Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Ted was away and Mayga dead long years. When had Spence been there to hear, and of what informations was Spence as ignorant as of tact? (Mayn felt language change in him, Hortensa’s auras, or Foley’s prison-bound astral projection threatened to come true.) Yet second-hand and third-hand information for Spence was just as good for whatever uses Spence planned. Mayn could get Spence’s phone number somehow, but talking was out. He phoned Flick and saw her face in profile turned half away from him, a dash of blue-pink across the cheekbone, hurt or made-up he didn’t know, and for the first time an answering machine gave him her voice, in which he heard the accent of his son Andrew, whom he schooled himself not to grieve over, or anyway not wallow in paternal sin. He wondered if it was true he never had dreams. He had felt drawn to ring Grace Kimball’s bell, they had acquaintances in common—but to ask her about non-dreaming. He walked around the dimensions of this apartment now his own by under-the-table purchase from the landlord, it would go for a load of money next year, he never cooked and he believed in hot food three times daily—anyhow he found that the resident roaches had deserted—and he realized that like some saint who had gotten zen’d out, he hadn’t thought of his son in weeks, why here’s the little room that had become Flick’s when she would not sleep in with Andrew any more, family is next rooms, oh the shapes of the rooms with little or no furniture "at the moment" (as Mayn said to Norma) held neither free space Norma said Grace K. was creating by shifting furniture right out of her life, nor a multidimensional movie he couldn’t stop, nor his reasonable body as strong almost as ever, falling through the births of children, the love of flesh and furnishings of habit, orange-juice glasses evened out one rushed morning, a deserted toilet unflushed, a cobweb he watched grow behind a sink for years, hot tears from a peeling onion, cold sweat down the forehead from fear and love when he saw not other wives in those gapped descriptions of final half hours in the delivery room but his own wife, his "girl," howling just once amidst all those steady, working groans on her back suddenly laughing in pain in labor to actually show or was it get rid of the child she had grown almost all by herself out of one of her eggs of which she had already the exact number of all she was going to have—his wife suffering in labor with his cold sweat to show for it—yet equal as fluid to all else he fell casually through, the trivia histories of the degenerating daiquiri which, as he falls unstinting through the strawberry d. or banana d. into the tequila sunrise away from his family as if he had something more important to do, meets, for example (but an example of nothing), a free-lance diver with a taste for Bach convinced after his young girlfriend left him that he was being irradiated by inaudible sound that was taking him apart because it doppler’d back to him having originated nowhere else—and a whole lot of people who could double-up and triple-up on names (be much simpler and no sacrifice) like the man Larry’s father knew who wrote his daughter he happened also to know not really well but somehow for such irritated immediacy and interest and even respect for drive, which the man said he got from his late mother that he felt like one of the two reported women in that man’s life past and present who met each other and talked about him thinking each had her own "Bill" when it was the same guy named, incidentally, for one of the famous millionaires in American industry, friend of the family, that man himself nearly superstitious about one market indicator he would not identify to anyone, not even the boy who was named Bill for him—until Mayn on this evening wished he could name this living room and in some uncertain solitude which obviously he had asked for in reinhabiting the apartment he knew this living room was no more about to tilt or collapse or do anything deranged than those temperate settlements locus’d by gravitational balance out ‘tween Earth and Moon would be successfully reweathered—thundered, hailed, flooded except with the speed of light, while he wished that the multi-d film (not as great as art) of his own life with his wife and his kids would yield to the coming attractions except it worked the other way around. He punched two spider webs—one, two. He wanted to rip out the phones but he need only unplug them. He didn’t find anything at all between the information of his work, which came down to measurement gadgets, and the living life of the people populating his emptiness; between his instinct, once, about the distinguished exile-economist and the purported facts threatening like Spence to cluster round the man’s head.

  Nobody was on the other end of Mayn’s house phone. Or maybe there had been a click-off, he wasn’t so sure. Wrong apartment. Did Lincoln neglect to answer hers? He thought so. People were dead whom he could ask; he would as soon exterminate Spence, whose power hovered near, convinced by his need profitably to parlay a history or two that he had acquired in a country where he didn’t speak the language but was ignorant of this fact.

  Mayn wrote abbreviations absent-mindedly all down a page, Larry’s initials, Flick’s, some Larry-concepts (S.R., O.G., O.M., D.M.), with crossword junctions accommodating M. H. Mayne and, out of the void, Pearl Myles (ha!).

  Mayn wrote his daughter, this night, a letter in his reasonable hand which was the visible presence of a tiny, terrifying, reassuring teacher in fifth grade whose surprisingly full-lipped smile descended over his shoulder as he learned fast; and in the letter to Flick he said he didn’t like her answering machine but knew how helpful it was to be in more than one place nowadays; he wrote that he had talked to a "Lincoln" lady who claimed acquaintance through Flick, and being of "sound mind dwelling upon this and that tonight"—(and, pen poised for thought, such as a lady-colleague he had known socially in Washington who had gone out of his life and of her own at a moment when, he now felt, that woman was about to tell him—what?—something to do with external copper interests opposed to the election of Eduardo Frei whose individual career making another run for the Presidency of Chile she promoted by selective reporting; or tell Mayn something about his own humdrum life, for she’s like that, yet also not prying: she didn’t tell you about yourself any more than she took notes on you down in her little notebook—yet come to think of it, she did take a note or two when he told her the strictly outlandish things—civilized South American hacienda-class, Mayn mused, pen poised above a page destined for his not-at-all-old-world daughter to whom he now resumed)—"but coming round to the belief that a system" he was part of was not sound, he urged Flick to have no dealings with one Ray Spence, who might involve her in harm yet had perversely turned Mayn’s own thoughts to such regrets as he could swear like a trooper concerning (if he weren’t afraid of being taken for an Episcopalian!) thinking maybe he and Flick and Andrew’s mother might have kept the marriage going if he for one had known that he was falling forward, casting shadows backward, anyhow known himself better for starters, though that might have kept them from getting married, which had, as he said, turned his clock back past the Indian Thunder Dreamers he had retailed to Flick and (when he could stay awake) Andrew, from their great-grandmother Margaret who had adopted if not changed them herself as had evidently Flick, but he was very sure the meddler Spence had never heard tell of the Alsatian mathematician that Mayn like their last-century diarist-relative M. H. Mayne (with an e) had (as in responsibility) delegated (to whoo? to wit, to air), but now along an inconvenient wishbone of a path with an old dear foreign colleague haunting the way, better say "person" these days (smile—to a daughter who shrugs tolerantly), just thinking, you know, that your great-grandfather Alexander, who predicted the weather from his elbow-tendon’s infinitesimal contractions or his cordovan-coated instep-tarsal better than his wife ever did with her Anasazi and Anglo or than Mel did with his Bureau bulletin (always itself a few hours late), got so exercised one day when Margaret had gone to the city for a funeral and he was alone on the porch perusing those old (as it turned out) foxed and brittle leaves of Marion Hugo Mayne’s diary that he didn’t hear us come up the walk—it began to rain— until Sam called out, "Hello there, Mister Mayn," and Granddad jumped up from his white wicker chair and clapped a hand to his throat saying "Ouch" and clapping the other hand to
his elbow that had somehow gotten banged on the way up and we thought he would die on the spot, unmoving, like a horse asleep, and he wanted to speak but couldn’t, but whether from sickness or some kindred problem we never thought because it passed and he smiled and asked us in for some chocolate milk mixing the Coco-malt darkly to a paste in the bottom of each tumbler then carefully adding milk to get a matchless homogeneity of mix—then looked long at me, while Sam gulped his chocolate milk and looked out the window, and my grandfather said he had been astonished to see in those diary pages he knew as well as he knew the back of his hand a mention of something that may well be what is pictured in casual sketch at the back end of the other volume of these diaries, most astonishing—but grandfather Alexander was cooling down now, sipping his chocolate milk—and Sam had to go—the rain had stopped—and Alexander then told Jim but in a manner of someone dizzy still that the half-erased picture was—he stopped but seemed to feel he must go on and lowered his voice— the picture was just a small circle with corners, what looked like pointers, with angles spreading beyond it, lines running out at different lengths—but when you looked very hard at the parts you saw that two lines looked like a carpenter’s square, and one double diameter had dim curves above as below marking a sort of oval eye in the middle which looked like a carpenter’s level—,vhy did Jim not ask to see the picture?—and an odd dotted arc connected the angles with two other lines to make them a draftsman’s compass or either line into a plumb swaying a little before it found its true vertical— and these were (he didn’t really mind telling me this hush-hush old stuff) devices so important to the Society of Masons they kept them secret. But something was missing. I didn’t say politely, So what, Granddad? But he had something to do and the Indian kid whose job I should have had showed up for work and went on out to the garden where presently he and I had words which upset Alexander and incidentally we had a fight, Ira and I, a pretty bad one, and later Alexander gave me a Band-Aid but you should have seen Ira —and my grandfather asked me if I thought Ira would ever steal if he was this violent, and it was the only time I ever got angry and really angry, I remember, and disappointed in Alexander but he removed the pistol from the mantelpiece but told me he had done so and said not to tell Margaret, but one day I did: and the point of all this was that an Alsatian mathematician Morgan wandering around our West who incidentally once saw a mythical pistol you know of in the hand of a mestizo spy (for proliferation of arms seems inevitable) was a namesake forebear of the printing magnate Morgen (with an e) that presumed friend of Mayga with whom she and her husband were perilously strolling the day she fell off one of the scenic heights round Valparaiso harbor; but, more, the printing magnate has a brother Morgen who is a left-wing job printer—ring a bell?—as was the romantic lover Morgan (with an a) who threatened to divulge Masonic secrets and fled an upper New York State village jail and was joined by his girlfriend, a lawyer’s daughter, who met with Andrew Jackson in New York City because he loved her and she wanted to bargain for her reddish-golden-haired lover’s security, or Jackson wanted to hear how much Mason lore Morgan knew, or Jackson had been prevailed on to come, by another admirer of hers, Marion Hugo Mayne, who had suffered partial paralysis of his vocal cords (he says), represented an unusually righteous New Jersey newspaper whose support Jackson had had and still desired, and was (unbeknownst to the others) aware that the brave master-printer Morgan, exiled from an upper New York village to Philadelphia where he had taken up with such trade unionists as the newspaper publisher Heighton, had ensconced himself at a table in a far dark corner of the tavern. It is coincidence that our relative-diarist-historian M. H. Mayne (who records what anxiety Jackson’s adopted son caused by his note-of-hand debts—he in fact even "charged" a young female slave, according to Alexander, the only person in the family who actually read the diaries—though Jim felt them in his hands unopened tightening that sequence of undone duty, newspaper, father, hometown, and the further knowing of his mother’s recoverable personality and biography; and M. H. Mayne, because of his connections) was thus secret custodian of the incognito Morgan who, if he is not related to the Alsatian mathematician who en route from Mexican War to California Gold Rush was nearly murdered in the desert by the mestizo bearer of what came to be the Mayne family pistol, must be such collateral to the Alsatian as to compel other parallels, ours, Margaret’s, Spence’s, straight or warped if not worse for wear and non-wear, to forks as curious as that given us by our alternative Thunder Dreamer who we think also brought the New York Hermit’s Anasazi weather friend a Colt pistol that had found its way not absolutely curse-proof from the upshot of the Mexican War at Chapultepec where the father of that dying white settler whom the Thunder Dreamer said spoke a bit like one of the Germans of the Plains had begotten his son unexpectedly and darkling upon a Saxon-blond war correspondent so subtly male, or so beautifully so, as to reveal her female center to the blind passion of the in-fact-doomed man only in the strange retrospect of the next day when as a Winfield Scott volunteer he realized at the moment of dust and staccato voices when he was hit by a Mexican ball that the nape of his exquisitely frightened lover’s neck the night before had been a girl’s. And so as the wound and the knowledge that seemed to come with it turned him inside out, the glaze of his eyes might reflect or absorb that the hand snatching respectfully the Colt pistol he had dropped belonged to the future mother of his child, the white settler-to-be. And so the pistol or pistols trace back both to the Thunder Dreamer’s white settler’s blonde mother, an Anglo-feminist war correspondent who, when embraced, had been writing personal memoirs of Jackson, when even the angels happen to know that Marion Hugo Mayne enjoyed a convincing English accent for many years, or trace to an unequivocally male correspondent even more English and a compassionate Quaker as well, who had never been seen with a pistol until the night after he had been interrogated by none other than Marion Hugo Mayne, and then he succeeded in losing the pistol at cards to the very mestizo spy and far-sighted horse fancier who very nearly insisted on trading one of his mustangs to Marcus Jones when Jones on his adjustably corruga-cogged bicycle wheels happened upon the mestizo in the American desert just after the latter, having breakfasted indigestibly on some desert shrimp grown instantly from century-old eggs he had pickaxed out of a dry mudflat and watered with rain stored in a random cactus—had relieved the Alsatian mathematician Morgan of a foolscap paper containing a design and calculations that might prove valuable when in fact Morgan had it in his head and was interested only in finding an exit from the desert and preserving his life from the pistol that continued to stare him in the face even after his accoster who would nevei have fired that weapon with some curse on it had it back in his coat pocket preparatory to finding out how old the person pedaling toward them might be—Marcus Jones.

  Mayn’s phone rang and he discovered brilliant tears of laughter sticking to his face and thought how Flick asked him about his work for God’s sake, but that was what she wanted to talk about at present, certainly in lieu of her mother, so let her, though she got flip. He hadn’t made to Flick in this astonishing letter some address he felt in the back of his demonstrably shallow brain pan, and as the phone stopped, he reached and dialed her again in Washington, and reached again the machine, to which he said, "I’m writing you a letter that’s cracking me up except I think some things in it are true; also I need reading glasses." She preferred the telephone to writing.

  He felt at his elbow the typewriter, unused tonight, and at rest, ready for overdue copy on the Second Women’s Bank of Connecticut and Pennsylvania. At hand his pen, mightier than phone or machine à écrire or the liquor closet which was just four or five bottles standing on the old painted counter in the kitchen, an appropriate destination for a sentimentalist: yet this material spurred now by its own noxious threatener Spence came out so unsentimental that Mayn could get depressed, came out of the wrong orifice which must be a future designed to handle medium or low not high temperatures out between Earth and Moon in c
ontrolled environments colonized by individuals who had once each been two.

  Not even supposed to be here in New York tonight, he told the Albuquerque woman; supposed to be someplace else. The Women’s Bank waits patiently for him. Had to tell his boss he’s going after all to World Meteorological Orgy’s spring congress, more talks about global weather network, what to do about drought in the Sahel, go to a new weather make clean break, flood-warning coordination, regional aqua pollution tied in with NASA’s long Johnson Space Center project in conjunction with federal agencies to get automated (i.e., "no human intervention") water-qual monit-system with sensors sensing bacteria and one gas chromatograph thanks to NASA Ames Research (as always) Center (let’s get potable!) while EPA’s dreaming total waste use for pilot apartment complex (or small city), will recycle people glass/metal, turn paper waste to hot water, so let’s economize as if people— let’s economize on our matter—while Mayn in person’s pouring a small four-D "mirror" exactly a third full of bourbon, draining the unfrozen water from under the surface ice of two trays of apparently permanently semi-defrosting fridge (fix-it? second-hand? new?): and sip-launching his body back to the large, humbly furnished living room whose floors could be scraped and twice polyurethaned, thinking, turning, turning, falling forward forward with sufficient inertia to carry an atmo or two with him, sharing information (witness the white 8/2 by 11 paper long-handed daughter-bound under the lamp beside the old black portable), divorced and all, yet summoned, summoned, and from this apartment that was "theirs" and’s now "his"—"his" and "theirs," a room full of so much tiempo it compacts into an empty obstacle to get through.