Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He had not known that he ever "thought it wasn’t" — and he was grateful to hear — in a way about power. And felt Norma had something more to say.

What had Mayga had to say at the end (this end)? Something he had felt almost not withheld. Her few notes about the future in a notebook in front of her on the bar. Random material last seen there, always with a surfacing capability, the mortal matter miscellaneous of Jim Mayn’s extended family so near-flung we could take responsibility for Larry and not go far wrong.

He was about to say to Norma, "You find yourself in other people," but it sounded stupid in advance though he knew Norma would have appreciated it. He said, "I gather my grandmother’s old yarns got into your workshop."

"I wasn’t there that time," said Norma; "but Grace said Clara, the wife you know of that exiled Chilean economist, came out of herself a little and got pissed off."

"What about? — the medicine man that dies and becomes a cloud for a time?"

"You must have been talking to Lincoln. No; calling a Navajo chief’s son a prince and having him follow a white girl like that and lose his pistol."

"They had quite original weather in those days," said Mayn.

During these few days of 1977 when all that had been started threatened to slide into action, Mayn did not ask his daughter her reported version of how the Navajo Prince had ended. (And were there princes among the Navajo? He had never been one of your know-it-all newspapermen.) Yet — perhaps because he hadn’t worked out lately on the Nautilus machines sitting back straining into the mirrored distance, strapped in next to a well-known left-fielder who visited the city in the off-season to buy art — Mayn felt in his actual bones a gap between invented events he was familiar with and some sterner presence shadowing him: a gap between on the one hand such acts once issuing from the Statue in the aging harbor as that unconvincing metamorphosis of the Navajo Prince into the easternmost Thunder Dreamer ever seen, though Thunder Dreamer in but one or two respects, at his critical juncture with the Princess’s faithful admirer Harflex, a metamorphosis due to the Prince’s having ingested a collossal dollop of the uniquely low noctilucent cloud somewhere between Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ford (or Fjord) of Choor, and on the other hand, some deflected intelligence that, possibly his own once, became now some sterner presence or surveillance — his daughter, who he had suddenly heard from his son had for all she said about operating by telephone, set out to be a writer; his wife, who he’d heard from Flick was getting married to the New Hampshire gent with the permanent tan; Mayn’s own girlfriend Jean, who (one) overnight switched from science journalism to science itself — nutritional biochemistry and global agriculture, a huge career decision at twenty-nine, that she said (and he couldn’t see it) had come to her four years ago in a motel near Cape Kennedy because of Jim, she laughed that it was while they were lying in bed digesting three dozen local oysters consumed at Captain Billy’s, a preparation for a disappointing press conference and a wonderful walk on the beach where there had been no shells but many stars; and beyond Flick, Joy, and Jean, and underneath every stone, that family less Spence, who, on the night Albuquerque’s Dina West called from a New York hotel, and the Chilean economist’s research aide Amy was absent without keys from her apartment, and Larry who had forgotten to press his button entering the elevator found on emerging at his floor at two in the morning that well-known opera singer famously dressed up like a Mexican and her auburn hair built upwards like a hunk of furniture kissing a tall dark man in a blue pinstripe suit and very expensive real-silver-tooled black western boots, goaded Mayn to get somewhere before Spence did: for Spence all activities so long as the dollar flag was up, or, if the mind is a taxi, down, were as equal as distances our bent head unleashes or compacts squaring change with the obstacles to grasping it: so Mayn, who thought he had never dreamed and had been told by Mayga that if he could only, well, recall his dreams, he would not have to lose any sleep over his life, seemed to find his way from his mother’s indispositions in the forties when she was steadily departing yet never seen to do more than be absent in another form: to Grace Kimball’s 1977 apartment at a time she convened the growing Body-Self: to 1965, when a frail, failing grandfather reported how mad Margie used to get at Jimmy and how they became friends again and Jim was the one who came up with the idea that because of shifting collaborations on, for example, territorial and shared weathers, the Hermit of New York and the six-hundred-year-old retired Anasazi healer might have been one and the same (but no): to 1950, when Margaret could not visit him in Pennsylvania where he was in college because she was sick, she had these lumps in her intestines or something, so he came to see her on an impulse on a weekday, she didn’t look so good, puffy along the cheekbone like his Boston aunt who drank only during the day, and Margaret was also a little weary in the focus of her eyes’ color, but able to love Jim and be irritated by him, both of them arrested and at rest, he, half-proud of stupidly jamming and badly spraining his wrist boxing, needed a day off ("What do you mean you needed a day off, for heaven sake?" his grandmother snorted) and so had cut a class where he’d just gotten a B-plus on the midterm, and angry and anxious at having left without telling his girlfriend, who had quite a temper, to put it mildly, as he told Margaret grimly, and he’d like to throttle her. His grandmother listened to him for a moment, so alone and established in her sunny bedroom that the rest of the house felt entirely contained in Jim’s grandfather, who had gone to the post office and come back and was downstairs somewhere, not here where the sun’s light polished the brass of the walnut highboy, and boughs with secret early buds on them swayed in the wind coasting a roof of dark shingles, and though she said she was tired having written a dozen letters in the last three, four days Margaret did not mention his not having written her a card in the hospital though it was a month ago now, the hated hospital, and she had never been in one as a patient before and felt that the purpose of New York was to go to Schumacher’s to buy material or to Rockefeller Center to sit in the ice-side restaurant and have clam chowder and grilled-cheese sandwiches and a glass of dry sherry, and so Jim had had to find out from his grandfather, whom he didn’t have to ask when Alexander phoned to say he wasn’t going to let Margie travel, that her operation had been exploratory, what they called "stretching," and he was more upset than she that she had to go back and have a second, because she absolutely wouldn’t.

"If she has a temper, enjoy it now while you can," said Margaret. "Don’t put it off," she said, and then shaking her head went into hoots of laughter like the "Hoo-hoo" with which she and her cousin but never Jim’s mother entered a friendly house without ringing the bell—"No; my gracious, don’t put it off," as if to say, I’m sure you never do—"but it wasn’t just that one class you cut today and don’t you have class Friday?"

And while they discussed such things that had all been discussed at Christmastime as President Truman, who would never fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes but wasn’t trying to, thank goodness, though Jim’s girl’s father thought Harry couldn’t help being an improvement — and Margaret said she had to like a man who bellyached in public about having to be two people, President and an ordinary human being, man, husband, and father, and she and Jim discussed whether the Washington music critic Hume would need a new nose ‘f he ever met Margaret Truman’s dad, who had promised he would, and whether the war in Korea would be done with by the time Jim graduated because at least we had a man with experience in General MacArthur running things, although his mother had run him, and Margaret questioned the dark glasses, but would Truman actually give MacArthur the atomic bomb to use as he had said he would? — no, he would loan it to him — while Jim’s Poly Sci professor got half the class mad for saying the aim of a political party is to get elected. .