Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Cut, said the man who played the director in a picture about Hollywood that was showing one weekend in Windrow, New Jersey; but you kept watching; the movie went on, the screen didn’t go blank on you with consequent whistling and stamping as if the audience were trying to get out: Cut yourself in on what someone else is doing, a woman coming home, saying hello, waving goodbye or was it good morning, or just good, practically speaking, off there, until you can’t tell if her scale is inside or all around her, like your own according to the powerful woman Mayn visited in the Bronx years later not because he wanted his own auras read but to get information on someone else, and there the locally famous woman, who was unexpectedly pregnant, leaning back thoughtful on one arm of her armchair, told him she do him but not gonna talk about someone else, some lady he said come to see her: Cut, to the grandmother waving slowly, not at all trying to be his mother (it came to him), but being herself, which didn’t rule out being at his house when he and his little brother got home from school, Brad earlier, Jim at dusk, a tall, surprisingly soft woman, although quiet somewhere inside her, for he understood one day that they had this understanding not to pry — let some feelings, some of the past, go unknown although wasn’t it true that it would always come out? and he waved back to this grandmother of his who’s way up the street there on the opposite side — she’s got her life thank you — as if this morning salute happened always or, looking ahead to when another event that felt sort of laid out, used to happen oh twenty years later in the century, and his own wife marveled that he accepted this odd event, namely, meeting just like that on a city street a very specific person from years past and on the spur of the moment taking for granted that here came this person he hadn’t seen in several years, but — well, walking down a street in New York’s Greenwich Village past a bike shop all metal, glass, and color and with a quarter ton of maroon newness in it, perhaps because of a great cold red English bike frame that, as he had not noticed knowingly before, is a plane figure in space, a near parallelogram stronger with sides and an angle or two gone on to a kiltered inertia of vector-time elegant and ready that always waited for it, a bike frame detached from all wheels applicable in future and hanging near a soft-blue French Motobecane completely assembled so the blue warmed the shining saddle as much as did the sunlight, he reflected upon a harshly curious interview he had just smiled, factored, and chatted his way through with a maverick meteorologist, only now to get run down by two small laughing kids escaping their mother who’s at the door of a brick-faced bank just as he met a russet-bearded man (economist) not knowingly seen by him in seven years, and (here’s the point) said directly, "Hi, Cliff," as if years were days, and nodded with a smile and passed on down the street for another seven, ten, twelve years — as if (did we say?) it had been laid out—

— laid out? asks a voice threatening to get comic that instantly acquires the body of the all-purpose interrogator who has probably picked up "all-day sucker" in his crash research for potential enemies’ childhood laid out with a jawbreaker roundhouse right — but no: not laid out on the carpet with one punch, laid out like a ground plan in motion—

— so later he knew that that morning that his always beloved grandmother had been off there waving away the distance between them like thin air, he had put away into a dump of his brain some sketch or letter in the seldom-emptied wastebasket in his own room two doors down from his father’s bedroom (pyjama’d forty-five-year-old bulk dead to the world in sky-blue cotton issued him for his July birthday till that father would come awake jerking up onto one elbow and shielding himself with the other against the room’s deep shadow so Jim could quote his father’s old "He’s a good boy when he’s asleep" remembering many not apparently unhappy bedtimes when this got said in his mother’s company but when company was present so the smaller Jim would grin dumbly, he saw himself, but no one in this dark bedroom to say it to now, and so much surrounding the now bigger, older Jim inside that it’s worth putting also out of mind), a diagram (close to) a coach’s blackboard play-pattern remembered (doodled) with an exactness honoring maybe not the scale or content but the method of the October History class he was sitting in; or during Geometry; or during Journalism (which, oddly, his father with all that practicality sweating toward acumen if not quite to it, didn’t think he should waste time taking when there’s a newspaper in the family:

: so the lines of two homes got linked by a street paralleling them by means of sidewalks the length of the town, and got connected by him and corrected by his heartbeat so that, shifting through at least one inequality, they became like the lines of one T-formation halfback going in motion to the left side until the ball was snapped, and the quarterback faked a quick pass shallow to the left but he handed off instead to his stellar fullback (me) who went three steps to the right, leaned toward scrimmage — toward tackle, where a void had been cleared by "Tornado" Tim Ivins, thus attracting doubly a new flow of enemy defenders — leaned the other way to cock his right shoulder and heave a surprise pass as unexpected as it was diagonally risky to the far left sideline where the very halfback who’d been in brotherly motion and to whom the quarterback had just faked a pass was now all on his lonesome, while drawing during History your circled Xs and your broken lines and the blocking assignments, he was aware of growing a rollicking hard-on receiving beside him his girl’s faint halo (just before lunch) of gentle sweat and a seasoning he knew one night some weeks later was gardenia. He had brought her one, having never knowingly smelled one, in a shiny white carton, shoebox size, he had to carry like a coffin offering with something live or afloat inside, gingerly anyhow, and dared to greet her with a kiss upon her cheek but long enough (was it one kiss, or two or three) so he felt her smile but with precious quakes along the dimple which are now and forever tender plus amused, so that (in any event) the play pattern of the quarterback’s faked pass and the fullback’s faked run displaced the teacher’s words — which were about words — and well this was the way the diagram of the two homes acted like a play pattern and that early morning that he felt was brought to some wonderfully imperceptible point upon the raw air by his grandmother’s being there,

he displaced or slipped into a fold of some soft luggage for the journey (Great day in the morning! his granddad could say, happily astoni’ed) which fold might have been itself something slipped away— dis (we continue) placed the atmosphere of seeing his grandmother waving, in the time it took him to go from porch down own front walk to sidewalk, his own home behind him had obviously swung round (but don’t tell anyone, they’ll say you’re nuts or, worse, that you’re not serious, don’t tell even yourself, for, shit, the truth’s gon’ come out anyway) — sailing before those prevailing easterlies you heard about {prevailing westerlies, a man interjects at seaside Mantoloking cripes anybody ‘n everybody knew what west wind meant!). But was it blew from or to the west? because Jim asked and forgot — to think about it, that is — and asked again {and wasn’t told!) for they didn’t even know all about clouds and you could see clouds but couldn’t see wind (said some voice in him) and this was there in him and yet wasn’t him at all because he was on the march to school: he blew up at his girl (though laughing all the way) Whadda ya mean I’m spoiled? — just ‘cause you say you got homework so you can’t come out to the movies? — and he squirted—