Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

If you are moving (you take on faith) but apparently not forward (as into the sea) and not backward (like the hairy man on the rubberized, banked running track at the gym who jogs backward half a mile for every mile forward), maybe you are moving sideways, for if life is an education it must be to find out what you are already doing because can’t avoid in some way Doing. Lateral transfer? he echoed his daughter in the nation’s capital last month: why "lateral transfer" used to be what the other wire service did a lot of, and now (for how did she, his daughter, know the term?) seems ancient and empty (but why is ancient empty?) like going back into an apartment once lived in and trying it and moving out again for many months and then trying it as a pied a terre and then at last moving in.

The rented drive up from Washington into New Jersey to visit the proverbial parent, drive capped now by that amplified flight through the tunnel, bright, night-tiled tunnel cutting itself not so transparently as his daydream (his only type of dream) through the stripes of mud and continental drift and subsiding sedimental trough — terms, terms, terms — he knows where to find them when that’s where his inquiry into big dollars and cents takes him: through structure created (they say of the Appalachians west) by drainage patterns— but that last run through the tunnel after layers of foreboding recollection compacted into the pavement his tires knew in advance (and they’re not his tires, they’re rented) from Washington to Windrow to New York, from Washington to Windrow where he stopped to visit his father and go through a turpentine-insulated library of books in the basement, and felt followed by a waiting automobile that made him feel he should make some other stop/visit in Windrow before leaving, that is, so the car could follow him there, for how can you be followed if you are not moving? (easy, easy) — but the car disappeared into an intersection as if reminded of the tangle of intrigue waiting like potential for him or anyone in New York where he had been yesterday, left for Connecticut, flew to Pennsylvania then to the nation’s capital thence equally to Windrow thence here to a tunnel bound toward New York where his daughter, who worked in Washington but had been in New York the night before last and to whom he had written a letter that had later been stolen from the wastebasket in his apartment that had once been the apartment he and she and her mother and her brother had lived in, had said unless the mails as usual had screwed up a work of writing awaited him composed to get stuff out of her system but she would be interested to know, you know, what he thought of it and don’t take it too seriously though she hadn’t taken many liberties with the facts, which he now felt were what he drove through in order to at last act as if the threatening system a man named Spence could not take entire credit for would have to be granted a force if not a reality he might be able to take some blame for while inclined to conspire on behalf of — while granting that even if the life of earning a living and totting corporate profit and marital division leading to new lives capable of being imagined parallel and a women’s bank attracting considerable deposits from a male insurance company and the death of babies through marketable toxins as viable as the warmth of mother love and the practical importance of harnessing (read for God’s sake some fresher word, like utilizing) so-called passive wind power across the pampas of America and other solid (routine if not always reportable) facts of the here-and-now didn’t answer satisfactorily whether conspiratorial sabotage stripped the insulation from a wire to cause the Apollo i capsule to go up (ouch) in flames — still, he knew in the sudden midst of "needing" (as if carsick or bladder-full) to stop right here in the tunnel to phone his father "Emergency" (but no phones here except for authorities so phone him in your head, you can do it if you’ll just remember what that voice or two he sure hopes we all share can tell him he already remembers) and thank his father for the afternoon they had because he and his father haven’t been exactly close for (literally) all these years.

He pulled away up the trough of the tunnel exit and woke his passenger with thanks in his humorous heart for all the lore that had not so much stood in their way from Windrow to New York as been it. He asked the gaunt, weathered man if on this professional occasion the contract was not just the graves in Windrow but the driver-host coincidentally met; and the man assured him that O.K. the universe ran on cause-effect but, through some frame of curve he didn’t really understand, it held to a convergence law that he grasped no better than he grasped his Trace-Windowhood, the margin was always turning us to it like a perfectly serviceable center.

"You haven’t foreseen everything that’s going to happen now, have you?" said the man with respectful intimacy as he reached back for his pack.

"I keep getting hit on the cheekbone," said Mayn. "I’ve got to do something about it."

The hitch-hiker told him a phone number. Mayn said he thought he knew it; the hitch-hiker smiled: "Live long enough," he said, and Mayn feared for his daughter while haunted by unknown pages written by her for his eyes, waiting for him when he got home he felt sure, promising him some responsibility he had missed somewhere.

It caught him under the eye before he could pull away bang on the cheekbone, and the imprint rang right into next week and the days ahead, until he thought others had always been able to hear this sound in his body. This sound in your body like thought control, though whose thought? For one day waking up in an apartment you hadn’t lived in in years, the thing that was going to hit you came like a day dreamt memory. Her hand. Your cheekbone.

But wait. The hand that struck didn’t touch the cheekbone.

The microphone came in between and had no business being in that place.

Men and women cops in and out of uniform have been coming and going in the official hallway, a broad-shouldered blonde in jeans sitting on a desk so she’s distinct in every way from the black women laughing at their typewriters, smoking on the phone. Efrain, whose absence from his sister’s when Mayn phoned seemed filled by the address of the stationhouse the sister was willing to give Mayn, isn’t here either. Mayn’s met one of the detectives at a law-school dinner he got invited to by a tennis partner and later Mayn gave the detective two tickets to a hockey game, no a basketball game, no reason to expect to run into him here tonight, which both of them take for granted, the man with a beard now, classier glasses, the same measured manner of a much bigger man than he physically is, lighting a pipe and talking to no one.

Then the woman, Puerto Rican, no, Cuban, rushes in from the street and all the cops and the two women cops, the blonde and a Hispanic who’s in uniform, seem stopped and you feel the width of the hall, the check-in table before you get to the high counter, the width of the place more than its length, and the noise widening as the man with the video unit turns and turns and targets. The woman, the mother of the lost boy, has a young red-haired cop with her, a step behind her, a young, mustachioed, happy-type-of-fellow. And a step behind him and a head shorter comes another Hispanic who’s with her — square-browed, stubble-jawed, slender, tired relative, her brother, brother-in-law, cousin, friend in the night.

So here’s the TV newsman next to you with that nose and skin — Indian? Eskimo? — pushing a mike at her and nobody stopping him, and she’s trying to get through the hallway to the end. To what’s the end on the other side of the glass-paneled door. Blindly you recall your own children climated by the places you used to provide for them, your son the day you lost him on the subway, he was five — you shake hands with the detective, as he comes by, but you don’t mention your son. And here’s the TV newsman — man made of news — pushing a mike at the Cuban woman and her wide eyes are fixed on the far end of this official hallway but jump to this mike with a speed like the speed of — landscape. Which is what flies into mind as a shadow flies at you, at Mayn. But you brought the landscape with you and you didn’t fly, you came by hired car, hardly stopping to phone, and you didn’t go home first, you drove here so it felt like coming past traffic lights and more traffic lights on foot, not flying.