Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  The woman shook her head. She had shining blue eyes and rather curly brown hair, and she was tall and had delicate shoulders.

  Davey said, "Our money is all that’s in the cash register."

  Ann, being a genial, alert parent in the waitress’s presence, said, "Then where did she get the change from?"

  "That’s a good question."

  "Have you seen him before?" Ann asked the waitress.

  The waitress shook her head. "I hardly looked at him."

  "I’d never forget him," said Davey.

  Ann heard herself say, "He was wearing a turquoise belt buckle."

  The waitress excused herself. Ann left two dollars and as they got up to leave, Davey asked what percentage that was.

  "Something over fifteen percent."

  It was the very same restaurant, except that the owner, like a neighborhood Parisian, was standing out front, looking contemplatively down the street. A cab turned into the street and came very slowly by with a passenger looking out the window.

  "Do you think he was dangerous?" Ann asked.

  "Mom," said Davey, embarrassed.

  "I think so," said the gray-haired man, his eyebrows raised.

  "How much did he get?" asked Davey.

  The man looked down at Davey and smiled and shook his head, but it didn’t mean he didn’t know.

  "Are the police coming?" said Davey.

  The owner gestured toward the street. "That’s what they said."

  When Ann and Davey said goodnight to the owner, the holdup was all his. At the next corner Ann looked back and he was gone. Some people seemed to be looking at the menu in the window.

  "Why did you shush me when I asked if the man was dangerous?" Ann asked.

  "Because of course he was dangerous. He had a gun."

  "I think it was a knife."

  "No, it was definitely a gun. I saw it."

  "I don’t see how."

  "I was even closer than you."

  "But they were still behind you, and when he pulled her out into the aisle his arm, his forearm, was turned around the way it would be if he had a knife handle in his palm."

  "I know I saw the metal of a gun."

  "I’m sure you’re wrong."

  "I saw it."

  "You saw something."

  They crossed another avenue as the light changed in the middle.

  Ann took Davey’s arm. He didn’t crook it at the elbow.

  "It’s going to be a good weekend," said Ann.

  They walked in silence.

  "I got to call Michael and Alex," said Davey.

  "You’re going to see Alex tomorrow."

  "I’m going to see them both tomorrow. I’ve got to tell them about the holdup."

  "Listen, it was real, Davey, it was serious."

  "You’re not kidding it was serious," said her son. "We could have gotten killed."

  "Well, I doubt that," she said, "but I was afraid he might reach for you, Davey, and he might have if the police had arrived." But it wasn’t delayed-reaction fear that seemed now to be overtaking her.

  "How could the police have arrived?" said Davey. "No one called them till after it was all over."

  "You know what I mean."

  "This was my first holdup. I want to tell Michael and Alex about it, O.K.?"

  "We’re not even sure what happened."

  "I know what I saw."

  "In the bathroom?"

  "In the restaurant."

  "But before and after the holdup."

  "And during."

  "But we can’t even agree whether it was a knife or a gun."

  "You can’t agree."

  "Look, let’s go back and ask the waitress."

  "Mom."

  "Why don’t we phone them when we get home?"

  "That’s fine with me. I don’t know why you don’t want me to phone my friends."

  "It was my first holdup, too," she said, taking his hand and squeezing it.

  But as soon as they got home she went and ran herself a bath. It was what she should have done in the first place this evening when she came home from work. She was so tired it had to be in her head. She stepped outside the bathroom and closed the door. The water pouring into the tub seemed larger at a distance.

  She listened for a moment and went to the bedroom door. She knew Davey; she pictured him. She heard him open the refrigerator, and she was sure she heard the freezer door unstick. She did not hear the refrigerator door close, but she heard a plate rattle in the closet and a kitchen drawer open. He was looking for a spoon. She heard the voice of a baseball commentator come on, and a moment later she heard Davey’s voice, talking fast and excited.

  She was sitting in the tub, leaning forward to turn off the water. The door was open a little, so she heard the voices in the living room.

  Davey called. She called back that she was in the bathtub.

  The voices continued.

  Then it was only the baseball commentator’s voice, rising and falling. She let it stay where it was. Somewhere in the silence around that voice, an icepick was being hammered into a stolen, rock-hard avocado. The hot water was almost too hot to dream in. She’d had the money for that avocado but would rather shuttle herself by astral projection to Boston/San Francisco— not that anyone was there any more.

  She heard Davey’s voice again; it didn’t sound the same. It sounded as if he were phoning the movies for the times, but the call went on longer.

  Then there was only the TV again, then a knock on the bathroom door, which moved, but Davey didn’t come in. "You were wrong," he said. "It was a gun."

  "Well what do you know," she said quietly from the still tub.

  "No, I’m only kidding, Mom; they wouldn’t tell me."

  "You spoke to the waitress?"

  "No, he wouldn’t let me, and he said they weren’t discussing the matter."

  "O.K.," she said very quietly.

  "Hey, don’t go to sleep in there."

  She thought she heard steps cross the carpet. In a moment she heard Davey on the phone again. Which friend would he have phoned first? The picture wasn’t clear. He was closer to Michael; their lives had some big similarities, like his father not living with him.

  The bath seemed to become deeper and deeper. Her legs came up in a revolving jackknife and she did a two and a half, a three and a half, an unheard-of four and a half, the way she would do slow-motion somersaults underwater at the deep end of a pool in the summer while Davey would hold his nose and do underwater somersaults with her, though he couldn’t really stay down.

  She didn’t want to go to sleep in the bath, but she was damn well going to. If she’d taken a bath when she’d gotten home from the office, they would never have had a holdup. They would have had broccoli and melted cheese, and green noodles, with garlic (which Davey now liked). And strawberry ice cream, which he had just been eating anyway.

  She might have been asleep when she heard Davey call from the middle distance, "Are you asleep in there, Mom? Are you O.K.?" But she felt she had had her eyes open. She didn’t want to talk about the holdup, didn’t want to think about it. She closed her eyes. The water didn’t have quite the hot fixity it had when she first stepped cautiously in. But it was good to her and she let the questions called to her go unanswered. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. She heard Davey come across the carpet, and though she heard the door move, she didn’t think he was looking at her. She felt the water stir subtly about her; she had willed it to move for her benefit. She knew he had gone away. She massaged her dry face, and her knees broke the surface.

  She listened for a while. The TV was still on. She heard Davey’s voice, its quality of inquiring esteem for the other person, its habit of waiting humor. For a second she thought of her son’s, any kid’s, inspired account of a brush with violence—And then you know what happened?—and she smelled in her soap, melting somewhere near her leg, a sweeter apricot smell of freesias. (They had tried to charge her six-fifty for a
small bunch last week at the supposedly wholesale flower market.) Within the scent of freesias there was a hidden, earlier, heavier vein of sweetness that she now identified as aftershave but didn’t want to think about. For some moments Davey hadn’t been speaking, or not so she could hear, but the TV was still on, so he hadn’t gone to bed. And yet the silence beyond the TV wasn’t quite silence. He would be getting away from all the city noise this weekend. A lot he cared about the noise.

  She got herself out of the tub, and against the wash of the bathwater listened again. She ran her arms damply into the sleeves of her terry-cloth robe. She pulled open the door and put her wet foot down on her bedroom carpet.

  Have a nice evening, lady, the flower man had said. Have a nice life, he said. The pale-apricot-colored freesias were doing pretty well on her bureau. The man had let her have them for six dollars.

  Halfway to the door leading to the living room, she was on the point of calling to Davey that it was time for bed, when she heard his voice. "I don’t know whether I can," he was saying, and then there was a pause. "Maybe I’ll ask her." Then, "I will ask her; I definitely will." Then, "She’s O.K." Then, "Fifteen dollars, including my allowance." Then, "Yeah, I love you too." Ann knew the voice at the other end of the line without hearing it; but she owed Davey his privacy even after he said goodbye and hung up. The commercial between innings ended, and the deep-voiced, happy commentator was back on.

  She stood in the living-room doorway. Davey was sitting over near the entrance to the front hall beside the phone. He could see the game only at the narrowest angle; he could hardly see the screen. The light gave her back herself naked on a rug and not alone and feeling upon her curved body the lunar radiance of the TV preserving her love.

  Ann went to the set and turned it off. "Time for bed," she said. Davey just sat there by the phone. They had divided the evening between them.

  She had to give them both a break, so she said, "You didn’t need to call collect." They both knew what she meant.

  "How did you know I called collect?" Davey asked.

  "I’ve known for a long time, but you really don’t have to."

  "Thanks," he said, and stayed where he was, still dressed for the restaurant.

  She didn’t tell him not to thank her. "You’re welcome," she said.

  "So are you," he said.

  "So are you," she said.

  BETWEEN HISTORIES: BREATHING

  BEGINNING TO BE HEARD

  Yet we didn’t need to go outside the home to change, we had a set here and one in the next room where a child is doing homework and some of it on the screen, so we have dual screens if we can go back and forth between the rooms fast enough.

  To stretch a point. On dual screens wall-eyed twain. ("Bleeps," adds the interrogator in some South American brogue, meaning blips, meaning points, we know by new intuition having internalized the interrogator. Points of light on a vintage radar-substitute we picked up at God prices everybody and her uncle can charge.) Not content with one set. Some inner leap between two separated screens being essential before we end the century in question seated upon the shoulders of Einstein-over-Euclid-man, if not over the shoulder (read soldiers).

  But we meant more than weather-air-and-traffic-controller receiver-monitors-you-can-live-with, two screens in every relative home itself tilting always tilting round as we approach. We meant renewable duals between newer screen substitutes that for a day trip or night might accommodate Grace Kimball (who is more or less the multiplier of her workshops) and James Mayn (with his by our calculations parallel and intersecting populations) hear the noise, duple music from two really wonderful people as human as any angel-san could role-model, though two who may yet not meet in person to make (and brand name) exploratory history Recipro-Cal.

  But happy with any proven home, we don’t argue with that femoral limb they share: thigh in the beginning angles cohering among the legs holding assembly under that conference table where agreement was general that a power vacuum was a real possibility: power vacuum a daughter found in and (para) for her Dad, but gap of such inner route it sings beneath your skin as if it thinks it’s that quaint spawn the worm we have been out of contact with: not our fault, it’s its turn to phone us we sort of remember on principle. For the one who calls, needs; but the one who is called, is that the strong or the weak?

  The mother who left those sons or double-son is still somewhere and so is the promise she left behind that not she but they were the ones to leave. And if receding, she could still be reconstituted at a later libration point ‘tween pulls, because one looks after one’s mother, too, though rebirth’s what we were into, winging it or waiting on it, and if you are going to start taking responsibility, you might let your relations know.

  Whatever. It was an intrahemispheric tapeworm yet slower than a gas-sped bullet spun out the rifling of a Colt revolver’s barrel belonging to the Mayn family: a tapeworm slower than the ready-to-eat horses loping down a western valley of red, brown, gray, and darker stone, past a thousand natural sundials, cantering so gently it’s in a slow scale, side by side mindful unmindful of their riders—the East Far Eastern Princess upon her gift from the Navajo Prince, as she called him, a compact black-and-white pony the Princess’s pale bird refrained from consuming; the Prince beside her upon the midnight-blue Mexican mare, his own thick-withered, tempered mesa-bird, whose land of monumental stone and desert-sea, of spring firmament starred red, petaled white, spread blue-violet, among the green of owl-eyed cactus and sinewy pihon scrub, and of winter space, finds its own four corners infinitely outward-bounded god-given; while still further, but, in the gridthink of territorial plot, less than a generation away from a state called statehood, the Four Corners are also, for administrative (read white Anglo, which is—just in case—redundant) clarity, ordained interior (the better to clear you with, my dear, my Laughing Antler, my own Doe Water escaping me yet lingering) and that administrative intersection neat as four joined squares of document paper or an idea in someone’s basic-four-color brain, where the mapped lands of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, abstracts in an infinitely vanishing cross divisions within, willed from a distance remote as that departmental will must always stand from the far corners of the Prince’s cosmos that’s held like his people in his heart where one day this cosmos of his is in part told to the visiting East Far Eastern Princess, who knew only then what she had come to understand, and thought the Indians had something—it all worked together quite sensibly, the forces were visible, by and large—but she thought, too, that there was something more the Prince himself was after.

  And to go on (against the returning undertow of an interrogator’s interruption—had come? he demands, had come so as to understand? he complains as if he had not the wherewithal to implement his feeling by juicing our embedded electrodes: you spoke out of both sides of your face): to go on, to bypass these continental sentimentalities Mayn was clandestinely formed by until they questioned themselves one day, our noted tapeworm, intrahemispheric spawn though slower than trajected bullet or breathing horse, has, in case temporarily forgotten, other speeds, other inferred breathing like sound we picked up with our ear to the thigh of the divine that could make us, who now breathless need somebody to recapitulate by, forget that it was just any old fish tapeworm to be flushed out by gently acting bacteria prescribed by him who’s been your G.P. since not even your dying great-grandma can remember; a tapeworm taken out of Minnesota’s thousand lakes by air accompanied by the Ojibway medicine man’s diamond squint (now increasingly embedded in, if not pegged to, the soft swells of the dollar sign), this tapeworm arrived via the Manhattan physician’s fond attention to his diva, tapeworm extraordinary, which was perhaps not hers alone to do with as she pleased, for even after it got flushed away down the diva’s silver toilet, its track clung like experience to the insides of the slowly self-understanding society we’re in that’s capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale world views, even after it had bee
n flushed by the afternoon diva, the swinging, well-sung songbird (read mezzo, read mezzo persona) from her soft system during the two hours between the exit of the brunched, rueful physician and the intercom announcing the elegantly lapeled, mustached, infamously gifted mufti officer whose hands upon neat-cuffed wrists delegated in his other, political sphere to marginal interrogators themselves trained in the best amputation may have crashed clapping through the earshot of friends of her father’s and perhaps her old father’s own amplified earshot head (faraway under house arrest) tortured but not by doubts. But this mufti officer’s elsewhere delegated hands have also here in New York (these very hands alive with knowing knuckles) clapped for her at two performances: Rosenkavalier we remember and (with a significantly different audience) Norma, the Druid priestess—slimmest she’s been during this several-weeks diet campaign, rather dangerously slim as danger approaches across the footlights of opportunity in the officer’s passion and across the intrahemispheric league-upon-league in awesome fear for her outspoken father back (down) home in South America where she the diva no longer hangs her passport, she of the divinely resonant (formerly-until-last-week tapeworm-echoing) thigh (daughter, priestess, officer’s lover, and, in today’s last act, beyond biweekly physic brunches and the hard-core soft-wear spawned much later over every half-lighted inch of her shared bed, now, in her brisk but high cuisine, sacrificing her stomach to her ringed pyre’s flame and a ghastly multiple spawn—(Norma’s little children-san to eat—) she offered in her Manhattan apartment to the military but naked appetite beside her at the stove, his breath upon her shoulder, trading for the omens of her duplex kitchen the real love she’s had of him in her own hemispheric-feeling bed)—where his hands that were out of sight she felt but hands right here, not delegated, also clapped for private performances where each of his "strong-arms" moved each hand to clap on its own in a silence not Zen-proof though contemplative because heard in the warm light of the diva’s bedchamber by the twain. And self-helped by feedback, awareness nowadays gets refined in some adepts such that the soul picks up within the common thigh a noted tendon’s oath that the next rash stride around this jogging track around New York’s Central Park reservoir will cost this lonely jogger a pulled hamstring, but through this oath that the soul picks up it can send back its fine tune to monitor the blood pressure risen expressly to this occasion of two independent observers watching the jogger if not his blood pressure which has risen to turn the neck muscles bound to the shoulder slope to stone (to lead, to consolidated scrap metal he an economist has thought) which in turn made him throw forth his middle-aged knee with a kick so his hamstring foresaw itself about to be yanked and thereupon flashed its elastic oath into that soul-center that’s everywhere but nowhere, and a painfully hobbling hamstring pull was spared the tall, bald, distinguished foreign jogger-economist who’s being watched, he knew, through the sunny trees and rocks of Central Park by the mufti naval officer and elsewhere by the journalist James Mayn, who, unknown to the jogging exile-economist and his enemy and fellow-national the mufti officer, came there to watch the officer as well, whose subtly callused palms even at this moment of political action (read surveillance, read commitment) hold the memory of those dual clappings joint and one-handed in the diva’s bed as, elsewhere in this city which is also an articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, that dimpled, divided, but stereo-attuned buttock-life he clapped also remembers: as when, in turn, bent into a spinal twist in a basement yoga class, the diva’s body complained, except then she could not be sure where the complaint was you know coming from, her upper thigh apparently all kinked but a pulse banging along her other instep thence brinked spaceward—across the room, the roof-like carpet, the floor under the carpet shared by the others of her yoga class—space anyway outside herself like someone’s coat hung in the hall while her soul’s complaining she’s not together.