Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

If one could make a suggestion, why didn’t she close her eyes, turn round three times here on the rug, and see if she could find her way into the next room, and if she could, there would be a prize surprise for both of them. But she stood looking at him. "With the opera on in there, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge finding my way."

He smiled and shut his eyes because cells in the right wing of his head had fused, discharging a duty he didn’t argue with. And in that head he heard her say, If you had used your genius to create a mineral cartel of our own to buy back the nation instead of proving that a preliterate American cartel appropriated it and destroyed our good man — I would not take your money, I would not take your love.

"America’s involvement is not worth investigating any more," he said, "though this man who said the journalist was dangerous and might be even in cahoots with him keeps up the game for money while I no longer care about proving it, and we do not need the money and he does not go away."

"A.I.," she said. "What’s that?" he asked. "American Involvement," she said humorously, and then he guessed she didn’t know "Artificial Intelligence."

Did she remember the retarded messenger he had told her about with the dark fuzz all over his face who—

"Of course I remember."

— who had turned up with a huge manila envelope — who lurched and had that deceptive vacancy of eye considering that he would stop to tell whoever would listen stories quite funny in a lisped, unpalatable gargle. .

"Yes, yes, I remember," she said, so he wished she might close her eyes against some chance of tears blurring the situation.

Well, there were three or four of them that came, not only one, and once one began looking around the city there were God knows how many retarded messengers, eh? plodding, marching up the avenues not acknowledging each other but you could swear all were part of a fraternity, an underground fraternity. Maybe the city’s messages retarded them.

"Why underground?" she said, and he didn’t know exactly what was eating her. "And what’s the point?" she added.

The point? He thought of a dozen. Oh, that girl, the research girl that these vacant messengers with their huge brown envelopes always went to, to her desk, this girl Amy had seen her one day recently, the girl said she was certain from the picture on his file cabinet, plain coincidence, the very same person, she said.

"Did she say where?" asked his wife, who could not be unfaithful to him.

Well, she’d been vague. He turned his head away, raised his eyebrows wrinkling his brow, shrugged without the downward completion of his shrug, and eyed her out of the maniacal corners of his eyes. But it was downtown.

"Vague," she said, not missing a tempo.

He guessed his wife, who had been so wifely much to him she hadn’t had the chance to find strength in playing defeated or fragile, wondered who really was the vague one here, her husband or the research girl Amy.

Her purse lay on the blue shawl in the apartment where they might pretend to be alone in a city unknown to almost anyone. A trickle ran down one eye, from this large oval seed.

"It’s an organization of retarded messengers," she said. "A secret society. You know what I think? I think you are jealous."

Oh yes, a very bear, a fox, an ape of jealousy, but wasn’t it that the city that united them in one secret security divided them in its time and size?

"You have nothing to be jealous about," she said.

Her hand caressed his noble dome. He caught a dull crank of gears in the street below and had again in his head the void of these volts, the push of a long river moving water against banks which were his right temple. He seemed to mumble as he told her he could tell every little part of her hand no matter where and with what small crease it touched down on him. She asked what he had been reading and he held up the small Shakespeare. She knew the title but not the comedy.

Had he not heard the phone? she wanted to know. Yes. He had answered one call and felt someone checking if he was home. The second one he let ring.

Now he showed her the prison inmate’s letter and he read her a few lines ending with Gibbon, which they had a good laugh over: "Among barbarous nations, women have often combatted by the side of their husbands. But it is almost impossible that a society of Amazons should ever have existed either in the old or new world."

She went away now toward a low, rising sweep of applause, and again he had the half idea of private life but as if it were hiding and not itself power, and he still didn’t know how she was.

The applause stopped short. She came back. She stood in the middle of the living room upright as a cedar, his harmonic mean, until he felt that between them was the angel, not she herself.

She closed her eyes and turned round and round again, her lids one expanse of sweet humor. She had turned more than three times around and was facing away. She held her arm half out before her and made her way to the threshold of the bedroom. She was on her way to be awakened. Was jealousy what he had not wished to spell? She was in the bedroom and turned. He was in view if she opened her eyes, copious economist. He was supposed to go to her. Everything got in the way. Railways, trees falling, the ends of opposed winds, places waiting for wood to make railroad ties, a desert laid end to end with solar reflectors and among these blinking dishes swallowing sun, an uneconomically single set of tracks along whose bed an antique railway ran as quietly through his thoughts as the ancient bilingual subway here blinded his ears to another volume of silence.

Elsewhere people, brawny Landburgers, waiting for the train not knowing the tracks haven’t been built yet. Baja York growing substitute parts and waiting for them to be shipped to the place of assembly.

Trees as thick as a horse is long, being sawn by remote control from an urban eyrie where an unseen private hand appropriates a public sector to its heretofore self-contained environment. Trees for the crossties in the railroad — laddering charming old locomotives up over still older mountains to bring pornography to New Castle, crossties to Denmark and Sweden once upon a time, and this was his lost country — what folk do during a given day, a matter of hours. The dizzy discharge hit again, he wanted to see his children thousands of miles south of here and he himself was still fairly young, and they were grown and he was disgusted to think the regime menaced them only because of him not because they stood against it which they didn’t. Some source as unseen as where a wind begins was loading this noise into his inner ear like torture that wasn’t normally painful. He breathed fast (hhh-hhh-hhh-hhh), there was also the messenger who, coming into one’s office, tried to speak through his impediment and gave up and left a card that said outlandishly, "Readings" or "Psychic Readings" or some such. He called to his wife, who opened her eyes squinting into a distance he was at the other end of unexpectedly.

It was nothing he wished to identify, but he did. And saw it was not jealousy. Was it the threatening absence of jealousy? They were not one of those couples here who had an "understanding."

He fell again onto all fours, neither child nor beast, his open jacket hanging down like his cheeks, and visualized against his will a surprised man missing his beloved legs blown away with the ignition keys of his American car; and growled and growled, and imagined a blue shawl tossed over him, and on hands and knees he stalked toward her, a shell of breaking troubles on his back the very least of which, if trouble it was, was an impulse toward verbal play at an ongoing moment of apparent lust and/or passion, and she smiled, uncertain, for he had not come silently to her side to open her eyes as he often did. "I like your shawl," she called softly, and he snarled or miaowed — they weren’t sure. "The better to see you with," he growled, pulling the front corner over his bald head and knowing he did not bore her. An immense weariness got the better of him, a fatigue beyond the repetitive, a repetitive insight that he might never reach the bedroom where she laughed. "Oh why is your breathing so labored, grand dear?" Finding the distance less, he growled, "The better to make you hear." "Come closer, so I can share your breathing." He sighed, seeing her around the doorway that opened between them as if he could actually see her, her silky knees. "Division of. ."she began, and he heard, like a beast, "labor," "dolor," and "all this and more." Heard a matching sigh of the bolster that, like the one they had had before they had had to come here, she loved to be under with him.