Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Ur?" asked Donald, and Larry explained, while envisioning with some happiness or other the Chinese woman seen the night he and a tight-lipped Mayn had gone in search of Amy at the foundation ("Nice space here," Donald indicated the apartment as a whole) and Jim when they were on their way downtown later gave Larry a five-dollar bill when he left the cab. But now Larry hardly heard himself answer like homework the "Ur" query, for he and Donald had not necessarily stopped discussing the heart, and a beatless, perhaps timeless measure came to him and was gone as if it had thought better of him! — md he reported that Mayn had told of a lighting designer-dealer whose girlfriend had had four miscarriages and had been told by her doctor that now she was again with child she would have to take it super-easy virtually like a flat-on-her-back invalid, and the man, who had once been Jim’s wife’s employer (when she had been, obviously, Jim’s wife) had actually seen the thumb-size fetus, and the fetus (if you want to hear the news) was all heart, and he talked to it and hoped it would know his loving voice when it came out; but Larry could tell that other parts of the body could dream, so why not a heart?

This was Larry’s first new friendship since his parents had split up— hey, he had just come out and said that! to himself, that is — yes, first since his parents had split up, launching him into a Manhattan apartment with his dad, while his mother and her friend lived on the Island (whom Larry wanted to talk to Donald about but he was shy about betraying his mother and also didn’t really know much on the new road of their life— their life? their life? — which was in the house in Long Island where Larry grew up. Donald pointed out that your feet and arms could go to sleep, so presumably they could dream. They laughed and Larry said there was some vino in the fridge. Donald asked if there was a vacuum handy and Lar’ said he’d been cleaning house when D.D. arrived. Good, said D.D. Yeah, said Lar’, what did he need it for? His typewriter needed a vacuum, said Donald, tapping his pack beside him on the floor. Larry felt that Donald liked taking off his backpack with its twenty-degrees-below-freezing down bag rolled on top, and putting it back on. Donald was rural-oriented but also, he said, urban-oriented; and Larry could see he liked being on the move. Larry had not been reaching for the phone to dial anyone when Donald Dooley had rung from the lobby to say that he was here, unexpectedly, and he would like to come up (because D.D. made statements more than asked questions).

Out by the elevator, there was a giant dark-orange couch left by the opera singer Ford North ("Please call me Ford, won’t you?"), and it had tasseled cushions and had been arrested there in the public hall on its way out of the building, perhaps to a new apartment, but it hadn’t moved in three or four days, and anybody could steer around it or could sit on it, for example the liquor deliveryman, while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to Larry too small for the couch even if they took the roof off; and this little guy Ford’s friend with the big eyes and a huge charge of dark-haired energy sat there waiting for the elevator or something like Napoleon on hold, but he had had a fight with Ford North, and Larry had learned from Grace that this strange little dancer-type gay guy who wrote music was probably going to be in her first Men’s (Nude) Workshop. And if Larry had any outside obstacles (not his own) to dropping all this obstacle (well, not course, but) hunt, he had no objections to their leaving him (alone, that is — that is, alone with his new-type friends). So Larry knew that there was a lot going down, but he had not been inclined to reach for the phone (like, to call Mayn, who was back). Mayn had gone to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Washington at a hell of a time, when Amy had been missing and Larry had had an insinuating call from a son of a bitch who asked if Larry had the phone number where Mayn’s daughter was staying, and Larry had had a dumb inkling, like a gentle dopy looping boomerang that came back to him, that the caller already knew the phone number.

The new plug-in instrument (in addition to the kitchen wall-phone) seldom rang, but when it did, it felt in its off-key tinkle like the middle of the night: which it lately had been, for his mother Susan phoned him once at midnight, he told Donald — and once at three-seventeen a.m. in red on his clock radio — in tears, wondering how Larry was (so he said, Are you awake? the very words Amy had said when she called to ask when Mayn was coming back and if Larry knew if Mayn knew this guy Spence and a messenger named Gustave part of a strange group of retarded messengers Spence was said to employ in connection with a warehouse-theater over on the West Side) — Sue’s call and her words and her tears were light years from that Larry’s gotta get laid crap in front of other people, Grace Kimball’s friends many like healthy-looking TV-commercial actors/actresses, none into marriage though some still in it, lots of eye-contact friendliness boo-buoying up a confidence training itself by supporting others-others-others, some of these folk in training to see who can be most trim-line, most "up," most free of habit patterns but confusing when they called work "addiction" and love likewise, and listen, quaaludes were definitely not the same thing and less like love than like heroin, O.K.? so Larry held to his small corner of history, of conviction, surprised that never in the dark of her Major Life Change (though Marv had always done dishes, some cooking, shopped for food, bartered money for forage after hunting down the money in hill and valley), never had she plugged into the available jack of probability circuit in order to imagine that her son upon the Person, Object, though no Obstacle ("Treat me like a piece of meat, Larry!") of Diane of Port Adams already had lost his virginity (if of guys it be so called), for he had given it and to himself as much as to Diane of the Visine-rinsed eye whites and mouth and eye sockets relaxed into soft stone, Diane of the slow tongue and of the shopping-center shortcut when they all lived in Port Adams — while Susan where she was with the Other or ‘‘Great Spirit" she’s trial-living with seemed for the moment to be doing all the dishes and cooking — simultaneously apologized for waking him up, it didn’t sound like her and not because it was three-seventeen till his red L.E.D.s turned three-eighteen, she didn’t sound like that toughie she used to be, but oh the luxury of having this extra ear against his and being able, through the bedside plug-in, to turn on either side or on his back, to curl up or down (curving his whole reception of the voice so it became part of him), it made other people only as important as they were, not more: unless you gave in to them so you let yourself think about waiting for them to phone, which if he had done with his mother (who was still a strong mother through these flowing, glistening, misting tears, but he might just not say that kind of thing because) it would be understood as pigeonholing women into vulnerable, weak, etcetera, which wasn’t what he was feeling at all!

And while receiving feedback from Donald Dooley on reincarnation as arising out of crisis in your life when the void opening in front of you could outguess you if you put yourself into it so you found you were more than one person which was O.K. and scary and creative, Larry went on savoring the dream of the names, savoring even some reach within the nest of them to a next he didn’t quite get his head around where he was subject of a prediction.

Donald agreed that the evolutionary reincarnation ensued through social history as a whole, not in literal reappearance of souls in new forms they had earned or longed for — speaking gently, slowly as if knowing that Larry had something wonderful and troubling to continue with. But savoring Donald’s words and friendly manner, Lar’ wanted to detour around reincarnation, and not because he savored the dream of names: from Martin (which was one letter off his father’s and the closest but really far away from his father’s self) to Angel (a Puerto Rican name in all probability), Lar’ comprehended a nest of dreams coming up out of good ground bearing more messages than he had regular time for or light to see by, and these included his dad’s own name, which had proved upon waking no substitute for his dad’s presence standing under the shower so quiet inside the falling water, bending his head and curving his whole contentment along the path of the steam iron ironing some shirt of his (he didn’t iron Larry’s, and neither did Lar’!).