Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —she was Pearl Myles High School Teacher all over again, Spence observed, who looked at his beeping wrist watch and said it hadn’t been a lost Chilean opera that night, had it? because he didn’t know anything about classical music, and suddenly he told her that he had had the wildest nightmares all his life and he didn’t know what they meant and every time he tried to escape them they got worse—

  —How would you escape a nightmare? the woman in front of him asked.

  And when he made an effort to see them as concoctions of the future and lies out of the past, he would lose them, some horses, hermits, Indians, all talking and as one, plus regular people he had never met and wouldn’t know if he saw them again unless he could get these awful dreams back but they went away when he went after them and he heard them but couldn’t see them.

  Because they would vanish inside of you, said his extended coffeeshop companion.

  . . . when he and . . . and they . . . knew they were waking him up in the middle of the damn night whether in the mountains of the American desert or in an underground shelter whose "government" contractor he was quietly tracing by photo-investigation to a South American operator who owned newspapers here but had faked the plane-crash death of a brother in order to establish, for corporate purposes, the originally quite dubious existence of this brother complete with jojoba-bush investments and substantial gifts to the Presbyterian world mission.

  Pearl Myles said, O.K., bad dreams were dreams we asked to be affected by, and though Spence asked her what a sidebar was, she went on: she could care less where dreams came from—a brief journey across our brain from one locale to another during which an infinitesimal "flam" of daylight where the head is thin lets some part escape, and what’s left was a piece of the ideal but it wasn’t where dreams came from that mattered because anyway who really knew about ‘em, they’re scandal-ridden—and she had only her own testimony to go on, but what she could share she could be sure of, and one real effect of some dreams she had had was that she put in a phone call to Mel Mayn, for instance, though upon hearing his blunt, inquiring voice nearly unchanged after thirty years, she just blurted out that her husband who always walked with his hands clasped behind his back had left two years before which was a good thing for them both because they became instantly closer until disaster struck—when why on earth would Mr. Mayn or for that matter his son care about Pearl Myles’s married history though she had said her husband’s departure made her recall that great mother-in-law of Mel Mayn’s who on the day of Brad’s Day in the hall mirror had seemed the pillar of practically everything. But in the few weeks after her husband split, Pearl had first slept like a stone then dreamt like crazy, then commenced changing the house around till she got drawn into the lighting business.

  Which erratic period—together with a dream that took her in one night to that mirror but more to the light angling into it from the small-shouldered, tall, strongly sculpted woman with the thickly stream-lined gray hair plaited and neatly and tightly bunned in the back with a small copper feather that could glint through you fearsomely and could keep you from following and maybe make you think she was with you even after she had gone back into the kitchen—brought her to phone Mel Mayn out of the blue and learn that his son Jim had phoned to ask if an unknown old-book dealer who might have pocketed a nineteenth-century Mayn-family diary had had speckled hands.

  Spence pointed out that he had speckled hands, speckled with blue and amber dots patterned past ordinary freckling. The Chinese woman came back along the street and went into the shop, and Spence said in his case these bad dreams taught him how to forget, because he remembered everything else, and too much. You have to want for it to come to you, she said; and Spence said that he had not been able to wait—he couldn’t for years. He had to go. He asked if Pearl Myles was all right, and she said everyone was asking this nowadays, even in Minneapolis. Spence could not confirm this, though he had been out there. It was getting to be another Silicon Valley what with all the technological companies but without the valley, he said.

  But then the phone call and its cause in the dream of Margaret lighting up that terrible mirror outside the door of the music room where Brad’s choked mourning beat the floor like some artifice or alien custom brought wonderfully back for Pearl so it could pass to old Mel yet stay with her that flimsy kite flying high in her very body four-sided now for perhaps twenty-three months but seen for the first time now with on each side dreams she had had in those days and a kite big enough for the nimbus of Ben Franklin to sit beaming inside and all she could tell Mel was this ancient silliness that she had been in a borrowed bathysphere beached but rolled by a great tide and as the water in windrows of white crests rose and a child inside her pressed upon her bladder (she hoped Spence didn’t mind) this sea-going room proved skeletal at best, its walls but windows and not closed off but striped with light like beams of darkness, so the briny deep was kept from coming in by—

  The Trace Window man Spence had to see appeared incredibly on the far side of the street between the foundation and the Chinese shop, and Spence told Pearl he feared for her safety yet didn’t know entirely why.

  Until, she went on, the room or light box was picked up and she was carried roughly and well aware the chair she dreamed she was sitting in and having trouble riding was obviously set off (but so what) by all the capital punishment talk then, when the point was that it switched into the next dream she told Mel Mayn where she was at the stove and literally transparent because of salt sweat and could be seen right through like a jellyfish and she was cooking up a pot of chili except her husband, who in case she sat down on his lap was sitting right behind her in part of the dream following her knife chopping peppers, was also in the next aisle under a tilted mirror because he’s a guard and the kitchen is part of this supermarket and just when she’s accused of stealing some of the vegetables she’s cooking up—for him—he is taken away and the earthquake that bursts and splits the ceilings and floors and warps the aisles seems O.K. with the customers and the most natural dimensions for them to slope along and she looked up with some nice ripe vegetables in her hand and saw the guard in the mirror holding up some robbers in the other end of the store and at the instant she learns how to stand she looks down at the warping and buckling and upheaval and it’s South America with dark-scaled armored animal or submarine pushing up everywhere. And Mel Mayn, who wrote such a brief narrow little obituary for his wife it was widely talked about, suddenly said that when she looked back up the guard had escaped, right?

  Spence held up a five-dollar bill—a fin, he told the Greek, who nodded and took it, and Spence rose awkwardly from the booth. Pearl continued: Mel said he had had the same dream: escaped prisoner, salt waves, imprisoned child: and now that Pearl had had it, he knew what it meant.

  Spence cautiously observed that there had been a model, green and reptilian, of the South American continent in the high school where Pearl had taught. Tears came to her eyes and she was amazed he knew, but shrugged it off. She said she had known then and there (but had not said to Mel) that dreams meant for sure only what you did as a result of them, and—

  Your husband had left you by then? said Spence anxiously.

  One dream before he left, one after, she was sure, but not the order; and then she did not have to ask Spence who the man was across the street because Spence knew she was thinking it. How about this young friend of Jim’s? she said.

  There’s sand on the supermarket floor, a lot of it, said Spence stupidly, and his words curved gently, dumbly to hers: That’s not stupid, that’s right, that’s right, there’s sand; and I knew that the meaning of the dreams was (when no one would tell me which of the vegetables I had stolen), We’re on our own; act accordingly ... but Mel Mayn saw them another way.

  Spence said he was concerned for Pearl’s safety, didn’t know if it was what she had said or hadn’t. She said she never knew what that word concerned meant. He had to go. Nobody was stopping him, they both felt.r />
  It was because of Mel Mayn that the Chilean economist had phoned Pearl and she was here. This young friend Larry? he had a theory about interhem-ispheric reappearance . . . ?

  Spence stood waiting and the Greek waiter came and stood nearby with some change in his hand.

  Well. Mel had told his son; and the next thing—

  Which son?

  Her old pupil Jim. And the next thing, well a day or two later, this cultivated voice with an accent was talking to her on her kitchen phone in Minneapolis asking her—

  But how had the Chilean gotten Pearl’s number?

  Wasn’t it easy if he had her name? Couldn’t Spence manage that?, though of course he was in the racket.

  Spence said quietly—out of character but into another maybe—that the object of this little coffee break had seemed for a time to be to go away from all that information into—but how had she made him talk so much?—and who was that imprisoned child? (He darted a look out the window and she knew he was out there for an instant.)

  Oh a mutual acquaintance had had these dreams from Mel’s son and relayed them to the Chilean (a fellow economist, apparently, though the Chilean seemed to joke), said her receiving these dreams meant that she knew much more and—

  Spence was looking down at Pearl and out the window, and asked what Mel’s escaped child had to do with it all.

  Imprisoned child, said Pearl, with a laugh and a shrug. But what about this opera in the warehouse?

  I’ve been pulled back in, said Spence glumly.

  So have I, said Pearl Myles. Mel said my phone call meant I still questioned his wife Sarah’s death.

  You do? said Spence.

  Which would never have occurred to me, since I merely believe that sometimes we become the person we’ve been in the dream or always were simultaneously.

  Spence thought this didn’t make clear sense but he had had a dream or two like Pearl’s and there was a We talking in some of it.

  Yes, said Pearl.

  The opera involved favors Spence thought three or four people were doing and what it led to was anybody’s guess, possibly unknown, but probably a feather in the cap (or someway utilized) of an opera star’s boyfriend—

  Ah, Pearl had heard of him.

  —but where the opera came from was getting to be another matter.

  You like opera? said the Greek.

  Pulled back in? asked Pearl, rising as if not to be excluded yet maybe to

  go-

  From where I was when I left the .rehearsal, said Spence.

  You are in the opera? asked the Greek.

  You were feeling something when you left that place, said Pearl, and Spence said, It’s why I’m concerned about your safety but I’ve got to go. Why do you look like you’re already in a couple of places? said Pearl—you probably know what your associate asked me over the phone as well as you know I got in touch with the Ojibwa healer Santee at the aeronautics school as soon as I learned the Park Avenue doctor had obtained a tapeworm through him.

  I used to know all these things, said Spence. As recently as yesterday, in fact. I guess I have to go on being myself.

  Your associate was upset underneath that pleasant sophistication of his, and he asked me if I had heard further from the Ojibwa as to the progress of his aeronautic training and if it was true someone was presenting him with a plane upon graduation.

  And? said Spence.

  And if certain journals of my old pupil’s family that had been taken by his brother contained information—

  I am concerned for your safety, said Spence.

  She asked him why, like a woman rather sternly on her own, and said he could have her phone number if he wanted it.

  Because of what you are carrying in your head, said Spence.

  Well, if he meant the information that had come variously to the Chilean economist—a charming, rather funny man, but in some kind of, pain, yes? —it was of a German sub that had been borrowed (or, he said, perhaps rented!) in 1945 for the escape of a thirty-year-old composer who had with her an unperformed anti-Nazi symphony with odd subject matter but a very plain message—

  And it passed near the Jersey coast, said Spence. The Greek took one small step closer. Spence glanced at his watch and pressed the date button and— What’s the matter? she said—Oh either this thing is flipping afternoon today into tomorrow morning, or— Maybe you need a new battery!

  —and while there is no question that she surfaced in Chile and was known to be trying in the most unselfish way imaginable to get produced a mysteriously original yet popular or somehow familiar opera partly composed by her great-grandmother, rumor now had it that the submarine had paused off the American coast to take on or let off some fugitive and had been threatened by a waterspout and disappeared but that the composer had more importantly been the great or grand niece of a legendary Chilean zoologist who had traced the scent glands of an inter-American mammal to the night habitat of a hermit-healer where she had left her mark upon a firearm later to figure in the Mayn family fortunes and that whether the reference was to her work with desert javelinas or to the opera still unperformed, there had been nothing equal to it since her day—

  —since who? said Spence reaching and jamming his hand into his pocket so the Greek waiter stepped back.

  Why, since Mena, said Pearl, shouldering her bag. Since Mena—the obscure sister (think I got it right) of the young symphony composer’s great-grandmother.

  Desde Mena, said Spence.

  This was the information you meant? said Pearl, and Spence opened his mouth to answer but could only ask what had been the opera’s strange subject matter, so that the tall and dear woman in front of him could quickly say, Mountains, mountains that could speak and think and dream and so forth, did it sound like Wagner or Berchtesgaden? certainly not New Jersey!—and still keep alive her query (This was the information you meant?): and Spence, who felt he could not see straight while Pearl Myles felt he saw her through a fearfully expanding angle, and each understood the other, told her that Jim Mayn never dreamt, whereas he, Spence, had never ... but he could only let it show, not find the words, but then said, You think I may be a brother of Mayn’s.

  Now I do, said Pearl. Some information is worth more.

  They were going separately toward the door, feeling somewhat clothed amidst the booths. Spence asked to know why she had really looked up the Ojibway—Ojibvva, as she said—and she said it was because of her husband who had left her after an argument to do with a father’s death caused in her opinion by a retouched composite photograph of two other shots taken by a pro with the same name as the Indian healer-flyer.

  At the door she bent forward slightly to kiss Spence on the cheek just where an abandoned tear stood. Yes, he would like her number, he said. The Greek nearby sighed, amused—but when she said, Here or home? and Spence/ Santee said, Home, and she named that old number, he lifted from his pocket a brittle oblong of paper with two phone numbers on it. I like a little permanence, he said. Oh my God! Margaret Mayne’s funeral! said Pearl Myles, and felt in her fingers the paper she had handed Alexander on the day of his wife’s unwanted burial.

  A bookmark, said Spence, and was gone.

  In the plate-glass window of the bank the two knew each other. What do you think you’re doing? you were following me, weren’t you? asked the gaunt-faced, once-murderous man in the windbreaker (suede), medium-small backpack (red), foreign cigarette burning away. I’d just given up, said Spence, you turned away from where we were supposed to meet and I’m going there anyway, I’m looking at myself to see what was wrong with me. Was? croaked T.W., exhaling as Spence turned to face him. Yes, in the eyes of the man I’m going to see I hope, said Spence. That’s his problem, said T.W.; who is he? He might have been my brother all these years, said Spence. Listen, said the man, if I got into tracking down my family, it’d be a full-time occupation. A fur tail was poking out of his backpack. T.W. pulled out two small green lozenges Spence knew to be eucalyptus from
Sweden specially made for singers, and popped them into his mouth. T.W. scratched the cactus-green double lobe of his right ear. I’ve decided to believe you that you didn’t dig up that firing-squad picture yourself but got given it like you said, though how you could have thought the restaurant in Minnesota went with the Cuban firing squad I still can’t see but my father’s dead and my mother I hear got married again so who cares? Probably not even the electrician who married her.