Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Because there had to be some use in my having had a brief horrendous affair with a young German writer who wrote obliquely about New York City, taking liberties with the street geography on the north margin of the Pan American Building, but spoke to me unforgettable lines of German poetry as courteously in translation as generous toward the English translators; amazingly generous, if you think about it. Meanwhile, Maureen told me that I should not put myself down calling my talk confused except that sometimes I did not answer the question with the information asked for, which was partly not Sharing (I capitalize it in my mind), and partly not loving myself enough to keep my attention on the thing asked for.

But once I found in a scrap of diary of Maureen’s those very lines written as prose and ascribed admiringly to me, so that I would have added what "happens" next except I would have gained only the honesty of admitting I’d been here reading her stuff, which was mostly second-hand from her beloved workshop Leader who had changed Maureen from a buxom Miss America catatonically walking through boyfriends and boozy hotel clubs with dark rustling dance floors to anyway someone who was physically a marvel and mentally at least determined to save herself, if side by side with her Leader, who was herself changing before my eyes though I could never easily speak of that woman to Maureen — except admiringly.

I have written down what she looked like, and my words are surprisingly good, though no more worth recalling than a hundred details attended to in the course of a week administering a hospital, at least a vital part of its work, going round in circles yet despite the relation of nurse to doctor a strong feminist fiber there in the strength of the women, so many women, working there, even if too often administering dubious medications prescribed as simply as a springy intern-priest accepts his relation to a tough, middle-aged nurse-nun — nephew to aunt in the ongoing patriarchy.

Maureen was definitely beautiful in the clothes she made for herself— right down to a lovely pale suede suit (almost western) and linen shirts sewn so invisibly you could find the patterns of that instinctive knowledge in the thoughtfulness of Maureen’s hands touching yours or folding together to brace herself when she did a magical headstand that made the room all except me fall away, the walls opening but not into the other apartments of the building.

Her face, even when some blood beneath it paled, could carry forth saffron perfume of color, half faintly tanned, half flowering coral, half in turn recalling childish freckles that might have begun beneath the light of one summer’s sun but scarcely took hold. The eyes were like the cheekbones, don’t ask me how, some width of hope and freshness stunned toward a fixity of purpose adopted from outside herself. Tall, narrow, leaner and leaner, with the softest wide mouth and the most dynamically drawn feet, arched inward and upward, toes somewhat spaced as if she went barefoot, and she would ask, actually, to have her big toe rubbed and rubbed in a circular motion and reported, once, that her model and guide and Leader used other people’s big toes to give herself an orgasm.

I have written down what Maureen looked like. Her eyes were brown with blue flecks; her hair brown, never dyed like that of her Leader, but for months shorn to the bone so it reminded me not of someone getting into touch with a living and beautiful head but of a model I saw strolling the autumn streets of Napoleon’s birthplace in Corsica totally bald with, evidently, a lover, who looked like a male model, yet in that sculptured skull a victim and later I thought "a victim of the century" no less.

Maureen said, "Power," when I asked her what she wanted. Power over whom, I asked — over which Indians? I asked, cornily remembering her Peace Corps work and her trips back to the Southwest where she had once been— "once"? — an army child and might speak now of how the padres had practically halved the population of the Pueblo Indians by bringing in measles, no wonder they needed those mission churches to get those poor, measles-ridden, smallpoxed native Americans in out of that powerful light.

I knew Maureen when she worked for a bank, a giant bank, the bank (if such a structure has a name) (Oh Luce, you’re living in your head again!) (Oh God Maureen—) (Oh Goddess, Luce, O.K.?) (O.K., oh Goddess, Maureen, you’re the one living inside your head, I’m just a person) (Oh, there you go again, Luce, saying "just" to minimize yourself). And her immediate superior, soon after she was promoted to a position of considerable responsibility for handling Eurodollar accounts, called her in to "discuss" the garlic smell that came like smoke signals all morning from her breath. Garlic therapy, garlic therapy, and did you read about the old nut whose five-mornings-a-week bus driver wouldn’t take him any more though then he sued the company, it was in New Jersey, so it isn’t just women.

And in not quitting for twelve more months Maureen later said she had not been in touch with her anger (I smiled) or with the fascist implications of (Listen, dear, the garlic is Good, but your problem is, you’re not high enough up in the bank and probably not even a man could ever be that high) (You’re doing a smoke-screen number on me, Luce, did you know that?) (No, honey, you got to get up into the abstract, that’s the echelon where garlic don’t matter no more) but a tear came into my eye because I thought, People matter, and the clients matter even if they turn away and don’t dig the odor of garlic because their nosebuds have spent too long in the smokehouse and never felt deep earthsmoke, and Maureen matters, Maureen matters.

She was the girl, the woman, I had stood with coming up in the elevator more than once — months in fact before meeting her (for such is the intimacy of apartment houses) — hearing the elevator coming apart until the current super told me one day not to worry, it was the slack in the cables rattling. But that day it rattled like wind in a house and Maureen, whose name I didn’t know, had a spray of baby’s breath in a cone of green paper in one hand, a knapsack on her back, an odd sweet smell like a foreign food that could never go bad — and I said, "Baby’s breath, aren’t they?" and Maureen smiled like a Midwestern girl and nodded but didn’t say anything, perhaps feeling me too close or finding nothing in the way of words demanded of her at that instant. Baby’s breath delicate flourish of snowdrop flowers.

I wanted to hold her, just as at later times I wanted to hold her down or shut her up — oh damn me, did she really talk much except in dogmatic speeches at intervals? And later I wanted to hold her back, because she followed her beloved Leader but always went too far. To where she wasn’t following her beloved Leader any more, but herself, however you do that. Yet still purchased baby’s breath, for that day in the elevator while she was going to see her beloved guide she was bearing those flowers for herself as well.

Later I heard that a small group of workshop friends, initiates, some strong hilarious resourceful women, who had long since seen that complaining in words establishes a historical record that can stand in place of doing something, planned a fairytale game of sorts which would subject the next man who entered that famous apartment to rape—"light rape," but overwhelming and thorough but "good" rape.

I did not ask what this would amount to, because I saw the apartment in question visited for so many hours a day of every week by the friends of the Leader. This person ran around like a child doing somersaults usually with nothing on, listened like the most shrewdly attentive mother to the person behind the story, and made tea but had long since stopped making meals and bringing them out of that kitchen into her large furnitureless salon.