Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

that is, Jim, if you’re there still, Miriam would not receive all this because Miriam did not reach that swirl that Juan by fits and starts leans into, then loses, working deeper into Surplus Contradiction alternating by fits with his attempt to see where in the building site his very small brother has disappeared; and Mir’ paid off (if I had let her finish the job) with her once precious self, the shadow I’d hopefully thought she’d engaged to follow me the day Ruth Heard and I met at Mrs. Erharjl’s, each waiting for another, each waiting for the other I do believe, and while Miriam did not come to meet this temporarily but structurally unemployed old friend of hers George, her bike-shop Hungarian not at that point in time identified by me as who he was pedaled past upstream and downstream several times, along Third Avenue truck’d, bus’d, taxi’d, brimming, jammed, but with one sinister space for him, while Ruth, my elder by nine years, and I walked her home, seen by not only the bike-capitalist Hungarian on his wheel and by my mother so that she walked right by the gleaming meat market, but seen also by Gonzalez who must by then have been age fifteen or sixteen easing into his father’s business, profiting by each new day—

— that is, the Hungarian bike-peddler (smile), as you have guessed, recognized not me alone but Ruth M. Heard as well, her heavy head of wild hair atilt, her eyes everywhere, her voice risen richly, telling me she was afraid they would pull her Green Card, telling me she would return to the South one day soon, telling me how her father had taken her on the rollercoaster which has another name in England — but asking me what I was doing (she cared, you see), asking if I had graduated, asking so much that was unanswerable that to my stammering interest in what she said I could not add that I had for a time made a regular thing of current-events discussions at the schoolyard fence — until I envisioned a time when bands of bicylists would break traffic laws so commonly they would go to jail for five years—

— that is, her hair was not heavy but light, her head not heavy but aglow, her recent history so full how did I pause and wait for what would come to me to change my life? — having tendered my resignation to the management of a garage where my part-time job had left me more than part-time free, until at Mrs. Erhard’s, both Ruth and I watching diagonally up the block toward the schoolyard fence, we turned to know each other, and she: We never had that walk, and I (feeling ahead of myself but a retard working on being a retread): I said I’d take a raincheck, and she: A raincheck? (coughing through her laughter at the American word, coughing with bronchitis, TB, cancer, trying to get free of whatever it was as if it was what made her laugh); and before we knew it we were in a narrow elevator and getting out of it and finding ourselves in a one-room pad with no curtains with to my surprise not one-tenth the books I have in my cell today, a canvas chair beside the couch-bed, a photograph on the wall of a very intellectual-looking elderly man with a bushy beard and eyes staring at you half-impatiently, half as if you needed to be treated (you know?) so that, half-tongued as I was, I couldn’t tell if time crawled or ran wild and this was the first thing I thought when I phoned Miriam to say, "Hey what’s happening?" when I meant how come she stood me up yesterday at Erhard’s — and Mir’ said would I like to explain how come I spent so long inside Ruth Heard’s apartment house yesterday, what was going on, and as I say I thought about how slow and fast time went, up there, listening to her describe like a witness Medgar Evers’s children on the fatal night pleading with him to get up where he lay face down just beyond the doorway, arm outstretched — I couldn’t help thinking, "Like a drunk" — and beyond him a bunch of new sweatshirts and in his hand the key to the open door and on the sweatshirts "Jim Crow Must Go" and, I recall remembering irrelevantly my mother the year before crying for days over our wonderful young Catholic President Jack — so I know Kennedy came before Evers — while Ruth had no tears in her eyes telling me how Medgar’s wife packing his toothbrush for the hospital was distractedly asking nobody in particular how many pairs of pyjamas he would need, and I sat down where she told me on the couch-bed and she sat down in the canvas chair and put her feet up on a suitcase and asked me what I would like, she thought they hadn’t turned the gas off yet or the electricity so the beer in the icebox was cold or she could make a cup of instant — you’ve got to get out of here, she said, which I kept stupidly remembering as if I couldn’t remember anything else for years, two, three years, Jim, and that I’d said, "I know, I know," thinking at the time, "I need a dry climate for my asthma" but also New York is too big even to get through; but thinking of her wise advice, for three years up to and beyond when Miriam let slip the message in the tax office, binding those years together so they were gone, Jim, like the road of hairpin curves up the mountain and all that was ahead and is then behind—

— that is, her hair was nbt heavy to the eye, but thick with electricity to the touch of your particles, not soft and straight like Miriam’s, as gentle as Miriam’s mind, and then she too left school, I see her before and after (smile), smiling when I said I was going to get car for transport-delivery and drive across the country, I imagine you’ve done that, Jim, but in an expense-account car, am I right? smiling (that is, Miriam) when I said, "All we did was talk — how do I know how long I was in her apartment?" — "Gonzalez saw her put her hand on your shoulder" — "What do you get for that, two free throws?"—

— that is, Gonzalez was too busy to see more than that, but Kallman the Hungarian who raced on weekends had time to do a soft-pedaling parallel-tail on me and Ruth my former substitute teacher, and it wasn’t even his lunch hour but he’s the boss, or one of the two bosses so he can be in two places at once, and more, because on the day of the raincheck walk-home to where Ruth was preparing to leave, I knew nothing of Kallman’s interest in Miriam and wasn’t inspired to guess, for she, who had stood me up or at any rate made me wait, could not self-evidently be paired with him for, for — two places or not — he was present along my route with Ruth, but I did not know she was then beginning to see Kallman, hear his accent on the phone, watch him far from the innocent women and children on Third Avenue swiftly unstrap from his Volkswagen’s bike-rack beside a New Jersey lake, one for him, one for her; and so I could only blame her for not meeting me at Mrs. Erhard’s and believe Mir’s claim that she had phoned Mrs. Erhard’s and the line was

full, which like some other history to be taken on faith was a lie I believe

that is, Jim (and thanks for getting Larry’s correspondence form in)—

— that is, when I met one of the three rich-American van chauffeurs and recognized him all of seven yeirs after the 1837-Flour-Riot-and-Union-Square-Bombing-New-York-History Tour, he told me Ruth had been ready to leave that last apartment on a moment’s notice, he liked this neighborhood, he’d almost taken that apartment, he knew the place, the address, had crashed there, the canvas chair belonged to his friend who’d also driven us that day in junior high though not the one who gave the definition of monopoly on the sidewalk when Ruth said shut up (oh she got arrested, he said, when I asked about her, right there on the street in Boston picketing a school), she was a warm-hearted gal oh Christ she was, he said, she’d give you the shirt off her back (when they carried her away in Boston something about her visa they made her leave the country — I didn’t have tipie to track down the whole story — history is being bombed, you can quote me, it collapses in the mind to what really happened).