Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She sensed the mood and waited around the corner. And then she said, "Are not you the man whose great-grandfather met Darwin on his great journey? And gave his wife for Darwin’s entertainment?"

"The myth is she played for Darwin."

"While he and Darwin discussed murder as human all too human."

He growled in agreement, in double understanding, and had to laugh being an animal that could laugh, and growled and made his way toward the threshold, the blue Peruvian shawl in the corner of his eye. They were not speaking the same language, word for word, and she did not know he might not love her without jealousy. He would take and hide her light under a bolster. "Your other earplug?" "No; only one." "So you heard me?" "No. I just knew that you were there." "I don’t believe that."

He knew how much she knew, and curves of privacy joined their thoughts often.

But she knew she would always find him funnier than life, and she knew he had not been unfaithful; she knew he would sometimes look through a window, for so would she, and see not a kid walking a mongrel or a pedigree but somebody going to execution, some one, some two, a dozen interchangeable poor persons, interchangeable even if you recognized one of them in that executioner’s dozen; she knew that wherever he turned he found home and

her; she knew that Lord B ‘s cousin had reported that Lord B, after

using the Atheneum Club’s convenience for years whenever he was in New York, had, upon being stopped and told that he was not a member, replied, "Oh, is it a club, too?" and she knew what passed through his mind often after she had done her weekly volunteer stint at the natural-childbirth office under a modest assumed surname. And she knew it might be tantalizingly hard to reduce the pressure they didn’t need the high-priced friend-of-a-friend physician who tried to treat them free to tell them was not only an effect of his deafening discharges but a cause, and a cause caused by causes. And she knew she was his harmonic mean, his chess mate, his past, his walking memory, and in a language he liked even more than American (and to use the Shakespeare words he had just read but thought that she had not) his "ventricle of memory."

All things to him she was.

But where, then, where, who, what was she?

What is this questionnaire form the report comes in, as if it weren’t her own heroic fault, whatever she thought she’s doing being all things to him? And she wasn’t getting any younger as the world turns, so your launch window gets smaller by the second until it’s maybe ten minutes wide if you want to launch to gain your desired orbit, because everything else is also moving in its directions and you won’t need a computer to process that stuff because women know. But whichever She it is that we relations raise into this window as a trial sacrifice, it was not consciousness alone we raised and targeted-for-Being, but the body she was becoming. Evolution of angel into human seemed illusion it seemed so slow at times. No easy fit, for hear it bump up ahead, grab, grope, grit — this body language we knew in their bones as Earth turned its windows in and out of line with the unknown aim of this evolutionary launch inclining toward undreamed potential. But can angels love inexperience enough to assume it. If build upward or inward, why not downward?

Did we want this grotesque marriage? Which one, even? And grotesque only in practice. And yet inner speech must needs get what it came for. So we relations angel or not will single her out: Grace Kimball — hear the noise. It’s the history of the restless window shade that’s now spent its spring and won’t go up. No matter, the history ignores the shade being broken and our sight-sacrifice in the window speaks for herself. And then we add, against her body’s effort to reject it, that the angel of today aspiring to Change — if that still is a thing in us — will claim the age-old human chance to sacrifice others as part of the package. And if you’re stuck in pecking orders or old coordinates, then along the curve of this new angel revolution (if it makes it), consciousness could make heroes of us all or feel like one more con, or raise or lower itself.

He, Lou, her one husband, medium height, could go to sleep for years to dream through the smoke of double signals all things she was to him: lover, co-breadwinner, co-coughing breakfast-nook-bar celebrant; calm, graceful swimmer to his mad, chugging lapper awash in his own potential; elbow at the movies; sister to him who’d been denied one, daughter-if-she-could-just-make-it to his would-be-power-vacuum-father-surrogate brotherhood; female pocket-billiards pardner once a month at a little West Side tavern with collectible red-and-green traffic light in the window; hostess to his growing problem, yet fair’s fair, both have drunk at length after the latish often not largish din-din of this working life (we hear them in American think, "But it works" — or her think — almost think — and all this awkward-sounding— was this sound their way of seeing things?) or if largish, oft not finished; and have brushed lower gums upward and uppers downward out of the shared tube, lest the proof from mouth to mouth not cancel whiskey-aura with vodka-wash along the route that lines the masses from stomach to gullet to mouth with the aroma smoke of spirits; that winds its fume up from the breadbasket but breath-broken and wind-gapped into old smoky signals blanketed soon out of your mind and to be lost in the next day’s blank; where also she was priestess of belongings and of the vacuum cleaner; mother of what have you (home, him, the object or ruled nucleus of daily life), and she’s daughter, too (throw in daughter with the bath salts); and recorder in scrapbooks (one the untouchable album white with gilt spinal lettering), and sometimes scrapper, scrimper, reminder like a co- or fellow sleeper who — look out! — wakes after twenty years (a "yore") of hours to tell him their dreams (twenty’s overdoing it)— a popular number in the Lincoln Van Winkle system if not quite his and her for it was just shy of ten years — (well, seven and a half) — they stayed together even it off e’en with jagged-jogged fibroid edge like your dream made you live an unnatural grotty voice not yours surely phase it out if you can’t even it out from ten and a half times per week to three and a half per month (or seven times one-half)—"from quantity to quality," she hears him laugh when her back is turned at a baby brunch — and "we" this, "we" that — and back to quantity in its preoccupied absence on the year-and-a-day anniversary of her hearing herself say during a long phone gab so unexpectedly that Lou, whom she was looking at across the living room now less crowded with wood and metal, looked dimly away from the eleven p.m. eyewitness news, "Well what you do," she said down the phone, "is you live with a friend," even it off, as we said, cut it off (ouch-ouch), we heard it said; clean break, hear the soundless snip, the lone hand clapped to the suddenly-not-there-for-you butt — the soundlessness of it wiping the noise and music and gross silence of those dreamable years out like a few late-model hours of our century that along its warp aged the grain of Grace and Lou. And scapegoat of him she also was.

Why "goat"? we many of us pick up the animal name — an animal posing as us? — then sense we asked a question, hovering, for we are not there in them even though they in us mayhap; yet (our) old descent from Insight stands us in good stead for did not we once hear ourselves adrift in the gut feelings of MacDune Scrotus centuries ago? — who really understood angels, defining them as not just Form but Matter too.