Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Which doesn’t begin to explain why James Mayn would go so far as to really feel his periodic conviction so uncharacteristically broached to the woman Mayga that he is in the future, the largely humdrum if optically violent future, and presents himself to the less economical present like a shade cast back upon a past not yet distinct, though give the man credit he is at one with the diva Luisa quoted in Celebrity Aura as wanting to change her shadow, quiero mudar de sombra, minus her footnote that the words are not hers.

There is, we admit, one discrete break in that shadow of Mayn’s, a gap shaped sometimes like a gnomon parallelogram, ofttimes like a cleft that later Mayn might wonder if the Hermit-Inventor had ever tried to explain in responsible scientific terms; a gap, though, in this shadow as if light or some body of it cast its counter- or non-shadow across the shadow’s effort of warning or survival or understanding emanating we thought from Mayn but possibly a vision he a mere one among others gladly enters into. But that gap is for one thing our amazement at how we could get here without grasping the concrete sources in our collective childhood as if we had had to forget them to get ahead — in order, say, to figure how to inject weather into a "weath-erless" place without ruining everything, balance of payments, bonfires in our souls, constant climate. The Hermit-Inventor could not always believe that lava from a volcano to the west was fundamentally blood of the great giant killed by the Hero Twins a very long time ago. But the inference he had made between volcanic ash up-ploded into cloud layers and cloud piles and high-altitude half-invisible colloids and, on the far hand, wind transport gave him pause on his way home, exiled upon the Prince’s disastrous seduction by the Princess away from his people, which coincided with the Anasazi’s death, which had very little impact on the Navajo — not because of ancient resentments against the people they had displaced or even wronged by the inevitable momenta of progress or accident of irrigational habits, but because of the Anasazi’s low, low profile so low that when Mena the Fuegian zoologist had doubled the Moon upon the pistol that Alexander took off the mantel that spring of ‘46 when Margaret was in New York for the death of the Hermit her friend (not because Alexander expected Ira Lee to avenge his "massacre" in the flower bed by simple theft but because he had derived from the two distinct diary volumes one new idea of where the pistol had been before Chapultepec) Mena who brushed her southern teeth with juniper at first experienced nothing peering into the ancient healer’s high cell sixty to a hundred feet up a laddered cliff (her forehead bound with yucca thongs) except a smell of feathers and untreated ammonia and Sonora bread sculpture, the goodness of the ancient baked dough sealed in with shellac so that shapes of weather goddess or of mandala, of painted house or animal seem to hold the hand-ground grain of the bread’s potential.

A profile as low as Mayn’s, who might long since have found himself far-sightedly gunning a hired late-model along the early, smokier stretch of the Jersey Turnpike rushing to unearth Marion Hugo’s diaries to put together some phenomenon in volume one with a known design drawn into the end of volume two, if he hadn’t had better grist for his attention whether it was his work or his unestranged but combative daughter, her welfare, her work, her voice now often machined from the nation’s capital yet in talk with her father taken more seriously than he let her know when, in the middle of reporting her and her boyfriend’s dioxin trace from Florida through Minnesota’s flumes into a west she entered after her father left, she demanded why he so coolly reported destructive strip mining and in a letter painted the great galleon of Ship Rock into the picture, including relations between women and men throwing in the Gemini astronauts and a taint of archaeology, when a few miles beyond the Rock on the other side Indian miners used by the government to mine uranium wheeze out their half life with lung fibrosis caused by radioactive particles which like asbestos in New Jersey and statistics which strive to outdo themselves will live on after their human sacrifices to the Great Spirit are gone.

Irrelevant to the Four Corners, the father said bluntly.

But, without time to check out Where and How that voice comes his way only What it says, O.K. if you describe a thing you are also responsible for it according to Indian common law by which the Hermit-Inventor was personally exiled from the site of the Navajo Prince’s departure, whereas now Mayn-pere learns you are responsible for it if you don’t describe it. Which is of course good Anglo law in the case of headless bicyclists (left their helmet at home with built-in head) or unidentified vehicle upside down on sidewalk (wheels won’t stop turning so you can’t get close), i.e., accidents you pass by or over and do not report. But the Four Corners energy problem (read project, read diverge, read dig, read Lurgi transformation, read matter, read people) is One Thing, New Mexico, while the expenditure of Indian miners at Red Rock is Another Horse, Arizona, and you take the making of history one buck at a time.

And he feels Spence’s long, intimate voice printing some irreversible code on his daughter’s remote voice though she would not give him the time of day or on her answering tape ask for it: until Mayn has found growing relations someone else likely has cached inside him overflowing from him or into him he may never put into words sticking with the trouble he’s already got while toying with what it would feel like to be his daughter Flick, who when he left the marriage said extreme words he shrugged off until Norma quoted them back to him from a woman in her workshop who asked her parents while they were arguing at dinner, "Why did you bother to have me?" whereupon the husband exclaimed, "We didnt ‘bother’ ": Mayn felt more securely what it would be like to be getting over a concussion diagnosed a couple of days late but updated from the ripped self of an Indian halfback ploughed under Margaret’s topsoil to the skull of a modestly intelligent average-hard-working newsman who once vowed to his departing Pearl Myles he would never go into journalism it was too much in the family, and can now thirty years later feel the bones of his head after a rough night of running around from the Chilean’s foundation to Dina’s hotel to a couple of operatic apartments to a street corner near Penn Station connected by pay phone to a Puerto Rican corner far uptown coincidentally near the Museum of the American Indian dreaming through the City’s rebuff of larger quarters at the other end of the Island of Hills looking out at the harbor and its fixed and moving lights — coming together headache-wise so he suddenly dunno if his caring for his daughter and his son (but it’s Flick who’s been connected by the correspondent-carpenter Lincoln, whose voice he now knows he has heard before and on a machine, to Spence) totally shrouds three figureheads, the Mayga, the Sarah, and the Navajo Prince fixing on each other’s relative motion approaching each other if not him on rough-shod courses of disappearance, for the Navajo Prince still armed with the Colt revolver acquired from the late healer was last seen running up and down inside the great Statue in the aging harbor having seen him pass as he rose up the winding metal stairway only a sweet mist, a smoke of summer humidity escaped from the city, smelling though of those blue berries he had studied the uses of, for which he was also known by the Navajo name of the ceremonial plant they grow on, the Ironwood, or, in Navajo, the Ma’iidaa’ Prince — so Mayn dunno any more, because one thing’s sure: that sonofagun Spence doesn’t work on spec but if Mayn can be threatened into seeing how these three disappearances are relations of each other and report it, then by the old, well-kept wisdom, he’s responsible for their connection which might not be worth the collateral price of being himself responsible for each individually, though those responsibilities would range so wide you would need a solution happier than Spence and simpler than that counter-Masonic rite of mingled flesh among Indians and Anglos in northern New York and central Oklahoma investigated by a President who, upon finding that actual flesh was taken from the paired participants and joined in an aromatic fire, could not believe the reports of greater and greater regeneration, and so he did not participate, although he was not well, though well enough to trace through a man of many turns, an itinerant chronicler, another man accused of having given more and more of himself to these thermal rites, first an arm, then an arm and a leg, then the fingers he had once merely joined whorl to arch with his Indian counterpart neophyte but now for the ritual moment gave up thus risking his trade of master printer — then at last entrails and, it is said, brain or parts thereof, always to be joined with kindred sections of an Indian co-celebrant, each time regenerating at a lightning speed seemingly at odds with loving intricacies of regrowth and cellular resilience instituted in shortcut form by Grace Kimball at a special session promising rebirth without pain, which was less than it gave, which was help in the form of such ordinary tales as a young black aspiring actress’s, picked up in the park by an older man teaching his granddaughter to ride a bike, or, as Norma passed on to Mayn because she could not get very far with Gordon, her own husband, Grace’s own long story of a short marriage, once-a-month pocket billiards at a tavern, the booze softening the game until at a late stage anger and despair settled them down to shots they couldn’t believe they’d made in the morning (or remember); the jerking off under the covers after he was asleep; the creeping friendship possible in a brother-sister deal that rediscovers incest in order to taboo it, till suddenly it was At Last — alone at last, she hears the addict’s words to the romance of his bride but now adapted to being single in order to double and triple and multiply herself forever, alone at last for at last she left him, but in that curious modern manner of kicking him out so he seemed to have been the one to leave, someone was waiting for him some ten month-miles away, a tough, sexy mother not just for him but for his unborn children, who will get help themselves someday — not quite Grace’s help, that night of the bland, adapted, "quick" form of the old Anglo-Indian flesh merger rite, in the much better form late in the session of the interminable good stories with which Norma repays Mayn for his — his what? his guessed-at stories, but his plants, his attention, his face, his very male, gentleman freedom from (not violence but) bad language, dirty jokes which she couldn’t imagine him remembering even at the club (like Gordon’s how do you tell if your lover is gay? answer: his cock tastes like —), but Norma’s story that sounds so close to her it might be hers, of the man who found in Open Marriage (as opposed to Closed Marriage!) a sanction for outer sex but unlike his wife, who knew the difference between feeling and above-average sex, fell in love and, in addition to concealing night after night from a small beloved child what was going down, kept from himself the right to leave the marriage like the house until… as Norma said, Mayn’s eyes seemed to have dried up into a stare so full of knowledge she found Y&rself crying, until Mayn said, "And one day the kid found out," and Norma, "Worse; the other woman became friends with the kid — it gets worse still," and Mayn, "I know," as if he were responsible — until Norma, knowing at the moment of loving him that she wasn’t going to have any affair and wasn’t going in for Open Marriage and not only because it wasn’t open while she simultaneously did not know if the "long-term" relation (read — ship) with Gordon was good enough, found words for what she felt before she knew the feeling, "You have that quality, Jim, of knowing, I mean without having to give advice and tell about yourself, and it’s strength and helpful strength, too, and don’t ever think it isn’t."