Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "I’ll give you fifteen dollars and that will be your allowance, and you can pay for your movie and you can buy them all ice cream Saturday night," she said.

  "O.K., Mom, thanks. How’s your crepe?"

  Her vegetable crepe was better than his cannelloni, she was sure.

  While she listened to him volunteer a progress report on what was going on in school—what was going on in science—which he almost never did, the avocado pit kept shedding light by means of the tree that grew out of it. She was sure. The light opened up the apartment house and flattened it and spread it out to become something like land, but it was more like time, and time that there was no way any more of measuring. And the answer was that this new variety of avocado could either ripen or at its heart be totally and with unprecedented richness a pit, all pit—hence the tree, hence the light, and the apartment house turning into a land of new time. Picture all that, she thought.

  She thought he was being nice to her, telling her what they were doing in science class. Yes, she knew about genes and she had heard of Mendel, but she had forgotten that it was pea plants he studied. It was about inheriting traits, and it was all about dominant and recessive. She thought of chins, she thought of personalities. Davey talked fast, looking over her shoulder, and she told him she thought he had it just slightly mixed up but she couldn’t remember for sure. He said that that was how Mr. Skull had explained it.

  Mr. Skull?

  Mr. Skull.

  She hadn’t heard of Mr. Skull. Maybe they presented it differently now, she said.

  Well, according to Mr. Skull, Mendel was a monk and a schoolteacher, and wasn’t known during his own lifetime, and eventually his eyesight started to go; but what mattered was that he took the next step. Nowadays, they knew that Mendel didn’t have the whole truth; there was a lot of stuff he hadn’t gotten up to.

  "But you will," she said.

  "But it won’t necessarily be true," said Davey, and as his mother reached in her bag for her cigarettes he opened a book of matches that had been lying in the ashtray, but she put her cigarette pack on the table and shook her head.

  "True?" she said, remembering words. "Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on."

  "It must be more than that," said Davey.

  "Nope," she said.

  "Who said?"

  "Actually, your father. He said that."

  "He did?"

  "Yes, he did. I can assure you he said that."

  She didn’t like her tone. Alone with her son, Ann had gotten used to being very alert, yet she lived also with this single-minded sense of hers that she wasn’t seeing everything. Yet she knew she was a good mother.

  She hadn’t seen the door to the small vestibule open. She was mopping the last of the oil off her salad plate with the last crust of their bread. Then she saw the young man in the white doorway. He wore bluejeans and a leather jacket. He paused, she felt, to give a person he’d come to see time to see him. He was looking toward the far end of the restaurant, where the kitchen was—the far end of what was really just a room.

  The young man passed their table, and she said, "He didn’t come here to eat."

  "How do you know?" said her son. "He probably works here."

  "Either he’s the dishwasher or his girlfriend works here," she said.

  "Well, he’s talking to the waitress," said her son. "She’s sitting at the last table and he said something to her."

  "You see?" she said, observing Davey, and chewing her bread and holding and gently tilting her wine glass. She knew that the man in jeans wasn’t the young French waitress’s boyfriend.

  "She’s pointing," said her son, and his mother raised her finger to her lips in case they could hear Davey back there. "He’s going to the phone. There’s a phone on the wall right by the entrance to the kitchen."

  "Well, that’s what he came in for," she said. "He’s not the waitress’s boyfriend."

  "Isn’t he a little young for her?" said her son.

  "I wouldn’t be surprised," she said. The young man had long ginger hair, lank but carefully combed, and eyes like those of some animal so rarely seen that its ordinariness is what is most striking during a brief moment of exposure; his short, light-brown leather jacket looked as if it had traveled, and there was a touch of color about him she didn’t identify at the moment. She looked into her son’s face and was tired for the first time today.

  "That was a pretty quick phone call," he said. "That was a quickie."

  "Maybe he was calling his girlfriend," she said.

  "He just disappeared, if you want to know," said her son. "He must have gone to the bathroom."

  "I bet that’s why he really came in here."

  "But he asked the waitress for the phone."

  "That was what he was thinking of when he first came in."

  "Hey," her son remarked, looking toward the far end of the room, "that was quick. He came right out." Davey stared intimately or absently into her eyes, so she knew the man was approaching. She felt the vibrations in her feet and her chair.

  As the young man in the leather jacket passed and she smelled a smell she couldn’t quite place, her son looked around over his shoulder and watched the man leave after pausing once more, as if the brass doorknob in his hand had made him remember something.

  "Did he get through to the person he was calling?" she asked.

  "I don’t think so," said her son, as the waitress came to their table and the man left.

  The waitress told them what there was for dessert. The boy turned around in his chair to look at the table by the window, where there were some fruit tarts on two plates. His mother knew he would have mousse. The owner was standing by the cash register, and the waitress excused herself and turned to him. The owner raised his hand and pointed with a finger that seemed to have just pressed a cash-register key, and she went back toward another table. She returned with a twenty-dollar bill and a check.

  Music got turned on and off. Ann knew Davey was aware of her mood; otherwise he’d have forgotten their little discussion about the weekend except as part of a general mulling-over that he probably didn’t spell out.

  They were going to have chocolate mousse and apricot—no, strawberry—tart. The waitress went to the kitchen, the owner right behind her.

  "Alex’s mother swam the English Channel," said Davey.

  "She did not," said Ann. "That just isn’t true."

  "All but two miles, coming from France; if she’d been swimming the other way, she would have made it."

  "Where did you hear that?"

  "Alex said so," said Davey.

  "Well, I doubt it," his mother remarked.

  Behind him, she thought, was her dessert, on a table; behind her was his dessert, in a refrigerator in the kitchen. The two of them might be having the littlest of fights; no outsider would be able to tell. The young man with ginger hair appeared again in the doorway and entered the restaurant.

  "Here he is again," said Ann softly, looking Davey in the eye so that he turned around and stared at the man, who looked at Ann, who, when her son turned back and put his elbows on the table facing her, said to him as if she were talking about anything but the young man, "Maybe he’s suddenly developed an interest in the waitress."

  "Atom," said Davey softly, embarrassed.

  The young man was waiting for something to happen, she was sure, but it wasn’t clear what.

  "Can I have a taste of your mousse?" she said.

  "If it ever comes," said Davey.

  The young man strode past them toward the rear of the restaurant.

  "What’s he doing?" said Ann.

  "He’s got his hand on the phone and the owner’s telling him not to keep coming in here using the phone."

  "How do you know?"

  "I can tell."

  "Well, what’s he going to do about it?"

  "It’s a free country," said Davey. "I’d call the police."

  Ann laughed and for a moment found she
couldn’t stop—it was all over her face and in spasms in her abdomen. Davey smiled with grudging modesty at his remark, keeping an eye on the far end of the room. Ann started up again and stopped. She drank some water as if she already had the hiccups. "You’re good for a laugh, kid," she said. Her impulse to laugh had passed.

  "He’s talking to the waitress," said Davey.

  "What is le patron doing?"

  "You mean the owner?" said Davey. "He’s talking to the black guy in the kitchen."

  "Where is our waitress?"

  "She’s talking to the guy who came in. Or he’s talking to her. She smiled. At least, I think she did."

  "She what?"

  "She doesn’t have my chocolate mousse."

  Ann felt the treads coming along the carpeted floor, and the waitress and the young man in bluejeans passed, and the waitress went to the cash register.

  "You see?" said Ann, and Davey turned to look. "She is his girl." For the man, who had his back to them, had put his hand lightly on the waitress’s shoulder. The waitress wasn’t doing anything.

  "You might just be right," said Davey, glancing back at them and seeing what his mother meant. He shrugged.

  "Or his sister, maybe?" said Ann, who turned instinctively to see the owner, at the back of the restaurant, step out of the kitchen.

  The ginger-haired man now brought his other hand up and gripped the waitress’s right arm just above the elbow, and she jerked her head around to the right, as if the street door were opening.

  "No, I’m wrong," said Ann, and Davey, hearing her voice, turned to look and half rose in his chair as the man standing behind the waitress at the cash register drew her back and pivoted her away from the register and around to face back down the length of the restaurant, as if, breaking the restaurant’s privacy, she were going to announce that there was a call for someone—or no, that there was a fire, no problem, or something had been lost, or the place was being closed down and the money would be refunded. And as he spoke, sharply and low behind her, there was a close moment not of ventriloquism so much as intimate agreement, when his command seemed jointly to be hers: they were about the same height, he was the roughly dressed brother or consort, and the composed life of this pleasing place derived from his behind-the-scenes industry.

  His information that they were to go into the bathroom was as clear as the angle Davey’s half-risen body cast in relation to his mother facing him and to the close pair on his right, three or four feet behind him.

  She said, "Sit down"—was it that he was trying to be brave?—but the man, having spoken, looked away from the rest of the restaurant at the two of them and particularly at Davey, as if he could do more than speak. Ann felt the chill. And Davey was not sitting down. He had pushed his chair back and was standing up, turned to the waitress and the holdup man.

  His mother had, she felt, received for them both the news that they were all going to the rear of the restaurant, into the bathroom, which was the place where you waited out this mandatory drill, which was to see how well it could be done. There must have been words; why they were so low she did not know, but what was happening was clear enough. Davey stepped away from the table and stood contemplating the young man and woman up against each other, the one somewhat hurried and scanning the room, the other rigid, and Ann for a moment didn’t reach for Davey, in case the man did something. The man was saying, Hurry, with his eyes.

  In one movement she rose and stepped around the table, hearing others behind her moving—she couldn’t look back quite yet—and she got Davey by the elbow, his arm firm but not muscular, and drew him with her away from the waitress and the man. The man’s hand, his left hand, was definitely up against the waitress’s spine, and his forearm had seemed turned, as if a knife handle was gripped in his palm.

  Ann had her leather bag on her shoulder. She was startled not to remember taking it. She had her arm around Davey’s shoulder. The five or six customers ahead of them moving politely, as if there had been a power failure to be patient about, were people she’d hardly noticed when she’d come in. Now, following them, she found them even less real to her—all except a blonde woman in her fifties with a lacquered bouffant—less real to her than they had obscurely been in the privacy of her dinner with her son. Tonight Davey had the view.

  She remembered nothing and prophesied little, but she had seen finality in the alert glance the young man had given Davey. It didn’t matter who Davey was—he was a person who happened to be there and then, from out of a field of chances. And a sudden killing in self-defense followed their backs as, the last customers to file to the rear and turn right and crowd into the bathroom, she and Davey were followed in by the owner, who shook his head gently at her and the others and raised his palm—as if any of them were going to do anything.

  The little bathroom was unexpectedly long. Davey’s hair was up against her nose and she put her arm around in front of him across his stomach, and she turned to look into the eyes of a short, bald man, who instantly frowned and turned away from her toward the toilet end, where there was a small, half-open window. "Where does that lead to?" he asked importantly, but the owner, whom he did not look back at, continued to shake his head. The bald man said, "Excuse me," and edged between the others and reached around them to the toilet, leaning over it. "Anyone else want to leave your wallet behind the toilet?"

  A dark woman in a dark turtleneck sweater, whose shoulder was against a dark man, also in a dark turtleneck, with such firm tightness that you knew if you followed their arms downward you would find them holding hands, said, "What if he wants your wallet—what are you going to give him?"

  "I got ten bucks in my pocket," the man said.

  "Ten bucks," said the woman. "Are you kidding?"

  The waitress had not appeared. The owner was shaking his head, but now to himself. They were close together in the narrow, longish lavatory, yet exposed by the peculiarly high ceiling. Ann didn’t count how many were crowded in here. Davey whispered huskily, so the others heard, "There are ten people in here."

  The dark man in the dark turtleneck looked a bit scared. The blonde woman, whose lacquered bouffant seemed to be in the wrong restaurant, had pursed her lips, but she bent around and gave the bald man a kiss that just missed his mouth. The black man at the door turned on the basin faucet and turned it off. The two young men who were at the rear by the toilet and the window had given way for the bald man to stash his wallet. One of them now said, "Are your lunch receipts in that register?"

  The owner hesitated. He seemed to have a clear sense of what was outside the room where they were. "There’s always a first time," he said, and his accent gave a poignance to his words. "Well, it’s too bad," said the other young man by the toilet. "It really is." His friend said,"My spinach quiche is getting colder by the minute," and the other said, "Remember Greece— they said you should never eat food piping hot."

  Davey leaned the back of his head against his mother’s shoulder and growled softly, "Where’s my mousse?" He said to the owner, "Somebody ought to see what’s happened to the waitress."

  The owner opened the door and seemed to hear something and slipped out.

  Ann hugged Davey. Her arm came around his stomach. "Did he say, ‘Everyone into the bathroom’?" she asked and she looked down at her bag, its flap covering the top but not fastened down through its leather loop.

  "No," Davey said, "he said, ‘Everyone get into the back into the bathroom’—that’s what he said."

  "I guess he doesn’t want us," said the woman in the dark turtleneck.

  "Beware of pickpockets," growled Davey in his mother’s ear.

  A terrific sadness descended upon her. The black man eased himself out the door.

  "I don’t think I want my mousse," said Davey.

  "We’ll ask for the check," Ann said. She put both hands on Davey’s shoulders. When this is all over, she meant.

  "Do you want your strawberry tart?" he asked.

  The owner appeared and
said the man had gone.

  The man who had hidden his wallet asked one of the young men to pass it to him.

  The restaurant, when they came out, seemed especially empty, because the waitress was at the far end by the window, sitting beside the pastry desserts, huddled in the chair, and the black man was comforting her. She was quietly hysterical; she was not quite sobbing. She looked as if she were waiting for someone. There were half-empty wineglasses and salad plates with forks across them and chairs pushed back. Someone said, "I wonder if he helped himself."

  It had been over so soon that Ann couldn’t think, except that with a pistol the young man could have made them go with him. Or killed someone just like that, so the person wouldn’t be around to go through the mug shots at the local precinct. She didn’t know the address of the local precinct. She didn’t know the address of the local precinct or what number precinct it was.

  The waitress sat in the window crying. People were sitting down again. Ann told the owner she would have her coffee later. This sounded as if they were having hot dogs and beans in a diner. The check included the chocolate mousse and the strawberry tart. The owner subtracted the desserts.

  The waitress stood up and smiled. Now it was the waitress Ann was paying; the owner was outside in the street. Davey looked up into the waitress’s face. He didn’t say anything.

  "Are you all right?" said Ann as the waitress put down on the table the change from a twenty. "Have you ever been in a holdup before?"