Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So Spence became formal and polite, different, as if asking her out— and she saw a buggy all painted shiny and black and gold with a Central Park horse distinguished by a large bunch of flowers between the ears, yet no future in that buggy or a dangerous future like a waterfall he for me or maybe me him — for all the world as if Spence was forgetting he’d already asked her to meet him: Had Mayn’s daughter (he wanted to know) spoken of a certain Mayga? — Mayga? — A South American woman with a round and not-at-all-bad-looking face who lost her life soon after being associated with James Mayn, who’s married, isn’t he?

Mayn hung up on her, hearing only the word "not—" then had to call back, didn’t have the number, last name, any sense of her except information he didn’t care about.

Lincoln, he laughed within himself. Oh nothing need happen. He had fallen forward into life beyond Windrow. The house phone buzzed and he did not go to speak into it, for Spence was at work in him; the layers of dirty cloud passing the Empire State tower that looked like it was falling was the atmo healing itself getting ready to "wet-clean" the air in a city where the sun’s light is easier to look right at because of — what? — he had never gotten the cause of the seasons straight in General Science although he recalled it was to do with tilting — maximum scattering of light in the line between looker and light source, you get your man-made brown haze but not your natural gray haze so the faraway ridge is made to seem less different from its sky, easier to understand than the seasons, the salt microns, the soil invisibly infinitesimally tilling the sky’s presence so if you could only see it you’re in a desert dust storm, but give me your poor man’s filter the blue haze, but you have to go to it, to Grand Canyon if Australia’s out, not even an electron micro-eye for auras can bring the blue haze to you, where the milky sky-within-a-sky draws viewpoint through semi-precious distance, opaled, to tell the truth, by billions of turps! yea turpentine, but organic natural, not combustible like the human brain’s troposphere of endless economixes.

The house phone buzzed again and the phone rang — something abstract in us won’t go away — and, seeing that in the absence of knowing what had gone on between his parents he had looked into other lives — a world of workshops helping themselves to the apple pie of change — he took the telephone on the way to the house phone and was saying, "Who is it?" while hearing the puzzled urgency of the woman Lincoln apologizing, then again apologizing ‘cause her house phone just went and she doesn’t know who it is, and he sympathetically allowed as how the doorman in his building was half the time in the deli across the street though they did not employ a doorman in the deli, the illogic of which she seemed to understand and told him she was sorry she hadn’t told him. . that in the workshop she had passed on a story she had heard from his daughter about the Navachoor Prince and his fate that Flick had figured out — she said Jim didn’t sound like his letters, though "Your daughter in this long thing you’ve probably seen doesn’t read like she talks, of course."

Cut to where he was a week ago and will be a week hence, as if he waits for what Larry comes up with. (Isn’t there at least another person all this years of stuff has been about? Margaret? Sarah? Grace Kimball!) Cut through a movie years ago containing a scene of a movie being made, with director in breeches and a second pair of breeches enclosing one of the actresses, and Jim’s friend Sam opening a crackly-wrapped Clark bar in the dark one week after Jim’s mother. . "went" (as Jeanette Many, her musicale friend, who actually believed not just in God but Jesus, said, who years later wrote Jim at an address she said she didn’t understand because it was not his wife’s to ask what was "going on" in his life, she "just" needed to know so she’d know what to pray for (read pry; just read on to the "Fondly" at letter’s end)) — cut to the Bronx Puerto Rican woman wonderfully at rest who looks at your aura which is what you said you came for, recommended (you say) by the lady Clara, who is deeply troubled but it’s only partly events in Chile (you add, as if you’re a friend), but the broad-shouldered, heavily rouged queen of a vision sees what you said you paid to ask about even if she’s declining to discuss that other client Clara whose husband is mixed up in an intrigue at the prison with the man whom Foley knows less about than his words are able to say, yes Hortensa, here beside the thunderous traffic of the Grand Concourse in a furnished but uncarpeted parlor with the freshest sunlight everywhere so you must be sharp to see an aura, tells Mayn his aura gets denser, like breath that as it speeds up finds more and more energy instead of less, but it has a limit though that limit hasn’t been reached and not only isn’t dependent on who else is reacting to him, it depends on his not being touched by that — but he has been in the future (she says) too long yielding only a shadow here and now, and his aura is of great force waiting, waiting, the light around the torso give waves no less, a person trying to get back into you, she’s claiming—

Cut, past her name, which is coincidentally also that of a guy in prison Foley knew; past Spence; but, though snubbed at bar’s end, it was Spence who did the leaving, if only for a few minutes to ring up a (Kontac: new Russian, poss. borrowed fr. Amer. Eng.); cut fast to a light plane, but not Mayn’s that landed in Spence’s wake and yielded a wingtip vortex-turbulence formula in the form of a dumb grin, passenger-to-pilot, instead the plane the boy-man Jim nev6r saw nor could have looked for except its toy remains: the one that came in like an exchange for Sarah almost to the day, in August ‘45, driven by mind, by wind, some sea-to-land meteorologic reconnaissance? air-to-earth purpose (do not read porpoise-quoia) —and the man who was surf-casting saw it out there in front of his arched rod, saw it bank sharply, come round, turn ninety degrees plus, and aim at the land on a course that seemed to fix on a house it wanted, not an empty house that time of year but under renovation, the occupants doing most of the work — and at the last segundo the small aircraft aborted the house mission and lowered its sights, reeled in by could-be the God whose "Divine Wind" means Kamikaze, and hit the beach at around six a.m., the dawn coming down this time and not like thunder and hardly burning. It was the day after Sarah "went," and Pearl Myles asked Jim if his family knew the man, a breakfast-food heir and sportsman-diabetic who had a medical degree but had never practiced. Jim didn’t know the man, but his father asked him what Miss Myles had wanted to know; at school, Sam’s fat brother, always on the move within some larger laziness of nonchalance or rest, casually reported that "Pearl" had bothered the owner of "the" suicide boat and that that was why she was quitting — she was being fired because she was asking questions, according to Fulkerand, about a deceased citizen of the town of Windrow. But Jim never knew. But why didn’t he ask {per quoit pran-quaia)? Too much else going on? But what?

We’d say, today, Heavy. Ever lose your mother in mid-o’bit? Jeanette Many volunteered that it was just her view but she for one would not talk about the Miss Myles matter; Mr. Winekoop, who underneath it all including his excellent, sporty clothes, didn’t "shiv a git," told Brad and Jim that Pearl Myles had had a run-in with the after all very-peculiar-looking principal over a range of activities that had a generally extracurricular tone and had kept answering, People matter, people matter. Jim got stuck. Never told a soul. Stayed in his head ready-formulated. (What? An idea? Himself?)