Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Farms — the environmentalist lady dreams of — encased in this transparent air you’re not used to taking in. You know that she, here two miles from the astoundingly near Rock, has a sense of you, that you wouldn’t get sentimental about legend/religion, yet that you have not yet refigured how to do your work so that it matters. A sense of you, she has, you (well) might skip the trip to Socorro, get the volcano man on the phone, maybe he can talk a more layman’s geotherm. You’re serious, she guesses (hits upon it, lo acierto). That is, serious about something else which may be volcanoes or idleness or privacy, but may be something to one side (both sides) of this assignment that’s your job, so much to either side of it that she’ll have to be framed by these margins of yours or she’ll just have to take off her public environmental concern and let the craziness the two of you are giving off speak to eclipse this infernal garrulous Navajo whom you do ask in self-defense to return your rental car to Farmington and you’ll go south with the woman, Dina, and why doesn’t he get going where instead he’s totaling you with the high place accorded the Navajo woman: she rules the hogan almost; yet where are the hogans? — show me a hogan — these pole-supported, earth-covered mound-houses, where are they? (are they the polygonal wooden cabins you see?) — north pole is Corn Woman, south is Mountain Woman, west is Water Woman, east pole is Earth Woman.

There’s a void fading out and you a reciprocal window fade nakedly in, into just a shifting weight of plasm, it’s what you are on this New York Election Day, plasm recalling in of the girl Barbara-Jean’s voice up there on the pillow that she said at Cape Kennedy she was there for a magazine that you now know more about but last night she hardly talked of because she started you in a western direction — you feel a slowness, greater and greater, turning you back into the rest gap inside you, groups of powers gimbaling the window far away in you, computerized adjustment with an equally far away outside —what groups? they are in communication — fades out, leaves one dark twinkle in the hair of her puff, primes this globulet of light there flowing through her legs, but it’s shower water, there comes a thumping on her front door again and you taste rose-flesh in the drop of her shower water on your tongue, determining to have what’s here — the margin is the center, forget Spence in the movie and the Chilean economist three, four years ago at Cape Kennedy — so long as the girl isn’t responding to the door. And so you won’t talk now for a long time of circling her as she circles you, turning the bed warm again, and the interruption once tight with the touch of chill for a moment between bathroom and bed crossing the palm of your old hand, now gets bigger and softer. Void fades out and the silver-disk shower head is no more the brain and no more that mutation beyond terror both future and past that could not be believed if voiced to this girl who’s of a scientific mind for a journalist, and would wonder what you thought you were laying on her, what being in future reinventing the present meant and as for public events threatening to be news, there’s private life and public life and always was.

Didn’t she do that at dinner before the movie? Not his westward grandmother Margaret who passed muster but the negotiator Karl immune from search who packed a very small Japanese pistol into a room in London that was right next to the room where erstwhile presidential timber Stassen of whom she had but dimly heard went even further than the long way the mythic little bit of him was said to go in 1957. He’d gotten the Russians actually interested in a couple of aerial surveillance plans, but then on the day that Karl had the pistol, Stassen spilled one of these schemes to the Russian, forget his name, and the West Germans and the British found out and got mad— they hadn’t been told; and Eisenhower’s face was red with rage because here we were with the Russians again and he was trying to soothe the British after not backing them on Suez, and Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State as you know, had for his beloved West Germans all kinds of Presbyterian good manners in the breach of which created by poor Stassen’s jerkwater impulse Dulles aimed at Stassen a backfire that blew him right out of a job. (But "How could this Karl get into the talks with a pistol on him? I didn’t know the Japanese made pistols" — "Same thing in Stockholm I think it was and there he was assistant to one of the sub-principals entrusted with the most finely boring technical details, you know" — actually in those days less the un making of weapons than making them on a rational schedule of rationed balances.) Mayn’s westward grandmother Margaret on the other hand: she saw the Statue of Liberty in pieces on Bedloe’s Island in 1885, she must have been twelve? and her father, who took her on these short trips from the New Jersey town where the family paper had run weekly since at least 1834, sent her in ‘93 to Chicago to cover the World’s Fair. ("The World’s Fair? Fve got pictures of the ‘39 World’s Fair, my father met my mother there, they were standing outside the Finnish Pavilion and some kid’s green balloon with Minnie Mouse on it blew by and Dad captured it and returned it to the kid, who was French.") It was called the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Mayn’s nineteen-year-old future grandmother took issue with a famous reincarnationist named Carl Browne whom she heard hold forth and he introduced her to the famous Jacob Coxey ("Who?") who organized an army of unemployed to march on Washington the following year.

("But why didn’t you take over the paper — what was it called?") the Democrat, and up to when Margaret’s grandfather became publisher in 1854, it had weathered many attacks beginning with the scurrilous and unspeakable and dastardly charge in its first months that it would publish only until the fall election, that being its only aim, but the attacks came from the same landowners who thought Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States was a left-wing stampede to anarchy, the same who had been known to pay laborers with notes below par value on a bank seventy miles away, and the same who agreed with Justice Story, who was one of two pre-Jackson dissenters on the Taney court, in ‘37, that to build the toW-free bridge, the Warren Bridge, across the Charles River in Boston was tantamount to raping decent monopolist stockholders of the already existing bridge at a time when the political routine of exclusive charters granted (as they put it) to businesses meant that — well, the editor of the New York Post was saying, The City is trapped, we can’t get our potatoes, we can’t get our fuel, without paying some damn monopoly that’s finagled a corporation charter out of a clutch of crooked legislators in the statehouse. (Lawmen, newsmen. "What, Jim?") Newspapers don’t give away a million loaves of bread any more, like when Jacob Coxey’s Army of the unemployed moved on Washington in ‘94—the New York Herald, can you believe it? ("The promotions have just gotten bigger, Jim, I got news for you! But. . your grandmother went to Chicago at nineteen?")

Something like that. Of course by then it wasn’t just your advertisements that showed you what was going on in town, for in the 1830s and ‘40s it was Congress, the legislature, politics, foreign news — not much local news; and she used to show me the ads for the stagecoach even before her own time that took people, her grandfather’s subscribers, to Hightstown to meet the railroad train, or to Key port to meet the steamboat. ("What river was that?" — "Oh it must have been the Delaware.") That is, if the steamboat made it. ("What railroad?" — "The Camden and Amboy; big inverted-cone stack, two pair of high wheels back by the engineer’s cab, two pair of little wheels up front by the cow catcher, and the big wheels came right up inside the railing with its little brass posts, twenty that ran clear round the engine"), and even fifty years later it was Chicago those subscribers wanted to hear about in the Windrow Democrat ("Windrow. ." Jean says the word—), June 1893, headlines the Chicago fair — Two Windrow Girls Visit the Great Exposition — An Interesting Account of What They saw — A Labyrinth of Crystal Rocks— Fooled by the Mirrors — The Germans Everywhere Ahead — ("The World’s Fair" — "Yes, and she and Florence were almost afraid as they wended their way toward the New Jersey building. ."). Margaret wrote,