Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Mayn had told this Spence years ago to shut up, which Spence did with such a lingering smile that he might in every other respect have been elsewhere.

Mayga was dead, and that was all that had mattered then in 1963, not the tilt at which we received the sun and the rain, nor any historic small talk that was all of it bigger than the death of Mayga — and welcome to its bigness. Yet recalling and recalling how friend Ted had told Jim the news not imagining it would upset him for he had met her maybe half a dozen times in ‘62-’63, he could get to another fact of Spence by the trivialest gnomon yet congenial because he and Ted had tossed this all-purpose gnomon back and forth, the L of the sundial or anything that tells time by the shadow it casts (though what does it tell time?); for one day at the beach Jim had stuck himself strangely into the earth of the Mantoloking sand just on the leaning point of pretty well murdering his little brother Brad:

and that "fact of Spence," conveyed on a gray day in New York in 1977 of the perishable century that aspires to be our civilization’s hour, he heard in the voice of a nice woman he had had steak and enchiladas with (or what did they have?) in a bedroom suburb of Albuquerque hard by Sandia Mount, calling to say she’s in New York, has to talk to him, she was supposed to be joined by Ray Vigil (remember?), she had to see Mayn, not talk on the phone — look it wasn’t possible to put down (put up?) a mountain overnight, was it? whose mineral "bank" could make anyone near it think it had always been there, and listen, a man who disturbed her but maybe wasn’t crazy had told her that Jim Mayn’s mother had disappeared into the ocean but his grandmother had stood at the memorial marker in the family cemetery plot and said there was something real there and a person had phoned the cemetery from New York to ask if burial had taken place, and the woman from Albuquerque her voice quiet with chill not privacy thought it all might mean nothing against this Spence’s allegation that she and Mayn’s daughter whom she did not know, if not Mayn himself, could be involved in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something she heard Spence call National Technical Means Capability for verifying placements of missiles — but… she had come to New York to talk to Jim about partly this mountain perhaps though she had not heard about it till she got here and of course didn’t believe it but also a strange thing she had heard in Farmington, a west-east nightmare for environmentalists, this mountain minerally capable of making people believe it. They would talk tomorrow, she said, as if it wouldn’t be now. Her firmness brought them full circle but it wasn’t the same spot, and looking over the edge of the phone or the circle, recalling her curly, dark-blond hair and a quick smile in the midst of fact and dedication still hoping she could save part of a landscape from being darkly stripped by some epic modulus but to store that landscape no more than the windmill prior to the giant electronic pylons of Wyoming stored wind for current elsewhere, he remembers her given name Dina like it meant something and despite her having just said her surname he can’t hold it in his mind until he thinks of once itemizing for his daughter a bleached beer can next to a candy wrapper in the desert brush at his feet when he stood contemplating Ship Rock while the Four Corners plume and gasification of cheap surface coal escape him, and thinks of another person a bearded son of two opera stars who changed his name to West which amused his bearded sometime-earringed father and upset and haunted his mother, she told Mayn. Dina West. Dina West. Spence had phoned her. Which meant he had known she was here, and where. Which meant he knew o/her. Which in itself proved for some minutes of this year of 1977 to be so tiresomely credible that Mayn could go back and bury himself in some New Mexico town with one broad street, a desert’s exit and entrance, and drive a new pickup truck and wear dark glasses and pump gas obscurely for the rest of his life. Dina West.

He had told a couple of things to a nice neighbor named Norma one night shortly before Spence’s name entered her ear, touched (and probably lowered) her consciousness (itself less "raised" by the woman Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops than reassured by the stories of other women and the gentleness that let the heart speak for variety more than bitterness, at least to Norma, who made Mayn think maybe his own wife could have been helped in workshops like these though he still did not understand why they had relinquished each other); and Norma conveyed to him some of this gentleness, and while deep rainless thunder-pockets cracked the long clefts of Manhattan (which would have been the name for New York if Mayn had had a say) he told Norma that the woman who had been neither Mom nor Mama, yet Mother, and his, had told him to go away, to become himself, and then she was the one to go, and that way of putting it was the mystery, not what’d happened. Norma did not dispute this. The advice, she pointed out, was still good. But, she heard Jim (this nice, only moderately articulate-seeming, modestly macho man) muse humorously, his mother had taken her own advice, which people didn’t always do. But what was the trouble? asked Norma — that Sarah was s’posed to let him go ahead first and do what she after all had said he was s’posed to do? Norma liked Jim more than a little, and whatever it was was gladly unspoken. He tells her that clouds heal the air. She likes that, but she wants to ask him what he’s feeling.

"You know where I heard that?" he said, and then, "Why I think I said that myself, that clouds heal the air. Almost unprintable."

Norma said Grace Kimball for all the enmity she laughingly bore men would say maybe Mayn’s mother listened to the good advice she was giving her son — a man — and one day decided to—

"— She wasn’t well," he said.

She waited.

"Go on and say it. It’s O.K."

"Decided to take some of it for herself."

"You don’t know," he said, unable to tell her, but feeling passion staggering stagy through his heart, the self-pity of cloaked melodrama.

He knew Norma wanted to ask, What happened with her? To leave a husband, two boys, a home, her things! He waited, for a time, to speak, and knew in his shadowy sense of immediate future time that he would have the chance, and saw for the first time that this sense meant he cared about her. He wanted to know, Did Norma ever have people she’d been getting ready all her life to see?

"Well, you.’9

He didn’t mean himself!

"You mean you look forward to knowing them?"

He guessed he meant that.

"No you didn’t," she said. But she didn’t press him. She said she didn’t buy all of Grace Kimball, her best traits were warmth and intuition that gave her listening a power of itself — though she was supposed to have had enormous influence on dozens of women breaking up relationships — no, that was putting it clumsily, but… the workshop did get heavy, you know dogmatic — inner-clean, clean-break, get rid of all that furniture, honey — but Grace you know was still in the place she had lived with her husband in, though so what? but the workshop’s too supportive, so much womanness you sometimes aren’t sure it’s old-time female, but Grace she liked, she had such a lot of bounce in her, she put her hand on your wrist rather than put you down — a beggar on the street with a brown paper bag over his head with eyes, a crazy old lady Grace told her of, some bum she’ll stop as if she’s barefoot too, give him a buck, tell him about A.A., she sees things so simply but what she says about men and history gives her all this preachy power and influence but when she uses it in all the talking she does (which includes putting down words, words!) it’s humor and a little-girl ("little-w^m^m"?!) changeableness breaking habit patterns (being constantly her funny, bumptious self. .) that is left with you like some good medicine that hasn’t anything to do with power and living-room politics, well Jim knew what she meant, didn’t he? Norma asked— Grace always meeting the most ungodly people, you know what I mean—