Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— but no, said Clara, resting her hand on his so he crooked vaguely his little finger where it touched the valley orbit of her groin, no hole but a glint of glitter she had applied to her skin that came out under the—

— no matter, Ford North’s bombastic stammer was Hamlet turned briefly buffo, said her husband yawning; but no, his wife retorted softly, Ford felt a ray of trouble coming from that little bully at the piano before he knew why he was mad, and responded in advance—

— like provoking a fight because you know it’s coming—

— exactly (though a car blows up in bed their minds silently in Central Park but two bikes rented with the two of them hiding away was dangerous enough to be trapped for assassination) a few moments later left again, had hired a Chinese woman to spirit away the kidnapped child of the Cuban just escaped from the prison so familiar to her husband, he believed he had —(say that again?) — though neither of them as the cab wound past muddled old Columbus Circle into the older lights of upper Broadway believed the missing Cuban posing as anti-Castro could succeed in killing "Pin" whose Santiago security was in inverse relation to the Food-Employment curve’s Reassurance Skew; and whereas for a second both Clara and husband believed that the man Mayn’s leaving precipitately after the "buried heart" line had nothing to do with de Talca following him, Clara shifted her lap in some abbreviated irritation or anxiety, and disagreed — while neither she nor her husband could talk in a friendly way now for a block or two about the relation of the aura reader Hortensa (present in the theater) to the florid fortunist from downtown, Seiiora Wing, known to be a Castroist information service, who sat actually near a black boy with a large, somehow familiar head that was turned right round facing back so one saw his lightning-bolt T-shirt when Clara and her husband looked back and saw Mayn leave and heard someone say, "You all right?" — doubtless the young friend of Amy’s, Jean, said Clara, but her husband added superiorly Amy was a friend also of Mayn’s and had been escorted to Madison Square Garden by him on one occasion:

until, easing away from their clothes, murmuring of the Leipzig Ring last year they would have enjoyed seeing, where a white web spun by the Norns ensnared the whole stage, they said simultaneously, "Yorick" and looked with humorous sadness at each other and moved gently toward each other’s welcome strong bodies:

until, in bed, they disagreed about Grace Kimball’s doctrines regarding women, money, and the patriarchy though their minds were elsewhere, and disagreed softly as to the nature of Margaret’s Ghost— Gertrude’s, he said— What did I say? said she, oh! and laughed — Your grandmother! he said — he then feeling the Ghost was a living double Other reincarnating Gertrude here and now by some scheme divined by Shakespeare and kept to (even lazily) himself; she feeling (with her hands now, and while one sole ran up his hard shin) that the Ghost was a dead thing in Margaret, a dead part of her— Gertrude —Yes, Gertrude, yet "Margaret" was also from Grace Kimball the other day meeting a demented old lady in the street in Greenwich Village who had had to leave New Jersey, and her name was — yes, the Ghost was a dead thing that had wound and fumed and circled its way up out of Queen Gertrude’s ear earlier-sucked like priming pump, to recompose in the outer world to be seen at least and last as the trouble it was, and make trouble by just, you know, standing in the way, and by the way (were they falling asleep or would they make love? — why, love made itself over and over with them — and under! — yes!), and by the way, Clara said, he had heard the young fellow behind them say "reincarnation" then — but her husband rolled toward her so she loved that mouth of his and brought his hand up in hers, and he said he had heard nothing behind him but she said that was the source of his thought, and he disagreed, here in bed, and then disagreed on the issue of Luisa’s "My love, my love," not sung but called sharply {porque? — well, Clara thought Luisa had not liked leaving abruptly like that, but Clara’s beloved knew deep at the base of his own horizontal, tense neck, which he therefore asked his love to gently but firmly rub, that in that sudden light-shed in the opening of the double doors at the back of the warehouse theater she had seen de Talca her lover in difficulties, but he did not say this to Clara) and he also disagreed about their not visiting Luisa after the outrageously aborted rehearsal-quasi terminus given the performance in disastrous arguments onstage and, too, because Clara was tired — and getting out of his seat he had known that he had seen this reincarnation boy in the row behind someplace before — and disagreed, too, on what the young Prince growing into his horse meant, and the issue of whether all our appearances turn double at times so that in the botheration of their obstacle-hood we help oneself to find (but he did not express his disagreement here either) — to find… my love, my dear, this April night when our grown children may be lost to us like our country, we will always love each other, true love born again all the time in a wild land, music isn’t it? side by side combatting fear, fear, which we’re not so prone to but as, with sex-sleep’s congruent drug encroaching and sex always between them whatever they got up to, be it nothing even, the phone rings and stops, rings and rings, and stops, in some void of headtripville threat, until, passing through each other toward first sleep which is like the most ancient first love he senses like blood not his own splashed from some passing adult onto the face of a small child and for one flickering frame of wish sees de Talca turned into news in next morning’s newspaper dying as he lived by bad works though he could not have been all bad if Luisa loved him even as she did, and Clara murmured Maybe the real ending of Hamletin tonight was elsewhere — and he didn’t care to discuss it and they passed into sleep and the mutual dream they will eventually forget for they’ve too much good stuff to remember already, each other’s ventricle of memory.

We already know what will have just happened next, Mayn’s dream in the Windrow burial ground (known as Maplewood Cemetery by people who lived in that town who would not necessarily know more about it than someone gone far away from it, say to name it). But Mayn and his grandmother named the town Windrow while he was still there in it, gentles the interrogator. But, we counter, she had already long since gone away. Yes, but come back, compounds the interrogator who fears what he can’t put into words, which is some newly arrived-at integral personality we wordwise help-ourself to.

We already know what will have just happened next, but not what that touching new bomb device will make its dreamer do — beyond laughing; rising by his personalized gravestone; and taking certain steps toward the girl Jean through the night obstacle course of model edifices capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale unit-memories, a stone city built up rather than out. He bears on his very tongue words he will say to Jean because you can’t rely on mind-touch here, and you can’t pick your place; and he loves her and will ask her despite his age to marry him. But then he hears a voice abstracted in him of our very interrogator now more himself than once, who disagrees "You can pick your—" and O.K., O.K., growls Mayn, damp as hell and with a granite print upon his upper back’s mind and his thick-haired cerebellum; he will go along with that; and when "We don’t know enough about Barbara-Jean" is dimly pursued, But I do, spreads answer into the body of all of us — and, for one thing, she is coming from a different place, scientist (or, precisely, technologist), prospective childbearer, she would not lie dreaming above family graves making herself accessible to what traces be windowed by a heart’s half-memories, which collect right now only parts of the Jim Ash dream, but enough to go on as the distance closes.