain — but urged them to make use of the time (and we’d all realized this wasn’t the last class of the day and we’d be on the trip) and Ruth told them, the three girls who kept staring at one another and no one else, that if anyone came they were to say we were studying City history firsthand and meanwhile sit at their desks and write an account of all they did in the p.m. after school was out, even Miriam laughed there, the secretary in the hall office by the front door scowled with her usual confidence, and we had paired off I remember without being told as if we were going to give the New Amsterdam exhibit at the City Museum a repeat visit, which as I remember is a hell of a way, but it was the unknown, that’s why little Gonzalez didn’t slap some kid ahead of him going downstairs in the neck and get poked back, that’s why the black girls didn’t act up as a group, that’s why High Kool paused half bent over the water fountain watching us pass like a thought he had never had before, an unplanned surprise — so we were introduced to our drivers, each of them, our teacher claimed, a rich American—"Light Moving" was the sign on one van, and I predicted to Miriam (who I recall had grabbed my hand after I’d dropped hers and then she’d dropped mine) that the transmission was going to go; and before we knew it our caravan had run a couple of lights and kids were shoving the windows open and we had stopped along one side of Union Square so we could get out and be asked what socialism was and be told who had given speeches here, and someone got Eric mad saying, Hey Eric there’s your father, Eric, of a blond-Afro’d black junky, then back into the vans like a battalion on the move, same seats except Ruth Heard was in our van now pointing out a tree where a bomb went off in eighteen-something, though the very quiet but roughest girl said clearly so we all picked it up, They didn’t have bombs like ours then, but R. M. Heard was asking such things we were too stupid or young for as what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and nobody knew, and someone said, They bombed the tea boat, and when Premier Khrushchev comes for a visit next year what would you show him that would tell him what this country is like? (Fire hydrant in summertime — Yeah, hit oil, man — Gusher City) but soon the fine stone of City Hall was being pointed out in its park by the Brooklyn Bridge which most of us (City Hall) had never seen, and in the middle of telling us that this was where the Flour Riot began with a whole lot of high speeches because flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel which meant that a loaf of bread cost the bakers more to bake and they had less profit, right or wrong? — silence, and a passing patrolman called Wrong! same profit, higher price, Ruth Heard stopped our van and she transferred to the third van without stopping her talk for a minute though I heard through the window that the rioters were marching downtown to offer one of the big flour merchants eight dollars a barrel, and presently we were way downtown near a church so Ruth could show us where an iron door was ripped off and used to batter down the other doors, whereas there was a revolving door now where she pointed. Which when I mentioned this to the old weather-sciencer in a letter he recalled as a building where his (great?) uncle the first New York thinker to weigh wind as an architectural element had hidden a fugitive girl when she was fleeing her "very other self." Jim, I feel you refusing to question me?