Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But back in Lar’s room D.D. proved to be reading a poem or poems aloud and talking to it, or them, or the poet; yet talking to Larry too, it might seem, who, on reentry, said that that was his mother, his "ma," and it had been heavy. D.D. shook his head smiling and said, "Cut the tie if you can’t loosen it," and asked if she ever played music to him when he was a child because Mira played the piano in the evenings, like Schumann stuff and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Chopin, nothing heavy or loud, music to unwind to. Larry said sure he knew what Donald was talking about, and he hoped to hear Mira play, and Donald threw out his brown-bearded chin, "Say ‘when,’ Larry, just say the word." Larry said if we got it together globally we might not need dreams in the future and when asleep we might just hear music. But not cut-rate prescription, courtesy of Big Brother, put in D.D.— No, Lar’ went on, hearing the door buzzer go, more like a fantastic waterfall flowing out of the mountains of the right brain into the— Was Lar’ going to answer that?—Lar’ said he didn’t want to—but D.D. said it might be Mira and stood up and left the room, Lar’ saying, Sorry—"It’s O.K., it’s O.K., I know where you’re coming from," he heard his new friend quietly say. Lar’ went to look at the book of his that D.D. had picked up and put down, and on that page was a poem of D. H. Lawrence Lar’ had never seen and didn’t know Lawrence wrote poetry, "Piano" it was called and was about a woman softly singing to you, but at a glance it wasn’t just about that and probably when you got past that, you found it was about—but Lar’ got just as far as "betrays" when D.D. came back, looking puzzled. "Must have had the wrong door, got a glimpse of his back and his hair, then he went out of sight from your peephole, should I have opened the door and—" but Larry said No, it was O.K., though if it was someone off the street the doorman should have buzzed but maybe they did buzz the right apartment. Donald was telling how he and Mira had the whole floor, where they were, and it was good space but too much, and this older guy he had run into at the college told him he had moved back into a pad he had lived in years ago (Hey maybe it’s a friend of mine, he did that, said Larry) and someone had stacked it full of junk (—Same thing, said Lar’), couple three statues of women, y’know, and a rusted-out drill press and some other useless machines and he discovered while he was clearing all this shit out and thinking, Is it worth it? and is this junk telling me the place doesn’t want me?, that it was his own body he was . . . (Getting in touch with? said Larry—No, said D.D.—Looking for? said Larry—Well, . . . —Looking to find, said Larry; unearthing, he added; it almost sounds weird enough to be my friend; there was a weird bust of some woman he didn’t know where it came from, and a busted machine with a lot of small functions he didn’t have a clue about and gave it to the super or the doorman but they threw it out, but this was different because he had kept control of the apartment during the time he had been living in other places after his marriage broke up and his wife and kids moved away) . . . "Right," said D.D., staring at Larry’s photo of Sequoya: this guy was pretty interesting, he had been around the country a dozen times and had slept in many rooms and once was sure he himself was the person in the next room yelling in his sleep (You know it does sound like my friend but he doesn’t dream and never did)—"O.K., O.K.," said D.D. trying to reach the point, "because then he woke up, y’see, and the person next door was a woman (he’d only dreamt she was a man yelling) and she wasn’t asleep at all but being given the third degree by a man you could hardly hear until it got very quiet and then the man started yelling" and this guy D.D. had run into right outside Eco class and . . . and . . . (What? said Larry) . . . "and I hardly ever saw him again," said D.D., puzzled and staring preoccupied at Sequoya. "But you had quite a rap for just first meeting him, you know." "Well, he said that he felt incredibly empty like he was surrounded by nothing and he went back to sleep in that room and dreamt he was burnt to an ash, a perfect ash facsimile of himself and woke up and was afraid to move for fear he would crumble and had a shipyard foreman he had to go interview about his work when he was really looking into some smuggling racket he had heard was using dry dock work as a cover for unloading, and he was lying in bed ("Strange, it could almost be this friend of mine," said Larry)—and he knew then and there that it would be good for him to live with somebody, like maybe a family, and as soon as he said that to himself he felt really together and jumped out of bed and knew it was impossible, he could never find anyone nor could bring himself to do it, but ("Did he ever find his body in all the junk in that other apartment?" said Larry, unsure of his own empathy for whatever’s happening right now with D.D., who said:) He really dreamt that, but he knew it had happened in the past and it made him go buy a horse and stable it in New Jersey, he didn’t have a clue why although he had ridden in the West now and then."

  "He’s one of those missing persons," said Larry, wanting to go out and look through the peephole." "That’s right," said Donald Dooley, "can’t afford to have them turn up because they’re living your life and you didn’t know it." "Didn’t want to know it," said Larry, and left the room because D.D. was about to discover Simultaneous Reincarnation. "God, we can’t stay off reincarnation," called D.D. as Larry strode to the front door and, through the peephole, saw an ageless man in the outer hallway in a (best) western-style fringe jacket and bluejeans and a ponytail at his age, standing next to Ford North’s giant couch but not like waiting for the elevator: Larry imagined the Chinese woman jumping down off her phone books, removing one to look up a number, putting water on to boil, sitting down again on two phone books, saying hello as he entered her store to turn away from a street full of parallels trying to turn into people where this man in the hall by the elevator was, say, Mayn reincarnate but not because Mayn was dead and returned for we had here (5.R.) Simultaneous Reincarnation like the two screens of truth that, on his previous bike, Larry had reached by descrambling Mayn’s informations about some future existence in a very real torus-shaped libration-point space station and his conviction that his grandmother had done a number of peculiar and heroic things out West as someone else, a princess or something, plus much more information that when Lar’ had descrambled it yielded theory weeks ago, and Larry felt it wearing him down and bothering his very existence as the man out there moved from the couch to ring Ford North’s bell, and like a body of light went up close in case North’s peephole was open so Lar’ himself, riding some curve of (call it) relativity away from his new friend and the Chinese woman so he might be in danger of—and Mayn’s voice, on the topic of his romance, came into Lar’s body—of standing in someone else’s place. So keep away from being inhabited by that curve. Oh how (but Lar’ knew the answer) could we be simultaneously incarnate elsewhere (he tried to wipe from his head, returning now to D.D.).

  "I thought he was coming on to me," said D.D., "he walked with me the first time—I don’t think you were in class, because Rail read your name off, and this guy asked what we were studying in class and whether there was good interaction and what type of fellow students we had, so he could have been looking for someone else."

  And the second time D.D. had run into this guy was just last week near D.D. and Mira’s space and he said he had never been to college but had dreamt of D.D. finding a new home and asked if he had any friends at college who would be interested in horseback riding in New Jersey in, actually, the vicinity of a good undisturbed cemetery, and though this drew a blank, it turned out friend D.D. and this guy shared an interest in the relation of Earth chemistry to sudden layer changes in weather and D.D. had mentioned Larry as a likely contact for this guy ("He sounds like my friend Mayn," said Lar’, "heavy-set with gray hair, wears the business suit"—"Not the same guy," said D.D.)—and he asked if we were into any secret societies at college such as the antique hand-gun sect in Texas or the—come to think of it—Masonic offshoot he had heard of that seeks a lost degree of radioactive effect that divides people into two without their knowing it and—("I think someone’s at the door," said Larry, "the buzzer doesn’t always work"—t
he Chinese woman was on her phone books, the weird guy in the hall was just stepping into the elevator and the light was still green, the man D.D. described was right out of Mayn, and Lar’ had to deafen himself to what was to come, a reversal economy by which two people then became one, although if Mayn never dreamt, how could he, this rational guy, find himself so sure of his presence in the workaday future of an Earth-Moon system?, the Chinese woman was a random particular, Lar’ loved her, she was remote even from our after-all-quite-real smelling-of-ginger-grass (in a green bottle) Amy, who worked at the foundation in the same block as the Chinese woman, and the threat of abstraction wasn’t just abstract, there’s a memory maybe Lar’ needs to dream up that puts him in danger from these tangled others—otros—and in need of new friends, he feels the encroachment again of some special relativity that corresponds to oW-fashioned reincarnation (time travel yet you come back out there not here and you’re one, not two) and feeling drawn to new people because people matter but, by turns, are matter drawing seemingly him toward them as if they were empty chance landscaped pathwise (fuck gravity), he knows what he after all did not (so well) know, that people are the obstacles we choose and by a system that is always double we are inclined toward these obstacles in order by some last-second correction like multiple-reentry of missiles to veer away around them at risk yet with awful chance, too, if we can find the way in to the risk of our lives, of tricking our old computers into passing right through, the way a medicine man Mayn joked of made his death an event horizon of new obstacle, which brings Lar’ so close to a threat to his life that he is back in company with Donald Dooley before almost either one knows it, and Larry knows now that the man D.D. reports knowing is of or in or from Mayn.

  "So he was going out to N.J. to a town where they tell direction by the nature of the wind rather than the wind by direction, and winds have natures not compass prongs, he had to do some digging he said, some final digging, he said, and I said, You a newspaperman? and he said, More a photographer, and he was looking for some old Indian who had turned into a new species of weather in order to avoid being—yes! by God there it is!, to avoid reincarnating as—"

  "Please don’t," said Larry, "that was the Indian who made a prediction a hundred years ago that could fall on my head, I have to keep some stuff out of my head, Don, you got to help me but I can’t tell you what it is, though I will say that even if General Relativity does confirm Obstacle Geometry, I would rather pretend at least that General Relativity won’t help us understand local events, like life, for instance."

  "Get your head out of here," said D.D., "especially if your mother’s freaking back when you’ve accepted her leaving. Anyway things aren’t always relative."

  "What do you mean?" asked Larry, but the phone was ringing and he hated this need he had for privacy, and he rushed to the far phone yet it kept ringing (no doubt accented, no doubt demanding to know from him what he knew or had worked out, demanding surely some particular thing that then turned into events already going on in the hall by launch-elevator and opera-star couch) still ringing of course because in the curve or his small piece of it he had been abstracted once more to the front door which was not ringing, and in the peephole he saw only what he could not afford to believe was there, and D.D. was calling, Do you want I should answer it?, while Lar’ saw also that these outer people were extremely dangerous like the embodiment of that tensor geometry of, really, Time which made Obstacle Geometry law but law he must leave to Time to work out, for the Chinese woman he had so treasured was there in the peephole approaching Ford North’s door with a very small non-Oriental child, and she had a key, and Larry rushed back to his room as the phone stopped (but not, blessedly, picked up by D.D.): "What did that guy look like?" asked Larry, leaning against the door jamb. "What’s it matter?" said D.D. "The main thing is you could help yourself." "Yes, I could do that." "Me and Mira got more space than we need, we got enough for three, or even four, depending—and the place is designed with plenty of acoustical privacy—and we need a share to swing the rent. So how about moving in with us? We discussed it, and Mira thinks you’re great ... I mean ..."

  Larry’s heart stopped for a moment. Life accelerated, but he had felt that for quite a while, y’know. Life seemed as dangerous as finding what tensor may plot the obstacle curve of the heart and other interweaving parallels; and he said, "I want to, I really want to; but my father might need me and . . .

  I want to but I want to think about it." "Sure." "I might talk to a friend about it." "Sure." "This friend is upstairs, she runs these workshops." "Sure," said D.D.; "we like want to get somebody by next week, so there’s time." "I think I might not," said Larry, "but I really have to think about it."

  And for an instant of nebulous future containing all the new people Larry would meet, with their strange but no doubt often familiar names, the eyes of Sequoya upon him as they had been upon that last-century relative of Mayn’ s who took the photo and recorded his travels told Larry he might economize and find the basic unit of value and that here at the edge, full circle but jogged up a notch, he might throw his light into the void and whether the void we had encircled with a kind of pseudo spiral went upward or downward, he need not worry about his light coming back to him.

  BETWEEN US: A BREATHER TOWARD THE END

  We already recall what has just happened.

  But these events left in their stead a light which is our faith that we have enough to go on even in the face of awful interrogation as to how many things can be meant at the same time on the point of the torturer’s pin.

  Have we not teamed in research of one solution to two or more problems? Like, how People slope around Obstacles may prove how they’ll sometimes go right through them. If so, we may find ourselves explaining at one blow or, if it is the next to last thing we do, in one breath, both the Obstacle’s power to repel approach causing refraction-detour, and the Obstacle’s power to be passed through, though this is due as well to the Obstacle penetrator’ s at least short-term understanding that since if you look at the history you find that the Obstacles we are dedicated toward can be seen to have been made by Us out of what from a parallel angle looks like the very void through which we passed in order to reach the Obstacle in question, it in turn must contain sufficient void for us to pass through it.

  Yet not so much that we feel nothing.

  Surprised by brotherhood maybe between Jim Mayn and him (while granting Mayn a perfectly real half-brother Brad already), Spence we already recall turned away from a sensational puzzle converging upon a less and less gay opera. But in turning Spence found himself drawn in all over again. Yet with the actual danger outside him and some inkling that everything outside was really inside, he thought to locate within him whatever still was to be unearthed on the actual site of the Windrow burial ground to judge from what the late T.W. had sensed there. One evening Spence discovered that the messengers Jimmy and Gustave were no longer using his office space. The next morning Spence decided not to redye his hair and this proved to be the same morning that the visiting (DINA) intelligence officer de Talca, suddenly the day before contemptuous of our exile-economist Mackenna as caring much less about Allende’s programs than Neruda’s history of mud and sweat and the man moving like a ship among the barley, and suddenly the day before seeming to Spence perhaps satisfied that there was no New York-based Castroist plot to kill a key Chilean leader yet seeming this morning on edge about his diva’s warehouse-opera dress rehearsal now ten short hours away, warned Spence by machine message and in Spence’s return call that, just at a time when de Talca had concluded the most risky arrangement for the release of a famous important house-arrest detainee in Santiago, a New York State prison inmate by name George, who had been friendly with the dubiously anti-Castro Cuban himself now fugitive for several days from that same New York State maximum-security prison behind whose gray concrete ramparts founded in dark-forested hills Spence himself had received more than once the fluorescent visitor’s stamp on
the back of his hand, had claimed to be in contact (hardly the first time this inmate George had announced this sort of thing)—but chemical contact—with a woman named Myles who proved not only to have been telephoned by our exile Chilean economist Senor Mackenna at her home in Minneapolis and to have come at once to New York to see him this week, but had said privately that she believed she had an acquaintance in common with the Cuban woman in the baseball cap whom she had seen in fact arrested for the street-murder of Thomas Winwooley (whose initials, de Talca added, were his real name, referring apparently to geo-chemical gifts through which he contracted out as a "ray reader" to clients as far away as Seattle and as close to home as Spence himself), the Cuban woman assassin seen by Myles and others in the company of a Chinese woman with diplomatic immunity who in her turn had been seen with a child identified (by a tiny but luminous scar under one eye and by two pistols in twin holsters) as the prison fugitive’s kidnapped son; but on top of this, the woman Myles had accompanied the journalist Mayn and a young, dark-haired woman to New Jersey this morning to the same town that T.W. had apparently been sent to at least once by Spence, and a young woman had followed them in another car who was identified as the daughter of Mayn. At this mid-morning moment with the warehouse dress rehearsal but a few hours away and the Lady Luisa in a state, due to inquiries she had been subjected to that she could not discuss with de Talca, Mayn had re-emerged as a figure "in" this opera: for a Chicago mountain-climber economist on General Pinochet’s staff, originally trained as a classical trombonist and recently interrogated on his association with a homosexual meditation troop of Araucanian Indians near where de Talca had had military training, had wired from Valparaiso the news—personal and private news—that the excerpts of score that de Talca had photowired him were taken from a legendary opera score Chilean and feminist never performed in the day of its composer because of its curious re-emphases of the Hamlet story but surfacing most strangely, one brittle, brown, folded, and envelope-sheathed sheet of it, on the person of a woman dead at the bottom of a cliff near Valparaiso more than a decade ago, and of the two inscriptions, the older one read "To the healer, muchas gracias, this is yours now," the name a mere scribble, Men-something, while the fresher inscription read, "To Mayga, a lady who spoke softly in my ear goodbye, here’s ancient music from my grandmother who would have liked you—I’d like to say this came to me in a dream of the future, Jim Mayn," the handwriting verified long since from Washington.