Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— wondering, with the two females in the right-side seat conversing about the night air and the Moon and the clouds, if Margaret smelt or felt the juice of their whole love in this cab, until with a shock that made him take his right hand off the wheel out of the night or no place, Sam’s brother’s legal Ford jalopy (in those days before inspection) came screaming across the intersection of Throckmorton and Brinkerhoff on an arc that aspired to be a ninety-degree corner and whose abandoned wake was a wheeling, faintly glittering hub cap sprung loose by the laughing, crowded car—

Why Bob Yard had been Jim’s own mother’s (he wondered if open) secret — he did not quite know the word "lover" (that is, to use) and he did not say or think "fuck" though in the next week he could use it in thinking about his girl though never in speech to his friend Sam — and only in the past few months had Jim known him to be the father of his own brother, which had made Bob, in turn, to Jim the lender of transportation in which Margaret might feel Jim would kill himself and Jim might feel he would power his way through the dilemma of whether to kill Bob or not (what a laugh!) (for what if Bob knew where Jim’s mother "was"?) and in which Margaret, his real grandmother and the mother of his own unfaithful mother, was riding home at this moment before he dropped her at her front walk which had been his front walk now turned into intimate, guilty mere nostalgia by going all the way with Marie, but only for the moment while Margaret strode away straight-backed toward the porch light blistering the ivy at one-thirty in the morning when, whatever she thought about the truck’s owner, she was exhausted (and said so, and mentioned that she had had two hard days in the city — where was her husband?), and had, incidentally, not told Jim and Marie they shouldn’t be out there. So the way she fit right into their sex life took him away from the circumstance of her two-day sojourn in New York, he almost persuaded Marie to let him spend the rest of that night in her bedroom with her entire family at home (but her father still up) which would have lost whatever had been given or gained this night — after which that strong girl remarked that she guessed they were not going to see the sunrise sun pillars he had mentioned which he then told her was "just" something his gramma had told him, while he wondered if his mother had made love with Mel so he would think if need be that he was Brad’s father—

— but years later Marie when he phoned her ("up") in California told him Margaret had seemed polite and alone, saying they had "picked a good night" and when she got out at her house (and granddad standing silhouetted at the window, the light haloing his bald head) telling Jim the weather was a perfectly good subject for friendship and in any case to discuss even if you were with people you cared about:

: but when Jim’s daughter had asked if "it was in the atmosphere or in people" and elicited from Jim "Holy hell what there is in people!" — his own lost words on an afternoon when falling within a large tree Marie’s brother had only bruised his lower back (where skin would never after grow) but not fractured a bone — restored for what it was worth to him now at his advanced age the Anasazi’s prophecy (readforecast!) that a young person would someday find ("found") a new reincarnation, and with it restored not only his addiction to fact but the fact of this curious sequence detached within that time when the War was ending as if there could never be another one, we would be too busy, and the boys, Jim, Sam, others, were realizing they were but two years away from landing craft and Basic Training sergeants’ yells and the grand threat of all that enormity of specifics and its promise to remove this town for a time from their lives, and maybe months from getting into maybe the Marines (Boot Camp) who grabbed up, well, sixteen-year-olds if you kept it quiet and looked hairy and tough, and Sam et al. told and retold the story of the fourteen-year-old Eskimo who (against the anger of his people whose economy needed the exact amount of hunting he could provide) went and volunteered, got sent to the Pacific Theater, and won a citation and then a name that got him sent home too young to fight anymore which was a unique retirement and wound up hustling older men in San Francisco’s famed Bay Area, until Sam’s fat elder brother who could punch you so it went inside the bone said to shut up because that was a sad story. .

When Jim Mayn in the sixties, who knew himself pretty well (knew but wouldn’t risk his well-after-all-dubious luck by saying out loud) and had learned somewhere at the start that when he needed to know things in his memory they would probably be there so don’t sweat it anymore’n you sweat intellect and being Walter Lippmann and history meanwhile even if history provokes us to recall in order to disguise its own possible if perhaps only future non-existence, told his children and his colleague Ted or the colleague-woman Mayga anything at all, he felt that he was remembering what he needed, so long as no one zeroed in and like the scamp Spence, point-blanked their way into ancient conversation demanding — imagine demanding! — to know which day it was that Granddad Alexander and he discussed Margaret’s hermit while they hardly noticed Amyabel Larsen with the large but delicate and slightly moving breasts and Leonardo Hugo the oculist with a hundred neckties go opposite ways at the start of the porch conversation and, with rain threatening in Alexander’s pore roots later, return together (hey!) for the first time as if two directions had been added together to make one new whatsis — dream, maybe, to judge from the immobile pose of trance each seemed obviously to hang their clothes on out there on the sidewalk — only then to continue as a couple and not into Amyabel’s but into Leonardo’s almost identical house (where maybe his mother had died that very afternoon, sounded the joke or joker somewhere well above the ground Jim knew his grandparents’ porch was built on).

But what was the importance of this Hermit-Inventor? asks an interrogating voice that once might have been Jim’s own if he had not refrained from those blunt inquiries close to home that are the mark of the family historian or the truth-chewer who has either lived through and just to the edge of the pain or is crazy amidst it and shouts to those who are supposed to know more than he or she, whereas Jim declined to go crazy and instead got on with a life, left Windrow, assembled facts every day, was unaware till i960 that near War’s end American bomber squadrons nosing into Jap air space were meeting (and irritably meeting if there be such a thing as technological irritation) "jet stream" headwinds often equal to the planes’ maxi-speeds — but he did not leave the messages he carried with him which he imagined he was happy with as is — and was collected really as he had always pretty well seemed even to his wife and to new friends slightly more than old friends so that, more plural than, say, one single account of what had transpired, these statements or messages stood as snapshots of the past into the (thank God) grownup present: for example, "My mother in ‘45 absented herself from my life by rowing into the Jersey sea without a permanent boat"; "Holy hell what there is in people"; "We’re ordinary people"; "Was who pregnant where when and by whooom when they made their egg-zit?"; "You don’t talk long hours for thirty years even just about the weather without having some friendship or other"; or "All of the above."

What was the importance of the Hermit-Inventor? Was it that his friend Margaret, Jim’s mother’s mother-to-be, had failed to persuade a heavy-drinking but collateral and intelligent promoter who’d once studied wind with the one and only Eiffel, to feature at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 a balloon ascent seeking to demonstrate high-speed westerlies at high altitudes hinted by a track of recent cirrus clouds insanely swift?