Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But we don’t now know how we found out how — except we had the heart for it because, come to think, we had bypassed the phosphorus-detecting trace that told us once upon a time if we could only digest its information about the left ventricle’s muscle tone! and learn to join two hearts and more.

As to what had happened at the dress rehearsal, prevue, or one-shot deal, Clara and her eminent, bald eco-husband were in agreement on no surprising number of things regarding Hamletin, Hamlet, and the real show out in the audience. E.g., that the newly basso Prince (after eighteen previous Hamlet operas where he’s a tenor), singing of poison that was so vividly heard trickling down the ear of his in-process-of-being-murdered father’s hearing that some heart in him failed ere henbane could curd his fine milk or waste his glands of smell that felt like they’re at the rear of his brain, uncannily paralleled the lovely aria in Verdi’s Otello though the parallel seemed curved or semicircular where in the soft opening two alternating notes and succeeding amorous fourth Iago love-songs his dusky master’s ear and soul’s aorta to seal some tornado of his love forever in the amazed semen framed by jalousie — surely Verdi here in this warehouse Hamletin! — and Clara and her beloved agreed also that collaboration had here flowed everywhere on wings of love pressure plus other arts unknown: for Luisa’s father had been released from house arrest but then had disappeared in Santiago while Ford North’s stammer had, albeit operat-ically, invaded his singing just before or just after the pianist-composer-conductor in the pit (such as it was, shallower than other pits) his doughty, diminutive young boyfriend in lush black evening clothes had angrily shaken his head during Fordie’s aria compounding the "my offense is rank" soliquoia normally Uncle Claudius’s in Shakespeare’s family drama, with Hamlet’s own "I must be cruel to be kind" speech da da "That monster custom…/… is angel yet in this / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery. . / but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me" da da deliver’d message-like some shadow moulting from some dream, where the boyfriend’s ambition shoehorned Ford into this warehouse showcase and Ford’s bulk compacted to manipulative pathos for Luisa precisely at a moment of her history when guilt for fatherland tinctured in her body to a terrible readiness of her house-arrested father that there let flow along the satin legs de Talca kissed such lust and tenderness for that elegant, terrible, vulnerable agent trained in Chile’s fine ships that she would fuck so deeply with him as to risk her and her father’s life by making her favor seem to depend on the favor of de Talca’s influence in Santiago, himself already stranger to himself than he had known, here "variable and uncertain" (Clara’s husband quotes to her in bed) as Hamlet when placed in a predicament worst possible for the display of his nature and gifts, where like Shakespeare (Clara’s lover gently quotes again from some critic read long ago) Hamlet had not fully planned the course of his action.

Many more agreements which we will get to as they to us, and no surprising number of things to these two who held hands in the theater, disengaged them when moist-warm, looked at each other’s profiles, sat sometimes one or other forward in the seat so the other gave the spine a firm, wonderful rub as much the breeze of passion as any light bending down at them from the stage, this immigrant couple who argued and played and talked and argued always in some suddenly and glimmeringly unpredictable agreement of near-touch like lovers who ring each other up three times per day and, at that, can aria and game through their pair-bonded circulatory systems to heart’s content like aliens (with green cards) who are three hundred percent married and flying always into loss of home and into the sea between that still takes them out of themselves and to themselves, let Grace Kimball (whom he has never met) reincarnate herself as she will as priestess of le Swing, doctor of Open Marriage, promoter of posture, poet-lariat of addiction that explains everything except Clara and her husband, isn’t that true. .?

In such shorthand (he by the way loathes dotted ellipses in fiction) and in conversation they two could forget the shadow of their country far away and hence huge — or the source was far away, but then the whole Thing was inside them (to coin America) — forget for hours "on end" (but which end, my love, which part of the—? —The umbrella? — Which point of the umbrella, oh God bless you darling for— Aiee, she broke in again, I just remembered I saw the green grass rains of the south coloring the Pole in a dream and— And where was I, Clara, where was I? was I the rain, wasn’t there an out-of-wok economist cooking up weather-predictions like weather itself like Michelangelo’s visions— Oh you move me, you move me, and a hell of a lot more than that opera — Only if subtracted from the theater as a whole! — Oh you move me, you move me, oh by the way, have you been spinning lately? because you haven’t mentioned the spins, your head-trips dear, maybe you won’t have to have one of those American scans) forget for minutes the wired skeleton of an unjointed country that shaded every impulse almost, except the impulse to themselves, whate’er that meant in this bison-torso-shaped land of dreams that all claimed New York was not the center of where the self helped itself to language of such weekly obsolescence and instant package that— until all over again these two elegant immigrants, but with freshness like the drama that’s rehearsed by you in a state of faith that you have it inside you to… we sometimes forget what comes next except faith, spontaneous faith. . that the next will come, e’en be it some near room. . and to forget yourself, my darling. . shading all impulses except such love that they might sit together in a downsloping audience in a resinous or wood-oil-smelling dubious theater (for we are particular who we go to the theater with, for we must love them) and Clara and her husband know that if need be, they completed (joyfully) this Hamletin (the suffix compacted from — tina, large leather jar, wooden vat, bathtub, where they themselves repaired at three in the morning when they could not sleep because the phone would ring once and not again and then again once but not again and they would think de Talca or someone was thinking again and even of them, by that connection that breeds reactions to a void of guesswork and fear though fear was not their problem, they could lie together naked to their necks and independently not be afraid, that is not be afraid in themselves of an agent’s revenge, abstract or personalized) yes, they completed this Amero-Chile-esque spiel-fable with a lithe black dame as a contralto Ophelia singing sometimes lines that had been the mother Gertrude’s, "Oh speak no more," yet wired in fury to those raised arms and her outraged throat, a tough Ophelia insisting on being present when her lover drags out his weapon, and insisting on holding it (though back and forth was not clear) in some fight that then propelled it through the arras into the next act — all impulses this shade of their country crossed except their impulse to themselves, these Chilean exiles watching Hamletin because their friend Luisa coerced herself into it — up there above them on a stage while they so private were in love yes beyond the friendship they had once for starters unfolded in each other in a London park, a friend’s London kitchen, a pub near the British Museum laughing at each other sometimes silently until they had to hold hands to keep from singing crazily in whatever place they were that had been forgotten. So put that in your vibrator, Grace Kimball, a continent well lost for pair bondage, she said to her husband, who shrugged with such subtle sexual fondness she jabbed him in his bicep and he turned to briefly mouth the tip of her nose that he had once in vain promised to write a poem on, and now he told her she had overreacted Kimball ward (he’s heard "overreacted" from Amy, but he meant it) and they laughed, and then Clara said it was true and that someplace between meeting Grace while seeking to help the one person in her world and later finding some new crushing load of silences controlling what she said to those naked women (one of whom ominously inquired if Clara and her husband saw a lot of other expatriates), she had seen the pretext become real, but not so he would notice it in her arms, her cheek, her voice, her love, but. .