Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "20/20" the prison inmate Foley ranks his own insight into life and the world, and seems to expect his correspondent the economist to think constantly like an economist—which is how? But one was moved by Foley. He got to one. There in some margin of life where life occurred and political acts aimed at stabilizing things instead doubled or locused that great margin where NATO Nixon thinks of Einstein as just home folks playing classical violin and Einstein while thinking only of his own vast difference from God descales his model universe and, at a stroke, decreeing this Far to be equal to that Near, sees it whole, we are told.

  On this side of the street the enclosed subway stairs into the ground generate people—that’s what they do—to eat the cardboard-contained fast-fodder at the adjacent chrome door in order then to be seen by family groups in pastel-colored ready-to-wear (already-/?^mg-worn!) garments slowly issuing out of the hotel under lights of a rehearsal they are self-consciously half aware of. Across the street a hundred functions housed all under the massive complex: mainly, though, the sports arena and the railway terminal you would not know by sight—all seen through signs that say nothing of a mighty athlete, a discus thrower, an ancient pugilist, and now an African giant bombing a net-skirted rim Americans call a basket—signs that also tell nothing of a night sleeping-train smelling of comfortably used steel and carbon afloat in the dreams of passengers upon steam buoying out under the platform—all hidden by the complex—taken for granted, like home.

  Solid people are cutting through three, four lanes of Sunday-evening cabs and cars, ruling out risk like hunters, daring the world’s in all probability mad reflexes, occupying sudden positions against the will of yellow horsepower southward.

  He has the tweed cap on, he’s exposed, and he’s at the northeast curb as agreed—where the voice on the phone said to stand. Tweed cap, his idea, English. As he sometimes in the past has quite been. Though never to look at. Though you do get English who’re Latin-looking, tall, moustached, because he’s seen them. Walking the fields, from a train. Dangerously private. Walking streets in black suits and capped, bird-crest fashion, by black knobs of bowlers.

  Folding his arms he surveys whatever could be watching him wait, his consciousness strolling on and on yet lingering, worded. But this is no such place. He can just about feel the slide of home fingers after dollar bills in his trouser pocket, his Clara against him telling him to pick up a stick of butter if anything’s open on his way home, and did she wonder tonight if it was just their neighborhood he was heading for? Tonight she is further away from him than she would wish. Younger than he, slightly and magically; less foreign to New York—is it because she’s a woman?—though half-English, which is also foreign, yet not like Chilean.

  So fresh and trustworthy: oh, he wants to phone her and say so.

  He found her this afternoon half-dressed posed in the mirror. He came back from nowhere, alone on a Sunday—feeling official and uneasily at home but especially childless, walking with the river, sitting on a bench. Two little girls were hugging and hugging each other, giggling, and those gross apartment towers across on the New Jersey palisades are the "settlements" you get today.

  Inland to Broadway, he had found the pay phone free that he had been directed to in a previous letter by Foley’s in all probability gratuitous code which was just close enough to real thoughts so you must pay heed to it, though it seemed to invent life when we had discovered enough to work on already surely: and then received the call right on time from a man called Efrain. And then went home to Clara feeling technically unfaithful.

  To find her half-unclothed before the bedroom mirror.

  "Thinking of changing your life," she said, as if she might be the one— ‘7 know," but did not ask where he was now emerging from.

  "Our life," he said, which they both knew was true all around, for they were in love and had no internal passport restrictions and could go anywhere in the States where he was invited.

  So full-length, she was: skirt off (or not yet on); gartered stockings on, he was glad to see; no slip; stocking feet with silken insteps. Not those gymnastic tights revolvingly displayed in supermarkets (like postcards) next to tall cans of pineapple juice on sale or in drugstores next to a stack of painkillers. And after years of essentially the same body in roughly the same full-length reflection, itself a place they took with them into the countries they lived in, he didn’t know entering the bedroom of a rented sanctuary in New York whether she was half-dressed or half-undressed. So they soon found out. Oh, the Kimball women’s group she went to which did a lot with mirrors, pelvis rolls, "love-your-body" techniques (that doubtless he could use) began in the mystery (for him) of why Clara went at all, and has turned two degrees to what was always there: Clara herself. A woman who had only those secrets from him that made them more intimate and said of the workshop, "Consciousness doth make garbage of us all."

  She had not found out until the dark green candles were lit and supper was on the table that he had to meet someone this evening, this night. He and she are so allied by good humor, by potential disaster, that she may have felt the public facts of oppressed female life here on New York’s famed battleground bending her own private but political exile toward some fresh distance she wasn’t telling him about. But she had no need to be that species of feminist with such real risks nearby and the tragedy of their country as near as their very bodies remembering what they had escaped suffering.

  He hears her being tortured for a second; hearing is all he can bear. They were lucky. His luck spins again for a moment. A French disease a presumably good doctor said. Meniere’s Syndrome. Stress, ear buzz, counter-clockwise spin, look out. The sidewalk trembles, someone sidesteps him, and a block or two down across Seventh Avenue (which the dark blue-and-white sign names Fashion Avenue—which is news to him, as they say here) the no-numbers clock above the entrance to Penn Station gives him in its passing design the message that he’s ten minutes early. A bicycle floats before his eyes, it goes with the Jap clock, the black boy in his lane at the edge of the packed, three- or four-lane traffic takes his hands off the handlebars and smooths his wondrous long face and crosses his arms in front of him, patting his bike handlebars on automatic, his sneaker laces tied. The sidewalk trembles, and nowhere is there a tweed cap like the one that the young man Efrain was told he would wear. Through the music and the motors and the wheels he hears the traffic-light control-box an arm’s length away run its cycle of two double clicks. He is exposed. But to others’ vengeance?

  But this is New York, not Switzerland with its passports, yet not Sicily, not a pueblo in Chile, not Ireland where the village grocer expects you to have a local girl to do your shopping for you; and not a Kansas farming town like twenty other grain-elevator towns at eight-mile intervals where they might know no more about you than Indians in Brazil measure how far a brainy anthropologist has come from his Paris desk; not the large Kansas college town he actually had received an "invite" from to make an appearance at and had been tempted; and not an Andean village where dark Asiatic faces watch and watch and drink corn until they don’t see much of anything, except mountains rearing in the mind; nor is it the mineral cartel that would not go away even after finding an inter-American association reciprocally funding and funded by his own foundation to be drawing on a D.C. bank account in the name of an agency which his photographer-journalist slave/master Spence happens to know is brother to one of the CIA’s sister laundries, and so it goes, the foundation seems conclusively as free of CIA as CIA is free of all ties by virtue of such reciprocal trade-offs as ensure that private life has a future, the only future. Which is not much more private than Asiatic faces reflecting the natural light of some landbridge long lost and invested in their bones and music and autonomic poverty system, looking, looking, deaf to a secret radio rebroadcast of Allende’s ultimate "History is ours, and the people will make it" speech from La Moneda.

  Yet here in New York they do look. And look away. But stand on a corner, and call, sh
out, scream—though "scream" is what they say they do, when all they really do is speak rough. And probabilities are that passersby don’t look around to see if you have someone to call to, yet, with an indifference that is not bad but O.K., they sway you as they pass.

  The tweed cap lies exposed upon his head. What if he looks afraid? He paid two pounds for it in Cambridge as an undergraduate. Good island tweed. For the wet. The chill upon the bald street of his head skin more naked yet less skin-like than the nape of his neck. For the long haul. A mass of woven yardage becomes a procession of cloth caps on Ellis Island an age ago, then grows into a mass on foot—but was there emigration from the west, then, too? He needs to speak to someone. Is he already observed?

  Tired and muddled masses. Huddled for the long haul. Who do not care if you are a constitutional democrat distinct from Marxist socialist or a Marxist socialist paving the way for a secret police name-change, one hears, from DIN A to something less human. In a carpeted museum, somewhere inside the Statue of Liberty (or its pedestal), Clara had ventured ahead. She passed the tall glass case displaying women’s dresses—a turn-of-the-century her and companion him—the he, say, fifty, here in the glass case; she, say, a good forty, all very reasonable. Clara disappeared around yes a curving wall, he recalls just now for a Seventh Avenue street-corner voice says into his ear, "Goin’ out tonight, honey?"

  And turning to the (truly) black girl his height who, against his eyes and his face, with a tall hotel rising behind her, is a flower of splendid eye rouge, lip paint, cheek warm tribal beige—he’s shaking his head vigorously, hearing the buzz in his ears again like torture in some next room, smiling No thanks, to make it clear he’s a person with an appointment, not in from out of town, yet adds, "I am out," for her to add upon her cinnamon breath and with a still grander smile than before, slowly, "Right" and lifts a hand toward his, and the curving wall of night and light round which New York bends and sweeps into a Beyond that’s right here curves into the carpeted Immigration Museum; seeing Clara that day disappear beyond the tall display case of long dresses and around a curved wall, he had not followed her at once. He would take bread from her hand, he’s taken cake. How far was she going? He had put a hand in his trouser pocket, felt some folded fifty-dollar bills; he and Clara wandered through a museum inside the base of the Statue. Folding money. Paper. Worth its print in silver. He never had to think how far his own would go, unbudgeted, half spent, stretched only as reimbursement as if for feeling under threat of death (possibly from competing intelligences!), so the slow middle-class poetry of being alive or at least for decades conscious comes to some late unexpected stage when in an hour your police melodrama lands on top of you and that’s it, a touring messenger from an office in Santiago could kill him yesterday or tomorrow in a cab or browsing at the newsstand or between furrows of a vast Kansas field so God-given at dusk.

  And when he found her, his Clara, she was looking at where the wall gave way to show some drab, rust-green metal, just a slope of Lady Liberty, a section they were working on before they would put back the wall; but Clara said in English, "It is definitely her underwear and she can’t see us down here staring."

  He had been in love on an island—that was it—Liberty Island; and he touched a palm to her shoulder, courting her. He hadn’t seen what this thing was that they were looking at. Now it was huge. It was part of the gross Statue.

  Well, he’s an immigrant. A secret. A secret kept. By his wife, kept subtly alive; professionally kept, though, by a rich man he doesn’t know enough about—kept fed and occupied in the pyramid that that man’s foundation bestrides in which (a phone call once said) you always have a place, you’ve earned it and you can be as incognito as you wish until after aeons of quiet consciousness someone decides it is all over: and so, with humor and killer rage, he could shout out now on Seventh Avenue, secretly meeting this Efrain whoever this recent parolee Efrain is (who says he saw him in the Visitors Room talking to one of the Cubans)—now, though, on this street corner in New York shouting silently that he is here—as if They did not know he was here in New York: so come and cancel him, go ahead, he’s not protected by a pyramidally founded health and accident and whole life policy, and not by sharing some unassailability spun off New York’s singing no-hands bicyclists, nor by the ticking of the green light or the brujos his grandmother told him purred in the jungle bark and took off your head until you went crazy and then put your head back on—all whistling in her old teeth transplanted into the roots of beasts, a giant leopard cub being born in the crotch of a swaying tree to be lowered yowling to mulchy earth by a python that curls spring-like about the new cat only it is sprung from these coils back into the leaves full of ancestral eyes because a pregnant king is stumbling through the trees looking for his queen. Better in the quiet delectable terror of a grandson’s bedroom than in these lurid books flowing out of some South American continent zoo full of whimsy-malmsey not knowledge, not philosophy, therefore no hope except for another dream on tomorrow night’s pillow to sell a South American spirit that middlebrow New Yorkers buy the way they dream of Vietnam girls in some uniform of ripped camouflage, though that can be done more efficiently.

  He is a secret kept, maybe from the city too, like death—or your personal Dial-a-Bomb frequency. A secret given the city like a hard figure to be absorbed in the long haul. Hard as drugs; solid as food; a dimension you lost track of in the longer run. Ingest now, digest later. Gulp down like a frog a fly; eat it slowly like a snake; drown it and swallow chewed-off pieces whole. New York is an open secret. For a talker with a community ready and already in conversation in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, he himself has done nothing but talk within himself. A he and a she was what was needed.

  He often looks up out of a street.

  Oh consciousness raised under the sky, look what there is tonight! Under the sky, the Hilton Hotel on this side of Seventh, what a system!—the Statlex-Hilton is six softly lighted pillars based high above street level. Gray curves glow above the marquee that drapes canvas to the sidewalk; then across on the west side of Seventh the vast Penn Station—Madison Square Garden Center marquee bearing upon it geometric shapes like a children’s advertisement for, maybe, dual-engine monorail hover-power, a clock’s bright wheel and a giant electronic oblong of changing words listing events he will never go to, not even soccer, which is catching on here; and then, risen above Penn Plaza and massively set down upon it, a lighted block of offices with a steakerie slotted oven wise above the street, but behind the building and to the right or uptown side what he now senses he’s been looking at all along from his angle, from the moment he came up out of the subway and tried to avoid the wrinkle of danger along his scalp and sounding inside his armpits, a vision, slanted parallels of light, doubtless the Garden, escalators lighting levels down one wing exposed by treated glass that dusks the down escalators so they glow the foreground and yield the traveling heads of people: oh all the lights and their spots of sheen make a night space of spaces in which he feels held by the whole city. Nations are not people, a nation is not people: is a conglomerate jumping the needs of people through parts to a whole that like an automatic attack-response system works on its own in the long run, works on—or, as thought, collapses what went into it, into fine unknowns in formula, but makes them go away into the generalization where they can then never be quite seen, unlike statistics, which in the long haul do not lie if you know how not to make them.

  A streetwalker stands. A taxi joins her, and she looks around her.

  He is out here but in hiding. Maybe he has stopped fighting until he finds himself in a fight again. It could be anywhere. Suddenly at a taxi stand. He did what he expected of himself once and did not lose his life, not even his livelihood if in another country; and now has for his trouble and study a counter-clockwise buzzing in his ears and brain and the painful power to think about his country and his grown children; and how they may have accepted the government—what fascist promotions advertise
as a renewed nationality: while ancient property that’s no more than breeding thought its way to good sense and good sense to protein programs for undernourished children’s brains and to negotiations with the American mineral mind that led to southern workers taking over factories, but a good doctor when he becomes President needs more than medicine, more than character—until now he weighs earth inside him against property that in his own country is haunted like immense charcoal beaches by the absent owner of America who can be abstract and a man. Meanwhile breeding leads to music, to routine, to thought, to light if only light cast by the wit of love, or, beyond exchanges among prisoners outside and inside, to the courage to be only here. In the long run he is exposed, while danger heard in the next room—if only of his brain—corners him here but only the danger on this corner he came up onto from the IRT subway that he now finds again moving under the sidewalk of his shoes while pop lyrics grind and pass as deeply as the dizziness that pivots taking him with it and its French name to remind him that the stage he is on is perilous to the health. Yet has he planted the flag of Chile in these straits? On this corner he stands between a yellow control box for the traffic light and, on his right, a newsstand sealed for the night, a stained, dull-silver container containing unsold early editions and lurid weeklies, the real news. He has become a Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

  A fine woman in paint-stained bluejeans coasts past on a bike, staring— an advert for Join the CIA and be a model; work for a foundation, ride a really good bike.

  Some of the music stays still; some passes; and he turns to look behind him, he doesn’t get the words, he understands the cello, but not this, he understands viola, French horn, the Chilean gut guitar even when his beloved cousin played Broqua, stranded each Broqua mystery like minimal song of the understanding to affront the understanding at least of those who in the last century sat through an Alfonso Broqua piece that retimed and so puzzled their own expectations that the mystery was over before outrage told them to get up and leave—and his cousin with the downcast eyes and small hands could play Broqua, some said they did not know how, he sees or feels her fingers cut off, wafted through sounds of silence and agony in a stadium, no Olympic marks in sight, while here along Seventh Avenue in New York the recorded singers are either nuts or having their entrails drawn out to be fingernailed by bare nerves of concentrated electronic juice. Well, did he get here early in order to back out?