Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

(who cares?

both true —

hey Don!

that you?)

And Larry hears and smells motley clothes skin-deep laying another’s matter on him (dig that! another is mattering him — so what if it’s the current moon we’re passing through or period we live and light and have our We in)? and another’s bent brain, like potential, arrowing through his own (Nothing to write home about, we want to emphasize, but…) and Lar’ has wordlessly and in an instant said No to this alter embodiment, toward which "a piece of him" has got Curve-slung, like look no matter how much People Matter (which can be a drag on an off-day), nor R matter in the poor but earfelt phone pulses that they become in order to get reconstituted at the long end of the line by the in-house soul attached to the ear, like this Curve itself that is not so on its own since let go by Lar’ to find other articulate host-solids to Be through that it decays in-continentally into that old We, muttering or would-be mattering some refraction where Larry just now isn’t, "If P R M, when, as ever, MRM, then maybe P R P" (People R People — where R for Rotation that here means "Rotationally Activate oR Turn To" — embracing also the sense of "get cracking" — oR "Turn Mo" or for that matter "Equal" — read also "Will Be"): yet, jettisoned by Larry along with its sometime-angel-fleshed ever-lonely-abstract Curve, this communal breakthru is lost on the aforementioned bluebird waiting for its fencepost which, cut from osage orange and not knowing it could serve as a feeding station, has gone in search of aforementioned crow lost on the Spence or Person the Curve bends into:

Who is both called up and unknown by that faithful gap Larry shares with the Chilean economist, whom Larry, making a minor mental note hanging up the phone and wondering if that sound was Don and why Don did not answer, has to like and whose secretary (the Amy he is supposed to be getting over, having never kissed more than her lips) would never let herself be called "secretary":

and this Person (turned to and from Crow, let’s stick with that), like a third phone-party though not talking at the moment to this extended son of the man Mayn he Spence most watched (until very recently) or to the distinguished exile the Curve now recalls he has hounded on business since shortly before they met at a Moon shot four years ago, stands before himself in an office with a full-length mirror sniffing still the odor of his serious and funny and tough messenger’s silver paint, his own strangely (for he’s never been able to do anything about it like his orphanhood) sandy face — yes, sandy— lit up by the desk lamp near him and returned to him by the mirror and by the smiling frown he also conveys into the phone as he works his way (they really both know) around the resistance of this woman Dina West with "a family" (he said) in Albuquerque (So what? she said) and a husband running a radio station, only to himself skid up short round the bend half past ("Hey, here’s another Dina I didn’t know!"). ("You didn’t know me at all, Mr. Spence") ("Oh I mean I know you’re in the Indian Youth Council water-rights litigation and all—") ("Well, that’s slightly inaccurate, Mr. Spence") (" — and I gather you’ve had a few things to say to the Interior people but you turn out to be as environmentalist-oriented as Mayn’s little girl" — ) bent on documenting what she thinks Spence already knows ("Well, don’t you?" Dina West asks) from having scanned those many pages Flick Mayn turned in to her father while Dina West hears a man she imagines insecurely contemplating his technique or himself ("Oh hell, lady, I’m standing here in a nothing old office looking at myself in a full-length mirror and if you want to believe I know what’s in Flick Mayn’s document, I can’t stop you, ma’am").

Hearing a scream of tires at his end and the gunning of an engine right afterward, she asked what it was (adding, "Oh we’re just talking, it’s just words"), and Spence said, Business as usual; and she said, You are in the business of information, and he, I’m getting out of it and go settle in the West, run me a boots-and-tack shop someplace small, maybe manage a supermarket; she said she hardly believed him and he said he hadn’t known about that supermarket or the boot shop till he had said the words.

There, she said, you see? but she caught at a gentleness they both felt in her vowel, and she said, I’m sick of city phoning, I’m all phoned out, I want to talk to you face to face. Who had she been speaking with on the phone, he asked, that is since she had brought it up, and in the moment of her being nonplused by his "move," she brought up his strange charge of four or five days ago, four or five? the City made her lose track, did he even know what he was making up? she asked — Collusion? he asked, and their voices met beyond them, seemingly beyond any concrete shape of line or spark of arc— He knew what she meant, she said, oh she needed to talk face to face, she hadn’t even known what National Technical Means Capability was when he accused her of teaming with Mayn’s daughter whom she didn’t even really know against O.K. her least favorite company at least in the West, that was destroying land and life.

What? he asked, she never heard of NTM? She knew about it now, she said. More than she used to, he bet ("Long-range satellite photography," she said angrily, "laser eavesdropping," she said, "sophisticated earthquake devices," she said, "God knows what they’ve dreamed up" — "But you know what it’s all/or," he said) — and she knew, she added, more calmly and with more assurance, that it didn’t much work except the earthquake-sensing stuff her husband said was better than nothing. Spence said he had thought her husband was involved in this, and she said, Couldn’t they meet face to face? it was important to her, and Spence said it was no skin off his nose if she and the Mayn girl were into exposing this destroyer of landscape as being also indirectly in the NTM hardware business as part of a long-term commitment to missile network in the western states, but this wasn’t what he was most concerned about.

She paused and said could they meet, could he come to her hotel? she would pay for his cab; he said O.K. she come to him, the corner up from where he was right now. Good, she said, and by the way, did he know somebody named Santee? — so they both felt they were suddenly looking at each other yet with something new between. Why yes he did (he sneezed and she did not say God bless you — Paint smell, he said) name of a part-Sioux he had had business dealings with — may have been part Ojibway too. She had never heard of that. Oh he had heard of some Creeks mixing it up a little. With what other tribes? she asked in his pause. He didn’t — oh he had heard it from someone. Who? she asked. Some hitch-hiker, he thought. Which hitchhiker? she asked (like a woman).

This guy was a professional.

He was? she said — I feel I’ve heard of him (and they both believed for a moment that she had).

Spence didn’t say anything, and they heard the phone line, which was there but nothing to speak of. All right, she said, if it wasn’t the missile trade he was concerned about, what was he concerned about? Survival, Spence said — but, he added, how about the mountain? All right, the mountain, what about it? she said with slight finality — did he mean the mountain she’s heard about here or the same one maybe that somehow she forgot she had heard the rumors of back home before she left? she’s getting talkative (Oh don’t say that, said Spence softly), the mountain that had some mineral resource that affected people near it, some said (she said) a mountain that was on the move, hidden by what was inside it. Did she come east looking for it? Spence joked; he had learned that some type of trace radiation had been picked up near a cemetery in New Jersey, but there was something going on right here in Manhattan and even closer than that — ask her friend Mayn — hard to know just why Dina West had come to New York, but had she brought her family with her?