Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "I know," he said, and he seemed more my equal than a widower or a man with a few drinks in him or a man made happy by his grown children returning to his household the first Christmas after his wife’s death.

  The doorbell rang and I went through the unlighted next room in this wing of the house that I was more or less familiar with. My host followed me.

  I put my hand on the knob of the front door I usually used. We’d been in another room today with an audience. Except that that wasn’t it at all. I was the audience, but that wasn’t it either. My time was theirs. As simple as that. This was his family even more than last year, when his wife was alive.

  "I had some good stuff for you," I said.

  "Will it keep?" came the voice behind me—"because I don’t know about next week."

  The three invaded faces had vanished into my head. They had never been there before.

  I pulled open the front door.

  The strange cabdriver with the powdery, wrinkled skin held out my shopping bag to me and nodded when I told him I was coming with him but . hadn’t phoned.

  I shook hands with my host. The last step had been mine and so was the next.

  "I’ll phone you," I said.

  "Do that," he said.

  This is the end of the story, except that I now see I should add that when I returned home much later my wife, whose sense of humor is unpredictable, asked me among many other things how it had gone with my man in Mamaroneck. I replied that we had had a good exchange, though somewhat abbreviated, and we had wished one another Merry Christmas, etcetera. But, thinking of her question, I kept an uneasy one to myself when I said, "I came up with a couple of things."

  "Like what?" my wife asked.

  "Like the gods," I said.

  "Oh, them," said my wife.

  "Have I ever told you about the gods?" I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if—"

  "You never said that to him," said my wife.

  "Wait," I said, but she went on, "You sit around and tell him stories on an informal basis as you say."

  "I had competition today," I said.

  "Well, that makes it more interesting for all concerned," said my wife. "Whatever happened to the gambler who bet his brother’s wife against a boat?"

  "Hold on and let me say what I’m saying," I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if we will; but they have their lives—I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say."

  My wife took a long look at me as if I were a way of seeing something. "That’s what you came up with today? That’s what you came up with in your abbreviated session during which you had competition?" She paused and tentatively continued: "You found out that he had his life—is that it?"

  "But I’ve never entered into his life as much as I did today," I said.

  My wife thought a moment. Then she said, "He wasn’t alone." She paused. "He had guests. He had people with him." She tilted her head, eyeing me. "It’s Christmas; there were people there."

  My uneasy question burst out, "Well if you got the phone message, why the hell did you ask me how it went with him?"

  But this was the funniest thing my wife had heard all day, and I was amused at myself to see her laugh. She said, "Believe it or not, I got myself together right after you left this morning, and I’ve been out until half an hour ago. Did he say someone answered the phone here?"

  I didn’t remember.

  "Maybe it was a burglar," my wife said.

  What I recalled was that I had said that I would phone and he had said, "Do that."

  I wondered when I would phone him again. It might be a long time. I said to my wife that the gods leave some things for you to figure out, and my wife nodded sagely, eyeing me, and observed that that was true, very true.

  Very, very true, I told myself.

  "He should have let me know," I said. "It would have saved me a trip out there and back."

  "Did you tell him that?" my wife inquired.

  "As a matter of fact, I did," I said. "What I didn’t tell him was that I felt your presence there with us."

  "I always feel that, but thank you for telling me," said my wife. "By the way, who was with him?"

  "His family," I said.

  OPENING IN THE VOID (smile)

  ... so much for the Foley Plan to make of this or any prison a home some know exists already of all men’s skills, the closet priest, the born brewer; shirtmaker, teacher, lawyer, Indian; singer, woodworker, Houdini, machinist, interior decorator (the guard beat up for hanging a "hanging" across his cell’s pillared front), the printer and the plumber, postman, nurse, angel, mason, and their comrade green thumb and let’s not leave out the economic mind who got us here (smile) bartering equalities for a family so open-ended, Jim, that Maximum Security withers away like memory of a den of guards, while ploughing its way outward to market surplus fertilizer, knives-forks-spoons-plates, vibes, vintage, fabric, and ideas from such soil of Inside Energy that where we have builders we will have architecture, where lawyers arise judges will be needed, and where green thumbs, another land. And what is your story? someone interrupts. What did you do to end up in this endless community of minds? I sometimes hear angels talking talking talking nearby and all they want is to be like us and live only inside our limits, change their lives.

  But so much for the Foley Economic Plan to best use this Maximum Security Facility: the walled garden unfortunately for the time being notwithstanding is outside the walls: while inside them, Jim, growing pain goes down with any beans, canned corn, rice pudding, any milk you had in mind to be thrown up if desired in reverse menu a la the raw diet guru woman one day visited from New York City with outlandish sex shit so that I have to forget I first heard of her from your fellow prison-visitor the generous South American gentleman whose wife knows her from women’s workshops I could see my Miriam attending once upon a time in order to help herself get over me. Tell me a story, George, she said, hey Foley tell me something, anything.

  Or pain is messages (believe a well-known dentist, who should be exposed for practicing without Novocaine so as to prove pain is) "nothing but messages": or was it Novocaine he was drilling for?, but the message I never got answered from the light of my life?—if she can’t get back to me it’s her choice though I am always with her (tough luck, dear Miriam; tough luck, Mir’): though not all inmates here know Getting Through is what this place is all about, getting not out but through to me and you (for James you too, give or take certain Cubans resident here, could be in danger) getting through at that special speed of Earth I learned and from no book—just the speed our light is slowed suddenly, bent by oil slick, blown glass, intriguing haze, eyeball, juice, gray matter, blood, sweat, or sea that that light falls into yet is not lost; or air: remember the grasshopper that landed on the biologist’s deck three hundred seventy miles from land? what air did it travel through?

  Which isn’t your facts of prison life immortalized by girl sports writer that made research visit here to check out a black basketball joust in the yard and wound up giving us (surprise, surprise) the complete treatment: smells of clean steel and surplus soap, the hawk-song pigeon-voices, nutritional strategy, educational programs (if not the amazing chemistry that brought you here), license plates she had to touch like Braille, painting by the numbers on glass that some here learn, under-the-bunk postcard sales depicting our seldom-used sacrifice chapel, the individualized mail privileges too complicated for words, the resident writers, the guards’ blue blazers, the physical jeopardy step by step, the Rican family picnics (‘‘festivals"), the death-row chaplain’s safety-valve seminars but not the guru woman’s one-shot sex and diet rap, the Box Efrain did his farewell solo in for redecorating his cell—all data, from the dimensions of cells and inmates to rising cost per unit-con; all specifics from Anatomies of Anger in her top-dollar title, clear into dreams slept through by inmates then gladly given up to be published under this girl sports writer’s byline though her younger, chess-master house-husband did a downsi
de rewrite and typed it for her—yet this latest exhaustive chapter on prison life is missing what /, Foley, had to tell:

  and this not just your George Foley Economic Plan (documented for the eyes of our generous Chilean gentleman by private mail drop so private Efrain the bearer didn’t even feel it happen on a city street corner granted swirling with hookers, tourists, beggars, basketball hoopoe-wackoes blocking all lanes continuing out into the night of a thousand whistles the game they paid ten bucks a stub to see refereed in the Garden—and other messages Jim some worth it some not), but a greater thing even than the Economic Plan her prison piece missed was no less than the Way, the Way which swirls colloid in all of us, her too, by which Way and Chemistry we Get Through, though those who have it may not know they do:

  as I told our gentleman from South America when he headed south to launch the Moon (smile), who thinks constantly of that southern continent some here abscond to on their nightmares—while he heart-targets with dignified rage and noble economy of word "that former country" he called his Chile to a certain anti-Castro Cuban inmate who we hear though (what with their political differences) doubt he has something going with—i.e., beyond that generous gentleman’s human interest, which you said wasn’t news (to you) yet not no news which no matter what my father says is not good news, but what mail does my father ever get?

  Meanwhile, in lieu of news, Jim, we have on tap all economic learning the generous gentleman got out of Chile with, exiled from that stranded, coast-

  WOMEN AND MEN

  like nation that the anti-Castro (if he really is anti-Castro) Cuban in question recently spoke in my hearing about (in peril of his life inside, yet anxious for his wife and son he thinks of moving from a doubled-up apartment two blocks from the American Indian Museum in Manhattan to a new Hispanic quarter of Poughkeepsie)—and, in the same breath, spoke of you, Jim, as if you worried him (that nation concealing mountains and estuaries within its single-minded length, dense mines below rivers running with the cold blood of glaciers, a south pole of anti-land and a northern border hot in temper as in mercury)—oh all our Chilean gentleman knows more about than you and I of surplus value, skewed capacity, which brought him and I together by eavesdrop, mail, interview, colloid way, for I had felt he would need me, just as I am with you, Jim, in this, whatever it is.

  Which leaves me often where I was, opening in the void, and if a mere vessel (like my mother said, meaning her Lord’s), my kind’s a vessel moving through a solid so long as in mid-trip you don’t come to and find yourself a chunk of fruit in the Jello Museum, and the light of my life if Miriam can’t get back to me might be having her own experience elsewhere that loving is more than being loved or "George, tell me a story, tell me anything."

  So we have tabled for now the Foley Plan for this correctional facility, Jim; and so on into a new vein where a messenger came but didn’t know he was one.

  And so on through all blocks of this multiple dwelling, this seventeen-hundred-toilet redoubt (for where there’s children you need plenty of toilets), walled by hills and woods (the trees in a book I have, and in the trees birds I think), walled by barns, brains, and moving figures I have heard—their limited-use autos, their working animals, all injecting tax dollars into the bird-pie to keep us and our ungodly potential at rest between the lines and from escaping this (strainer-with-built-in) jug where fourteen grand (you said, Jim, updating to ‘76 or so, my figures) pumped into each man’s annum inflates day and night as the Inside gets more inescapable (where the sale money’s spent—from the Inside), gets more cloudy, and so on. But in an adjacent vein—

  (you with me? for believe that more than one of us are in touch with you, if only through your unused power—

  (to get me outa here! (smile))

  after our trip into the nuts, bolts, and budget lines of a scheme to make this jail more than a bird preserve so we who’re inside (not just I) grow into Insiders living to keep the Outside in its place—let’s say a messenger arrived not knowing he was one.

  New vein after all Foley’s Wide Load to you of unused capacity (almost all we got here), trade-off bartering one-to-one hand-sewn shirts for another man’s talent to entertain a thousand people all by himself, one man’s instinct for engines for another man’s legal mind, a born chef coming out of the closet to inspire that tired genius with the green thumb; surplus value ploughing the collective heart back into the labor value of the use value, which is true value in the Foley prison economy still merely ho-hum to scanners of outgoing transmissions—hence all this has covered the coming of the messenger like all our talkers inside who never heard the rest is silence, who’ll tell you why they’re here if they ever find out. And, Jim, a different vein now—and we’ll trust that the correctional scanners of mail who never knew ol’ sex-box Premier K’s adage "A long wind that is too long forgets the mountain it has come down from," got gross-dipped with foregone lode of Foleynomics (constructive as jailhouse lawyers’ nit-picking here where cleanliness long since killed all nits but not the body oils) so that the above-mentioned correctional scanners didn’t comprehend Foleynomics (with its self-contained prison cooperatives of craft-skill, revenue management, marketing, and retreat) as part of the long-term continuum I’m really sending you, the shadow thrown by the words— and by now the scanner powers in this Multiple Dwelling that is Nowhere but walled inside Somewhere may have passed this particle transmission by, as it them; whereas my Dago friend Dante’s Life Inside got intercepted by our scanners on its way to a humor contest and Dante took them to federal court where you also have to talk fast only to have the judge tell him insanity was no defense of such writing and he should be ashamed to submit such a critique of authority when guys like him drove authority crazy not the other way around, and better go back and try again—which is why I contact you not mainly by word-unit or real-page but as I do, including voice-over and memory-merge and the twin-scopes to come. So in the case of this communique which can be as long as you want to be equal to, Jim, let’s hope them frogs have let us bugs limp past their slimy, froggy nose holes on one wing looking for air; so let’s assume the coast is clear. Look there, and there—if possible both at once. Stay with me; this was all you needed. Prison is not just full of murder or of bodies.

  So what’s the issue, Jim, you visitor, me captive host? Me making sure you shtick around to the end, and no judge is going to send you off to jail because you took your eyes off the road, looked in the mirror, checked the nervous alternator or the fuel, looked at the passenger on your right to see she was still there, fellow-pro you said got you into this once-a-week experiment but how come you didn’t bring her, Jim?, I can see her so clear I know you love her.

  So in a different vein, say the messenger arrived but didn’t know himself to be, and didn’t know the room. Yet this room was it, all right. Hadn’t he aimed for it, driving his rented car through the hills up tree-lined parkways we remember and down rock-bound hairpins so fine they are timeless, across trout pool, by a stream’s sheer rock with writing on it along tree-guarded parkways above New York taking our poisons and breathing back green oxygen—so giving back better than you get is the sign of a vegetable!

  While because of the mail scanners I had to get here my way, by our full account of the Foley Plan for 5-to-20-year development of this retirement compound, prison, or, some bad days, all I know.

  This here then is not just what you the pro with life experience asked us for, as once a statuesque woman asked of you when you didn’t, you said, pick up on what was really on her mind until you had blundered ahead and put yourself to test. But you know I couldn’t fit it all onto one screen. And I didn’t come yet to my girlfriend Miriam’s father’s four-star garbage cans, or the space under the float at the Y camp one July, or a substitute teacher at my gorilla-training school; nor have I come yet to the guy with your name Jim but less hair, who slept through his own eleven-o’clock execution ‘cause nobody bothered to tell him his attorney got a routine stay from the afte
rnoon judge! So maybe my communication to you here and now, this penetration of your head, Jim, by chain (clunk) reflection, given as well as written you from way back before I knew who you were, and half-unwritten now like primal scripts among many unsnarled (smile) thoughts, is what’s transmitted here by need, to put it in a nut’s hell (smile again), not some expose of prison life, its secret suicides posed as murders, its historic farts and mutterings in the night.

  So maybe it’s not what I should have sent you, what you asked us for, you driving alone arriving from many times I felt; but the messenger I said has meanwhile passed his road signs and such signs of the Outside as the low guard-rail dividers we remember so close to the road that your fender bypasses the air between, unless you go faster, yes there’s a thing I miss. The guardrail divider that moves because you and the road move, always in the left lane ready to pass, and so close your left fender’s tracked on a point of the divider rail that’s always a few feet ahead though the fender looks like it’s touching, am I right?—and the optical flicker stream is enough to make you epileptic. Hear the pain of your steel-belted rubber (as on TV, which we get on Honor Block) rubbing out the road, turning gas into gas, eating it up. Messenger driving the highway to get to prison on time, through hills, valleys, forests, sheer rock, you name it, get there on time before his time is up, am I right? And I know that some of you out there dream of getting us out of here at last and us killing you for your time, but a guy in here can’t know for sure if silence means friends haven’t written because my mail’s been held up and that is why I’m connecting between the lines.

  No Andes here, Jim, no lone Indian shepherds along the parkways and no work here for wild llamas watering head up head down, along the Chilean shore drinking straight brine (turning salt water to blood—now there’s economy for you). You’ve flown to far-flung climes, to seas, cities, mountains, seen only by astral projection which reached unprecedented range in New York State prison system if this bunk tourist hadn’t learned a better; doubtless you’ve woken up, Jim, in Southern Hemisphere with a girl on your arm, the two of you flying high, am I right?, rented car, the works—while I have been to Peru with Karl Marx in a footnote, the fine print’s how Foley snuck in.