Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But that was work for others, for brains that cared, and for science— even if, being called on by Pearl Myles’s full-throated plum-hoarse feet-on-the-ground-of-the-classroom voice, he left that explanation of the Anasazi’s cloud formation to others to play with yet felt he ought to gasp his own way to the surface even if what was going on was nothing more than itself, his mother gone, his brotherhood with Brad exposed as something you couldn’t just say simply and briefly and his grandmother now this very week subtly bereaved by the oddball in New York who had once upon a time helped her come back from the West — instead of staying(!) (were she really the East Far Eastern Princess nee of Choor): but was his laziness in the way of something else? for if he lazily let his mind roam into how the Anasazi became a night cloud not to be confused with a reincarnation, didn’t this "how" amount to something too? (perhaps a "what"?) — even if at this moment Pearl Myles, who was losing her job, had called on him for doubtless some What-Where-How answer — mayhap Where he was, or sarcastically How (he was) or (what was left?) When, Who, What— was it like at a boring moment in math envisioning so sexually Anne-Marie’s elbow spectral above him in the pickup truck and dark cemetery that he forgot she was sitting next to him in the classroom taking good notes? — though when he came out of his daydream-of-night she was not taking notes but fluttering her eyelids toward some dark windowed place secretly beyond the nerve-racked man in shirt sleeves erasing one sandwiched unknown with a long finger instead of using the edge of the eraser (which was at rest along the ledge of the blackboard for use as a projectile at certain moments of release in the course of the month), so Jim remembered with a quickened smile like a jolt that having visited her wordless vagina to find how well all came true with her, he had next morning woken in the trough of his own bed’s mattress and lazily considered jerking off but, absent as she was, she felt inside him — oh, some long rest given him that was awake and asleep with him, a power certainly his that took its humor into where he didn’t need to be in a couple places at once; and so far, if he couldn’t when he tried put it into words to Sam who knew so well how to listen without being ‘fraid to snicker here and there, he had found some place that could stay easy and untended in him, in the knowledge that it was there to be let out or touched off endlessly at need, though he wasn’t going to talk this bullshit, except to Sam, not even when he told Anne-Marie (in her permanent clarity audible even then through a phone line thousands of miles and many years away) that he loved her: because a voice he knew (but because of it itself did not tell himself) had materialized for good into the very rest that Anne-Marie’s presence in him could not equal but seemed to have discovered already there, and it said stuff like what he much later learned the code of (which was like an energy of) If this rest or place which is neither real rest nor a place of rest is, according to you, to be touched off endlessly at need (which is by the way not your way of saying things) then quiere decir (does it mean) an endless need or a being touched off endlessly? A plural voice. Not at all "voices," though a man he once had a brief pushing fight with in Briggs Stadium at a Tigers-Yankees game who later told him the story of burning his own house down with seven years’ work in it told him "voices" of that schizophrenic species while they drove him nuts (which he already was) gave him this friendly sense of his mind being endlessly settled by colonists who changed their career goals and departed, then moved back vociferously: but for Jim as boy-man and later man-boy, a plural voice he felt wasn’t only his (and wasn’t always within his own earshot), though he felt he would never care (enough) to decide if he was in it or it got into him; though one would gladly have held him responsible for not being open about it if the game had been worth the candle and the interrogation of the dangerous hadn’t sometimes dispensed with the exposure of such clandestine operations as ‘‘least said, soonest mended," though who "one" is in those preceding formulae may yet be settled by "we."

Yet responsible he knew he was for something or other: and if it wasn’t his mother’s disappearance into the sea, it also wasn’t in later years a cyclone in Sri Lanka apparently "triggered," as NASA said, by monsoons whose flow got diverted there by running into the Sumatra highlands, for he recalled the shared versus territorial weathers from yakking to his children and not from the fact that the winter monsoon (unlike its summer sister that makes or breaks India’s agriculture annually like a natural mistake that corrects itself only sometimes) may precipitate twenty inches of rain in Singapore but next to no rain anyplace else, having originated far away in Russia/China sweeping up en route extra heat and moisture from the South China Sea.

Responsible for what, then? The Rest that could get touched off or not and lay untended in him that Anne-Marie’s bare shoulders erect between him and the windshield or her fine-bared tits, clear-tuned tits (that they were, God! discovering together!) and covered shoulders or, one Thursday night (never forget which night of that energy-rich week it was, call it miscellaneous information, call it what you will or we), at the extreme race-track frontier of the (again) cemetery, her whole, God! person curved open to him on a quilt under a dim midnight sky when he sat back on his bare heels, his hands spread behind him, and waited for the longest time gathering her into his heart until she smiled a little differently and made a light blind-like pass in the air covering with its current his cock that had been dreaming its very own angle for a week of minutes there between them on what seemed also a Saturday night when they waited for the first time as if she were in him and he in her.

But he never thought what it was like to be her, or not then, and wouldn’t have known if he had thought, and he thought dimly only that you didn’t imagine yourself as a girl though he wondered if the little nibbles he felt in her were her doing or were doing themselves to her or were just a doing: yet he felt she knew him, and one day long long after — and it was a whole day — he found he had knowingly held, amid all that Rest that she could certainly not alone give him, a sinking feeling that she could not marry him nor he go so far as to ask her, and she knew it truly and he knew it carelessly in one of the voids in him between the Hermit-Inventor and the Anasazi, or between Margaret and Alexander, or between his ineptly painfully widowed father Mel (with his professionally compacted obit for his wife) and the brother Brad whom Mel loved very much (and even for his fair piano playing) and who stayed in Windrow — period — and who got angry enough as a child at the buffets of the winter northwesterly some January school mornings to go and find a bag to catch that son-of-a-bitching wind once and for all even if he had to first find the whole cloth with which to make it and before that settle the future questions of whether or not to use synthetic fiber, whether to boycott slave cotton, or get his older brother to help when (if, granted, he hadn’t lifted a finger when Braddie was learning to ride his new Schwinn bicycle) Jim had already given him a hand on scenery for a high school play though suddenly they had to wait while, to Alexander and Margaret’s delight, Principal Ful-kerand refused to "sit on" Miss Larsen no matter how original she was and defended her against Mr. Victor, the math teacher, who objected to the intromission of a thunderstorm just before and just after Act V Scene i as a mad misconstruing of the atmosphere (and Jim’s grandparents agreed) at that point of the play that would only overshadow the "golden couplets" left us by Shakespeare’s endless patience, to which Fulkerand protectively retorted he had no idea what Mr. Victor (who often said n’est-ce pas to his class) meant, but he did not have to read the play in question in order to know where his loyalty stood, whilst the director herself retorted that the play was not written in "couplets." But Jim had in his possession a larger copy he had drawn of a drawing Margaret had made him from memory, an anvil-topped Navajo thunderstorm, and he let Braddie see it in his room but not hold it and when Miss Larsen came to him in the cafeteria and asked to see it, he amazed her by replying he would rather keep it to himself though she told Alexander she did understand and Alexander who from time to time told Jim what he might profit from reading, sent her a token wedding present the next summer of an ancient copy of Hamlet —ancient? bound in leopard skin — as old as the Greeks and the Romans combined, though when was Shakespeare? — and then she did not get married after all. All of which could seem to fit between Mel and Brad — or between the Hermit and the Anasazi (to stay close to home) the former now suddenly dead in New York in the spring of ‘46, the man who helped Margaret get back from the West having spurred her to go, until the new thought hit Jim and vanished within him, a pollution of gossip not to be contemplated much less peddled and he was happy to joke with Margaret about being himself the Hermit somewhere in himself whom she gave some things to think about at a rough time and whom she inspired to a new weather (well, that’s putting it strongly if freshly) to get in the way even of the old which seemed in turn at times in the way of the new, which made him also (to humor her) the Anasazi medicine man (perhaps in their shared mortality), who "saw" the Princess professionally while Jim, sinking the thoughts slowly into this Rest he had grown within him, gave up, one night alone in his bed as he heard his father breathe and dream, trying to reckon how he could with scary certainty know (we already remember) exactly how the Anasazi pulled off his own death, when this Anasazi who (in Margaret’s fantasy, joke, affection, and fact) he was supposed to be had not been reincarnated, whatever one made of the late Hermit’s replacement the nephew now in residence in that weathered lab or railroad flat where death would have been enough maybe to upset Margaret but Jim still couldn’t see what she was doing coming out to the cemetery at night unless Alexander’s news of the fight in the flower bed coupled with Jim’s irresponsible rudeness re: Sarah’s possible pregnancy had drawn Margaret graveward or to Jim’s known recent haunts at the risk of interrupting him and Anne-Marie in the middle of a kiss. But the Anasazi was a healer and that was why the Princess had gone to him and while Jim could never be a doctor (with all that Chem) any more than go into the family newspaper which was soon folding anyhow, or any newspaper — healing was satisfying if you knew the other person real well. Understanding other people — well sometimes you did or you didn’t! Found a person years later you knew you knew already — forget the past life bunk — Mayga, the Chilean journalist; Ted, his old friend in whose very hands Mayn could sometimes feel a glass or the air moving when Ted got exercised; his own father, pyjama’d and tossed by his stormy bed to make his very bones sick of his failure as a husband; and more which Jim did not identify except to see he could be someone in the future who wasn’t him — well, what was that? and especially if you were somebody else who’s living at the same time — let it sink into the hopper, the tank, the reservoir, the sunken destroyer he had read about off the Jersey coast and imagined airtight that wasn’t where it should have been when they dived for it.