Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— that is, I had not killed his face, only I had had it up to here, the junior-high Revolutionary-New-York-History-Tour van chauffeur’s (who didn’t drive the light-moving van any more but had gone on to contracting, he had a team of musicians and painters who worked for him plastering and painting apartments, non-union, off the books); and so to stem violence I turned my back on that face but the wor4s of his message got to me and were admitted to the Colloidal Unconscious, which at large in its space has no front or back; yet that developing power in me needed the truth of his cruelty in order to come to know what doesn’t matter and what does, Jim — Ruth’s touch on my arm, my leg, my sleeve being helped on, and, come to think of it, my back, which recalls her father who was off the wall (smile) and who took her on the rollercoaster—

— that is, in some region of England rollercoaster goes by the name of switchback; while what doesn’t matter, Jim, is the van driver’s will to show such knowledge of Ruth as I would not match. I knew what was in his mind which meant that he could not; (at that stage of development) know what was in mine.

And so he was able to say to me that Ruth never made that bed of hers, that they had shared that apartment through some pretty bad times, that Mrs. Erhard got the air edition of the London paper for Ruth, that on the day of the raincheck walk-home (I lo^e track of seasons) and the shared beer and the advice re: my life interrupted and cut short by the arm and a leg I would have given her for that and more, and did give, I say on that day the van driver (as I divined through his words and with a new use of the centrifugal though unidentified coagulant clarification I now think I was coming then into) had himself been stood up by Rut)i Heard just as I had by Miriam whatever her busy signals said; and over his pursuant, early-afternoon words circling me as I went round and round Miriam’s and her father’s and her Aunt Iris’s block that night recalling louder and louder Mir’s father’s I-told-you-so relayed now months later by Kallman whose direction I could never have taken, never never have taken, were my words to a thirty-year-old former substitute teacher as I paused at last on her semi-vacated threshold for further words of advice and still barely tasting our one beer: we will meet again Ruth (the first time I called her that)—/ just know \ve will —and returned to me swimming in my dreams, dispersed through days and months, swung round by a cruelly other voice to leave a clear vacancy at the center which is me, my doing—

— that is, my meditations before and after divined what must happen for the high-risk development of powers I had no name for then, God curse me and curse your obsessed but (I Jiave to think) good questions, Jim Mayn, curse you, though—

— that is, when Larry’s sad, fucked-up letter (for you’ve brought people into my field who I then know have often already been there) reported hearing your ladyfriend namely Jean worried herself about you (lucky you!) because you "confessed" — not "claimed" — you’re in the future doubling back upon the past which is our present to see it and us so plausibly that it exists— claiming to her nonetheless that you’re not the type for this deranged stuff, not crazy, not off the wall (like me, or, come to think, the sleaze who hung out with our fine senor), nor did you honestly think the future yet exists—

why, it came to me, Brother Mayn — and who says you ain’t crazy as a container ship full of do-it-yourself corn kernels that pass like a shadow over a vein of heat gushing up beamed geyser-like single-minded as lasers bombarding a tornado and no one in designing the containers and the container-ship allowed for these billions of kernels growing like plant cells out of control in the next century or the next room into — call it — popcorn but is it growth or death? — it came to me and my freedom to receive the before and after so they dissolve — that whatever the giant differences in how you look but given the fact I have never seen the two of you together, you and the Chilean’s associate Spence may be one and the same and don’t say no, Jim, because in the great community where the colloid’s facets of human light do not escape us but do not settle either nor readily filter out, this identify of Spence and you might be true—

— that is, with another particle of me, not cruel like the van driver’s voice that gave me back Ruth’s words, I later learned what I knew already. I knew what I was going to do that night though above this meditation went the traffic of particles trucking helter-skelter up the river of the city until—

— that is, having had it up to here, I told Kallman — several bikes still between us — where did he get off blabbing about me and Ruth Heard when he hadn’t been up there in her apartment? What was he shooting off his face to the van driver (which van driver?) (what’s-his-name who shared the apartment with Ruth Heard, Miriam’s and my substitute teacher back in school) (—is there any other Ruth Heard? cracks the Hungarian and answers: Oh there’s only one Ruthie, we threw coffee mugs at each other over Hungary, I threw a wet cake of soap at her and it hit a picture of Karl Marx and busted the glass — you mean Fred Monk, who painted my apartment, oh Fred Monk I saw him last week, I sold him a three-speed for his little girl)—

— that is, the van-driver-turned-apartment-painting-contractor had known Ruth Heard did business with the German storekeeper Mrs. Erhard and later that afternoon, cutting it so fine you might say I had already given by default my new car-rental job a trial, finding her with her back to me on the phone, I slipped a few copies of the early Post onto the sidewalk before entering the store; I stood across the glass counter with its breath sweeteners (or is it suppressors?) and asked Mrs. Erhard, who seemed upset, if the English woman Ruth Heard who had once had a standing order here had had a friend called Fred Monk with one bad eye, a white streak right across the eye; and when she didn’t know what to say as if I had something on her, I kidded her: I said, Mrs. Erhard, that little pistol you got’s going to go off and hurt somebody someday you’re bound to get robbed as long as you got it on the premises, and her face with the big round cheeks was saying, Do you really think so, but she said, "Yes, she would come here and wait for him, and use the phone, and sometimes he didn’t come and she was very mad and talked to me like we were close friends—"

— that is, I didn’t go right to Mrs. Erhard from Kallman, I went and phoned Miriam at her office and made her talk to me. We hadn’t gone together in months. I said I’d like to take her father to court for bad-mouthing me. She kept saying, "It’s so long ago, it’s so long ago, it’s so long ago—" and had to hang up amid—

— that is, Kallman claimed that I had it wrong, as he slowly approached through his ranks of bicycles^ — no, man, it wasn’t him who spoke to Monk about me and Ruth, it was Mir’s father who had spoken about me and Ruth to him Kallman, but it was so long ago, you know—

— that is, Ruth on the day of the raincheck had been reading her air edition of the London Times and opening it out to continue the article she was reading, and when she noticed me and we spoke, she looked at her watch, she had on one of these heavy sweaters with buttons down the front and a collar, the Colloid Unconscious divides and divides its particles, faceting faster than light so light pauses relieved to be no longer champion—

— that is, Kallman, definitely not smiling as he reached me, heard the very tall woman in the baggy overalls with large smoked glasses and the aviator’s leather cap skull-tight with the earflaps snap-tight under her chin call from where she’d been left staring at the racing bike up on the platform, Hey is anybody selling bicycles around here? — and called again, while I traded words with Mr. K., who, looking all around the store, waved an assistant, a girl with Italian words all over her T-shirt, away from a young boy in a baseball cap and toward the aviator woman, then turned back to me: "Miriam’s father said you were sneaking up to the apartment of that Communist teacher, he said you were always a no-good, I’m just telling you what he said"—