Joseph McElroy: Women and Men

They were in agreement about Hamlet’s mother’s ghost appearing just when an intense hushed unsung argument arose in the audience between evidently de Talca and some other ticket holder; in agreement that the greater event (though center and margins might gently shift each other inside out like light disbelieving it found state of rest at last) proceeded on perhaps three separate tracks: (i) the sung text individuated as per ego continuum, yet ensemble; (2) also, some real and "now" intrigue involving a number of them and climaxing now or soon; and (3) pieces of unknown individual life for instance frictioning North/boyfriend; Mayn/Jean (seen by Clara once kissing lightly shoulder to shoulder and Clara pointed them out to her husband); a family of four including two teenage daughters who kept leaning across the adults to convey messages; a well-known black model whose name escaped and her sleepy little boy; Grace Kimball/Maureen (who herself several times at end of row got up to leave and sat down again as Grace said Go ahead); the ex-con Efrain and the aura reader Hortensa to whom Mayn had gone asking about Clara; a long-headed, slick-haired, slender, predatory-svelt dark athletic man next to fat, russet-bearded type; and several empty seats that might raise again the rented question how much life is required to be exchanged for a thing you want if only to use, not own, where own means not wife but our wigwam we are at liberty to tear down.

And Clara and her husband, though only later in the privacy of their bed suddenly afraid, agreed as well:

that de Talca moved about and sat in three or four seats during the scenes when Hamlet devises his play with the "coagulated gore" of that other, most un-English woman Hecuba’s monstrous fate

that (for they recurred to this) Luisa had done this strange performance stint in the first place because Ford North, coerced by his boyfriend, had urged her, yet because it might somehow help influence her lover to help free her father

that this work was not some mere folie North was helping his certainly dangerous young, highly metabolized boyfriend show off

that in the Play-Within or self-styled ‘‘wormhole" (phrase unquestionably translated out of a nineteenth-century Spanish phrase for, among other furnishings, "mousetrap") Hamlet played Claudius, who dumb-show woos the Queen, who spurns him richly, delicately, only to be kissed long in her ear which maketh her mad if not literally to suck out of her the "her" soon to appear

that it was a pity the aborting of this perhaps after all dress rehearsal had to cut the famed Yorick skull-session not to mention the tricky spread of toxin at the play’s ultimate good night

that Yorick nonetheless got mentioned earlier in a line neither Clara nor her husband thought was in the text and would check tomorrow having decided to get some distance on the opera by going home to their exile-home’s seamless bed, and maybe Hamlet was no more than regional literature recording what it was like to live on the coast

that the line "My heart lies buried there" which came in the amazing doubled scene of Gertrude’s ghost sleepwalking near Gertrude herself had been lifted from that later Yorick scene we never saw that upon the singing of that line by Gertrude’s ghost low words were said, though whether onstage or in the audience wasn’t clear, that caused a sharp pause, a static suspension, during which the journalist Mayn rose and left, and the villain de Talca after him, and a man with long hair Clara described to her husband who did not turn soon enough to see

that de Talca reappeared, followed by a heavy-set man heretofore un-apparent but recognizable by both Clara and her husband as an employee at the Chilean consulate

that Grace Kimball called, "Right on!" when the black Ophelia sang a totally interpolated aria about woman’s lot being to lift her bloatprince up out of his rank bathtub vat where he daydreamt new lives more animal than the last that in the scene where Gertrude’s Ghost dreams out loud her own self-sought death, two upstage-directed spotlights seemed to cross and join each other’s body-beams to make, as the Queen and her Ghost patrolled their brief area, an illusion of mutually embracing light unmoved at source but, through the elevation of the strange principals, casting a very singular Moon, but now single now double, and disturbingly so, as all the appearances we—

that at a moment when, visiting King Claudius, Gertrude’s accompanying Ghost, played here first by Hamlet her son, tells Gertrude herself that her Prince (sic) so becomes his horse, so grows into that brave beast’s back as to demi-nature and encorpse himself into—

that at the moment when Hamlet himself appears in this painful but luminous scene at full blast necessitating Gertrude’s Ghost’s disappearance and reappearance now played by the hence absent Claudius who, as Ghost, now embraces the real Gertrude, an echo drummed from a known early Elvis Presley folk-burst light-motivated certain shadows cast by the double Moon—"pale breasts, tanned neck to last a century, keep out insidious rains" — and through some freak of angle a spotlight retargeted itself so fine there seemed an entry or an exit from—

that at this moment Gertrude’s Ghost — when Hamlet, not seeing his actual mother, rushed slowly across-stage toward it — sang of having dreamt that she would cost her young horseman prince his life unless he dreamed his way away from her by—

that at a later moment a photographer flashed upon Luisa’s scene a light that seemed to come not just from his bulb but from behind him for the double door at the rear of the orchestra, one young man seconds later said, had swung open briefly, and Luisa stopped in mid-note and cried in anguish "My love, my love!" having seen something, perhaps some truth, however broken by the life onstage that must go on, though a moment later it in fact did not go on.

But, awake again at two, two-thirty, two-forty-five, arms along each other, so warmly known they were afraid for once and told each other so and found it was that they had dreamed — probably the same dream and now mutually forgot — Clara and husband found they also ^agreed on what had happened at the Hamletin.

Whereas Clara, as they had flagged a cab and boarded it to go north on Sixth, felt a woman’s work restitching here the famed darkness and brilliance of the Shakespeare and the dependent plight of Ophelia/Gertrude as the axis to catch our conscience, her husband easing back in his re- or de-sprung seat and looking suddenly back out the window into the glare of a street lamp felt vaguely a crisis that never comes, a music half-Italian half-Hindemith half-mountainously supernal that continues with utmost intensity independent of the drama of the love of man and woman, " plus" the Moorish virago Ophelia with her sex and dancer’s strength and spitfire and height hardly commits suicide, don’t send flowers! but was briefly said (wasn’t she?) to have plunged her rage into the long and troubled sea, witness steam rising from some strait of the Baltic misting our eastward window so the obstacle of Sweden dissolves! though the lull in the music evoked, he had to say, really that old rippling canal (remember?) in Bruges with the market belfry in the background, yet it was nothing he wished to identify — her hand upon his cheek to say he was crazy but original, and he "Yet I feel myself in some other’s words" — "A critic’s?" — "A dead critic’s?" — "Long gone"—". . into the long and mountainous sea" — "You’re thinking of home"—". . of bed" — "of bed, too," so he knew she had meant "Chile."

And whereas Clara swore she’d heard the agreed too-early- (and Polonius-) mentioned skull’s name Yorick with "New" before it, her husband scoffed and had his hand upon her lap, . "from know —as in, ur families knew de Talca’s family"; and whereas Clara knew she had heard nearby some cry of surprise upon "My heart lies buried there," her husband knew he had not; and while Clara felt some earlier palimpsest of Camp in making Rosenkrantz and Guilden-sterno woman and man then absorbed into a large, secret unity of art, her husband felt parts never really met but as if ideas were buried here that could conceivably be unfamiliar, like, oh well, new boundaries discontinuously defined not just by what they contain but also by where they are in their course, a quality of translation even in the double Moon and that sudden retargeting of light upon Gertrude’s forehead as if "this arrow of song" (was that Shakespeare?) would burn a hole full of—