Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  First Woman and First Man were transformed from two ears of corn, it’s what the Navajo say and it’s easier for an Anglo to believe, a white ear, and a yellow ear, white for woman.

  But if I am to cover this story I have to know for sure beyond a tincture of doubt who was the father of Changing Woman’s Hero Twins.

  What’s the matter? (a nearer voice asks like a pillow) did you hear something? Do you want the answer before brunch, old man?

  Raymond Vigil, portly, young, beamingly serious busybody, and Dina West, cool, kind, healthy, melancholy, Anglo environmentalist lady speak at the same time in the void of your head: I am no Mattie Grinnell who at a hundred and one went to Washington on the Poor People’s Crusade and was the last full-blood of her tribe but her Indian name also meant Many Roads, and what’s around now is a new type that sees the land not only as what the treaties took away with only promises to pay but what lies under the land and does not only lie but shifts its energy and is in turbulence.

  God I’m sick of energy.

  My grandfather got mixed up with that march of the unemployed in 1894 when he went out looking for my grandmother who was only twenty and wasn’t even his fiancée yet. There was at least one Indian on that march.

  Well, there is something in that story you know that the great She lay upon the Earth in anger, scratched it with her nails until the minerals, the coal, the mica, silver, gold, and vanadium were heated up into her by a process whose secret has been lost but was fed by all the desire of the Holy People Left-Behind-Underground, who raised such an upward pressure of passion for her which came together by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost that new coordinate shafts of magma dikes formed so she grew hard with minerals radiating into her which came together yet by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost fell apart in her, giving off two fields of flesh which grew to be the Hero Twins.

  Sure, Mr. Mayn, if I could speak I’d say we could drive all day all night in my late-model Dart into the sky, my husband has his Thunderbird—

  Wait, Jim: no one interrupted you; go on, what are you waiting for, your breakfast? What about an organic Bloody Mary for Election Day?

  My ex-wife’s dad drank dry Manhattans.

  Wilhelm Reich drank Manhattans.

  I think church organists drink Manhattans.

  Maybe they like something special.

  My wife’s father played the piano, I’m told.

  Nonsense to all this mineral cookery. Changing Woman conceived those Twins by the mere advent of puberty. What traffic needed she with a male? What mere equality?

  I hope you will do something with the airport question, Mr. Mayn, local though it is, yet readers in the East could put it together with their own priorities.

  We hope you will do something with the joint geothermal technology-sharing project possibility, Mr. Mayn. Did the car rental take your credit card?

  Nonsense, Jimmy—the true story—but what about your grandmother? She went out to the Chicago Fair and came back with Coxey’s Army marching on Washington?

  Not "Jimmy," please ... no, she knew Coxey and met the reincarnation man Carl Browne and some blood-medicine seller from Chicago, who was called the Great Unknown but so far as we know she wasn’t on the march, she was back home in New Jersey long since. I think she said the march was at least one-third correspondents.

  O.K. If not "Jimmy," then not Jeanie. The true story is that Changing Woman was impregnated by the rays of the Sun and by a shower of water: I’ve been out there. I have a silver and turquoise buckle.

  Well, I been down to Ecuador on my way.

  "Scrambled eggs are up!"

  On my way where?

  Something special. An onion for sure, and the dark mushroom oiling a touch of sweet invisible as a spice’s membrane.

  You couldn’t get out of your head the bones removed of sacred enemies, and what they did then. But you reported mainly business so you would not get into what they did then (with the bodies).

  "I scrambled six big ones."

  Well, two or three bodies anyway, dried to perfection in hot hot sand, then smoked. Get a new slant on yourself, one’s body. In the forests of Oriente in Ecuador. No other white man has seen it! Indian bodies softened up and then remolded. By hand.

  Hand around the empty, red-filmed glass, while thumps speak against the front door.

  "I juiced the tomatoes. You want another Bloody Mary?" She’s realistic.

  "I want one just like the first."

  "You shall have it."

  "Now we’re getting somewhere."

  "I thought so, Jim. But I’m trying to find that Bolivian beach we’re sunbathing on. I think of you letting fly in the shower grinning up into the water with your eyes closed."

  "I thought I had my back to you."

  "Maybe I imagined it. I was daydreaming like crazy. It’s the overflow the last few hours."

  "Shower power to the middle class. You’ve got a good shower there. That means you got a good landlord."

  "It works better on two bodies. It’s very reliable almost all the time except at eight in the morning Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday."

  "Hey, you mean you were daydreaming in the shower?"

  "Only because it was so great being there."

  "Where did you get to, angel?"

  "New Mexico, the usual places. Hey, you can stay here until the people are out of your apartment."

  "It’s too comfortable here."

  "Do you think Bolivia will get its coastline?"

  "They been talking about it a long time, Bolivia, Peru, it’s a shame to have to earn a coastline. It will change the weather."

  "Having a coastline?"

  "Some crank theory. Coastal configuration-outline, instability of moisture front above coast. Maverick weatherman I tried to get a story out of. Lives like a hermit in the Village."

  "A hermit?"

  "Oh there’s someone with him, an old girl about his age but her mind is babbling to her from a long long distance away. It’s a railroad flat—a long hall each next room opens into. He’s not interested in being known, but I think he’s confused on that issue, and I’m picking up some terrible risk in what he’s figured out."

  "How old are you? I would rather hear about your nineteen-year-old grandmother and the Great Unknown. Did your own mother travel around a lot?"

  "One at a time. I guess my daughter would say I’m pushing fifty. She wants to keep me in my place."

  "She sounds like she loves you."

  "Did you stand on your head while the water was boiling?"

  "No, I like to take my time whatever I’m doing, and then I find there is time. It’s like finding you know more than you think you know."

  "I know less, always."

  "You’re kind of stupidly modest, aren’t you?"

  "Look, I’m not on assignment all the time."

  "And nobody knows you’re here?"

  "You saying someone does?"

  "The landlord’s nephew came to the door while you were in the bathroom."

  "So the landlord’s nephew knows I’m here."

  "He wanted to remind me his father is a ward leader and hoped I would vote today. He mentioned your name."

  "The nephew?"

  "Yes. Someone came by this morning asking if I lived here. I mean, my name is on the mailbox. The landlord’s nephew said Yes. The man asked if you lived here with me."

  "Sounds like a divorce detective."

  "Are you one of the flippant ones? Are you only part here?" she gets serious, youthfully, pompously.

  "That would be ungrateful."

  "You mean I’m ungrateful?"

  "No, only the top gurus get to be in two places or more at the same time."

  "Why are you so flippant? It’s not funny."

  "Who asked for me?"

  "Some guy. A Puerto Rican in an army jacket."

  ‘‘But I have a perfectly good address. It has a street name and a number." />
  You reach out a hand toward her and she moves her arm. "I’m familiar with your address," she says. "There’s a rather well-known woman who runs a workshop there that I don’t happen to go to, I go to a workshop someplace else."

  "They seem to . . . work. I mean they do."

  "Because they’re so easy to make fun of."

  "The self-help?"

  "The support system," she responds authoritatively, but then "—just ganging up on the guys sometimes. It’s O.K."

  "As for me I would increase my competence in science if I joined a workshop."

  "You in a workshop, Jim? Pardon me, but . . ."

  "Or I would increase my competence in those areas I now have some competence in—don’t laugh—such as the politically sluggish issue of ocean geothermal energy which is in a way the opposite of land because the surface is comparatively warm while the water deep down is cold where I gather they pipe the water from to the surface where they get the good passive solar energy though they have to run the pumps, don’t they?, but now if we pollute ourselves a new ceiling to greenhouse the planet, we melt the glaciers and up the oceans, but how fast does new glacier water really sink because what if the surface gets cold in that case?"

  "O.K., this is my opinion, Jim. You are locked into some obsessional reluctance, and it comes out sort of meant and sort of not meant. Do you know who came asking about you? Was it connected to the man you saw ahead of us at the movie? Are you involved in something?"

  Mayn has seen the streets of Santiago grooving into slippery sluices to acquire momentum-wise the passive energy of people-bodies in the manpower sense sliding toward consolidation into a new power base as if a dictator without imagination could open national resources and reserves without being one himself, or are these "bodies" sports fans? for the tilted streets all sluice toward the Stadium (its inherent grandeur captured in the name of sport and even the social), while economy dictates that via compaction technology a percentage of those who gain entrance through their togetherness among all others are not seen to leave the Stadium.

  "Where’d you buy your shower head because it’s a powerhouse."

  "I’ll tell you. And if someone is following you, I don’t care. Because we’re here having brunch and if you’re here that’s O.K., and professional intrigue is anti-family—it’s an anti-family bomb out there way at the outskirts."

  Sure, sure, he’s familiar with that one, his own family go way back into the mists of continental trek, and (agreed) if at this point in the century extreme left and extreme right be no different except in religion (whose entertainment is openly embraced on the right) and in the style of wealth-holding (which on the left requires more pomp), what is there for us except private life? Yet to agree with her and (who knows?) her hormones might confess that political power is more and more a South-American-style spectacle you witness from the orchestra or upperdeck practicing your job of fact discreetly: which has been for donkeys’ years the policy he reached precisely through giving up on family, not political, history. Yet she didn’t mean, Forget political integrity-action; that’s not what she meant. She meant intrigue of surviolence: what? wait . . . violent surveillance, paranational pastimes like assassination, more the spirit of participation in these, boytime with no more Caring for History than a disciplined hit man’s automobile accelerator explosion whose anger is perhaps lost in the shoulds and distances of some father’s disapproval or some mother’s or just overarching miasma of absence. Yet—

  "Don’t you have a buzzer?"

  "There he is again—the buzzer’s broken. Weird: he was knocking before to tell me it was fixed."

  "That was three things on his mind: the election, the Puerto Rican, and the buzzer."

  "Your sweet stuff distracts me."

  Tall girl in white terry cloth, hair dark and damp—she’s looking down at him—you—in his shorts. What is this? She’s getting younger before your eyes. Does she now have the technology? To colonize space, that is. She falls from a beautiful height upon your—his—neck, his shoulders, chuckling through her hair and into his throat. She wants to know his birthday. Same as his grandmother’s, etcetera. "That thumping," she looks at him cutely, "that thumping on the door won’t go away."

  "It won’t?" he says. "Better find out what it is."

  She rises away from him leaving him feeling naked, and turns to leave him but the thumping on the door reminds her: "You weren’t really serious about not dreaming. You sure you don’t?"

  "Answer’s still No," he stubbornly leavens his reply.

  But if he did dream, she ponders, moving away . . .

  He would dream, he answers, maybe all those books he tried reading one chapter of, you know.

  She says it doesn’t sound right. She’s gone away to answer the door, leaving him with love and, well, technology beyond el toaster and her anxious suspicion of fiberglass adrift in the lining of her oven—call in two hundred thousand ovens. What history will he find if he truly enters Spence’s life. His own? Her apartment is like his head today, and there’s a danger at the door, potentially historic, hence with its tedium to work through. He would rather discount it and weigh her breath spilling him forward, for at his age he is in love-again now with a person other than his one-time wife, so a front of private life spills forward, though he knows he has been followed lately, though it’s perhaps par for the course, like some shadow of bomb-war or throw in disarmament with the shower water. He meditates in his shorts upon the shower head, for it has taken him—you—a ways into the future from here, and the weight of the water’s raying wash has turned to a force that can so re-matter what the rays hit that you wonder the water can be so real. Except that you don’t wish to ponder that future force that deconstitutes and works on two not only one, a shortcut toward colonizing space transferring two into one—the thought makes a relation that is so rough you’re thrust into where you are, like future forced you to step back into the most alive.

  "Did you ever see that movie?—I mean, you know, not coming in in the middle?" She’s here and sits down hard on his lap, tall and subtle enough to carry his love into the Great American Question Who was here first? and beyond.

  He doesn’t want to get around her. "But is weight slow?"

  "It’s steady," she guarantees. "It’s steady?" she asks the void.

  "That’s what I was thinking in the shower."

  "We had a great one. Slow as weight itself," she says. "Do you ever feel," she wonders, "that we fit into a large life that doesn’t much know us but—holds us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?"

  "Well, let’s not tell it about us," he seems to agree, and she puts an arm on his shoulder and frowns.

  "It is beyond understanding us," she pontificates softly.

  "It’s still fun being here," he is going to say but instead out comes, "I think I have to go and ask it a few questions. It’s fun being here, Jean."

  "It is," she agrees; and feeling her legs across his all over again, he finds that she doesn’t yet know what she wants of him, so he brings the question inside himself, switches the sexes to protect the innocent, and now sees he’s had the question in him all along. To be sure, it’s shared, but at the moment he was here first.

  the departed tenant

  It was a distance from her place, but he often walked home. The hours were insane to be leaving her. What did he think he was doing? Along the glowing, blank streets, where the cab at 3 A.M. or some face, above a wind-breaker, of a man going on early shift at five had less than nothing to do with him, he imagined he was married and bound home to his wife. He could imagine this because he had been married. Yet when he had been married, he hadn’t been unfaithful in this way. Unfaithful? But he wasn’t married now.

  Sometimes he stayed overnight, but sometimes he didn’t. But he liked staying overnight with her, so that when he didn’t stay, it lingered, like a bad time. It wasn’t a bad time, but you might call it a bit dumb. But it was his life.

 
; She didn’t much question these departures in the middle of the night, except to complain a little and maybe make a joke. Like did he have a paper route? Was he moonlighting as a milkman? There are no milkmen any more, he told her. Did he have another girlfriend, a daytime girlfriend he went home for? You’re my daytime girlfriend, he said. But that’s the point, she said— you’re not spending the night tonight. Oh, but I do, he said. Oh well, she said. Because it wasn’t worth arguing about.

  She might switch on the little globe-shaped light beside the bed and get up and pull on her bathrobe and hug it around her while he put on his clothes, which had been lying on the floor, or on a chair, or once—his socks—on the keys of the upright piano she kept in the bedroom. The bedroom was bigger than the living room; she thought she wanted to move. Sometimes she stayed in bed while he dressed, and told him sleepily that she’d had a good time with him. Then the darkness and slight strain of what he was doing, going home when they could have been sleeping, seemed to make her say less than she wanted to say, as if, in ‘he dark, she mustn’i. even ask his name or he would vanish; and so there were words in the air between them, and perhaps it wasn’t clear who was thinking t m. What on earth did he think he was up to? What was this? Who did he thinK he was, doing this to himself? Really to her was the equally unspoken reply; to her, if anyone. (Forget it, pal, she 11 survive was surely in both their minds.) One time she laughed and said, Well, did he have a wife he hadn’t told her about? No, not one he hadn’t told her about.

  He said, "I only have two bodies. How’s that for fidelity? Mine and yours."

  "Well, I should think so," she said quickly, without feeling. But generally she was easy on him when she was with him. She was smart; in fact, she was artistic. She had a happy influence on him.

  When he got dressed in the dark, he might find himself back on the bed for a moment or two, the covers and his coat between them, his mouth on her cheek, her eyelid; her mouth, thank God, smiling in the shadows while he told her the same things he had told her before, but now he was dressed.