Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Yet proudly the diva feared still more that her officer would hear some price upon his head in her soft interrogations of him, post-ecstatic, pre-prandial, so at ease in (as her widower father would say of her mother’s long convalescence) "a darkened room" that, asking the demufti’d paramour a fine thread of questions like Clio of all her Antonys floating past the Moon-implanted pyramids, the Manchoor Mountains, the roof tiles of Florence and Paris, and over the Nine Ten Eleven Bridges of Nueva York, Where were you a minute ago?—and where an hour ago? I have won you naked and dressed, have made you my body and made for you each charming accident and endearing blunder the art of love hath care of, and still what are you thinking?—if you don’t love me I will not love myself, she hears some other voice of powerful relations seeking at our expense improvement, say, and she repeats it dismayed that she is some kind of angel if he says so, but she knows, troubled, that her lover does love her and did ten days ago with lust and admiration when he was principally at that time in her view an officer of that regime that broke Victor Jara’s guitar hands so he could no longer accompany himself except down the runways of the sport stadium where Neruda had read poems in 1972—regime-officer-someone this young opera goer who might hurt or help her father. But now ten days later she’s flirting with one answer to two wants (how did any man ever kill two birds with one stone?), felt in the devious track coming out of her some evidence that she didn’t know after all this very body of hers she was so happy with here, pre-menstrual; so close with and so happy with that it and its cosmic environs of bed and chamber had forgotten each other easily for minutes and minutes upwards of an hour-and-three-quarters of such love!

  The friends of mine who sat near you? she murmurs, you knew them? you recognized them?

  He makes a sound—or is it a touch—upon her leg—that’s all.

  At Norma, she adds.

  At Norma?

  You obviously knew them, the man and the woman.

  At which performance was this? he asks with the soft humility of a killer who knows what he may be called on to do, and he specifically does not say Rosenkavalier, which they both know Clara and her husband were at.

  Oh at both, she lies (and nothing happens, unless the tapeworm track way above the thigh his ear’s to reenacts the ghost worm itself in some notion that gives her away).

  Which friends? he asks.

  The only ones I know were there, she lies—near you at Norma, where do you know them from?

  Norma is the opera, he mutters as if he is under a pillow of many years of marriage, Norma is the opera about the Druid priestess and the Roman soldier, with a modicum of suicide at the end, I think, he murmurs, jokingly double-checking that it wasn’t Rosenkavalier and the silver rose, and the satin breeches weren’t the sacred wood, the threatened kids, the funeral pyre, the hated Roman occupation.

  The ones you mentioned, she persists—the man and the girl.

  They were a mere socio-sexual phenomenon of older-younger seen in New York quite a lot, last season and this, comes the reply from his mouth but apparently from his ear into her thigh’s live bloodstream, and what she thinks of herself at this instant she would rather not think, and not even "lest he pick it up" down there against her.

  And so he moves upward like waking, like remembering, seeking her up here where she’s a soft eye to kiss and a long, warm surface of neck, while she, a good She, gazes over his shoulder. And, blocking the thought of this as a political scene, she finds and describes better than she knew the man with the girl, though not the half-observed movements to and from seats, nor that the man’s bold, squarish, weighty face turning, with an older courtesy more than once to, she remembered now, the girl beside him, hove forth into mind emerging right out of the blank obstacle which is her refusal to think what the present scene with this Pinochet officer makes her, and she can’t think how she saw him that square-faced man in the orchestra so well, she didn’t know she was looking that hard—because she wasn’t.

  Socio-sexual, she softly scoffs out of Spanish now into English—you know who I mean: the man with the heavy head of Spanish-gray hair, and heavy, broad shoulders, who seemed to look off over the audience.

  I know only, says the man at her neck, that the two vacant seats near me were occupied only during the second act, and not by this man and the girl you are . . .

  She sees those seats during Act One vacant of Clara and her husband, who after all didn’t use them; whereas in Act Two some seats are full of other vacancy . . . : two women?

  Two young ladies with goggles.

  Goggles? Surely not goggles.

  Policeman’s smoked sunglasses, a bit big for their fine faces, maybe they had standing room for Act One.

  But, she says insistently, her powerful lips at his ear, her eyes way past it, but she doesn’t see what she’s looking at for a second on the wall. Those two, the man and the girl, she begins again, they left after the first act: you made a point of asking about them: what do you want with them? I don’t know their names. I don’t even know their faces.

  What would I want with people I don’t know? he sighs.

  To know about them? continues the interrogatress.

  You are making something up, he sighs; I thought you felt good.

  But as she notes the poster, her poster with concentric squares that she was looking at over his shoulder, and actually bites into the upper rim of his ear, he cries out, and then he says, All right, then, they are important if you want, they are probably key figures in a master plot to infiltrate the opera.

  And his interrogatress is so ready with her next question, But what do you want? that he lets her hear him think (and say), Not them, and adjusts his ear to her shoulder, dear that he’s willing to seem.

  So she wonders what her relaxed neck and shoulders betray to his listening instinct when, fearing for Clara and her important husband and fearing for her own father (whose imported sweet cigars she can smell from here), she finds in the framed poster on the shadow-like wall only that same man—or his face—the man who was with the girl for Act One and left for some reason which is probably as plausible as she to herself (upset plus pre-menstrual interrogator of her suspect, close-up) is not plausible, and she must know why that man at the opera is behind each idling query of her breath against the blurred, gorgeous, close-up demufti’d young fascist admiral who’s less bent on landing a nuclear submarine for his country than in adding to the bank of its intelligence, which is not adding to him—and the sum of its vile subtractions (she works herself up), and has she dozed off into his ear for an instant?— she has—in order to needlessly say, I’m asking the questions—but he, at rest yet drawn by her words, asks (and it could have preceded her own words), How am I supposed to know these friends of yours? what are their names? maybe that will shed light.

  Their names are no concern of yours. Or mine, for that matter.

  Easy enough to find out, he says.

  I’m sure it was, she says, but feels the exchange turning awful.

  Can’t we be in love? he says.

  I am asking the questions, she says with soft daring.

  If not their names and faces, which I do not know, he insists, their connections—is that it?

  That’s why you singled them out?

  You, not I—and why did they walk out of Norma? Opera is the most democratic of art forms, he adds.

  Rosenkavalier? she asks: personal preference, perhaps, she answers— and has made a mistake, forgetting to be true to her lie.

  That was what you said. Therefore, it was my presence that drove them away from Norma after the first act—is that it? is that what you are suggesting?

  But he doesn’t care; he draws his hands down her back and she is confused, not hopelessly, not hopefully, and what is democratic about opera here? the opera house is right smack in the Puerto Rican tenements you might say. She can’t ask him to arrange for her father to leave his home and come here because, even if the regime agreed, her father would prefer t
o stay and the regime would not agree, because her father would speak louder than any act except his silent murder some night here in the free world. And thinking of anything but this, she contemplates the absence of everyone, of the middle-aged man and the girl from the second act of Norma, the absence of Clara and her husband from Norma altogether, the absence during Act One of Norma in the two seats she’d given Clara and her husband, into which the two young women with glasses had moved for the second act: until, as he moves down her, letting go of her shoulders and she finds behind her closed eyes the bristle of his mustache on her hip, her rib, along her stomach until his mustache disappears, she finds emerging the face and long hair of the mere girl whom that broad-faced, middle-aged man with the rather harshly striking thick gray hair sat with and leaned toward, in the seats she left for her friend Clara and Clara’s husband—the girl who hadn’t mattered before with her broad forehead and fine cat face coming back to mind having never till now been seriously present, and the diva, left alone with her own abandoned neck, lips, ears while her lover nuzzles her, and softens his own aim gently to a fault where she is wet so that, pre-menstrual for what her desire might not hold back, she starts to say, "I wouldn’t if I were you," but supplies instead of the last four words that would warn him of blood the other words "be surprised if it was the girl you were after."

  Whereupon, confounded by what she has called forth—a snapshot of Clara’s husband with three of the staff at the foundation in whose sanctuary for the time being he keeps "a certain profile" (he says), a snapshot—a snapshot that she’s sure includes that very girl, as if the diva onstage were ever absolutely sure of who is in the house, her sight flowing over and ignoring them like things in her when she is singing . . .

  . . . confounded by all this somewhat as we are confounded of whom she is a part by her wholehearted breathing that starts up a little light of blind relation, even to the diamond squint of the Ojibway tapeworm trapper now matriculating in his aeronautics program within shooting distance of Lake Superior but she knows she had not the pain in the head and the pain in the belly and the throw-up sweating behind her tongue after all, but then, glad he’s where he is, and glad she is not him and need not close her chamber door, for no one else besides the two of them is here—no children, no old folks—she feels him breathing like his shoulders are inside the flesh of her legs, which they are, and knows that beyond her closed eyes he looks at her, because he chuckles, and takes a little swipe, and chuckles ancora, and rests his ear lovingly ‘gainst her leg to say—with a first trace of bright blood on his mustachioed teeth?— and perhaps he is here (in New York) only to discuss acquiring from the United States a submarine that she has heard spouts (and she sees it along their lone coast) like a whale (beloved, patient coast long enough to berth that U.S. aircraft carrier our Allende was urged to invite for a visit and inspired then to announce publicly the invitation to the aircraft carrier only to have it declined by the U.S. President whom her friends in Paris used to strangely respect for his support of the NATO alliance)—Is that girl (he asks) therefore a friend of your friend Clara? I know you are asking the questions and that is hardly a question, but—

  No, she stops him, I hardly think the girl is a friend of Clara’s (and the diva finds his question is about to turn her off, and her stiff answer too could turn her off—which then has an opposite effect, for by an oracular chance she has heard again by memory or tapeworm track or co-female unconscious Clara’s brave remark down the thread of this last, turning mouth, to wit that Clara’s elegant exile husband (who can sing "The Midnight Special") does have a friend or two here—one a girl at the foundation who is devoted to him—and another thing or two Clara said about what’s going on hangs back in the diva’s remembrance like a real thing she forgot to do, or a face not her own).

  Therefore, her lover murmurs, her fascist argonaut, her other body, murmurs muffled somewhere—therefore (he says unseriously or drowsing, or half-dreaming of her), your friend Clara and her husband . . . who likes music, and would have a box at the opera in another country ... do not see this foundation girl Amy ... are not in touch with her.

  And the diva experiences a fixed shiver at these words of the man dreaming practically inside her. Well, her interrogation of him has brought them to a connection unforeseen, and saying, Amy? She is really feeling she may have endangered her friends—when all she wanted was to arrive at her father about whom she therefore now asks, What are you doing to him? tell me, what are you really doing to him?

  She hears herself say not "they," which would mean the regime in general, but "you"; she might as well be proud she’s charged this naked man as part of it; she might as well, though all she will get from him is charm perhaps.

  She rides the gentle shrug of his shoulders now in partial answer. She smells the vanilla smoke from his hair and she is nearly dispersed by some future feeding inside her but she smells dry, sharp unsmoked cigars, more acrid than their smoke, above the paternal hearth upon the mantel as many years ago as she once walked kilometres up a thorny, gravelly mountain behind a famous father who gave her a pair of black heavy hiking boots higher than the high shoes her anxious mother kept her in through the beginning years of her piano lessons though not a Sunday-afternoon song recital when she was no more than a child and her father nodded and smiled fifty feet away by a tall, ornate door, and later unseen by her disappeared leaving only a blank in her mind, disappeared with three tall men all about six inches taller than he, and handsome—one (it came back to her) a sewer architect and another a fiery-eyed, auburn-haired scientist, a Popular Front man of course who had been in the South when fifty thousand souls had perished in the earthquake, their heads emptied of the Front’s election slogan Bread, Roof, and Overcoat, so that, years later, though at this moment she, a goddess on a king-dolphin, can’t help seeing the great door ajar to the hallway that led to her father’s study, and finding an aroma of sweet cigar, and a door ajar where three men of her polite audience had been a moment ago—smoke rises from the vanilla of her present lover’s scalp and, in the midst of him with the violet of her own roof overhead meeting her vague, breathing eyes, she finds that whatever that unknown man in the orchestra at Norma (with the girl—Amy?—who works at Clara’s husband’s foundation sanctuary) means to the diva’s spiraling heart, she arrived at her hard-to-talk-about father only to see he was not the end of all her languidly irritable interrogation (no he was another obstacle sought, in the midst of these words of her naked admiral’s Your father is under house arrest and only he can hurt himself; he is fairly safe, he is a great man in his own way and he is, of course, old).

  So she sees what she was about—though it too will change as she reaches it weightlessly, daughter, spy, counter-spy, counter-daughter, so totally at ease with her skin-and-bone-gripping arms and scrambling fingers and her neck and shoulder slopes as to prove the ease with which she does what she does so as to absorb the chambers of herself into one amorous whore just in time then to feel this role pass away with who but the broad-faced, broad-shouldered, unknown man in the orchestra who impressed her only upon his absence so that she thereupon became another woman whom the prostitute exploring some secret sign of her own celebrity inch by inch could never buy: and she suspected she might never tell this military man who was all over her like a boy overwhelming her in their joined breathing almost to the last, he was her other body known only for a couple of weeks growing two limbs onto her (his calves, she thinks, amused and clear) for her to plant the soles and heels of her bare feet on—of course they’re bare but what about that long-ago-felt "little swipe"? we remember we wanted to know and to be—never tell, never tell, never tell him that after their dementedly affectionate clasp ten days ago as naked inside as out, she was bound by bodily vow to miss her period and why the devil not?

  Or telling him (for she has a reputation after all—and a trousseau beyond all need of a husband to go with it, yes telling) would be a thing she would think about when (and if!) she g
ot to it among remembered phrases of his love—remembered, the way to a man’s stomach is through his heart rerouted via such doctored slick sea eggs as brunch is made for—for she doesn’t see him clearly in her future (not certainly as that We the young wife speaks for herself and her husband that takes on a wholeness sure enough to invade their dual humanity to appropriate it, is that it?, have we approached the fact?)— no, she sees him only as "a blank that will be in the way if we could but find it," some reasonable invading voices, mysterious We, angel perhaps if there were angels anyplace but inside us, saying the words she hears.

  And now the diva, swaying generously toward a duplex kitchen and the light in order to rustle up a dish of roe, can be again less than a story in herself and once more part of a greater Breather capable of accommodating implicitly not just her mind but her body with its memorial maps where at least one tapeworm left its narrowing track converging unknown to it or its bearer upon a future point of self removed as soon as reached, flushed atabriney from the scene to show a possessive, solicitous, though friendly physician a thing or two (yet give a body a chance, as even this knowledgeable auscultocrat of the brunch board believes) with all his pharmacopoeiac chemistry floating in his head for his old Boston idol to walk on or—for such is the power of the great American doctor Holmes—to ride across in his wonderful one-horse shay discoursing on Ricord, "the Voltaire of pelvic literature" and (not to be mixed up with Tussaud, who was a madame) Rousseau the therapeutist who professed medicine as an art (read experience) as much like making or like love as history’s obstacle quest where an American Indian tapeworm (or Indian-processed tapeworm) gives way to another blind appetite or two beyond being "with" tapeworm or with father along an always narrowing future which— like the thing or two told her by Clara that hung back in her friend the diva’s mind about what’s going on with them (all these people illuminated by us quite possibly and perchance engendered by them, which includes Clara and her economist husband), their stranded, witty life—was not at the forefront of Jim Mayn’s, on an afternoon in New York when (for he was always thrown back shadow-like by the future he’d been in and so he’d actually witnessed and felt its narrowing) he tried to interview an old loner maverick with a beat-up face who talked about everything almost except what Mayn had been drawn to visit him for. This was a new coastline meteorology this man had made up which had unfrocked or unemployed him, hermit that he almost is, here in a quiet, multi-room "railroad" in a pretty high-rent neighborhood in the lower Village. How could Mayn, e’en with his non-position on history, not wonder that a maverick pressure-front analyst across Mayn’s path could prove also a hermit of New York who had done his share of invention? Was it that we were always thinking—we have to help each other out—of the next thing, not this?—like what is in the next room or apartment? And so because Mayn kept losing the skinny beat-up polymath’s name in favor of adjacent data, substitute epithets, and because this loner with the inventive mind don’t like to be interrupted—distinctly not!—Mayn can’t shift gears and backpedal but is aware of being after not just the elements of, well not just a new meteorology but a new weather new enough to have unfrocked this hermit crab when, as a weather specialist with a national service, he began introducing his own thing into reports and surprisingly was not picked up by the wire services, but stays busy and alive among the red-and-black diagrams drawn on areas of brown paper, split-open supermarket bags taped together on the wall of the final room of the railroad flat, diagrams of weather levels like coastlines and he’s talking about what came out (or went in) as, Mayn later told himself, "obstacle"(!) geometry but Mayn didn’t register it until hours later, having groped for a name he was renaming this old man as mottled and chipped as the fortified walls of his railroad flat until, with another word coming in his mind instead of "obstacle," he nonetheless voiced the term "obstacle geometry" to his phone mate this good crazy overintellectual kid Larry who is coping, he really is, at this transitional juncture of his life (though Jim Mayn hasn’t got the full story) coping with the busted-up marriage of his parents which he really as he says feels won’t last—that is, the bust-up—though he didn’t say where his mother was up to whatever she is up to, and Larry (all ten of him) was on the point of telling what felt like "all" (though Mayn isn’t receiving dossiers of that luridly commonplace sort because he knows enough about contemporary marriage to forget a great deal and still have a rich backlog and standing reserve), and so Larry at once picked up (before Mayn could find the word to replace "obstacle") the term "obstacle geometry." And Larry said he’d never heard of "obstacle geometry." "Oh well if you haven’t heard of it—" "I mean I can figure what it is, Jim, I can figure what it is—" "—//that’s what the man said" said Jim. "Who?" said Larry. "The old genius." "What’s his name?" "Is it the Hermit-Inventor of New York?" Mayn asks, but of whom?