Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"What is it?" she says rather softly when he gets her name right and she moves her elbow off him; but her face doesn’t turn toward him but a couple three angels have hung around near the modular chests of drawers long and low or are checking out the towels and the clickless light switch.

Well, "it" threatens to grow by blurring into insignificance: is it a story? "How I played winter ball and was approached by anti-Castro elements," or "How I declassified a CIA director’s secret play to have himself abducted by his own men," or "How I became a message from here to there implanted in me and recoverable but not by me" — or "How as a P.O.W. in Vietnam I had to whisper for five years and what this did to my hearing," or "How I kept to myself a conversation with the pilot who helped stage the plane crash that faked the death of a right-wing Chilean revolutionary in January."

"Yes," she says.

No, said the Chilean that night in December, have we?

But I looked the same; he was the different one: was I drunk? No. He was taller and a shade less thin: mustache dark and drooping but he’s less bald close up if possible than five hours earlier in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center—

I don’t think you usually talk like this, she says to Mayn, the most intimate thing so far.

Anyway I saw him meeting this moderately disreputable guy I know named Spence, and now I’m meeting him again and he looks different and seems to be saying he doesn’t think we have met (I mean, who really cares, but). . and he’s murmuring, half-politely, I dont. .

While I stared, and—

I don’t think so, he said. Unless, New York? he suddenly added like he would give something to get something, although there was fear. The accent on "York" Slavic, Italian, Spanish. But then hands were clapping hollowly in the early evening, hands that were not pressing pictures into cameras.

Jim, she’s saying close to his mouth, I can’t be bringing all this out of you.

No. You can’t.

But am I right? are you in the middle of something you can’t decide if it’s there or not? — so I feel, Is it trivial or dangerous or important or what? — because you aren’t whimsical.

Anyway the three brilliant white suits came out of the building, each man carrying his twin-hosed portable life-support pack, out of the suiting-up building (you understood that) and under the outside roof-overhang above where the white van was parked a grand hotel seeing off a team of — I don’t know what they were: not warriors though suspicious plunder was their aim; not priests, notwithstanding the slow uniforms and tight caps beneath the helmets; not condemned men in their divers’ fishbowls fixed forever onto neck rings; not statesmen in protective on-site inspection suits — but (words fail, again and again, words, words) surprise! — explorers: hunters. A fireman on one knee watches them stop to greet their families, the rangy American women dolled up, a cool, Sundayfied adolescent or two, one in a long skirt, was it Carlsbad Caverns, the Empire State Building? No kissing through the helmets, two wives not three — one wife, the Command Module pilot’s, did kiss her husband’s convex bubble and he the air inside, so their kiss met very firm, no tongues, poles invisible they are so familiar. And the blithe bachelor rock man Schmitt (also seen off by a lady) kicked up his huge Earth-heels — or was it Evans, the Command Module pilot — just before he climbed in the back of the Apollo van, his white bringing up into contrast a touch of rust-brown.

The boxes they are carrying said the South American gent next to me after all, maintaining the conversation he had seemed to decline. I pointed out the hoses and told him what I’d picked up — which did not (in reply to him) include who made the space suits and where. He said, They are taking overnight bags. .

Kidney-machine overnight bags, I said.

They are getting away from their women for a weekend—

— on the Moon, I said—

— it is every American’s dream, he said, it is what you and I were bused here from the Press Site to see, it is a brief, expensive shot from a movie—

— seen much closer up (I pointed out) by the crowd back at the Press Site on closed-circuit. But are you a journalist?

The astronauts are elated.

They’re like kids in those aviator skullcaps.

Who is the one who danced? Was it not our bachelor rock man?

The geology of space.

But now that they are in the van I am not so sure.

Hard to tell.

They look alike, suited up. Unknown soldiers.

Wasn’t the idea one unknown soldier? Mayn asked.

Yes, more than one spoils that.

Ah well, unknown soldiers vacuum-packed for burial in space, Mayn slowly quipped.

Is it the Service Module pilot who orbits the Moon while the other two are on the surface?

The reliable friend who is there for the heroes.

Still, a vacation in a vacuum, said the tall, bald man with the mustache; what was that you said? vacuum-packed for burial in space? I will remember that.

The van has a rusty tailpipe, I said.

It will drop off on the way; nothing spent, nothing gained.

You know about the Polish revolutionary who was told to blow up a bus.

I knew him; he was not Polish.

And burnt his lips on the tailpipe.

That’s not the one I knew. Your astronauts don’t make mistakes. Can they be heroes?

Those tight skullcaps, that’s the secret.

It is a performance.

Shot out of a cannon, I said: do they have that act in your circuses?

In America you can see anything and live to tell about it, said the man with the Spanish intonation in the first phrase and in "leave" for "live."

Or see nothing and not live to tell about it, Mayn had replied, he thought.

Nothing? A man in prison assured me, yes, prison is about nothing. But of course that is not just anywhere.

A journalist also? I asked.

Also?

A journalist?

In fact, he had once wanted to be one, since you ask. As well as a public speaker, perhaps, though now compelled to have a limited audience however practiced an audience.

Political prisoner? I asked.

He killed someone. He had a theory, said the tall, bald man.

Political? I said (I couldn’t just say, Oh?).

Possibly about imprisonment, said the tall, bald man, but it was about the unconscious: in effect he said — he was not so clear as my summary of him — he had found it unavoidable, the unconscious — we reconstituted ourselves in each other’s heads, I believe, our minds being congruent frequently, does that sound right? — always near to being one mind, was that it? Oh, he apologized, always, and it was not him I at first went to visit; he eavesdropped; he ignored a man and woman who had come to see him, actually, and listened to me and the man I was talking with. It’s chemistry, this mind-family affair, but I was unable to give him my full attention. His theory was of imprisonment, and in the fragments I heard while essentially speaking to the person I was with, I gathered it was consolatory rationalization, yet moving. He expressed contempt for exposes of prison life. He was quite intelligent: he called jail abstract. No, his theory was about all imprisonment, if there is such a thing; but I would not have called him a political prisoner. I learned later that he had killed a woman one night who had been his girlfriend more or less since grade school. He was doing a long stretch.

You were not.

A matter of hours, no more. He seemed to have taken up economics but later I wondered if/ had started something.

This lean, diplomatic man with a mustache turned away, clasping his hands behind his back and raising his chin like a royal consort on a visit. Or a king. Not a journalist.