Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Who are we then, Jim, you to come here like you had something to tell or had something you wanted to get out of me — and who am I to be there with you now or be a man you’ve told your friends about who think they will never see me? But by colloidal action they may find, out of their minds, me on their doorstep a substitute for another trip, escaped from outside to inside, like my always waiting for Ruth Heard, escaped from England to America, to tell us what?

In our very early twenties — to answer your question that, admit it, Jim (though you’re a pro) was a substitute for further query re: the Chilean’s wife’s plans to get back at the journalist who sought information concerning the Chilean’s continuing activities on behalf of interests undermining the military state-capitalist regime in Chile that had killed his friend and leader Dr. Allende — Miriam left me over a considerable period of time for an older man (smile). I guess I mean her father, too, but the part-Jewish part-Hungarian guy who had a share of a foreign bicycle shop was three years older than she and she had gone out with him once in a while, long (a) before her message to me in the tax office but long (b) after the Sunday morning she slept late in order to keep from her conscious mind that she had told her father I was going to be saying some controversial stuff about Jewish homeland Sunday at the schoolyard fence and if a good discussion ensued it would not be surprising.

And when at the end I saw him down the block across the Sunday street at the German Mrs. Erhard’s newspaper store and we knew each other in the message he received from me but which we, the boyfriend and the widowed father, together created, I follpwed his sudden absence the seven and a half blocks to the well-tended tenement and the string of bright garbage cans because I had to be on the scene in case he burst in to tell his daughter her boyfriend was planning to concentrate all Jews in the limitless Australian desert at whose edges according to Ruth M. Heard Cockney long ago became audible because the settlers were cons shipped there out of sight out of mind and low class low speech. But what could I say to Iris who opened the door all dressed up, her beloved, the printer Eddie, her size, in his blue suit, a tattoo on one hand, ready to take her out after Sunday dinner (which I smelled through Iris’s perfume and her hesitation between asking me in and wishing I’d go away, it would be so much easier) and who when I tilted or cocked my head to say to Eddie, "How’s it goin’, Ed?" was replaced by Miriam’s father as if he was all face, vdice raised not to shouting proportions only to the violence of one who didn’t know, poor bastard, that he had communications to make to me only by colloid suspension express (smile) and was in no mood to be told especially by one who did not have a name then for this power to which our lives and spirit are to be raised, not an anger voicing what was false, namely that Miriam was sleeping late and she didn’t want to spend her time with no bum who ought to be out of school and working, whereupon I shushed him if Mir’ was sleeping, and he slammed the door, and I could hear steps coming out of an apartment two, three floors up, and as I heard the old man’s stupid sound going on—"At least she’s not with him" — and seeming to calm down, I found myself admitted — half admitted — again to Mir’s home, or facing the door magically ajar again and heard the old man’s voice go on and saw that he hadn’t calmed down at all but only faded into the next room as if there was something there, too, and Iris, I see her holding her apron bunched in her hand, saying to me softly, Miriam went to the movies already, her father thought she went with you.

I know I could have killed the old man except he was Miriam’s father — I admit it, Jim. You learn to go for what is inside you like no stigma at all. You go round and round it till you see it, then you don’t need to say it except in these particle facings between you and your self, or you and me, which the Whole Turning Factor turns thank God into the Two Screen never fully known till I came here to prove it in my body, my touch, the presence of others whatever their race or social class — and thanks be to the Giant Colloid Swirl we share whose galactic disk we can see, or flat Earth, or on end a gibbous bike-wheel, or the full mass to live within by letting it find itself an infinite neighborhood, such as this, and between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it — as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.

Iris made Sunday dinner in that house mainly for her sister’s husband, my Miriam’s father; he burst out the front door muttering like a super whose building’s suddenly getting bigger over his head behind his back and passed me standing there in the first-floor hallway seeing cast of thousands featuring in the three or four movies I knew she wanted to go to, and on the other side instant and constant a void for whoever she was with, a void I couldn’t fill except with the feeling of myself and couldn’t see but as the dark reflection of her friendly face, Jim, turning after several seconds of my watching her enjoying the movie in the seat next to me, turning like a wife, I guess, Jim — you have had a wife because you have a daughter, so much I know like a wife I say, so beautiful, her glasses on because she wore them at the movies starting around age fifteen; garbage lids crashing outside, I in the hallway standing back to let a rent-paying tenant-couple pass and knowing that turning the hidden, living-room switch for the garbage-can circuit the day Mir’ and I had occupied all too briefly the vacant apartment, hadn’t been much of a joke and I had hated him for being the reason why Mir’ said up there that it was too risky, and minutes later when her old man came storming in and blamed Iris for flipping the juice hoping he’d go up to one of the upper floors so I could get out of the building—

— I thought she loved me enough to have followed me the day of the rain-check walk-home with Miss Heard to her apartment which was no longer the "flat" she had when I was in junior high, for she had been in and out of New York several times since then, though that earlier "flat" I one day heard described by another English voice.

That is, one of the three similar-looking van-driver friends of R. M. Heard but not the one who said so unforgettably in 1959 that you could see flour caking blood in the street, a monopolist was the sole seller of a commodity that has no substitutes, to which definition I could apply the Whole Turning Factor to connect the van driver’s definition with that Law of Substitution I learned from the Chilean gentleman between us when I proposed burial in space as a substitute for cemeteries or our precious oceans — a Utopia dissolving interface between outside and in

— instituting an elite brother- and sisterhood working together with the inmates to make the Inside a center of self-supporting craft and industry, not license plates but clothes and furniture, and exported therapeutic services, all maintaining a balance of payments with the Outside and always a center too of communal thought directly engaged in like democracy in your inter-lunar space settlements while enriched unpredictably by individual thought alone in contemplation, call it subsistence thought whose surplus can be saved by being shared by the men and women in communion here or stored like my own lone swirls of colloid light forever and a day — from, as I say, these Foleynomic projects for a great articulated structure where an infinity of whatever you called small-scale units may find their being — all the way to changing the concrete itself they wall this retired compound round with — so that someday each new vacancy here would be an opening for a new and different freedom, it would be a resource vied for with an elan that someday in future could dissolve guard and con not into one non-individuated mass, but—