Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But breathers aren’t what they—or we—used to be: once marginal, the breather came to take up major space like a friend in need whom you have to listen to for weeks of personal crisis: once space, a breather has become a person like turning into yourself; witness even those doubtless workshop-trained adepts who hold their (if it is really only their) breath and have it too, and, within that body-hold, keep so deep self’s other intake/out-go that coming upon the phenomenon of breathless breathing less like the old tab-less tab men’s collar than the cordless unisexual (little) shaver, we children of the phenomenon may grasp only its idea yet feel its matrix quite absent, while we would drown in our own fresh-squeezed still pulpable information with built-in gaps as if it were the breath of life—not Jim, contemplating reported reincarnation of the noted Grace Kimball from one change stage to the next, from the Great Mother-Sun of forbidden Splinter-Inca lore along the Peru-Chile frontier, and from the Goddess who was Greek yet then a sister renegade who occupied the oracle Tree-Lith on a Mediterranean crag perilous yet organic in the lower Peloponnesian wilds of Mani, until she (still Grace) became the lorn Prince—what just would not blow Jim’s mind because "almost nothing surprises me" (he remarked to Norma and Gordon)—the reported lorn Prince (that Norma reported was of Nava-Choor in Kimball’s version) derived like revelation from a detailed account given Grace by a newsperson friend of a Prince or high-born brave who (news though ‘twas to Mayn on his own doorstep and beneath the lintel of his long past or at least as presently adjacent as Little Wind teaches the Hero Twins to throw their breath—for immortality purposes), (this Prince) on being destroyed by some "Princess" type he thought he adored surprised himself by self-resurrecting secretly as two people in the visible form of one, was it man and woman now?—according to all that’s recently been voiced—and not half one, half the other, but both—and since the evening when the news of him had passed from Lincoln (significantly, Grace thought, robed in saffron) to Grace, Grace had, she told Norma, who took some of this with a grain of salt, joked but with some secret rest-reserve of truth that she was this Prince reincarnate but that the extreme light like a tiny planet far back in each of the newsperson’s eyes which she did not know were one light told what she also did not know, that the reincarnation Grace had obviously been "ready for" was a new brand and—

  —three interruptions converge on poor Norma—first, as is only proper, from her husband Gordon ("Well Grace would like to think that every man wants to get himself up in black lace pants and a garter belt"); second, from Jim, politely entering only as if in part to divide the husband’s roughshod wedge (Puts me in mind of the Krakatoa easterlies above and the Berson westerlies below: they were supposed to be parts of a single zonal current— How do you show a thing like that? asked Gordon—with an unusually mean cycle of twenty-six months—hey Norma, who was that newshen-person-lady-woman, and who was her source?) (Gordon, like a lost voice, "They don’t know that man as in chairman comes from German Man, i.e., "one, nonsexual"—"Unisex," retorts Norma, surprising Gordon into softness: "Not unisex at all," he says too quietly); third, we, whom proposition for proposition Grace knows less well than she ever will how she uses us, for we—as she and such trammeled husbands as Gordon say as if it will all go away if said or, humid lights of breath thrown outward or away, compound with quick noises of sense the atmosphere they mean like walking newspapers when they say, "It’s in the air,"—we are each a change in life too personal not to be grouped, too shared to be all shared; while Grace, who for Woman would become a man as mortal as that general He who called the "true security problem . . . man against war," on behalf of one woman that she is has found, in her one-sixteenth Pawnee root (and touched with her fingers whose prints are arches becoming whorls and back again?) a faith that man the hunter brought back with him not just the fiber and juice of meat but guilt for killing time away from home as real as the opiate receptor molecules (Grace heard of from a delegate to a rolfing conference who had become an inch longer yet now said next to nothing) that are one part our history and future waiting only to be activated for romance, dependence, twilight aperitif, any key habit deepening into those that like the key melted into the short-circuited ignition Mayn knows of as facts isolated by the million kept by us addicts as close as out of sight within the tumblers they’ll always make fall into place: which Mayn half-hearing interrupts—what also will not be interrupted like the ongoing time of his computer-wristwatch timing turnovers at a basketball game with Larry and Amy, the same Amy with whom he occupied opera seats in which the Chilean diva expected to see an endangered economist and his wife Clara, who was herself present when the correspondent-woman told the Na-vachoor Prince’s fate and the first and last name of her source, a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter named Flick, though Clara was unable to connect this with a journalist named Mayn she feared.

  "Prince? Prince? would that be the Nava/0 (not -choor) Prince who one night along a river dolloped into his lungs a festoon of glowing cloud above him?, that rarest of radiances a pseudonoctilucent which looks like your true noctilucent cloud fifty and more miles above Earth that in summer twilights in the better latitudes may become visible with the stars—"

  —"You’re—what are you?" interjected Gordon. "You never—"

  "Oh sure," said Mayn, "and that pseudonoctilucent in question was really a late-departed medicine man, old story, got it from my grandmother, passed it on to my daughter Flick who’s an honest half-breed like the rest of us and wouldn’t swallow it and as I recall embroidered upon it—and my estranged son Andrew, who seemed to believe the stuff but always went to sleep."

  "—but when you all interrupted me," said Norma, "I wanted to finish that Grace perceived what she says this woman Lincoln didn’t understand: that this is a new type of reincarnation, sort of parallel—"

  "What egocentric garbage," said Gordon.

  "She heard it from someone who heard it from someone else," said Norma looking into Mayn’s face intensely curious.

  "It’s more likely than the usual kind of reincarnation," he hears himself saying, thinking he likes these people because they have children; knowing as if he were in Norma’s mind that she’s thinking, "You speak of these others, your daughter and son, but what about your wife?—What is her name? is she a former wife?"

  —and he gets away with answering Norma in the same way—in his head and here, "I love her more now than ever" (picking her out among the corps of undivorced but separated wives or is she, illegally speaking, divorced yet wttseparated?)—

  —wondering if Flick can believe such returning history (Well why didn’t you do something about it?) who cares for both her father and current history, whichever is obstacle for the other (as Mayn wonders if this kid Larry with his split family and his Obstacle Geometry system he claim him got from Jim of all people knows, who goes in for fact not formulas, that’s Jim, and, when not on the job, scenes of fact, which make a hell of a family history not to be told easily—the scientist whose baby died while she was at work in her lab {the lab); the black model studying to be an actress taking her son to the park and telling him go on and ride that bike if he’s going to learn; these people he instantly knows as other people are known to their locksmiths, supers, former and future girlfriends and boyfriends, and he wonders now, against the presence of Norma’s loving voice still in his head after she and her husband exit at last, who the long-despised man Spence is—who he is— aside from a deal about transcontinental trucking here, a deal for information regarding the future of obscure federal-agency handling of the trucking of transcontinental waste, a sequence of surely expensive, unauthorized, and uncredited stills of a multilingually intelligent young chief-of-state who’s cleaned up most of the foreign-run casinos where he lives dealing Russian roulette click by click to a political opponent—how come you got it in for Spence? he never got caught, did he?—a presence, Spence, attentive and sleazy in a bar as far back as Mayga, and as recently and malleably close as some history in
his grandfather Alexander’s inner ear or fiction this new friend-son Larry makes into an irritating geometry—who Spence is, to have phoned a new friend of Flick’s to ask out of nowhere if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter, her friend, had lived in the very apartment house where Flick’s friend (who’s calling her, having been called by this Spence) had been attending a woman’s workshop attended also by (oh gee) a (whew) woman momentarily involved in springing from a New York State prison a supposed anti-Castro nationalist who, it is planned, will find sanctuary in a narrow but lengthy nation run on an economy imported from the shores of a Great Lake of which school of economics much actual knowledge in that Hispanic nationalist inspires not love but its tactical facsimile to cloak his real mission to kill a high officer and abduct a charismatic old Masonic socialist now under house arrest.

  It is already too late, a terminally optimistic sometime-interrogee offers, to speak of women and men; for aren’t they at the barricades working out together, watching together (between amplified aerobics) the old organic plume mushroom? So from weekly formula to current form one’s last name turns to ash in the heat of some race to inflate currency by finding the unsplittable seam to make it from?—while Larry’s Modulus will get one from here to there if one wants it to, and the new marriage contracts just out and not to be confused with the earlier, mutual dowers of the very beginning of the decade seem already a thing of the quantum, though some casualties of that Open Marriage cruelly less easy than its Masonic abbreviation O.M. in wanton rooms of rising rent and energy levels devise new home weddings and new faiths painfully reviewed.

  Yet no power from the next century’s L5 libration settlements to imagine into life the mid-twentieth (hardly the first to see itself the last) can deny to Jim

  who knows at times himself to be in that awful two-to-one population-limited civilization where nothing too much has changed to be honest except the swimming pools where you dive upward into water as well as outward into margins of sufficient wetness, and the wide loads and looseness of structure that from the outset failed to be designed and accommodated into the secure torus whose doughnut shape no more shows itself to our everyday attention than the whole porch of the weatherless sky with its spectrum of sound now only visible in the deep screens we have internalized two to each hopefully stereoid customer-soul, do not bobsled their way through, and marriages account for new peace as being paired of pairs, since each partner came out to L5 transmuted from an original two half-suspecting the emigration wasn’t only on the up and up but locused of willingness contained by, yet containing too, some thrust of inner wilderness

  a lost dream such as Jim’s one rainy night when he woke and exited from bed sweating to open his door and saw his mother in her nightgown of course heading downstairs so slowly she seemed sleepwalking until she turned to look back up at him, her hair across one side of her face and he saw she was "readwalking"—a book in her hand, no common word of "It’s late" in her eyes that seemed protective for a change but he didn’t know of what—and he asked her what it was, and didn’t mean to though the act produced an effect, which was that as she told him he forgot his lost nightmare: "The Marble Faun," she said, "and I’ve almost put my eyes out staying up reading—and what have you been up to, my darling?"

  He didn’t know, and could only say, "What are you doing?" to which she softly replied as if her heart were in it, turning away and proceeding downstairs, "Just reading." But he remembered going back to bed and later starting up awake convinced he was plunged into a future where people had been at once combined and sent away to settle another world.

  Larry didn’t ask Jim to elaborate on that combining of people. Did he know it without asking? He said that a succession of obstacles had been reciprocally substituted for the vision and he advanced his system which Jim passed on to Gordon once in a moment when he could think of nothing to say yet was disagreeably surprised to be able to report Larry’s recently hatched system which Larry we know ascribed to Mayn’s inspiring.

  What need had Mayn of formulae? Larry was passing through a difficult time. How could Mayn live in his old, now quietly owned apartment. (Owned secretly.) Weren’t old scenes moving in and out—oh, the children of his former wife! Each time he felt it coming, he had substitutes? Why was he in this apartment? Wasn’t he really someplace else? He was no speculator waiting to jump when they discovered which way gravity was really moving, that is, in general. Mayga took away to her death that alarming willingness not to doubt his delusion that he was in the future specifically traveling to and from a libration settlement between here and the Moon imagining what was else the only apparently actual present time—

  —if you’ll buy that—

  (—she didn’t have to, she’d been given it: and had she, then, taken it away with her to or from that ledge near Valparaiso bay from which she had vanished into death which was a kind of ignorance?)

  —he wouldn’t try it on Larry, lest Larry believe it, too, and now Mayn had to admit delusion in 1977, he had the firm scenes of the many people he had met in crisis, their own minor dangers and opportunities, their awful "we" voice on occasion exploding about him like the one that is the sum of two; and he didn’t need Larry’s Obstacle Geometry formulae to get from one chamber of tensions and human warmth to another, though he would grant Larry’s Modulus a humoring power to get you from one isolated incident to another without undue connection—

  What was the point we missed about the Moon?—

  until the coincidences between what he had witnessed of women and men at home and in the park and in their mutual media coming with such self-containing accuracy from Norma who reported to Jim what Gordon could not listen to of the women’s stories many told to Norma not in Grace’s workshop but in pretty private midnight raps with Grace alone, caused Jim regularly in the world who would always hold the door for a woman but a bit too semi-retired from combat to seem (he thought) male supremacist (having been, it seemed to him, caught carrying the membership card of every targeted power minority of the past twenty years—white, male, middle-aged, lapsed agnostic, middle-class routinely-married-then-sleazily-single newsman-oid) to want so much (on a gray day when Red Smith’s column had failed to appear in the sport pages) to tell Mayga his fresh suspicions that he nearly phoned (as he sometimes did at times of sentimental panic, or even horror at his life, or love for her) his quondam wife, but instead found his young friend Larry, Larry in a sad mood, his mother largely unmentioned gone to live "temporarily" with a "chum" (not a word of Larry’s generation but he was able to do that) but not launching a stratosphere of theory as he often did with Jim but complaining about his neighbor that Jim had dimly known of, having seen him, yet understood that the fairly famous singer-man was moving house—yet more notable than Larry’s news of strife in the hallway

  between the singer North who was wringing his hands like he was singing a scene and the two in truth costumed creatures (male or female, who knew?) whom the older man tried madly to separate (oh shit, they were guys I guess) whom he was fantastically upset about just at the instant when the elevator flung open and this woman Larry didn’t know in a large white fur coat burst out and started bitching Ford North the opera singer (I know who he is, said Mayn) who was wringing his hands like he was on stage and she sweeps him angrily into his apartment leaving the flower boys to work each other over in the hall at which point they disappeared . . .

  was his unsurprised acceptance of Jim’s theory so mildly slipped into talk that Jim thought maybe Larry hadn’t understood, except Larry did say with equal gentleness almost inaudibly a thing remarkable enough to show he had heard—that these little life stories Jim was hearing through Norma from the Paying World of Grace Kimball, mainly Grace herself, were quite congruent with only the slightest blurring at the borders with scenes Mayn knew of, that Mayn joked that he’d decided while playing squash no less, in that white theater-in-the-round of the boxed-in ultimate barrage-escape or court, that this Grace Kimball person and he we
re some same person perhaps in life right now as an ant community he’d heard was one organism in effect but he and she probably not larger than the sum of themselves and since both right now alive to tenant some same articulate structure that accommodates a multiplicity of small-scale units (Larry nodding rapidly recalling the lingo of "your" red-haired economist whom Mayn had listened to in an auditorium press conference) why Mayn conceives (perhaps through Larry) of reincarnation that’s somehow all here and now, with no past (recalling also someone asking him in the midst of a four-way rap what was the point we had missed about the Moon).

  ‘The haunting of America," said casually the younger sage though troubled in a yellow sweater purchased for him by his father, "reincarnation that is simultaneous, the haunting of the world maybe since there is where America came from, all the uglypipedreams tradewinded over here from Europe at the founding that later they pretended they didn’t want back.