Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But all these people in the story just now retold through Manuel wanted apartments in this turn-of-the-century building, all coming toward Grace Kimball as if she had asked them? You and only you made your home, and mucus could be an amazing building material, we produce enough of it, don’t be squeamish, and she wasn’t getting into some discussion with Maureen about these zooplankton Clara called appendicularians.

But which story now retold through Manuel? Not this story quite: for Clara was not Sue, she was frightened and let herself be posed as Grace’s potential friend. Which Sue would never have done, the vibrator’s hum almost said. For Sue was her friend. But Clara might be, too. Grace was much taken with her, she knew things, she kept her own counsel which still wasn’t good enough. For she had come to Grace Kimball for more, and, when taken for Grace’s friend, didn’t deny it — it might come to be true. Yet she had a home and had said nothing about moving into this building. And, observant as Clara was, hadn’t she noticed the Superintendent with "Super" on his pocket? Well, the answer, hummed in its own body tongue by the microphone with its ear that doubled as a mouth bearing on her flesh-and-bone Gaiete Parisienne, acid Rock, My Old Kentucky Home, in its own sweet time, was that Clara was in Grace’s periodic cluster and, shy of phones, maybe afraid, had come here drawn not just to eye-contact with Grace but through Manuel, who would by coincidence see Clara as Grace’s friend, so Manuel, who had at another time today left his post at the door and for whom three men tenants, Mr. Goody and the other two, would go to bat tomorrow with the landlord, had joined the convergence of her periodic cluster until the meaning of her day approached, and she almost had it, Take me as I am — still, words in another mouth that was distinctly fleshly. It was coming toward her and going away from her, but nothing she would tell the women in the workshop. They needed to hear about give and give/take and take — needed to hear themselves —marriage con came: and between the coming toward and the going away was a nothing which (something like We Are All Just Voices was retelling her) you had to keep trucking until you saw that this void where everything was happening in her life yet nothing, was nothing; so, like the heavy set gray-haired dude with the curving look today that was between Surprise and Recognition, there was really Nothing standing between the coming toward and the going away. But she didn’t quite have it, didn’t quite get what it was that came after her — she the future — orgasm peace. Until, coming or on the point of it coming, her softening eyes moistened the tall pier glass (my dear) across the candle-lit room, so it was wings taking her away — but her own — one throb, but that didn’t quite end — a woman-minute of her constant self: which was not enough: she saw that her day was lived, and this was as far as she could go, meaning coming to the point, and, given by her, not wholly in her hands, like the glimpse of the heavy set man in the street who didn’t turn toward her, or the woman Maya who published a book and brought it to Grace and when Grace said, "Join the ranks of successful women," Maya in the heart of her eyes didn’t really like the words but couldn’t come out with it, a meaning happily out of Grace’s hands, like the life of the stranger-woman Clara who had stood at Grace’s threshold, the light coming off her face and the light itself saying, Listen, my life is at stake, can I speak to you of it? — and didn’t speak till Grace asked if it was about the workshops. For Clara, whose address was upper West side not upper East, had come to this large apartment building looking for someone else, who had been turned by Convergence and the Goddess into Grace Kimball.

He was not waiting for her but he looked forward to her coming home. His whereabouts were well enough known no matter what he did: a New York apartment for him and his wife, for the time being theirs. He was reading the inmate’s letter by the living-room window and listening with his one open ear to the voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera. They were richly preoccupied with themselves and came from far enough away off there in the otherwise deserted bedroom to be at a nice distance. The telephones were in the bedroom and kitchen, which was the American way of consolidating atmosphere and action and privacy. Here where he was, bright-honed window panes shivered and warped, bashed by Saturday winds old and seagoing bearing endless light, and they seemed to come into his plugged-up sick ear from his good ear. He felt not quite alone. He had a force in mind, but he could not quite have identified it even if someone had offered to torture him. Private life in some unexpected simple way was what it was, and he was willing not to betray it. He was reading the letter from prison when he felt the gloved hand upon his head.

It was nothing he would own up to — this private life in all its power— certainly not testify to. But he knew it well when he felt the surprise hand familiar on his head; and had known it before the two phone calls, but especially while he had let the second one just ring. Knew it like an over-slow, a lifelike event rereading some of this letter on ruled stationery from a prison inmate who was not the one he had gone to visit but who had leaned over and said hello and started something there in the smoky, overclean Visitors Room, to the darkly uncertain amusement of the Cuban inmate that he had gone to visit. On a weekday without telling his wife. In a rented car driving sixty-five miles up the parkway and into hills.

Here at the window a block from the North River (as he liked to hear it called), the winds got neighborly and practically sacred banging away like irregular song against the rotten, high-tension system in his ear that an expensive doctor had a French name for and that struck him now in its panic ringing as the American city phone internalized with mechanical flow intact, the sign of it a light in his eye that would be instantly noticeable to the interim owner of this hand upon his head should he turn around, leaving the sentence he was rereading typed on schoolboy-ruled lines of prison-issue writing paper about a jailhouse lawyer who would handle your injustices for the experience, if not rid you of them.

But his head, his single great immigrant brain cell canaled with sounding ire like trapped light, had been spinning prior to the hand. Not with this half idea about private life he could not identify even under torture. And not with the local will, now, of a woman’s movement as near as the philosopher’s cue proving its power on the philosopher’s billiard ball flesh-colored but as yet unnumbered. And not with the history of opera, though on this workingman’s day off to crashland or hit the chocolates (knowing as we now do the truth that the expectation of them was half in the caffeine) or close the eyelids half trusting their pale-rose-filmed insides not to display boringly ancient scenes he knew too well, or have a secret from his heretofore absent wife — he had entertained just now while reading this inmate’s letter an alternative life for exile-Prince Hamlet: arrived in England; on impulse determined to stay; ensconced now in London no longer melancholy making a clean break with all that toxic family history back home in damp Denmark; and, taking responsibility for his life, being surprised and inspired and liberated by the new Italian-import drama-by-means-of-music with its song-soliloquies on plain firm chords like majestically shifting stages, forget your madrigals, homophonic si, polyphonic no — Euridice, the first opera, followed dazzlingly (this soon? and did it come to London?) by Orfeo —the Euridice of Peri followed by Monteverdi’s Orfeo —these Greeks! the latest Greek connection, for Hamlet had in effect more Greek than his businessman sponsor who when Hamlet arrived and decided to stay, was out of town on a trip, some said in Stratford, some said vacationing in the New World.