Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "Don’t worry, it could never happen in the same way again."

  "You wouldn’t kill him by the same method?" said the younger woman and put her finger to her lips.

  "Oh, I told you he said that—that I killed him."

  "I thought you did."

  "He always was a braggart."

  "Has he recovered from being killed?"

  They smiled. "He’s immortal, that’s why he’s boring," said the fair-haired woman, whose name was Maya. She reached across to touch the other’s hand, looking past her as if easily distracted by the street. "I’m better now," she said. "He pushed me into this free-lance thing like he pushed me into the book. I’m better now."

  They seemed to tell each other in the corners of their eyes that the large man two tables away was listening to them at his leisure. The younger woman felt this modest challenge from the man, who was bald but had bushy red eyebrows and a mustache to end all mustaches.

  "That book was everywhere," she said. "I even saw it in Burlington; I saw it here, of course, and do you know I saw it in Albuquerque."

  "Oh," said Maya, "it was everywhere for two or three months, and then suddenly you couldn’t find a copy anywhere. A lot happened too fast. I thought he was being supportive. He said, ‘Behind every successful woman there’s a good man.’ "

  "Yes. In her past," said the younger woman.

  "Sounds like you know from experience."

  "Other people’s."

  "Saves wear and tear."

  "Saves time," the younger woman said.

  "Why don’t I believe you?" said the other. "Oh hell, one picks up what one can."

  "Maybe so," said the younger woman, "but I’m never sure what it means when I first hear it."

  "Well, I overheard it," said Maya, "that thing you mentioned. ‘Behind every successful woman . . .’ "

  "You mentioned it, Maya."

  "You’re right," said the fair-haired woman, in response to the familiarity. "We were at a party and he had his back to me when he said it. He was wearing the burnt orange sweater I bought him. I remember how he looked. Tall as he is, he looked almost slight. But then it came to me: Second-Generation Pig, that’s what he is."

  "Second generation?"

  "A generation’s only about five years these days."

  "Listen," said the younger woman, "at least he wanted you to do something with your life." She cast an eye at their neighbor, the man with the red mustache; he had received a large puffed pastry powdered with sugar, and he tilted it in his fingers curiously, like something outstandingly large, before biting into it.

  "By that time," said Maya, "he wanted me out of the way; that was what he wanted. You’re nodding," she said to her attentive companion.

  "He wanted you out of the way?"

  "But nearby—how about nearby? Happily surviving—how’s that?"

  "What’s nearby?" the younger woman asked. "Same house? Same neighborhood?"

  "You really ask the questions," said Maya.

  "They can be painful to ask," said the younger woman, nodding, nodding.

  "Especially if you know the answers already. There, you’re doing it again," said Maya.

  "All I know," said the younger woman, "is I’ll be glad to live in this neighborhood for a good long time. It’s not at all depressing like the West Side, and it’s realer than the Upper East Side."

  "I couldn’t agree more," said the fair-haired woman. "It’s where I’m happily surviving."

  The younger woman uncrossed her legs and recrossed them the other way. She leaned sideways on her elbow to sip her coffee. "You yourself said he wanted you to make something of your life."

  "Why, he was proud of me. He bragged about me as if I weren’t there in the room; he reported my originality and my talents as if I were someone he happened to know. You’ve heard that story?" The voice eased into faint curiosity. "You’ve heard that one?"

  For—as if to say, When will people ever learn?—the younger woman was slowly shaking her head, smiling with sisterly resignation: "Yes, I’ve heard it."

  "Granted, it’s always nice to hear about yourself."

  "There was nothing about you on the book jacket."

  "You noticed."

  "Suppose," said the younger woman, "the awful truth is that he’s right and you are talented."

  "Listen," said Maya, "to hear him, you’d think I was consumed with ambition."

  "What were you consumed with?" the younger woman asked, and then, surprised by herself, she laughed.

  "Let me tell you," said Maya, "the Second-Generation Pig comes to you supporting your every endeavor. He wants for you what he knows you half-think you want. He tells you you’re loaded with talent, you’re incredible, you can do anything you decide to do. He’s a feminist, right? Wrong; he’s a closet pig."

  "But this guy," said the other woman agreeably, "when I first sat down here, he sounded kind of special."

  "You’re nodding again," said the fair-haired woman. Her fitfully blinking blue eyes looked away, undecided as to how lightly her needling had been meant.

  "I mean," said the younger woman, feeling boring but smiling more or less good-naturedly and nodding hopefully, "the way you said he still phones, and he gave you the picture of yourself you didn’t know he took when you were working, and he tells jokes on himself, and he got that woman interested in you. He probably still loves you."

  "Of course, he loves me now. Good old Dive."

  "Dive?"

  "My English for Dave. He did a lot of business in London in the old days. I guess it’s a term of endearment."

  "Maybe it was once."

  "He did take time off," said the fair-haired woman. "I mean, during the day though he’s a businessman."

  "To do what?"

  "I’d meet him here for an hour."

  "Sounds nice."

  "He scheduled me."

  "Still, it sounds nice," said Sue. "I mean, you lived together but he took time during the day."

  "One day—just like clockwork, one day a week," said the fair-haired woman, and actually looked at her digital wristwatch. "I’m talking too much. I’ve got an audience. So listen, Sue," said the woman with some touch of confidential humor. "Sue is your name? I just got this message from you: you would like us to be silent for a minute."

  It seemed true. They looked toward the rather gross man with the brilliant mustache munching on his pastry. He raised his eyes to them from his paper.

  They looked past him, past the marble tables on the ironwork stands, to the Gaggia machine in good, silver working order. A small woman firmly pushed down the steam handle. She wore a yellow T-shirt and she had fat upper arms. Between the accelerations of the afternoon traffic outside, the man could be heard chewing.

  The minute of silence was passing. This was the best table; it was in the front corner formed by two broad street windows. The two women, who didn’t know each other except through a mutual acquaintance, raised their cappuccino cups, which were glasses in metal holders.

  She had come here earlier than she’d planned, and she had recognized this woman and been invited to sit down. This was the unknown woman Sue had once seen across the street walking with the leader, star, and proprietor of a workshop Sue had attended. It lasted four weekends, it was called the Body-Self Workshop, it had been a bit of everything—terrifically tense getting out of the elevator, later a relief, a weird, quite happy relief. It had been really a mind-bending (literally naked) overload of rap, sympathy, information on food, eating, yoga, habit patterning, marital muteness, role constipation— just about everything and anything from speculums and sex-after-marriage to how the ancient mysteries celebrated the reunion of mother and daughter after the daughter has been raped during the harvest. So Sue and this woman had that in common—same workshop though not the same sessions.

  But a moment later, when she learned Maya’s name, Sue couldn’t get over it. This was the author of a book she had bought and read, a book that had won an award.
It was a small, wonderful book about the author’s weekend attempts at art and the spoor of strange signatures, monsters, and angels of patterns that weren’t there the first time you looked, the tangled clench, the struggle secretly recorded and perhaps actually dreamt by these amateurish oils and watercolors leading back, or was it forward, to the intrigue of the author’s own odd, half-free self which more and more looked like the true creation.

  That was the book and here was the author, with a fresh tan from Trinidad, taking an afternoon coffee break at an Italian pastry place in the neighborhood. She had been meaning to come here.

  She couldn’t get over it. This woman was the author of the book she had on the shelf in her living room. Maya’s book was a book to reread and see the author finding herself and sharing it.

  "My boyfriend is named Dave," said Sue and stopped.

  "It’s quite possible," said Maya, "and it’s quite possible he’s not a bastard."

  "I don’t know how it’s happened, but he doesn’t appear to be," said Sue.

  "You’re funny," said Maya.

  "I mean," said Sue, "sometimes I think he’d just as soon not talk about it, but he’s been through quite a lot."

  "My Dave hadn’t," said Maya. "He met me and made it up as he went along."

  Sue opened her mouth. What came out was "I haven’t known him long. I mean, it’s been long enough. I really love him. We just bought a beautiful canoe."

  Maya frowned. Sue nodded. Maya continued. Once upon a time, Maya was saying as if she were telling a story she’d told before, this Dave had had a mother, a mother and some brothers.

  "Now that’s interesting," said Sue, who did not ask how many.

  This mother had sent Dave out into the world trailing clouds of family pride. Maya told it from such a distance. This mother had told Dave to come back with first prize, otherwise forget it, she didn’t want to see him.

  "Are mothers like that?" said Sue.

  "I don’t follow you," said Maya.

  The woman in the yellow T-shirt brought the man with the russet red mustache a small white cup of espresso and took away a cup. He opened his newspaper and refolded it.

  This Dave had won first prize all right, Maya continued. Yes, indeed. He had done O.K. He had $300,000 in municipal bonds by the time he was twenty-nine. His mother was a beautiful person, he said; that was where he got his drive.

  "Maybe he needed to explain it," said Sue. "I can understand that."

  And so, of course, Dave had always needed women, and he had met Maya one afternoon when she was running up and down a train platform looking for her stolen suitcase, and later he wanted her to change her name from May to Maya after she had toyed with the idea. And he always sort of liked women, he listened, he asked questions about what they did and about their parents, and he touched them.

  "Touched?" said Sue.

  "He wasn’t very funny," said Maya, looking past Sue. A child yelled in the street. "But sometimes he had a jokey sweetness about him, and he did seem to listen."

  "It’s nice," said Sue, who knew what she was talking about.

  Maya frowned.

  "I mean, it is," said Sue, but Maya’s frown, aimed at her cappuccino, might have nothing to do with anything but distance and with this story of Dave with its sense somewhere beyond even Maya—and a sadness that half-included Sue.

  And always in that glass house he had built for her, there had been that mother. Well, he kept women on the far side of his mother; but this beautiful person, this ever-dark-haired, amber-eyed mother who never changed and when she was sixty-three her hair still looked like a painting, well, he actually didn’t see much of her, this great mother of his, even though—

  "Did she live far away?" asked Sue.

  —even though for a long time she lived close enough to drive to for a weekend (Maya had seen her the first time from a car window and didn’t know it). Later Dave’s mother sold the house and moved out West, right?

  "What do you mean, ‘He kept women on the far side of his mother’?"

  "What do you mean what do I mean?" said Maya, distracted.

  "I guess I know," said Sue, and couldn’t look at anything but the metal cupholder in her hand. "I meant, what did he do when you saw this?"

  A pale shadow went over Maya’s face as she looked past Sue over Sue’s shoulder, and the long window behind Sue seemed ready to expose Sue if she turned to look. It wasn’t that Sue was irritating Maya. The man facing them two tables away gulped some water.

  "It wasn’t what he did, it was how he did it," said Maya.

  "There you are," said Sue, "the how."

  Maya frowned at her and looked past her out through the street window behind Sue.

  "I only mean," said Sue, "it’s like I said. I mean, if you don’t want it to happen all over again the next time."

  The pale shadow went over Maya’s face again. Her mouth was speaking. The story had a mystery missing from it, something left out, some act undone.

  On a Saturday when Maya was at her table in the study, Dave would tiptoe down the hall like the dog moving over the floorboards, then stop at the verge, so her heart would start pounding, and she’d get mad—she admitted it. Then he would push the door open a crack and watch her, so she felt she was being checked up on and approved of; whereas, if he had knocked and come in asking if he was interrupting anything . . . oh, it was all in how he did it. He made her feel like a well-endowed slave on display, when all she was doing—

  "But no one can make you feel like that unless you’re willing to," interrupted Sue, recalling the workshop.

  —when all Maya was doing was her own work although, mind you, it was stuff he pushed her to do. Like, there’s encouragement and there’s encouragement: "some encouragement is like alimony—deductible."

  "But," said Sue, "when he came home for lunch when you weren’t expecting him, and he brought two splits of champagne—"

  "A bottle, I said," said Maya, "didn’t I?"

  "—it’s the gesture that counts," said Sue, "however he did it."

  "But I wasn’t going to drink at one-thirty in the afternoon. I’m not his mother. I don’t even look like her. He even pointed that out to me."

  "But champagne," said Sue, "an impulse."

  "Maybe it would be different now," said Maya. "I really don’t know. His mother drank champagne; that’s all she drank. He sent her a case of French champagne at Easter and Thanksgiving, probably still does. He used to quote her—"

  "His mother liked champagne?" said Sue. "So do I." She smiled impishly at Maya who frowned. "I mean," said Sue, "I’m not at all extravagant. I’m quite careful about money. When I wanted to buy a canoe, he was going to order a bark canoe although he would have had to go on a waiting list, but it cost thirteen hundred dollars, and for me the main thing was just that it wasn’t aluminum."

  The newspaper crackled at the neighboring table and the man with the red mustache was heard to say, distinctly, "Good old Dive."

  Maya rolled her eyes upward, lowered her voice a notch.

  "He did bring home a couple of splits once."

  "You see?" said Sue. "He doesn’t have a bushy red mustache, does he?"

  "He appears to have changed his looks with the times," said Maya dryly.

  Sue and Maya seemed closer. The woman in the yellow T-shirt leaned her elbows on the counter looking out toward the street.

  Sue wanted to know how long they had been married.

  Maya thought it over unhappily. She and Dave could be said to have been together, all told, for the better part of six years.

  Sue said that Maya must really know the neighborhood. They identified the apartment houses where they lived. Sue got Maya’s address. Sue’s phone number was in the book with the initial S, she said.

  When things were breaking down between Dave and Maya, rays came from him; he was hating her for knowing him, yet she kept reasonably quiet about it. She knew him, that is, too well.

  "You kept quiet?" said Sue.
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  Later, more than earlier, it seemed to Maya. Dave seemed to think she didn’t know he was seeing someone; he couldn’t imagine that she would be angry only about how he was handling it.

  "I don’t understand that," said Sue.

  Like he was putting one over. For example, walking the puppy all the damn time. As for Maya, she didn’t want to know—that is, who it was.

  "But you must have been angry," said Sue.

  Maya looked past her out the window as if she had more to look at than Sue did.

  The fat man exhaled audibly. Fresh cigarette smoke reached them.

  Anger—it was a matter of degree. Of how things got said. Things had seldom been calm. Maya got a letter from her mother with advice on a particularly sore point. Maya determined to ignore the letter, not tell Dave; but then she left it on her table and, of course, Dave saw it and told her he sympathized. Then they got into a fight about it.

  "About what?" said Sue, feeling the neighborly red mustache facing directly her way.

  Maya’s not telling Dave.

  "About the letter? A fight about the letter?"

  "Isn’t that what I said?" said Maya.

  She and Dave were close enough, and in the beginning Maya had never minded being dependent on Dave for love—wasn’t he dependent on her? He was so proud of her, didn’t want her to work, didn’t want her to clean the place until she said, hell, she had been used to doing her own place. However, it was two floors now of this brownstone he owned. And then she found him to be a greater slob than she’d first seen; he’d walk around the apartment first thing in the morning, brushing his teeth, his mouth full of toothpaste—and talking.

  "Walking around?" said Sue, "talking? That’s . . ."—she shook her head.

  It had indeed been something to see.

  At first Maya never minded being dependent on Dave for money, but not because in those "preinflationary" days she’d thought of her housework —her "homework"—as bringing in a portion of their income; his income was high even when she first knew him. Money was only money, and it wasn’t as if he had cleaned up at someone else’s expense—a chuckle came from two tables away—and if they had needed more money, she would have gone out to work again. But they were rich, comparatively—even not comparatively. She wasn’t saying it right.