Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Have you been hearing things again?" she asked, and her hand came down his sleeve to his wrist.

"Earplugs are disgusting," he said, and she might have laughed again, she had a right to. He turned his unpredictable ear toward her and named the opera playing in the bedroom. Roman soldiers. Priestess mother. Her niñitos smack in the middle of their mother’s official life.

But she had noticed the letter, if not the light in his eye. "Have you been up there again?" "No." "What is this Cuban planning?" "What does one plan in prison?" "I think I have always liked Cubans. Your letter is from the other man."

The inmate said in his letter it was more dangerous in New York City. You wondered what all those children thought about their grownups off in a castle in the wooded hills (where you didn’t address them with the name of the prison but at a post-office drawer — like an unknown box holder’s discrete freedom: Number 2020 skis in with skis for feet like flippered South Pole gulls, terns, birds, not even God knew their name: no, the unknown box holder mysterious Number 2020 flies in, a small cross moving against the slopes of the sky, Cessnas in from the Arctic Circle once a fortnight to check his mail; canters in from the shimmering middle of a multinational mirage upon a camel whose time scheme is different from his; no, swings in along a hundred forest trees from lush safety to see what’s waiting for him in Drawer B drawn all the way out, and found not the grownup inmate — his fingernail clippings, his unmistakable hand, lock or lack of hair, thumbnail sketch — but his kids instead). Do you know where your children are? The man he had really gone to see "behind bars" said he worried about his little boy, and the visitor knew what he meant without his elaborating and so perhaps it is as well for this beautiful, still young woman on the rug to notice the letter from prison because it is so innocuous, and think this is the man my darling lord and master is mainly interested in at the prison. Did the children write the cons letters? — miniature offspring lying in Drawer B with dolls’ stiffness and calm; space savers seen but not heard (clippings or parings to be restored to fingernails after execution before burial): this, this was where his letter from prison had brought him and it was a substitute too close to his own nothing-he-wished-to-identify to be worth following until you got to the source.

"I said have you been hearing things again?" she could speak from her motionless hands. This time he indicated the opera with a slide of his head.

‘‘What pretty music, but what a lurid story," she said.

Druid priestesses being fed, bel canto, to Roman soldiers, you know.

"Well, two to one, my love," she said, "if we are counting."

He told her she seemed sometimes so much less a foreigner because of being part English; but then he didn’t know. It was his hemisphere. She spoke to him from other points in the apartment. He would turn to his window as he did more often now to see what he would probably never see again from this sixth-floor window, a man he recognized — but had actually met — at Cape Kennedy, a journalist — and liked — but then had been told was dangerous— yet told by a man who himself seemed dangerous but was a business contact (a photo-journalist) whom now upon better thought he could not manage to make go away.

And when fear touched home, he identified it as being on behalf of his children, who were not here. And were not children. Or on his side.

He liked everything about her. Her blue Peruvian shawl fallen on the couch.

He stayed out of trouble, produced his exorbitantly paid statistical overviews at the foundation, sometimes wondering who else was on the payroll. He had been named an exile in the newspaper once.

She was on her knees in the kitchen, he saw one stockinged toe upside down poking out beyond the doorway, and the power hit the right side of his head again in a discharge that fused cells — celled him for one two three expanding seconds expanded into one indivisible one.

She came dancing across the room, detoured to kiss his lips lightly, swept away to retrieve an oblong white parcel from a large red shopping bag standing on the small table in the dark foyer. With all of her sadness she used the city better.

"Martin Marpe has had Hector put to sleep," she said from the next room.

His beagle.

"You have a charming memory."

This Martin, was he more real because they did not really know each other? Something of a chameleon in her reports.

"A chameleon!"

Seemed to fit in wherever he turned up.

"I don’t see that at all, and look here — I’ve met him only—"

When he’s talking with a young policeman studying law, he’s against lady cops; when he’s talking to a young woman who’s making a career for herself in a well-known laboratory as a biochemist, he’s saying that we need women in many of the old sex-dominated—

"Hoyo-to-ho! la la la!"

— because their fresh slants are destined to make the great breakthroughs in the next quarter century; when he is talking to a Buddhist he’s against tailors; when he’s talking to a famous swimmer—

"You have not heard him talking to any Buddhist. The dog was old and Martin’s free-lance work is taking him upstate and sometimes he’s away for two weeks. Are you seeing him as a Roman soldier this afternoon?"

Let’s have Brünnhilde in the Valkyrie again riding her horse.

She sang with such heartbreaking softness "Hoyo-to-ho! Hoyo-to-ho!" he guffawed, but the softness was fresh distance down his inner ear due to these turns he was lately subject to or equaling a new measure of her unwillingness to ask him to see the doctor again who would shrink his labyrinth but in so doing amplify what might better stay dim or soft. On the other side, though, the inner-ear disease which this very Martin who put his ears under pressure beyond subway decibels had menacingly suggested to her as an explanation of her husband’s occasional ringing quasi-deafness plus dizzy discharge was supposed to feature a vertigo that spun your vision, rotated it, while leaving you behind — and this he did not "do," nor wished to investigate it, and he didn’t like this Martin knowing other people’s ears.

"Do you remember the beautiful woman with paint on her jeans who was teaching her little boy to ride a bike in the park?"

Weren’t they supposed to be going to rent bikes today?

"She was so elegant running along beside him and gave him that push that sent him racing off and he went round and round, do you remember, and couldn’t stop, and ran into a pram that was empty, do you remember?"

Of course he remembered. But why?

"It’s too late to go rent bikes now, isn’t it?"

He looked down into the street. He did not see the friendly journalist once met apparently by chance at a minor historic occasion (American) who was supposed to be dangerous to him, nor did he expect to see him down there, for once had been enough, one day in passing; but he saw now a small bald spot on the head of a passing bicyclist and the head clamp bridging those ear muffs which could be tuned in also to the climactic voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera where everything came unstuck at the end if you knew the story, and he wound up not mentioning that his own girl-researcher at the foundation had seen his wife entering an apartment building where two friends of hers lived, and he looked at his wife whose children on their own feet thousands of miles away were his, too, and — the late light drew faint curves beautiful between them and, because it was an old favorite no doubt, he could for one phrase hear in Bellini’s music "False-Hearted Lover," and felt room-wide trees falling toward him from thousands of miles south, felt boxcars disappearing over magnetic mountains operated by scale-efficient interhemispheric cartels otherwise known as American Involvement—"A.I."! — and lived again one of his rare social appearances nowadays with her (not that she, poor thing, because of their low-profile situation, had — or anyway took — many opportunities like the one in question) where he could feel even more incognito than at home hearing and overhearing fellow New Yorkers telling all the good news about themselves (so he would at the time have welcomed another encounter with the man supposed to be dangerous to his security, to his low-profile existence high among the river winds of the Upper West Side of Manhattan island, dangerous to his wife). And she, he recalled, had turned away from that youngish man Marpé who was not political in the least but was a free-lance diver — who looked like a lewd fish.