Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But he’s not alone in saying it, as don’t we many testify all here at this point? Future workshop women said it of themselves and of their spouses. And were urged to speak this language by Grace as she became.

The South American expatriate diva’s New York physician said it too, we already remember, arriving for a brunch he’d dreamed of after being demoted to it backstage the night before. He’s said it now on the threshold of her faintly disturbed living room, said it meaning last night’s backstage dismissal, seeing last night’s silver roses long dry of that drop of Persian rose-attar secreted by the silver rose of Act Two, for they’re strewn now all over the place, one by one along the blue and brown Andean rugs and as far as a corner of a kitchen counter dark and dim through a distant doorway, then back across the diva’s silver velvet divan (where once the doctor had been invited to bed down) which he sees over her shoulder to her left; then across to the grand piano’s music stand, where another silver, rose-bloom bends toward him as he sees it over her other shoulder to his right, where he stands on the threshold with a white paper bag—"Here" — that she with her other hand upon the sleeve of his camel’s-hair blazer takes from him oil-damped, so we see through almost to the brioches fresh from that miraculous bakery, and his eye zeroes in on one silver rose its stem cut short at the neck of the pale dressing gown that covers, he knows, three Chilean freckles.

"What was that for?" she echoes softly, noting his new jacket as if her own deep life could take its wool back to the source. . "why for my father, for my family," she goes on, "for my country, for my sex," she laughs like there isn’t quite room for laughter, for she’s referring to the South American officer she went out with — Judith, he thinks, Judith, is she Judith? — and she adds, "For professional reasons — public relations" — and, irritated—"danger, curiosity; danger, comfort, fun," ignoring what her doctor-friend took as a snub last night backstage when she went off with the other man (as a stagehand-poet passed with a black-edged prop, a newspaper, only to return to interrogate the doctor as an afterthought), and she’s now referring, in all these unstable nothings—"my father took me to see a blast furnace once: where they make the copper?" — (then turning away with the bag of brioches in her hands) to what he with all his knowledge of her insides cannot know.

This is that the (as he senses infamously gifted) officer in mufti with a Romance name, introduced to him (a panting physician with a cone of silver roses) backstage last night by the diva may well have been asked by her (the doctor can guess) if the council will please ignore her frail father thousands of miles away along a South American coast, let him speak his mind louder and yet louder the older he gets (the doctor can guess this) but not that the officer asked the diva (at dawn in their walled duplex during some interval of (murmured) confidence or when she returned like a sleeping queen, a tranced priestess, from the kitchen her fine unstockinged flesh set off by the tumbler of imported seltzer she bore for them both) where in the world had he her night’s lover seen (did she have any idea?) the tall bald man seriously applauding near him in the orchestra and the fair-haired woman with the bald man "risueno" (smiling) but not clapping, not clapping, smiling but not clapping (was it at the embassy, a concert, a reception?).

Yet what the diva’s doctor does know — recalling the gap in which he fell as toward some unwanted horizon only to hear himself asked by a hungry-looking stagehand if the right brain works the same in a left-handed person — following her now beyond the piano past the stereo cabinet featuring on its top the record jacket of the Schwartzkopf eve-of-the-war Rosenkavalier (those wonderful Nazi singers, her father said with an empty laugh giving it to his daughter one Christmas hearing children caroling outside in the summer air), the libretto booklet containing a bald man with a flowered bow-tie, the composer, big ears, Strauss himself a smile over his face) — what the diva’s doctor does know, hearing her say she’ll put off the atabrine (if he remembered to bring it) she’s grown overnight so fond again of the food she was raised on that she abhors the very thought of that hunger diet she’ll be back on if she gets rid of this angelic worm: not to mention that she is going out for dinner tonight. But what the doctor, her doctor, does know (following her across a blue and brown Andean rug) is that the canal he dreamed last night in anger (getting a cold) or this morning before or upon waking, the canal with him in it, would recede so long as he must seek its end: for he was it, and he would like to tell her. And this canal boasted a queer force keeping just open the planned original hairline fracture of its bed. And along its length he is taking in, like a tapeworm, menus of nutriment but keeping his identity secret from all but his partner with whom he hangs out sinkerless lines with such still worms for hooks they’re then just baitless hooks bare as a sleeping fisherman’s but this partner (who?) alone knows his identity in the umber dawn of a nightmare spread with cashew beurre and local anchovies, turns on him, and it’s a waist narrowing to a silver rose below, yet it’s a squint— the diva and the Indian guide ogling the friendly doctor as if he is prescribed tapeworm so that, like the messenger who is the message, prescriber turns prescription, the tapeworm eats at length unmindful of the noise of waters, one thousand Minnesota lakes, since Minnesota’s only a map now, and this doctor-dreamer’s a live-in tapeworm fixed in a dear friend’s system free of Manhattan’s sea and of a cough crashing around him and taking in menus of nutriment and in return watering the dry earth, taking in from head to tail desert pike swimming terribly ahead; banks of rice goldenly upholding persimmon-freckled muscles stewed pear-soft, their skin basted to an Ojibway gloss; and a la carte a great vegetable deformed by peasant gourdists who give it two, three waists, just as divinity blows us hot and cold in alternate gravities to lopside our stomachs, coil our gut, thicken the neural tube of cousin fish a thousand sea-bottoms removed from our own tube-to-come that fattened all along its length, grew and grew until it grew its own bone around its growth to hold it, so we had nowhere to grow but where this mercurial but cramping spinal column left off at the top and our will’s way blew and swelled, doubling widthwise laying about itself right and left to take the sheathless end of the neural tube gourdward treble-bulbed to light the world to who knows what refracted recipes for mind and face, here craniums balloon at anchor, there chins retire before such seasonings of evolution that no double-sexed tapeworm shoveling it in, shoveling it out, evacuating week upon week can know the whole of it, nor Manhattan medicine man tracking a loved patient across her national rugs dream that on the noise of that nightmare he’d cruelly think maybe his diva is to find out that her father in Chile (having long since been moved from hacienda to apartment) has been or is to be tortured for speaking out or for the Masonic secrets of logia, famed liberation lodge — tortured, pray, how? melted down? first things first — deafened by the telephone treatment, juiced by the testicle generator, paddled on his formerly long-john-sheathed puckered behind with the olde wooden thing with the little holes, and, as if that were not already weird, is to be stood barefoot on open sardine tins holding a weight greater even than the weight of the world (which is called in the political branch of Chilean S. and M. torture circles "the Statue of Liberty") till either he drops or he succeeds in bleeding two exact half-tins-full of his own fish-scented blood pudding — then maybe the diva (read daughter) will so condemn her night’s companion this instrument of a murderous regime that she breaks her date with the mufti’d officer who plans to take her to a restaurant serving national food if the officer is not already here, hidden, muffled, coughing, snoring in some unit of this majestic flat established in what was farmland in Washington Irving’s day. But that coughing: who hears it? can we tell? is it some patience developing? It’s not the doctor, and he for one is alone here with the diva, who has tossed over her shoulder, "You’re taking yourself a bit seriously, darling," which he knows is right but only for him to really understand.