Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

Their grins giggle. But their silences — don’t their unspeaking tracks run on like mine? Like me? — for all that I know one day to overtake by surprise my own voice amid those inside conversations mouthless and runaway.

Tracked in circles like those of a marriage. And all at once we hear them talking above the undoubted uproar inside us, drawing together, threateningly selfsame, adults, children.

Hey great! (There’s a lot of greatness in the air these days.) Great idea! Let’s do it. Let’s.

(Yet who was this speaking? Do people speak like this? Surely, Liz’s mother and I do. Nine of an evening, say.)

Let’s have a drink around the corner; let’s do some backgammon, where’s the board? Call the Martins; what time is it out there? What day is it? The week, where has it gone? The court’s reserved anyway, and if the Darbins can’t make it, we’ll play singles.

Let’s bike up to the boat basin, it’s not so far, we’ll hear the subway underneath us. Norm rents his two-and-a-half-room houseboat from a traveling paper products salesman; Norm, our somewhat junior friend, loves the older lady Lucille (older by a little less than a decade — which has been inflated into fashion like racially-mixed love); and she loves him too much not to move onto his houseboat, while Norm for his part loves her too much to ask her to put up with the wear and tear of him and the houseboat he comes with, and so Norm may have to cast off and drift, if he can, downriver.

But with her, he sometimes means.

Why not decide?

Because he doesn’t have to.

New Jersey to starboard, historic cliffs and cooperatives. Those great New York towers to port: riding into that unknown harbor that laps the canyons of Manhattan’s gross memory — but is the river capable anymore of moving itself?

The question’s academic when Lucille’s on all fours. If leaks and plaster dropping constitute weather-as-usual for your apartment, consider a leak in a houseboat. Lucille would go down on her hands and knees to find that leak. Lucille we are probably going to hear more about here and in the next life, which is close and no longer beyond the grave unless we had incorrect information and, in fact, the grave never did stand between us and the next life. So Lucille, a bright singer with a heart-shaped face, sings on the boat-basin dock at twilight, waiting below the West Side Highway drones of fossil-fuel accelerators for Norm to make his weekday way uptown on the underground.

What do you know about women? a voice was heard in the gap of last month’s next thing — last decade’s (for by now, women and men, we’ve heard here if not out on our business junkets in the hinter-lands, are beyond all that unconscious exploitation and find themselves at the barricades together before the future that is no longer to come). Still, what do you know about women? a voice is heard. By which is meant, to know is to please.

Or let’s drop over to Tanto Bene, have a cappuccino; the froth will have to suffice — resist the crumbly Napoleons, you who can — imagine we’re already there; and a foursome waits smoking at the glass-cased banks of free-floating forms with names packed with stiff, sweetest cream, specks of citron jewelling the glue of our floured sugar.

But if we didn’t go, we did something else simultaneously. Meanwhile, the fact that I didn’t dance at the party in the mammoth loft last night hints to my wife that when tonight I say let’s bike over to the Unitarian church to catch Charles for a drink at the end of his organ practice (powerfully muscled, thick-necked, uproarious also-tenor Charles), I’m making up for last night standing around in the light of a furnace and not dancing.

The Unitarians believe in more than they need to or used to; they are said to practice Plains Indian dances. They see gods everywhere — on the hoof, in the weather, along the equal arms of the famous Cross or in the hot, rich subterranean rocks that make it shake with drama — plus, equidistant from that old sin thought to be primal and surrounded by global wisdom, a peace that passeth understanding so fast one’s not sure if it’s eastward or westward, though Charles in his music holds to the known March of Christianity.

Industrial screening in last night’s loft showered us with rivulets of darkness, and I did not know why (speaking for both of us) we were here. World falling away on all sides constant, if that’s the way you like it. Sieved through sheets of dry light — Welcomes Anonymous a high, no less — but young for me in my present form. I like to know someone at a party.

And thinking that by proposing this little jaunt the night after my danceless marathon to surprise Charles whom she loves, I might be taking up the slack of not having offered my body to society at last night’s dance, I discover her saying most quietly, No…she will listen to TV and sew patches on the knees of Liz’s jeans. They’re luminous, funny patches, and “we” are no longer four or five going off to work in the morning in overalls.

Last night’s industrial screening shredded a tape of noise — ignition, concussion, coalition. Rained fish and insect stuff out of the thundering shifts so that the long, long ceiling of the mammoth loft furnished by the unknown lessee of that blast area got sifted; rained bombs, fir, rotation, geometry, dreams, and (if you looked at how the moving, for-a-moment-apparently-counter-clockwise-spinning fold swung around) rained ants.

Moved, though, not with that aim and life when Liz and Val blow by and leave behind them a wake — only to pause stock-still, together thinking of what? — stranded navy looking for its whale-boats. Val older physically a little than Liz, but younger in the mettle of maturity’s magic. Could I say it better?

Maturity beyond question. I’ll always give her that. A rhetorical answer if there’s such a thing, coming home off a business trip. But no answer to the dreamwork’s rhetorical question, “Then why did you bother to have me?”

What she has had to put up with I’ve had bad dreams about. Daydreams that are the despairing, would-be insanity of my class. And when it builds and hurries between her mother and me, Liz stays the same. That’s strength.

So strong I might forget she’s eleven. So strong I can’t ever get over it, or won’t for years.

Glad and able to be left alone (in this city) should we go out. And able to see more than she needs or wants. A story of real life, a dose of her parents sometimes not seeing straight to launch salvos at each other’s doubled blurs, you might think it the middle of the night, and just as well, no one gets hurt if a few healthy salvos heard round the apartment aren’t just on target.

I’ve found too many words, I’ve found too few. For this kid has had an unknown (not hard to guess, these days) amount of wake to vector through. But is it love, then, that lets her see her parents as they are, or strange maturity? So let the light shine in, shine upon her mother’s short, dark curls. The light comes in one end of a bedroom, passes through to be augmented by diagonally opposing mirrors that at first divide the morning influx of sun which then pours itself together again when it fills the bathroom threshold and reaches these two largely naked people approaching each other in height, if not always in looks, having an impromptu hip-to-hip analysis in the bathroom mirror, me fixed some paces behind them across the threshold over their shoulders.

They’re talking hair, the long and the short. I’ve heard the subject in a song sung at twilight at the boat basin on the West River, yet here it’s braids and parts, oily and dry, washed (the one) and to-be-washed (the other). And one’s belongings, the care of. And skin. But then, beyond skin and teeth — homework. What do you expect if you never do any? (That’s a lie, a complete lie.)