Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And when the man’s voice, its hand upon a New Jersey headstone under a moon multiplied only by all who saw by it, called back hoarsely, "You were right," our heart had burst had it been not already divided through all of us and more.

  Though he had not sounded a word during his whole sleep.

  The wind had come and turned about him.

  He had been returned from one surface of the universe to another.

  He was thinking, The unborn child was Margaret’s; was Sarah’s; was what you do as the result of the dream, wherever it slipped into you.

  We stood on not the head of the pin but pin-pointed. So we’re upside down-loded only to find in that state of liberation that gravity is what you make it. Long as you keep talking round or under the tables of power. We could talk not so much in our sleep as in others’. Light pursuing other light. Which is what light is the pursuit of. As when (as Shakespeare could have said) throwing the gist of life’s book up against an adhesive partition you can’t throw it all up at once so it arrives in its own time but then is known to have got there also all at once, its speed everywhere the same, and to describe a curve. So life describes itself, in which event it must take full responsibility.

  "The Hermit-Inventor!" called the man across the Windrow night cemetery suddenly aware of others here besides the young woman walking toward him. "He said that!" And in the silence he turns a degree or two staring toward what might be in back of him, the direction of the wind? no the presence of or scent of someone else here in this stage of his life where he came he recalls in order to test his windowhood tracewise like a do-it-yourself EKG (for don’t go near a hospital, his plant-waterer neighbor Norma, now happier in her marriage, reported the woman Kimball virtually ordering her when Norma had a serious, even painful dragging in her uterus and her husband lately engrossed in non-invasive medical technology, malpractice precedent, and newly opening areas of environmental law had told her it was fibroids while himself contemplating a new Kimball workshop in part because Grace Kimball had intrigued him with strange talk of new weather generated by new air in part told her by a manic old lady who remembered only that she was from New Jersey, which is not why Mayn is here in Windrow cemetery in the middle of the night having dreamed what he can only now know was not his first dream): while we, who will take his part even if he will not, recapture the events of three hours or so ago that now remember us, having happened in the ancient city fifty miles from here; and, remembering us, these events find local habit in us; and, in twin next rooms, two screens we’ve found out how to join in us need no Dreaded Modulus to trans-hither and trans-yon.

  But we don’t now know how we found out how—except we had the heart for it because, come to think, we had bypassed the phosphorus-detecting trace that told us once upon a time if we could only digest its information about the left ventricle’s muscle tone! and learn to join two hearts and more.

  As to what had happened at the dress rehearsal, prevue, or one-shot deal, Clara and her eminent, bald eco-husband were in agreement on no surprising number of things regarding Hamletin, Hamlet, and the real show out in the audience. E.g., that the newly basso Prince (after eighteen previous Hamlet operas where he’s a tenor), singing of poison that was so vividly heard trickling down the ear of his in-process-of-being-murdered father’s hearing that some heart in him failed ere henbane could curd his fine milk or waste his glands of smell that felt like they’re at the rear of his brain, uncannily paralleled the lovely aria in Verdi’s Otello though the parallel seemed curved or semicircular where in the soft opening two alternating notes and succeeding amorous fourth Iago love-songs his dusky master’s ear and soul’s aorta to seal some tornado of his love forever in the amazed semen framed by jalousie—surely Verdi here in this warehouse Hamletin!—and Clara and her beloved agreed also that collaboration had here flowed everywhere on wings of love pressure plus other arts unknown: for Luisa’s father had been released from house arrest but then had disappeared in Santiago while Ford North’s stammer had, albeit operat-ically, invaded his singing just before or just after the pianist-composer-conductor in the pit (such as it was, shallower than other pits) his doughty, diminutive young boyfriend in lush black evening clothes had angrily shaken his head during Fordie’s aria compounding the "my offense is rank" soliquoia normally Uncle Claudius’s in Shakespeare’s family drama, with Hamlet’s own "I must be cruel to be kind" speech da da "That monster custom .../... is angel yet in this / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery . . . / but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me" da da deliver’d message-like some shadow moulting from some dream, where the boyfriend’s ambition shoehorned Ford into this warehouse showcase and Ford’s bulk compacted to manipulative pathos for Luisa precisely at a moment of her history when guilt for fatherland tinctured in her body to a terrible readiness of her house-arrested father that there let flow along the satin legs de Talca kissed such lust and tenderness for that elegant, terrible, vulnerable agent trained in Chile’s fine ships that she would fuck so deeply with him as to risk her and her father’s life by making her favor seem to depend on the favor of de Talca’s influence in Santiago, himself already stranger to himself than he had known, here "variable and uncertain" (Clara’s husband quotes to her in bed) as Hamlet when placed in a predicament worst possible for the display of his nature and gifts, where like Shakespeare (Clara’s lover gently quotes again from some critic read long ago) Hamlet had not fully planned the course of his action.

  Many more agreements which we will get to as they to us, and no surprising number of things to these two who held hands in the theater, disengaged them when moist-warm, looked at each other’s profiles, sat sometimes one or other forward in the seat so the other gave the spine a firm, wonderful rub as much the breeze of passion as any light bending down at them from the stage, this immigrant couple who argued and played and talked and argued always in some suddenly and glimmeringly unpredictable agreement of near-touch like lovers who ring each other up three times per day and, at that, can aria and game through their pair-bonded circulatory systems to heart’s content like aliens (with green cards) who are three hundred percent married and flying always into loss of home and into the sea between that still takes them out of themselves and to themselves, let Grace Kimball (whom he has never met) reincarnate herself as she will as priestess of le Swing, doctor of Open Marriage, promoter of posture, poet-lariat of addiction that explains everything except Clara and her husband, isn’t that true . . . ?

  In such shorthand (he by the way loathes dotted ellipses in fiction) and in conversation they two could forget the shadow of their country far away and hence huge—or the source was far away, but then the whole Thing was inside them (to coin America)—forget for hours "on end" (but which end, my love, which part of the—? —The umbrella?—Which point of the umbrella, oh God bless you darling for— Aiee, she broke in again, I just remembered I saw the green grass rains of the south coloring the Pole in a dream and— And where was I, Clara, where was I? was I the rain, wasn’t there an out-of-wok economist cooking up weather-predictions like weather itself like Michelangelo’s visions— Oh you move me, you move me, and a hell of a lot more than that opera—Only if subtracted from the theater as a whole!—Oh you move me, you move me, oh by the way, have you been spinning lately? because you haven’t mentioned the spins, your head-trips dear, maybe you won’t have to have one of those American scans) forget for minutes the wired skeleton of an unjointed country that shaded every impulse almost, except the impulse to themselves, whate’er that meant in this bison-torso-shaped land of dreams that all claimed New York was not the center of where the self helped itself to language of such weekly obsolescence and instant package that— until all over again these two elegant immigrants, but with freshness like the drama that’s rehearsed by you in a state of faith that you have it inside you to ... we sometimes forget what comes next except faith, spontaneous faith. . . that the next will c
ome, e’en be it some near room . . . and to forget yourself, my darling . . . shading all impulses except such love that they might sit together in a downsloping audience in a resinous or wood-oil-smelling dubious theater (for we are particular who we go to the theater with, for we must love them) and Clara and her husband know that if need be, they completed (joyfully) this Hamletin (the suffix compacted from -tina, large leather jar, wooden vat, bathtub, where they themselves repaired at three in the morning when they could not sleep because the phone would ring once and not again and then again once but not again and they would think de Talca or someone was thinking again and even of them, by that connection that breeds reactions to a void of guesswork and fear though fear was not their problem, they could lie together naked to their necks and independently not be afraid, that is not be afraid in themselves of an agent’s revenge, abstract or personalized) yes, they completed this Amero-Chile-esque spiel-fable with a lithe black dame as a contralto Ophelia singing sometimes lines that had been the mother Gertrude’s, "Oh speak no more," yet wired in fury to those raised arms and her outraged throat, a tough Ophelia insisting on being present when her lover drags out his weapon, and insisting on holding it (though back and forth was not clear) in some fight that then propelled it through the arras into the next act—all impulses this shade of their country crossed except their impulse to themselves, these Chilean exiles watching Hamletin because their friend Luisa coerced herself into it—up there above them on a stage while they so private were in love yes beyond the friendship they had once for starters unfolded in each other in a London park, a friend’s London kitchen, a pub near the British Museum laughing at each other sometimes silently until they had to hold hands to keep from singing crazily in whatever place they were that had been forgotten. So put that in your vibrator, Grace Kimball, a continent well lost for pair bondage, she said to her husband, who shrugged with such subtle sexual fondness she jabbed him in his bicep and he turned to briefly mouth the tip of her nose that he had once in vain promised to write a poem on, and now he told her she had overreacted Kimball ward (he’s heard "overreacted" from Amy, but he meant it) and they laughed, and then Clara said it was true and that someplace between meeting Grace while seeking to help the one person in her world and later finding some new crushing load of silences controlling what she said to those naked women (one of whom ominously inquired if Clara and her husband saw a lot of other expatriates), she had seen the pretext become real, but not so he would notice it in her arms, her cheek, her voice, her love, but . . .

  They were in agreement about Hamlet’s mother’s ghost appearing just when an intense hushed unsung argument arose in the audience between evidently de Talca and some other ticket holder; in agreement that the greater event (though center and margins might gently shift each other inside out like light disbelieving it found state of rest at last) proceeded on perhaps three separate tracks: (i) the sung text individuated as per ego continuum, yet ensemble; (2) also, some real and "now" intrigue involving a number of them and climaxing now or soon; and (3) pieces of unknown individual life for instance frictioning North/boyfriend; Mayn/Jean (seen by Clara once kissing lightly shoulder to shoulder and Clara pointed them out to her husband); a family of four including two teenage daughters who kept leaning across the adults to convey messages; a well-known black model whose name escaped and her sleepy little boy; Grace Kimball/Maureen (who herself several times at end of row got up to leave and sat down again as Grace said Go ahead); the ex-con Efrain and the aura reader Hortensa to whom Mayn had gone asking about Clara; a long-headed, slick-haired, slender, predatory-svelt dark athletic man next to fat, russet-bearded type; and several empty seats that might raise again the rented question how much life is required to be exchanged for a thing you want if only to use, not own, where own means not wife but our wigwam we are at liberty to tear down.

  And Clara and her husband, though only later in the privacy of their bed suddenly afraid, agreed as well:

  that de Talca moved about and sat in three or four seats during the scenes when Hamlet devises his play with the "coagulated gore" of that other, most un-English woman Hecuba’s monstrous fate

  that (for they recurred to this) Luisa had done this strange performance stint in the first place because Ford North, coerced by his boyfriend, had urged her, yet because it might somehow help influence her lover to help free her father

  that this work was not some mere folie North was helping his certainly dangerous young, highly metabolized boyfriend show off

  that in the Play-Within or self-styled ‘‘wormhole" (phrase unquestionably translated out of a nineteenth-century Spanish phrase for, among other furnishings, "mousetrap") Hamlet played Claudius, who dumb-show woos the Queen, who spurns him richly, delicately, only to be kissed long in her ear which maketh her mad if not literally to suck out of her the "her" soon to appear

  that it was a pity the aborting of this perhaps after all dress rehearsal had to cut the famed Yorick skull-session not to mention the tricky spread of toxin at the play’s ultimate good night

  that Yorick nonetheless got mentioned earlier in a line neither Clara nor her husband thought was in the text and would check tomorrow having decided to get some distance on the opera by going home to their exile-home’s seamless bed, and maybe Hamlet was no more than regional literature recording what it was like to live on the coast

  that the line "My heart lies buried there" which came in the amazing doubled scene of Gertrude’s ghost sleepwalking near Gertrude herself had been lifted from that later Yorick scene we never saw that upon the singing of that line by Gertrude’s ghost low words were said, though whether onstage or in the audience wasn’t clear, that caused a sharp pause, a static suspension, during which the journalist Mayn rose and left, and the villain de Talca after him, and a man with long hair Clara described to her husband who did not turn soon enough to see

  that de Talca reappeared, followed by a heavy-set man heretofore un-apparent but recognizable by both Clara and her husband as an employee at the Chilean consulate

  that Grace Kimball called, "Right on!" when the black Ophelia sang a totally interpolated aria about woman’s lot being to lift her bloatprince up out of his rank bathtub vat where he daydreamt new lives more animal than the last that in the scene where Gertrude’s Ghost dreams out loud her own self-sought death, two upstage-directed spotlights seemed to cross and join each other’s body-beams to make, as the Queen and her Ghost patrolled their brief area, an illusion of mutually embracing light unmoved at source but, through the elevation of the strange principals, casting a very singular Moon, but now single now double, and disturbingly so, as all the appearances we—

  that at a moment when, visiting King Claudius, Gertrude’s accompanying Ghost, played here first by Hamlet her son, tells Gertrude herself that her Prince (sic) so becomes his horse, so grows into that brave beast’s back as to demi-nature and encorpse himself into—

  that at the moment when Hamlet himself appears in this painful but luminous scene at full blast necessitating Gertrude’s Ghost’s disappearance and reappearance now played by the hence absent Claudius who, as Ghost, now embraces the real Gertrude, an echo drummed from a known early Elvis Presley folk-burst light-motivated certain shadows cast by the double Moon—"pale breasts, tanned neck to last a century, keep out insidious rains"—and through some freak of angle a spotlight retargeted itself so fine there seemed an entry or an exit from—

  that at this moment Gertrude’s Ghost—when Hamlet, not seeing his actual mother, rushed slowly across-stage toward it—sang of having dreamt that she would cost her young horseman prince his life unless he dreamed his way away from her by—

  that at a later moment a photographer flashed upon Luisa’s scene a light that seemed to come not just from his bulb but from behind him for the double door at the rear of the orchestra, one young man seconds later said, had swung open briefly, and Luisa stopped in mid-note and cried in anguish "My love, my love!" having seen something, perhaps
some truth, however broken by the life onstage that must go on, though a moment later it in fact did not go on.

  But, awake again at two, two-thirty, two-forty-five, arms along each other, so warmly known they were afraid for once and told each other so and found it was that they had dreamed—probably the same dream and now mutually forgot—Clara and husband found they also ^agreed on what had happened at the Hamletin.

  Whereas Clara, as they had flagged a cab and boarded it to go north on Sixth, felt a woman’s work restitching here the famed darkness and brilliance of the Shakespeare and the dependent plight of Ophelia/Gertrude as the axis to catch our conscience, her husband easing back in his re- or de-sprung seat and looking suddenly back out the window into the glare of a street lamp felt vaguely a crisis that never comes, a music half-Italian half-Hindemith half-mountainously supernal that continues with utmost intensity independent of the drama of the love of man and woman, "plus" the Moorish virago Ophelia with her sex and dancer’s strength and spitfire and height hardly commits suicide, don’t send flowers! but was briefly said (wasn’t she?) to have plunged her rage into the long and troubled sea, witness steam rising from some strait of the Baltic misting our eastward window so the obstacle of Sweden dissolves!, though the lull in the music evoked, he had to say, really that old rippling canal (remember?) in Bruges with the market belfry in the background, yet it was nothing he wished to identify—her hand upon his cheek to say he was crazy but original, and he "Yet I feel myself in some other’s words"— "A critic’s?"—"A dead critic’s?"—"Long gone"—". . . into the long and mountainous sea"—"You’re thinking of home"—". . . of bed"—"of bed, too," so he knew she had meant "Chile."

  And whereas Clara swore she’d heard the agreed too-early- (and Polonius-) mentioned skull’s name Yorick with "New" before it, her husband scoffed and had his hand upon her lap,. . . "from know—as in, ur families knew de Talca’s family"; and whereas Clara knew she had heard nearby some cry of surprise upon "My heart lies buried there," her husband knew he had not; and while Clara felt some earlier palimpsest of Camp in making Rosenkrantz and Guilden-sterno woman and man then absorbed into a large, secret unity of art, her husband felt parts never really met but as if ideas were buried here that could conceivably be unfamiliar, like, oh well, new boundaries discontinuously defined not just by what they contain but also by where they are in their course, a quality of translation even in the double Moon and that sudden retargeting of light upon Gertrude’s forehead as if "this arrow of song" (was that Shakespeare?) would burn a hole full of—