Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Attended also by a woman named Clara, yes? . . . suspected of helping to spring from a New York State prison a supposedly anti-Castro nationalist:

  So that this trained agent could supposedly find sanctuary in a South American nation. But why had a man such as her phoner said so much to her on no acquaintance?

  The aforementioned anti-Castro anti-Communist with cousins in New Jersey all with thunderbolt emblems on their cigarette lighters was then to operate against that very South American, junta-ruled (what else was new?) sanctuary state he was supposedly sympathetic toward, by liquidating a key general officer of the junta and abducting a famous old socialist presently under house arrest (in this case apartment house). A nation, it is learned, recently redesigned to replicate the tough-money model generated by the Chicago Institute but a nation also where the thousand-mile-long surf coast often pondered by a maverick meteorologist moves like a would-be shadow as we think about it, listening for breakers, for breakers breathing, recalling the silence of undersea boats passing or pausing like evolved creatures, silence remembering sound, bearing music.

  And now, having identified in a Mexican restaurant the mustached Latin man leaning against the tree last Sunday as the departed escort of the woman with hair whose rich auburn might drip blood, the correspondent Lincoln left the place certain the gray-haired, powerful man’s eyes were on her—she would gladly have made a foursome—he had obviously had it with the kids, yet loved them.

  But she did not stop, nor look back, convinced that she had figured something out only to find behind it the obstacle that had been keeping her from it.

  Which was that she had reached this awful point before, like stalled full circle, nor very full, at least of love, like knowing all the souls in the world who had had this sentiment, but not knowing any of them as friends—for "full circle" (we recall In Jim) said Sarah once, and took her long hand off the lower keyboard of the piano bringing it to join her right hand in her lap, when her son, her older son who took his life as it came and didn’t need as much as little Brad, pushed open the door long after midnight. "You woke me," he said in a friendly way as if she had given him some help.

  She was playing, she said—had broken into song—come full circle, Jimmy, singing to myself again.

  "You ..." said Ted in the bar of the Washington hotel, "let’s see— you knew—?"

  "That Brad was my half-brother?" said Jim. "I don’t think I knew."

  Does Bob Yard love you? asked the son like a soft pistol shot, that kept going.

  Bob probably did, said the mother.

  You didn’t love him, though, said Jim as in a normal talk.

  Not today, came the answer challenging the boy to go on, and that further point was exactly where he directed his sense that "it" was not full circle she had come; and she seemed to decide he wasn’t saying anything else and without warmth yet in a friendly fashion not saying the obvious which was go on back to bed, she gently raised her hands from her lap—she had a very prominent beautiful nose, so she was always "created," "drawn," and she dropped her fingers upon the keyboard giving them life to play into the large Chickering piano a thing he’d heard often—his little brother would know the name of it! but well maybe he wouldn’t!

  "Well, you got away," said Ted ("Clean away," said his friend), and Ted finished his highball as if by "you" he had meant "we," and she hadn’t done what she had done, which few mothers did.

  But then as Ted left Jim in the Washington bar a decade and a half ago (and Jim couldn’t later recall if Spence had been in, that night, for he could be a couple places at once besides Mayn’s mind, live in a burrow economizing on oxygen while he made a few phone calls) the South American lady came in. Jim hadn’t seen her in a while. She had a son and had a snapshot of him in his scout outfit far away. He stood at parade rest, squinting, smiling up from the southern hemisphere. He wore his neckerchief tightly furled into more a tie, so it showed striped red and blue hanging down through the neckerchief holder, and he had blue tassels on his high socks. Pretty tough-looking kid. She was going back home to work in the national airline; her husband was expanding the airline’s operations and wanted her to stop being on the move all the time. Away, more than on the move.

  And this time she didn’t ask Jim about the practical successes of the dream colony—the opiate-receptor molecules chemically tranced so that old ingestive habits were erased—curious enzymatic persuasions between brain and belly so that a colon ate only what he/she needed and gradually might achieve through mental concentration like a springboard diver’s single act the elimination of all waste or residues which one day would ironically reduce the water supply which had relied on recycled human waste which had itself grown such a pale tan as to be transparent like your jellyfish that’s had its sting bred out of it—

  —but instead she asked if there were other space-station shapes besides this spoked life ring, this torus in the great lake of nearby space, this doughnut generated by a circle, and were there compartmentary sealer-walls—they’d have to be vast—that would drop down, that . . . (she drew it in her little notebook) well, what would happen, asked the South American woman, if the pie een the sky came with its own slicer and one day it swung through the libration point in question and cut right through the life-ring torus . . . ?

  Oh, the trouble with compartmenting (said Mayn reacting how?) is it interrupted the passage of daily life through the torus wheel but you know the doughnut’s is not going to separate into two pieces if in the event of a break you could equalize the gravity-pressure differential between outside and inside but surely the shell would crumple. But it had never happened; and anyhow, the real heavy traffic was in those equator orbits where they put the weather and earth-resources satellites.

  However, when he began to speak of other shapes—the cylindrical and (on the dark side—of Earth) the boomerang that bent light and made it lurch toward it—her question got between them and he saw his mother’s so self-sufficient eyes, the musical mind of her queenly nose down which she looked upon the neck of her violin until one day Margaret his grandmother became his shield in the absence of his mother who was the shield in the Indian custom his very Margaret told him of: a shield, a painted buffalo-skin shield that he had, it seemed, against taboo heinously let touch the earth on the way to the horizon notwithstanding—the shield with deerskin cover and green turtle depicted there. But this earlier shield of his mother had seemingly left him, not he it. So you look after your mother particularly if she has left you with a leeward conundrum that takes ya breath away and is beyond you and so you set out to obtain information to outweigh your absent breath, not having seen that you had the message upon your person all the time until, having found the barside woman’s question an obstacle leading to that other woman Cleopatra’s historic nose—

  But then Ted—in the thick of his idea that history lurches from one womb to the next womb by small talk and hence is written with the left hand since the right is busy handling hidden impulses which nonetheless is how you Jim partway levitated above your brother prone upon the sands of the Jersey shore, the sun casting you—

  —upon the place beneath—

  —beneath you where your brother lay—

  Mayn saw he had had pity on his brother Brad and could not have hung at peace with gravity if he had known the pity: so he said to his friend Ted —in ‘63; no, ‘64—wishing to get on to something else, for Spence, the only other occupant, was at bar’s end watching with his ears—"I threw my shadow on him, that little bastard, instead of strangling him in person." Why was there no one else in that bar? An answer was somewhere on the way.

  "But it wasn’t your responsibility to kill him," quirked Ted.

  "What year?" called the vagrant tag of a man Spence from around his glassless beer bottle, missing Ted’s humor, until Spence looked older than he had ever looked—made up, perhaps, with the herb and pulverized-mineral hues of the earth down where he had his moldy little hole.

  "If
we knew the exact direction Brad was lying in," said Ted, "we could know the hour, given the day—or the day, given the hour."

  Jim knew the day but a cold weight in his stomach worming through his brain like his brain was everywhere in his body made him know that Spence was listening with his eyes now, as if Mayn and his family were promising news.

  Jim said instead that that had been the day Mel Mayn, his father, with a fresh gray brush cut, had come palely, plumply home to find them arriving from the Mantoloking shore and had proceeded to the kitchen to make himself some iced tea and a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich and soon afterward addressed his sun-blushed wife Sarah (whom he would rarely and rather gently yet with faintest insult call "Sorry," which was not her middle name) on the subject of Franklin Roosevelt’s new pay-as-you-go tax plan, concluding with the curious surprise that the newspaper would have to cease publication within the next year or even few months.

  Sarah for her part told her husband not to worry and to take it up with Margaret, she was the one who cared about the paper, though of course she had preferred running a family to running it.

  "There’s a word for you, suspended above your little brother like magic, Jim," said good close friend Ted, who perhaps because he could not put his finger on the word at that moment interrupted himself "—oh by the way," and Jim felt something coming, "the Chilean lady we used to see here who went back home to—" "Yes. Mayga." "Why she was killed last month, I heard it from ..." Ted had discovered the weight of what he was saying. He went on deliberately: he had heard it from that colored guy, covered South American trade for a wire service (who, Jim in a dazed pocket of timelessness remembered, therefore had not seemed so colored, so Negro).

  Mayn would not believe it. But he would believe that this was the way you heard. He wanted to dispute her death, or pretend he had known.

  She had fallen from a cliff at Valparaiso (the manner of her death not under dispute). Somewhere behind that semi-circular bay so much more fine than the foul city important in direct proportion to its ugliness (where Darwin during the latter half of 1834 having disembarked from the Beagle survived a several-weeks bout with a worming ague induced by the wine of the country). The Chilean lady had been climbing in company with her husband, who had that very day arrived back surprisingly early from a business trip to B.A., and a third person, a rich printer from the North.

  A what? gets asked somewhere communally way inside Mayn, who by habit takes information as matter, as grist.

  Named Morgen—with an e—a printing magnate, North American, more recently exporting paper products from Jacksonville; kept an eye on things South American; was a humble descendant, Mayn already knew, of that mythical Alsatian mathematician who in the last century arrived in Chile from the California Gold Rush. Already knew because Mayga and Jim had shared these coincidences that barter themselves sooner or later and may seem mad or silly or nothing depending on how people feel no doubt, though he did not tell Ted, who saw still the feeling in his journeyman friend and must have felt the factual coinciding, etcetera, suddenly covered the shock of sadness which itself wasn’t at all unsayable because Jim said words to Ted at once, though aware of Ted exercising discretion in what he let himself imagine had gone on between professional acquaintances, that nice woman and this fella Mayn he’d known for donkeys’ years.

  Arrived in Chile from the Gold Rush—from the middle of it, you might say: though having entered an American desert and for a time found no exit from it, at last traveled on one of the steamships licensed by ten-year monopoly from the senators in Santiago to that Yankee projector William Wheelwright, who was said by the Chilean lady’s friend Morgen (the math-man’s descendant) to have inspired Wheelwright to move inland of that country’s indefinitely (and in a later fractal meteorologist-maverick’s theory mfinitely) long Pacific coast so problematic in Chile’s economy. Wheelwright, having listened to his inner ear’s itemized interest rates all converging on the number five (percent), saw drawn on a perfectly good tablecloth (in the very tavern where Darwin had drunk a toast or two to Nature out of a local bottle with a difference) a somewhat numbered design (the original lost up North but remembered) depicting with lines that angled outward, like very slight arcs generated by the Earth, lines that felt like railroads to join among others two towns one of them coastal in a desert province where the great silver mines had been discovered.

  "But you knew her really well," spoke a tinhorn husk of highish voice, downbar, and it was not that current curious old meteorologist of New York no doubt (someone else must add, since Mayn would not credit such coincidence) carrying on a late uncle-counterpart’s weather work that Jim’s grandma had described the East Far Eastern Princess experiencing in 1893 or ‘4. No, the voice was the photo-info dealer Spence’s, the year no less than 1963, some soiled-pollen aura of Earth tunnels about him as if he had been reared underground. And Ted replied, "So you did," as if adding only now the known times when he had left, or found, them together, Mayn and the round-faced striking lady with the high color, Mayga from Chee-lay, who had put down in her notebook some facts of that future Mayn was convinced of. Did he remember what women said more than men? Had he drawn her to him? Of course not. Did he believe in coincidence, convergence? But what belief? He was here because of his job but also he was here because he at the moment had not tried hard enough to be somewhere else, some hundreds of miles elsewhere.

  But in these fugitive, not deeply bibulous chats he and Mayga had not found out why he had happened back here out of that future that, by no principle at all consistent with his habits of mind and happily pedestrian imagination, was present to this reimagined past (which went under the name of Our Present (1962, ‘3 and so forth) than they had reached Marcus Jones (visibly clearer in the narrow shoulders and wiry torso and rapid legs than from the neck up) bicycling the locoweed circuit of Colorado and adjunct lands.

  How on earth—? (Ted’s topographical question)—

  That’s it: on earth, his grandmother had stressed, fact-wise, and not in (Mayn observed) the domestic sky where run-about "outboard" rockets never quite made it into the consumer economy oh the minithrust type of moderately priced spinal rudder job’s O.K. for a quick hop to a rooftop supermarket, but, when it came to it, no more competitive against the new microbattery of the late century’s mirakelectric tri-wheel automobiles than bike copters on which old heads got high: whereas lean Jones, so lean that his head at some approaches to recollection approached two dimensions, took his lumps obsessed with unknown varieties of locoweed until, the night before he found his last one —which was the night or late afternoon he ran into the woman naturalist whose white lips testified to her own devoted acquaintance with the fierce javelina —"Marcus" (as younger followers of botanical history readily called him) found the famous bike’s hard wheels at last weirdly cogged right into that grand terrain like cog-mesh teeth seeking but finding an answering surface in the land: we mean the battered but undying experience of his wheels had come to fit what they met until, with things at last adjusted, Marcus thought he didn’t have to worry any more: contemplate tomorrow’s variety, and this morning s lone sunray, an ordinary western wildflower, wasn’t it?—but, wait!, with a right-angle-growing stalk!—yet same gray-green leaves and broad yellow head—but no! this ninety-degree bend in mid-stalk! So that, trusting the unlooked-for sign, Marcus altered course to roll on toward whatever the stalk and neighboring events must point to. And never gave it a thought: until in the twilight of the Four Corners’ vast vicinity, the moons of the lady animalist’s lips looked more and more particular (yet not smaller!) as he approached so smoothly that his bike sailed through the land. She called, Who was he?, her white lips navigationally fixed by an unidentified ground-level glint—which could be a shard of the dying day—but only if, Marcus Jones thought, ‘The sun out here in the West sets in the east—that’s it." And she asked him who he was on that bicycle, and if he had seen a hermit of the East who on vacation out here fed animals so car
elessly as to upset the natural food balance supporting the fierce javelina whose study she pursued.

  Whereupon, with a glint conscious in his eye as if she had said the word, Marcus Jones leaned his vehicle ‘gainst a waiting cactus (fleshy-speared cardoon-o’choke, New World style) whose eye was the eye of an owl—which thereupon turned around and shat its guts out—an elf owl that went on shitting blue particular guts out from strength to strength yet then to weakness. Marcus humorously and like a cavalier told how he had been directed to this convergence in the middle of nowhere—the bent stalk asking for (what?) some new significant existence—the right-angle bend an unusual growth in botany—