Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

You’ll have to go back to bed, with her or not, because of what the water doing to you, it’s got the shower-power formula let’s protect it if we can. Maybe it is she that’s talking to you, not you (or "Mayn" as you prefer to be called). "Hi, Jim," she does say, for a second not touching. Oh you see she was touched by your saying "Angel" wordlessly; yet more than one female lurks loud in brain-speaker hot to reincarnate, bless ‘em, it’s a strange fashion in the air nowadays, so someone’s got to be there to receive. But which reincarnation? One that makes sense: like at the last instant of approach being in the shoes of what approaches you.

Now you do say a word. "You’re quite an old angel," you croak way down below crust of earth, which just now has levitated to this porcelain-lined above-the-ground floor of a city apartment, bring it up from under your bare toes. What’s in the women-and-men air along gravity-balanced libration points out along Earth-Moon curve? Canny Independent that she is, does she think anyone’s leaning on anyone? taking advantage?

Next question: What does she want of you? — the question you put off. If it hit her that you — He — try to take over a position that she has taken up in advance so it can’t be occupied without aggression (and our only referee has been internalized, which keeps the payroll from getting out of hand), could she kick you — Him — out? But if you are the one being occupied, could you kick her? But if you’re the one being occupied where are you?

The last time you looked, it was her place — the round, dining-room butcher-block table (‘case you need to chop up your dinner by candlelight), and right beside magnum gun-metal bookcase packed tight with the largely paper spines of anthro-historico-botanico-technologico-linguistico tomes is a low, square Mission-style easy chair luxurious ancient relaxer — if it was yourn, you’d plug it in and let it vibe like the motel bed in Buffalo does for a Buffalo quarter; no, it wasn’t your place the last time you looked, not to mention those four-dimensional pictures in the windows of the outside world, across the street fire escapes being farmed and a sight of the sky ploughed by helicopter.

What’s she want from you?

And if you knew, would that mean you had it to give? If your two grown children are truly grown, then you got more spending (-type) money but Jean (Barbara-Jean)’s a young star that gives this original-model but not light -years-seared old space-ship position. One tine of spray now flips out from shower head, walleyeing its route to drill your eye, and you’re not all here, though you woke half an hour ago in bed smelling oil and onions elsewhere in the building, which is the City, which is Election Day ‘76, which is today, onions, oil, a crisping side of unidentified fowl, Jersey chicken, prairie hen, and give yourself to the grandeur of a bulge of cliff, under which a thousand people so much part of the Rock it’s a vein of the cosmos have invented an apartment house: and they live together — nice! — and you’re getting there, they’re almost Indians in territory now belonging to the Federation of Arizone or Holy New Mexico, but you didn’t quite make it out of the shower westward yet.

Italians one floor below her have got a cousin running for office, and it’s not prairie hen cooking; in reality, it was her almond-shaded skin, her shoulder bone bed-shared to your mouth and eyes like sound that opens all the other sounds and sheds them to music; and now, looking again into the water that’s a degree too hot, you guess it’s her shower however much rented because it is her place; she got the keys — two pair.

Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, it’s a shower for sure, the water’s free so long’s you’ve got the good coffee to purify it. It’s a shower but, over her low voice saying, "I like having you here," the flow’s thick like whirring wheels in sun, so when you step back the water you thought was falling turns into legendary Rising Geyser tapped from the automated thoughtfulness of the community: she soaps herself fast like light you hardly follow, let it be, and low down out of sight and upward shining a-grin, her grin as large as last night in the dark you ran your fingers along to find out Is she smilin’? when you’d made a joke — under the canopy of bedroom ceiling where one by one she’s stuck the heavens embedded in all exact constellations each with a future and a message that she knows like she knows better than a man sometimes twice her age happens to know why the orbit of Skylab that you two shared months and more than months ago at Cape Kennedy, decays — or at any rate (speed-factor-curve-plot) both saw fired— and she knows how fast, while at dinner she told of a bone-marrow disease they’re trying to lick, that knobs the bones and swells ‘em closed upon the nerves — of hearing, of sight; and the grin of well-sexed soap now joins her divided flesh there out of sight (if hands and fingers couldn’t see) to your own comfort and surprise, while she so complete next to you soaps you as if she’s found cleanliness aped in her science by the godliness of sport telling you a dream, asking you, imagining you joked about not dreaming: looking with interest, then eye to eye where, in her streaming eyebrows and happy teeth and the blithe little (is it) sinew (?) of play that stares naughty in the round brown (God! violet-flecked!) eyes, you find a message like "Lookee here" — until you hold her shoulders and see right down at what she’s doing (two hands) so that she can happily seem to be self-conscious, for what we buy when we buy soap is tenderness, for she has discovered how to make it rain inside, keep dry and bright outside— but warm and bright inside, too.

It’s a shower, that’s all, but over her low voice saying through the flow that if you did dream what would you dream about, and that she likes having you here (whom she called Recycled Man at dinner last night) the water when you step back almost out of it could be rising, and this geyser and her voice’s backdropped distance reincarnate your belief that you’re in not just a shower in New York but two places, wait and see. Is that why you’re here? Give or take a few inches between your head and the shower’s, for to tell the truth you and she aren’t quite so tall as the shower is deep yet are deepening all the time and helped by the shower. She’s right under the heart-gush of the water while she’s soaping you with her eyes half closed.

She’s reached the coast and is imagining it, but behind you there’s another place and one of the two voices there behind you, the voice of portly, sport-jacketed Navajo Raymond Vigil is saying down through some bending drone of your still arguably if evolvingly human bladder, "It’s gonna happen." Voice of the Navajo.

You pick up graying lights of water turned yellow and blue through the shower curtain by a misty light bulb — this coastal weather, what’re you going to do? The shower bombarding her lags her busy motions a hair but one of two things are known for sure: not whether she has a boyfriend (inconceivable, considering), or is between boyfriends; only that this wonderful leak in the roof is O.K. and you’re taking a shower with a body on Election Day in New York, which must mean it’s a particular year, you saw a sign in Spanish, No Electioneering, and now hear a boxed shout through the bathroom wall from the next apartment, which God knows may be where those cooking smells originate; and while you’re still waking up to this Election Day in touch with this young woman as you have been for hours, you’re letting go unstable particles of energy such as ye meson here, you muon there, and grinning in your minor stand-up dream as your old chosen journalist colleague Red (of face, that is) Harley, possessed of a speaking voice so lowdown deep it sounded acoustic and should be slowed down by outmoded electrical wiring, sounded the ancient warning of his college swimming coach — sounded like old, tobacco-proofed crust but the vocal cords under the crust had turned to bone, for haven’t seen Harley since running into him and your tall-as-a-rusty-iron-post friend-in-another-and-now-immortal-category (dead) Ted walking the aisles of a train, Ted’s stark profile permanently fixed by its association with plane seats, though here at the moment on the Washington train — Harley’s coach in Indiana who was also called Ted calling down the gaping years words like your own New Jersey coach’s on a November field of stone-cold earth mashed and imprinted by teenage men in cleats, "Don’t stay in the shower, boys, sap ya strath," hollered into the shower room through Red Harley’s memory from the brink of a wintry pool on the Indiana border tiled with bricks of age-old blue-green ice long before Harley learned that he was to spend his life as a bass-voiced newspaperman saving time by spending hours on the phone, following history or preceding it, as he told Jim after a professorial dinner in Washington they’d both got asked to. Keeping one jump behind, added Jim, and they got into some nuthouse laughing — in relief after an evening of Gross National Product yielding never to plenty of tasteless roast beef but, curve upon curve, to Net Economic Welfare floated still on statistics denying the wisdom of an incomes policy — and when the nuthouse laughing ran its course they decided, getting into the elevator at the hotel, to go to church in the morning in Georgetown; agreed on this plan two or three times until in the carpeted elevator a bland or was it blond actor with long saffron sideburns and a silent girlfriend a hair taller than he asked himself along with them. But he was nowhere to be seen next morn, as almost neither were Jim Mayn and Red Harley, though heard deeply croak-voiced wading across the hotel lobby.