Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So when the phone rang, Larry saw he had been slipping away from Donald, yet was it because Reincarnation of which un branch was Simultaneous Reincarnation (S.R.) threatened Larry? No big deal because Jim Mayn looked forward to Lar’s definitive formulation in good heart and faith and a good casual smile lay between them and related to the possibility of breakthrough vis a vis S.R.; yet it was in the air, and Kimball breathed S.R. in and out and Mayn did not oppose research into it, and there’d been this near-dream involving Larry in it as target of a prediction, and somehow shit S.R. in its theoretical warp seems playing into the wilderness of those older people’s lives full-up with dejd vu (see recent scientific studies of) cum painful recollection cum should-haves and shouldn’t-haves etcetera so heavy all in all and wall to wall with after-lives that come to think of It they are downright abstract, and Larry doesn’t just now want these people’s sympathy and the strings attached, or even praise, specially for his no doubt epochal concepts. Nor wants to even, like, explain that he’ll settle for the mainland-Chinese lady sitting on the phone books.

And let Mayn muse in the night taxi that the noted man whom Amy gal-Friday’d for — where research might well cover surveillance — at the foundation, continued still, upwards of four years after the final manned Moon shot, to be mixed up with a hustler whom Mayn would like to throttle who even Mayn the world’s (according to him) least-prone-to-lurid-plot-speculation-much-less-conspiracy-peddling of "current historians" is coming to believe may now be engineering news without quite knowing it in order to make a buck out of being there when the lightning strikes; and let Mayn muse that he felt he might be indirectly responsible for the death of a fellow journalist in Chile in 1963—Mayn’s great to know, etcetera, but this morning Larry thinks he would never have moved back into that apartment where Mayn and his family had lived even if Mayn did have some co-oping deal with the landlord (according to Lar’s father) plus Lar’ knew of Mayn’s daughter-inspired interest in a landlord syndicate’s link with insurance groups, O.K., O.K. already— Larry would frankly rather listen to Donald Dooley reveal how tobacco firms borrow great sums from insurance groups in return for soft-pedaling cancer when approaching that mass of client-insurees who matter too deeply to their insurers to be asked to worry about the mysterious workings of inflation or cell play: and if, for an awful moment right out of some poetry that Lar’ had read in high school, a shadow passes Between, an unembodied smile, deja-vu’ing weeks-ancient words of the Dreaded Modulus that People (not just) Matter, People aRe Matter, till as — quite far from Lar’s dad Marv’s 1940s sexista RU/18 (‘less dey raise de age) — R turns into (and therefore equals) =, the wind, with perhaps that secret curve attributed to it in an "off-the-wall family discussion" Jim Mayn half-recalled from "outer space or outer something," bore Larry toward the phone a la part slippage from Donald via daydream warmed by abstraction, part Donald’s fulsome conceptualism (where one sentence became an oration) since his girlfriend was coming over but it wasn’t Donald’s but Larry’s abstract and traced not by D.’s word-content but only by his voice-print though Larry knew Donald was taking off on some of Larry’s guarded remarks on reincarnation being Now and a matter of crisis and a void that opened in front of you that you filled before you hit it, in his opinion, and as Lar’ rose to go for the phone and heard D.D. say wine was good unless he had some Cuerva and saw gratefully the particular Chinese woman of four nights ago sitting on three phone books with covers ripped off, her gray wool socks puffed by her plump feet out of her slippers, he had to speak and hardly knew what he was fast saying (or, rather, why) between the first ring and the second: "Look, my mother is living with another woman out on the Island, and I was freaked out about it underneath all this insane fucking Open Marriage BiSexual Cool that’s going around, you know, but I didn’t know who to talk to but now I’m freaked out that she isn’t happy and probably wants to get back with my father but I didn’t see why they split in the first place but now I don’t feel good about them getting back together." He was moving out of the room toward the kitchen, looking back not at the plug-in phone but at Donald, who was nodding and smiling and saying, "You’ve had a lot to deal with, man, but it’s all right, you know? it’s all right. It’s all cool. Let it go."

We gotta get outa here, Lar’ thought — a piece of him out there beams back but not so fast as light to its old spot in his shoulder-neck-tension field finding in its place there a living-breathing eye{\), wait, an eye in his newly relaxed neck-and-shoulder area? as he concentrated it became an all-purpose heart (up there) and in touch with feelings though others’ (don’t please try to explain it!) as fast as light, attractive as somebody else, and charged with such communicative volts it flares the contradictory decadence of the would-be returning weak piece into one a billion times less weak as if to take the measure of—

"I think I just saw my father’s death—" Phone ring again before he seize (about to sneeze). . " — but it didn’t look like him."

‘That’s heavy, Larry," said Donald Dooley from the bedroom, "but—" Way ahead of him, Larry took the call and sneezed beyond it, receiving in return a current of nothings sidestepping him as they came at him and flowed by, while the voices in the ear-mike of the receiver were not the Chinese woman in the shop who was as real and there as D.D. or D.D.’s girlfriend approaching through the City — or the raspberry on Mayn’s cheekbone acquired in an uptown police station the night he got home and he told Lar’ about it, O.K., O.K., but meanwhile here’s this phone call, ‘n. .

"God bless," interjects the quieter edge of man’s formality like an interruption before he has begun, though opening upon (what?) marriage? for the courteously strong foreground voice is heard against a woman’s in the background, oh along the waves of a whole life strung out behind him not just accented like his but speaking in Spanish, so Larry, who’s (a big piece of his Body-Self) light yards back in bedroom with new friend Dooley, is hardly into this call and picks up from this female background a hysterical "curva" something, and a moment later (curva what?) amongst all the other words a highly dramatic "curvadura" (it sounds like), the man meanwhile calmly asking if he may speak to James Mayn "eef hee ees theyr": and here it is again, this living web that’s nought to do with Lar’ who’s anyhow so far from it back with new friend Donald the noise level rising behind the Spanish-accent man comes down over Lar’ too as if it’s a hood over his heart beamed to Donald’s voluble hands with which he talks, but fuck it’s this outer crisis again, this living maybe even breathing web Lar’s let go (man) & doesn’t matter if Lar’ turn out on someone else’s breakdown to be, unbeknownst to him, an employee of this courteous Spanish-accented gentleman, Lar’s having his own crisis, and he names himself (Larry Shearson) at this distance of curve and of letting go and of courtesy and asks if Mayn gave the man this number, and the man’s voice with hassle or anxiety skipping a breath tells clearly the truth that he found it on a pad on his secretary’s desk with another number and Mayn’s name (Let’s get outa here, Let’s get outa here!): but sure enough the intrigue of these older people’s lives is nipping through the screen or something, and Lar’s own crisis you can’t put an equals to or formula, its task though is To Be Real — yes, with new friends and the ordinary stuff like the random Chinese woman on the ragged phone books, O.K.? "Sorry to trouble you," the man has said. "No trouble," said Larry. But the man went on: "Everyone has trouble." So Larry: "But not everyone takes it." And the foreign man, who has turned into his sound, is answering strangely (Ah is this the young man who has understood a strange pattern of reappearance, interhemispheric reappearance? — a young woman of the Spanish-accented gentleman’s acquaintance reported she heard this from the man Mayn himself), while Larry, sidestepping whatever trap this is, coming at him with the woman weeping in the charged background and carrying on (curvadura, he’s sure he hears but it’s another woman’s voice there), and Larry’ll see this cluster not on old two screens but (shrug) one, he knows that the curve (not Rail’s economic graph line or some part of the body) having left him has taken some spinoff force decaying off his Let-it-go into Let’s get outa here: