Joseph McElroy: Women and Men

Really.

O.K. you agree in principle.

But what if clean break bring circulatory problems? You know?

Don’t go looking for trouble. Fall toward the horizon with us, that’s where the market is. You’ve earned your trip, babe. Don’t go looking for obstacles. We’ll set your sheets to the wind.

Who is this "We"? We have but to ask when lo! it curves piecemeal off breakneck into nowhere, we shouldn’t have asked. Was it these angel relations trying to change their lives, adopting the local language cum customs? Have we learned to breathe together? Breathing is waiting. The mother who said to go away but who left first — Jim would not forget her yet does not quite know her. We have to learn all over again. And isn’t this hard when we ourselves are always at the beginning of ourselves?

The child looks up from its work and no one knows if this is that unknown child who said, I know what’s been going on, don’t think I don’t know. For we can’t tell except that this child is one of us. The child doing homework. Homework that is new to us at least if not to the angels rumored circulating in us. Whose child is this? There may be others in the next room, and are; and we, of whom these children are parts as if we were the whole, note that this child who looks up at the dust-sheened gray screen of a small TV and reaches and turns it on and then off, and looks down again at the math workbook, studies rotation. Which, if we let ourselves, we at once grasp, and with regret as odd, vague, wide, and bodily as this child’s studies in rotation are to us abstract. For R equals apparently almost any number. But we are in the next room now where another is copying homework information on those giant molehills to be seen several hundred feet apart in Persia, now Iran; mark the well-known qanats, your system of underground canals that irrigate the desert by drawing moisture from the earth: and these channels under the desert go on as surely as they have been insufficiently understood these five thousand years. How they collect water from the dry desert and return it.

The unknown child has not quite yet asked why these desert canals need to be studied; the child writes on, and is part of our larger concentration taking the form we now see of dispersal, though the curve of this dispersal we don’t quite nail down but at least point to — and feel the pointing inward, don’t we? — to two chief specialists so far: the opera singer’s Fifth Avenue physician and his Ojibway medicine man (one third Sioux in fact) between whom our concentration shifts because drawn either way: for instance, toward the Ojibway Indian, who had guaranteed there would be at least one tapeworm in the belly of the pike tank-loaded narrowly by him in its own M’Lacs water to take its own high road airborne from Minnesota to New York. This guarantee was backed by his long sporting acquaintance with the diva’s physician, who fished with him regularly and had arranged, through his star patient (and star friend) the singer herself, who was of South American extraction, for a South American government to sponsor along with several of its young nationals this native American healer in an aeronautics program at a small college within shooting distance of Lake Superior as the diva’s doctor put it.

This doctor likewise siphons off this concentration we achieve and suffer as a community were there not here like force a way between these two medicine men that — as we pass a woman combing her hair, a random submarine conning a beach, a dark man traversing a whole continent tracking a mystery for all of us but also tracking a beloved woman who nonetheless never moves from her night chair except to pause in her combing and stare at the window — condenses and multiplies our speed and us and even at an illusion of length travels so blindingly well that we spin (we think), finding what else but the diet tapeworm in our way: a worm that has female and male capabilities, yet by itself will only grow, not reproduce. But while the Ojibway-Sioux (for he is part Sioux, which takes him in his past westward) would not guarantee that the pike-aged tapeworm came without a companion (one or maybe more), which even so would have to lie close alongside for anything to happen between them, the diva’s doctor swore on bended knee that when the time came and the desired weight loss had been achieved, a dose of good old-fashioned atabrine would flush out any number of worms as neatly as the dramatic soprano’s system all along would regularly eliminate terminal segments of worm as they ceased functioning and dropped off, which happened more slowly than new segments formed up forward just below the tapeworm’s neck.

Yet forward? below? Which way is up? For the worm may stay hooked on one pasturage for weeks and the thrust of its growth be backward.

And should diva watchers on both far shores of Oscillocean see their star barmaid, princess, vengeful mother, priestess, lover, prima donna contract— yes, lose weight from week to week, from role to role, some said — seeing through her secret means from end to end, we saw her not recede but be there more than ever.

The infamously gifted general officer of a South American republic’s navy told her offstage in Spanish (vaguely both of her slimmer self and of that evening’s role which was new to her) in essence that she seemed exactly as if she had more than found herself inside her now eternal beauty; meanwhile she with roses in her arm and sweat on her brow stared at the pen (a late-model Japanese ballpoint pen with fountain capability) in the South American officer’s raised hand and she feared in his sweeping compliment an inquisitor’s next question — Was the tapeworm story true? So she turned away into the known obstetric jolt of a flashbulb, hearing the man at her elbow whom she had met at diplomatic dos but never till tonight in civilian clothes (read civvies) ask her something different from what she’d feared; so now she’s relieved, inspired (and we potential relations with her) to feel inside her her secret hunger to forget herself.

Forget herself? She doesn’t believe it; she’s implausible to herself, flashing back magic at the officer whose name and politics back home do not bear inspection (she is certain) and whose eyes and words touch her and recall she can’t tell what histories of passion she aroused in him, one unknown member of the broad dark living house she played to for three hours from memory herself. (What’s she doing here? The path between the two medicine men led through a tapeworm not the tapeworm’s host.)

Tonight, a note or two below her range, and to tell the truth below her status, desiring to sing a lesser role in company with a great, not greater, goddess, she sang the Kavalier who, attentive to the older Princess, poses as a chambermaid; is flirted with by the bass Baron yet in Act Two as Kavalier proper again bears the loutish Baron’s silver rose love token to the Baron’s betrothed to be beloved at first sight — and will leave the older lady for the younger. So we ask the unknown child if silver roses grow in the Persian desert, but the child has gone to bed.

So much for the customary token and its loutish sender’s message; and so very much for the Kavalier, sung by this dieting diva, the boyish bearer who becomes the borne, who gets the girl who got the real message which was not the Baron’s silver rose but the singing messenger himself, who, in the mezzo-persona of a female artiste the South American diva who’s been a Swiss citizen for thirty months, could forget for three hours if not that endangered species her father back home in Chile at least her own flesh, and at least one tapeworm, and never know that if her notorious backstage inquisitor (as it happens, of the regime — fellow- if officially former countryman) seeks her out not for her voice alone, we now like her — we whose growing voice breaks into many voices we have always known, many breaths, all shadow of (was it our?) former prism — we like her for herself if there were time, and not just for her tapeworm, its lighted path, thoughtlike through embedded night, its own tunnel or "wormhole" (to be quite as blunt as the obstacle out its far end). Obstacle? But why would the tapeworm track take us anywhere if it is in the diva’s beloved body? Is there an answer for us as we seek another pause?