Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

she said without putting her down, but Grace is so alive that the last time after I left I sort of couldn’t imagine what it was like with her, you know what I mean?" — "Yeah, you’re saying a lot of things fast, you know. The South American woman really doesn’t dig Lincoln" — "Lincoln’s sweet" — " No no" — "Shit, man!" — "I mean, it’s a real honest-to-God workshop! We work!" "Sue, did you say’God’? It’s 1977!"), . he was made to remember that watchfulness according to the Anasazi healer was a mark of reincarnality or its yearning at any rate, which was ultra-slow-beating to tease the mortality that set him apart (and by centuries) from his people who had all gone on to other things depending, Mayn guessed, on what they watched most watchfully until a luminous javelina behind replete with scent-gland system or, say, a jojoba bush beaned with commercial possibilities ranging from shampoo through fry oil and engine softener to a standing reserve of fuel which that little hustler Spence had doubtless heard might do in sinisterly minute platelets for a future generation of renewable missiles — or a hundred other living identities — would imprint their current essences on some supple mid-grid of opiate-receptor molecules that were the immortal genes’ message bearers, as, that zoometeo-rological night the Navajo Prince took off in pursuit of his beloved, his mad mother’s return to life and lung matrixed ever afterward on each downcoming and upgoing weather in that part of the world (Larry’d tell us how that phenomenon was managed!), and one watcher might return as a javelina’s behind, another as a jojoba bean with a solid-missile future, another as a function of some old wind demon if you’d been watching for it as it breezed in and out of town, or some poor gal’s head at childbirth when, say, her unhappy marriage doesn’t quite leave her thoughts even during labor (though you could be a kid in the next room doing its ancient-Mesopotamia homework where when the gods disappeared upstairs to have at each other or just rest — or maybe economized by becoming Us), the weather was caused by demons and omens and dreams of void-like absences which are early unidentified forms of low-pressure zone, though if James Mayn, his once-heavy life delegated, along with such weathers as leaving and arriving, to those growing relations in and out of him busily at rest and medium cool ‘bout the "we" of it or the "they" so long’s the plural obtains and don’t for the time being bother Jim or James how far these relational structures (articulate and/or blessedly non-so) are something he’s in, since evidently they are as well in him, if James Mayn (we say) had done the regular reincarnation trip he’d have gone for someone he knew so little about that there would be plenty of room for initiative as with the Navajo Prince who suspended his studies of God knows what all to chase after—

— the new friend Larry, as Mayn looked ahead to their next discussion, concerned Mayn, he definitely concerned him; for they had got each other into troubles best left to dream, especially if like Mayn you didn’t ever "have" dreams to the best of your—

— while Mayn, impatiently waiting for the next talk with Larry though not getting in touch with Larry, felt that a century had passed between now and the time when he had known more than he knew and had consigned it to some curving-away-from-him (might’s-well-be-movin’) track in the sky of his private fall away from hometown and from the muted melodrama back there, or six centuries he smiles, hearing some old beginner’s logic of yarrow leaves with now in year ‘77 of his own century in question the forty-nine yarrow stalks introduced to him at a sunset swim-party (at a blue, skylighted pool on the thousandth floor of some quick(-lime)-rise multiple dwelling serving tequila sunsets and cucumber prods) by a seventy-five-year-old real-estate executive as the right and traditional way to "drop" an I Ching: for what he heard was himself, on a day in April or May of ‘46 soon after the Hermit-Inventor supposedly died to be supposedly supplanted by his nephew, knowing without ever having been taught what a tea steeped in yarrow leaves was drunk for by Indian women: and Margaret, or for that matter the East Far Eastern Princess, had been the pregnant one, not Jim’s mother: and that was why she had to get away from the Navajo Prince or she would never get away: and, with spiral weathers, or some genuine obstacle to all this void in the form of a preciously durable friendship with his grandmother, Jim had put away for the future’s rainy week which in the controlled environs rotated for gravity’s sake between Moon and Earth was never to come unless the controlled population voted rain, a marvelous if broken train of thought, if not in a class with the special reincarnation that he knew in his bones (the rest of him stored in that radiant, rumored mountain fed by the minute Pressure Snake of the South) that Larry had or was about to eerily come up with — whereby, O.K., if Margaret was pregnant when she departed her Navajo community in ‘94, then Jim’s mother by some law of non-coincidence was not the pregnant one when she invited the New Jersey sea to take her away from it all in ‘45; but Sarah, it had been firmly speculated, would never have killed herself pregnant. Therefore?

Answer: at least half a generation of falling forward toward the horizon — leaving town as his mother told him to, though then it was she who did the leaving, if only first. (And are the first to leave like the first to arrive?) He heard his little brother play a sad thing on the piano haltingly and realized he hated his mother for good reason, while loving her unknown thinking yes, in a piece she played of. . "Schumann" (Braddie called, looking up and down from his music to the keys and back as if one or other would get away from him if they didn’t stay close), Braddie her love child played it with beginner’s skills — in an always somewhat energy-inefficient sound-escaping home, out of which Jim was often coming, often starting, hearing things, well little more than basic equipment sliding/shifting/rattling around in him, voices as unreal as Miss Myles’s "You’re a brave person, Jim; this has made you grow up fast; tragedy does that; we can’t always pick the pace at which". . or words to some effect when Jim wasn’t being brave at all, but dwelling upon Anne-Marie’s breasts which he had just the day before touched in daylight and for a time thinking there really had been a Hermit-Inventor, that is in the Anasazi sense, and so there had been an Anasazi healer give or take a few prescriptions immortal enough not to have expired after several centuries, though smart ideas can get passed on for a long time and still apply, even if saying the thing in French compelled the mother, then, to say to Braddie in Jim’s hearing that the piano was to the orchestra what the individual was to the mass except the orchestra was better than the mass. But, asks the interrogator so long quiet as to have been legally absent (though always in the wings, his own, and more than in the wings, indeed in the feelings of all these relations circulating like money but also like Grace Kimball so clear about history being written yea razored on the male’s ever-’vailable tabula the female doormat that her power has been to be known and used changing in the imitable warmth of her own that multiplies in lives of women and men where she might be as invisible and inaudible as a spirit that reduces surplus though vulnerable always if not quite ready — for she’s a monologuist — to the blunt male word working at its insidious, non-leaderly worst, in interrogation’s interrogatory, But) were you, about your maternal parent’s embarcation into the unknown not at least as curious as Pearl ("statuesque" but only "-esque") Myles who may have lost her job through inquiries about the abandoned rowboat and the lack of a traditional-type suicide note, i.e., about the How of Sarah’s exit? Or did you clandestinely check on the time-distance odds of her meeting the lofty waterspout reported nosing the ocean near the Barnegat seafront between Mantoloking and Point Pleasant that afternoon appearing so unusually free of its normal thundercloud source a mere-mile-high cumulo-nimbus from which it funneled down to vacuum the bright-foaming salt scallops of whitehorse whitecaps the afternoon she "went"? (Answer at once not only for yourself in the usual rousingly dubious way but up front for all of you — and oh yes are we as history-buffers expected to swallow as mere coincidence a modest interest in weather work in later life and those earlier self-embedding weather trips of the boy-man’s extended clan interracial, continental, ranging upwards and downwards thirteen decades or more?)