Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Which stopped the spin in his head no more than the hand materializing behind him on his bald welcome mat, or the Saturday-afternoon opera continuing like an actual production in the bedroom. His head spinning off the ringing visiting his ear that a doctor had discussed as if it had been his; spinning like final force off the dizzy discharge in the head, a mineral-smelling echo of vicarious death, his, here in this land of sport while disappearances if not traditional deaths of people far away whom he did not know, most of them, except as countrymen were possibly what was making him sick, or at least ring. The crowds that were gathered in a soccer stadium: it reversed, he thought (with the now ungloved hand settling slow onto his head like some limb-substance), the relation customary between locker rooms, underground runways, and so forth of a stadium, and the great visible central white-chalked playing field where the match took place that people came to see.

Yet why labor against love? For if his head was spinning, the hand out of nowhere upon it must be the distaff hand!

So, being less a philosopher than economizing on effort, and still hanging on to this "nothing" he would testify to that was almost here, he corrected his course slightly as he was hauled by sheer dizziness half out of his chair and instead of hanging on to it or the prison inmate’s ruled letter fell tall-ly out of it, out of this chair by the bright windy window and onto all fours for then she would not think he was dizzy or sick and only hear him on all fours growl GRRRRAAAWWHHHH! at that touch upon his hide. But expecting his wife’s approach, heralded a moment before by her silent hand upon his bald head, he could hardly anticipate it for she was here already on top of him.

And as he received her laugh and her slender arms elbow-crook’d around his ribs down where he existed on all fours on the rug and felt again her hand upon his head, for his head was what she wanted (and would have, but could not hold the drowning discharge inside his brain which was part fun because she’s here), he found that well before this he had known that he was not alone, and this was half what he would not testify to if anyone offered to torture him, say in a beret such as the beret she had bought him for his eminent dome. And now this inkling (roused moments before to some unlatching or a lonesome draft of air trying to get at his eardrum or the rustle of a thing coming to rest or a moist cluck — from her mouth opening, as she saw him and thought, His earplugs are in) plus that other inkling that was nothing he wished to identify was clotheslined by the opera long forgotten on the bedroom radio that’s nearing its violent end. What else was it that they had planned for this afternoon?

He rose way down in himself to the cheerful hand on his head, it had taken off its glove. He read every little part of that hand no matter where it came down on him — shin, chest, his ankle, his neck hair. The palm familiar, her palm tenderer than fingers, more delicious than her squarish downright fingers on the skin close to the osso spooko of his dome. Satisfaction with a minimum of means — a head, a hand. "Oh my sweet," she said, and he still had not seen her. She was related to angels, he knew in the warm liquid spread outward in the radiator of his body so he was very wide and inside himself sort of peeing slowly or bleeding not so slow. Not telling her about reading her hand no matter where it came down on him was like reaching out to her (and he thought, Where-wer^-you? — I-was-glad-to-be-alone). What else did they need but each other? He reached out to her without moving a muscle, amused musclewards to feel his face’s calm fixed until he grinned. He was pleased with her that a few seconds ago the shine across his bald eminence must itself have seen the light of his life coming across the carpeted room and not related the message downstairs. Thus interfered he not in her secret progress across the room, her nature. A room that, with the next, was like beginning again — did not these people say such things — in this immigrant city, this city in therapy (when it was the nation that needed it). Taking control of one’s life. Growing. Starting over. Making a clean break. Yet if Relationship was Bone, did not the strange people of this city mean "Amputate"? Then there was A Clean Breast. Yet here were he and she not in that way beginning again but in secret plenty where no one knew you. Though their name was not unknown, nor their whereabouts.

The letter from the convict lay half folded against the radiator as if sitting casually like the skeleton of a ghost.

He sat on the rug, eying the letter and digging out a soft earplug of wax (squashing, then filling out again but not like sponge or flesh), pink wax, rather disgustingly soiled by a short hair from his temple sticking into it; dug it out, squeezed it but not in two lest he leave a bit stuck down the burrow against his eardrum, and she couldn’t stop giggling as if she had been holding back, or would cry, which she never never did.

It was nothing he would testify to under oath or torture, this force he had more felt than said (to himself) before he had known she was even in the apartment with him, and now it was less known than a minute ago so maybe it was not just private life in all its power. (Smile.) The inmate’s letter was punctuated with those parentheses. (Smile.)

And then she murmured (because she could say it to him — because it had been said before and so was O.K. or at least code): "With your brains you could make a million in business," murmured less wickedly than before, when she had felt like an artist working on him, her fingertips and then her breath and throat on his heel—"all that you know." To which he still did not know how to give in: "You mean forget exposing the Americans and create our own mineral cartel?"

"Design your own life," she murmured modestly; but living here she and he were often ironic.

"They do have a way of speaking here, don’t they," he said.

"Oh my sweet…"

"We have that relationship of which they are always speaking."

She smiled touchingly, and he let jealousy shift from his betraying eyes up into some dumb wrinkles in his forehead. It was nothing he wished to identify. He would kiss her foot in a moment. The letter lay near (or, on the rug and up against the lower edge of the radiator, sat near) the two books that had been in his lap. It was nothing he wished to identify, this force he had detected before the second phone call, the one he had let ring, which had been confused with the also regular ringing in his inner ear, if that was what it was — his doctor was the doctor of a famous singer after all.

His wife reached to caress his skull. She blessed him and he foresaw that when she took her hand off she would find again the creamy shinings making faces off his carved pate so maybe she would skip the nothing to be found upon his forehead, his brow. He stared with obedient doting a trifle fraudulent except in the love.

She, who was less a foreigner than he, had been so much to him Through Thick and Thin that he would sometimes subdue all that in endearments of style like calling her "Madam." Been so unbearably much that he thought he should not be accepting sanctuary here like some earlier immigrant. He thought of all the children of the prisoners in the prison that his letter came from, free children of imprisoned parents, brothers, uncles, relations. Also friends of friends. This one of the letter he had not gone to visit; he had visited the other, who would never call himself a political prisoner though he was one of the New Jersey Cubans, except he might call himself a political prisoner in the black way — a good cover for him. Happening to be spoken to by this other inmate in the visiting room, the visitor had responded once, twice, and, to the disapproving amusement of the man he had gone to visit, he exchanged with this other man, whose letter now sat against the radiator, names and addresses. ("You Irish? You don’t sound Irish." ‘The name is originally Scots." "But…" "No, I am not from Scotland.")