Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Yet responsible he knew he was for something or other: and if it wasn’t his mother’s disappearance into the sea, it also wasn’t in later years a cyclone in Sri Lanka apparently "triggered," as NASA said, by monsoons whose flow got diverted there by running into the Sumatra highlands, for he recalled the shared versus territorial weathers from yakking to his children and not from the fact that the winter monsoon (unlike its summer sister that makes or breaks India’s agriculture annually like a natural mistake that corrects itself only sometimes) may precipitate twenty inches of rain in Singapore but next to no rain anyplace else, having originated far away in Russia/China sweeping up en route extra heat and moisture from the South China Sea.

  Responsible for what, then? The Rest that could get touched off or not and lay untended in him that Anne-Marie’s bare shoulders erect between him and the windshield or her fine-bared tits, clear-tuned tits (that they were, God! discovering together!) and covered shoulders or, one Thursday night (never forget which night of that energy-rich week it was, call it miscellaneous information, call it what you will or we), at the extreme race-track frontier of the (again) cemetery, her whole, God!, person curved open to him on a quilt under a dim midnight sky when he sat back on his bare heels, his hands spread behind him, and waited for the longest time gathering her into his heart until she smiled a little differently and made a light blind-like pass in the air covering with its current his cock that had been dreaming its very own angle for a week of minutes there between them on what seemed also a Saturday night when they waited for the first time as if she were in him and he in her.

  But he never thought what it was like to be her, or not then, and wouldn’t have known if he had thought, and he thought dimly only that you didn’t imagine yourself as a girl though he wondered if the little nibbles he felt in her were her doing or were doing themselves to her or were just a doing: yet he felt she knew him, and one day long long after—and it was a whole day —he found he had knowingly held, amid all that Rest that she could certainly not alone give him, a sinking feeling that she could not marry him nor he go so far as to ask her, and she knew it truly and he knew it carelessly in one of the voids in him between the Hermit-Inventor and the Anasazi, or between Margaret and Alexander, or between his ineptly painfully widowed father Mel (with his professionally compacted obit for his wife) and the brother Brad whom Mel loved very much (and even for his fair piano playing) and who stayed in Windrow—period—and who got angry enough as a child at the buffets of the winter northwesterly some January school mornings to go and find a bag to catch that son-of-a-bitching wind once and for all even if he had to first find the whole cloth with which to make it and before that settle the future questions of whether or not to use synthetic fiber, whether to boycott slave cotton, or get his older brother to help when (if, granted, he hadn’t lifted a finger when Braddie was learning to ride his new Schwinn bicycle) Jim had already given him a hand on scenery for a high school play though suddenly they had to wait while, to Alexander and Margaret’s delight, Principal Ful-kerand refused to "sit on" Miss Larsen no matter how original she was and defended her against Mr. Victor, the math teacher, who objected to the intromission of a thunderstorm just before and just after Act V Scene i as a mad misconstruing of the atmosphere (and Jim’s grandparents agreed) at that point of the play that would only overshadow the "golden couplets" left us by Shakespeare’s endless patience, to which Fulkerand protectively retorted he had no idea what Mr. Victor (who often said n’est-ce pas to his class) meant, but he did not have to read the play in question in order to know where his loyalty stood, whilst the director herself retorted that the play was not written in "couplets." But Jim had in his possession a larger copy he had drawn of a drawing Margaret had made him from memory, an anvil-topped Navajo thunderstorm, and he let Braddie see it in his room but not hold it and when Miss Larsen came to him in the cafeteria and asked to see it, he amazed her by replying he would rather keep it to himself though she told Alexander she did understand and Alexander who from time to time told Jim what he might profit from reading, sent her a token wedding present the next summer of an ancient copy of Hamlet—ancient?, bound in leopard skin—as old as the Greeks and the Romans combined, though when was Shakespeare?—and then she did not get married after all. All of which could seem to fit between Mel and Brad—or between the Hermit and the Anasazi (to stay close to home) the former now suddenly dead in New York in the spring of ‘46, the man who helped Margaret get back from the West having spurred her to go, until the new thought hit Jim and vanished within him, a pollution of gossip not to be contemplated much less peddled and he was happy to joke with Margaret about being himself the Hermit somewhere in himself whom she gave some things to think about at a rough time and whom she inspired to a new weather (well, that’s putting it strongly if freshly) to get in the way even of the old which seemed in turn at times in the way of the new, which made him also (to humor her) the Anasazi medicine man (perhaps in their shared mortality), who "saw" the Princess professionally while Jim, sinking the thoughts slowly into this Rest he had grown within him, gave up, one night alone in his bed as he heard his father breathe and dream, trying to reckon how he could with scary certainty know (we already remember) exactly how the Anasazi pulled off his own death, when this Anasazi who (in Margaret’s fantasy, joke, affection, and fact) he was supposed to be had not been reincarnated, whatever one made of the late Hermit’s replacement the nephew now in residence in that weathered lab or railroad flat where death would have been enough maybe to upset Margaret but Jim still couldn’t see what she was doing coming out to the cemetery at night unless Alexander’s news of the fight in the flower bed coupled with Jim’s irresponsible rudeness re: Sarah’s possible pregnancy had drawn Margaret graveward or to Jim’s known recent haunts at the risk of interrupting him and Anne-Marie in the middle of a kiss. But the Anasazi was a healer and that was why the Princess had gone to him and while Jim could never be a doctor (with all that Chem) any more than go into the family newspaper which was soon folding anyhow, or any newspaper—healing was satisfying if you knew the other person real well. Understanding other people—well sometimes you did or you didn’t! Found a person years later you knew you knew already—forget the past life bunk—Mayga, the Chilean journalist; Ted, his old friend in whose very hands Mayn could sometimes feel a glass or the air moving when Ted got exercised; his own father, pyjama’d and tossed by his stormy bed to make his very bones sick of his failure as a husband; and more which Jim did not identify except to see he could be someone in the future who wasn’t him—well, what was that? and especially if you were somebody else who’s living at the same time—let it sink into the hopper, the tank, the reservoir, the sunken destroyer he had read about off the Jersey coast and imagined airtight that wasn’t where it should have been when they dived for it.

  He went down the green street to his grandmother’s house one early June evening and she was not where he expected to find her, reading the Trenton Times or Newark Star-Ledger or poetry on the front porch waiting for the American ice-cream man with his wagon and his horse; Jim pushed in the front door, the figures of the brass handle firm-printed against his hand and the slight sticking of the wood against the jamb, and did not find his grandfather in the radio room smoking a cigar; he passed beyond the Oriental (which his grandmother said wasn’t really Oriental) rug’d mahogany dining room, the corner window thick with leaves, and found only the odor of chicken in the kitchen, the glistening skin traced in the surface of the pan-gravy on the stove, and a mouth-watering rhubarb smell containing like the gas refrigerator he almost pulled open gobs of dark-specked vanilla ice cream but went to the porch where the top deck of the old wooden icebox was open, and through the silk evening of the screen he saw his grandparents inaudibly talking off by the flower bed where he and Ira had fought.

  Margaret not so tall next to Alexander, kept gently raking the earth pushing away along the surface lightly pulling the iron back, continuing because she was
having a talk with Alexander who stood so timelessly beside her in a way Jim had often seen the two of them here or in the kitchen: she talked low and Jim felt repetition in her shoulders till Alexander said, "Stop it," and she turned directly to him as if to show her profile to her grandson behind the porch screen and she said quite low, "Don’t you tell me" and Alexander said something Jim didn’t hear and Margaret hooted and went back to raking; then she looked around her, everywhere but where Jim was, at the two cherry trees he climbed in and at the hedges, and she turned abruptly to Alexander saying something Jim didn’t hear except the name "Ira," the sound then suddenly receding as her mouth pivoted and without looking at Alexander patted him on the back several times until he turned this into a hug, each looking over the other’s shoulder.

  Jim’s mother and father seemed far away, then. And he knew he could get away from here when he wanted, and as he felt this he felt a breeze entering subtly through the screen called not by what he felt but felt because of what he felt, for it had been touching him already. Then Alexander lightly patted Jim’s grandmother on her backside. Jim, she had said, had the same gray eyes gold-flecked that the Anasazi seemed to have.

  Well even that old pilgrim cloud he became for his post-mortem tour of the continent watching over the itinerant Navajo Prince, some said seeing America, others said aiming for some stream in New England where he might at long last see those delicate if frozen foam volcanoes that the Hermit-Inventor thought only mythical, though the Anasazi had understood that in the East summer was winter and so he was doomed to go looking for the foam voles at the wrong season or in the wrong direction, South America being a better bet at that time of year. Less man- than machine-made are those contrails of hot, instantly-cool-condensed plane exhausts we already remember having mistaken for a growing cover of cirrus stripes multiplying with each jet passage across mid-American air-space until post-War Illinois observes a steady decrease in the number of rain-generating thunderstorms and a narrowing of the temperature range. Yet on the other hand Mayn quotes a university climatol-ogist qualifying the bad news with good: "A blanket of high clouds could seed a layer of lower clouds with ice crystals and cause precipitation."

  His son looked up at him on a subway platform one Sunday a month or so before they lost each other in a subway crowd on the same platform and Andrew boarded a train just ahead of the prematurely closing door to find a door becoming a window through which he saw his distraught father suddenly moving with the entire platform of people, and asked how that old Indian turned into a cloud. Mayn remembered. And this was a thing the Hermit-Inventor wouldn’t have known about the Anasazi’s death—the How. Unless the Anasazi med’einer had described it in advance to the Hermit, who, well, Jimmy also was: yet this was so important as to be discoverable only in its own doing, and while you can’t always try it to know it, though Jim could have "killed" that worm Spence in later years who treated investigative reporting as a proof that other people’s lives were as sleazy as his own—killed him at a bar in Washington and at a launch in Florida—the murderer’s existential knowledge was still more overrated than seeing a murderer executed in the flesh, seeing him walked into the chamber and sat down—like having a haircut, said a UPI colleague fresh from the state capital, that’s all there is to it—to learn that a spark, a precious spark?, may jump from one foot(-gear) to t’other, oh ignorance is sometimes knowledge, as knowledge is often only ignorance with between the twain the chance that the spark was basic speech between two discrete incarnalities of the condemned. But Mayn was usually a lazy guy on the surface where it counted, so one day when he heard an eighteen-year-old kid who was living with his father in Mayn’s building spell out a theory of Obstacle Geometry and recalled how his own dad, Mel, always misunderstood the effect he had when he told someone, "Why hell that’s what I’ve been thinking and saying for donkey’s years," Jim recognized the hu-manness of the shape (whatever sex) left buried in his vague daydream (he did not have night dreams by and large) and heard talking back to him now and then and reversed the process unwittingly and tossed Larry’s way the clinker that while there was no reincarnation except if you were a gene, there was something else. And Larry looked long into Mayn’s eyes as if he made sure Mayn was the bearer of a message he had been looking for, and Mayn was happy to oblige the kid, he was a nice kid and he would take him to a basketball game, and he was very bright, and freaked out about his parents’ split: he had some ideas, all right, and Mayn was happy to give him for his own use whatever he had in the way of disassembled information, name drops, and oh stories like the man who had remarried and named his daughter the same name as that of his other daughter by his first marriage because he had forgotten that was her name or maybe wanted to flatter his new wife who wanted nothing to do with his prior life—until Larry responded unexpectedly one evening, it was the evening, and a young woman was present named Amy who worked at a foundation as assistant to an exile-economist, and Mayn recounted how a Nez Perce Indian known to Mayn’s grandmother had traveled from Idaho across the plains to St. Louis in the 1830s with returning fur traders to get missionaries to come out because the Indians believed the white man had contracted curiously profitable relations with the supernatural—

  —But this was true! said Amy, irritated, look how well the Quakers did!—

  —But wait a minute, said Larry, the Quakers are anti-war, look at them in Vietnam—but (he interrupted himself on the threshold of a documentary discourse Mayn’s certain)—it’s like contaminated money—I mean can money itself be polluted?—I mean, my mother took her money out of Chase because it was male-operated/war-oriented—I mean she says she can actually feel what it’s like to be the man at the bank who told her friend she was not to eat like raw garlic any more if she expected to keep her job there—

  —And who knows where your money comes from? Mayn said to Amy, meaning the outfit where Amy’s an assistant research coordinator with, in fact, part-time, the Allende economist, studying some of the time how the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) which aimed at a national proletariat got lost in the male-run AFL-CIO.

  It doesn’t matter, she said, at a distance from both boy and man, we’re free to find what we want—like the woman whose husband wouldn’t ride the subway with her because she’s got a job and taking classes and she got robbed coming home.

  Mayn remarked that sixty years ago his grandmother spent days and weeks lobbying against the wages-and-hours argument that women were more prone to disease than men, and he thought there had been considerable hilarity at a collateral meeting on her own home ground of Windrow-town when she described the wrist-drop disease of house painters vulnerable to lead but primarily to demonstrate how the labor market’s alleged weaker sex in fact had called attention to all the occupational diseases, whereupon on being taunted by of all people an Indian carpenter whom people were afraid of, she fell into a faint—shock, we would call it—with all the symptoms of an unusual poisoning reported in an Italian woman who was a skilled brancher and buncher of artificial yellow muslin roses.

  But Larry, who was deeply interested in Amy and could not but show it, wanted to know how Margaret had gotten out to the Indians all alone—if she had—and more about her friendship at a key juncture in her life in ‘94 with a St. Louis woman and Catholic convert who was the niece of the beautiful Narcissa Whitman who with her star-struck, long-traveling husband Marcus had taken Presbyterian Christianity to the Pierced Nose people who seldom if ever gave the United States any trouble until the 1877 rebellion of Chief Joseph who, when he surrendered his rifle near the Canadian border and with it his campaign to salvage the lost Indian culture, said to the generals, "My people ask me for food ... It is cold, and we have no blankets . . . Where is my little daughter? I do not know ..." having flummoxed the vastly superior white army for months in the Rocky Mountains, in order then to be betrayed by the conquerors first into exile in malaria country where six of Joseph’s children died and thereafter to what would, but a few sho
rt wars later, be known as survival training, here permission to walk fifteen hundred miles in winter without provisions.

  Provisions? ask Larry and Amy.

  To a reservation way up in northern Washington.

  At least they had a reservation, says Larry, who’s half with Mayn, half with Amy, half elsewhere.

  So that only primitive witchcraft saved them, smiles Mayn, reaching for a cigarette and not finding one—that is, they were seen leaving the malarial bottomlands and not again till they materialized at their new reservation, their numbers magically reduced by two to one, ‘case anyone was seeking history’s convective links.

  (Mayn and Larry were now standing, just the two of them, outside Larry’s apartment but his father was not home, and Mayn would meet him another time, angry almost, though not at Larry, at the hooting and singing in the apartment down the hall of this floor, the door half opening upon approaching voices apparently fighting some silly battle between song and talk—"It’s the opera singer still moving out," says Larry—neither talk nor song particularly inspired) ... of the Columbia River "Dreamers," Smohalla, who learned religion from missionaries, had a bloody one-on-one by a river with the rival Indian miracle maker "Moses," died and disappeared only to be provisionally resurrected downstream by a white farmer, vanished on foot only to materialize much later: he had talked during his death so clearly with the Great Spirit that when he found his true mission and preached the native Indian religion with its four joined, outward-facing coigns, against the White Man’s faith, his listeners followed him even to the ends of a cosmos composed of trance fragments as equal in their order as his history made peoples here emigrating from the Creator’s hand unequal since ranked according to their arrival time, Indians, French, priests, Americans, and Negroes, in that order, which meant the Earth belonged to those first Indians—who if asked to cut grass, make hay, and sell to be rich like whites, answer, "How dare I cut my mother’s hair?"