Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Mayn carried an old pale-leather valise which he did not set down as they waited for the elevator. It hung from Mayn’s hand and he might have been about to board a train. Gordon was a couple of inches taller than Mayn, a couple at most, but Mayn was broader than Gordon and stood with some final, strong balance that was power that came from patience.

  The unusual dark shade of Mayn’s uniformly gray, thick hair didn’t look like a younger color mixed in, and his square, roughened face made you think he couldn’t be quite as old as he looked, which might be forty-five or fifty. The elevator floor indicator stayed at 5, and the new man came and pounded on the elevator door, put his nose against the diamond-shaped pane of reinforced glass, and tried to see up the shaftway. He shrugged and said that it was coming, and went away.

  While waiting, Gordon and Mayn talked of security in the building, the boiler, and a general shift in weather patterns toward extreme warm and extreme cold winters in alternate years; also snow tires—in particular, radial snows. Gordon and Mayn re-introduced themselves. Gordon didn’t really know Mayn, but Gordon’s wife Norma, who had greeted Mayn once in Gordon’s presence, said Mayn was a nice man; he had lived in the building once upon a time, had left, had now come back to the same old apartment which he had somehow kept, and was often out of town. According to Norma, Mayn had bought an old white Cadillac for his young daughter who worked in Washington. She had not received it with quite the sense of humor her father had hoped for. Or so Norma had told Gordon.

  Gordon at forty-four had taken a leave of absence from his law firm. He had to think, and think also how much this leave was costing. He kept thinking of himself as around forty. He had listened to Norma speaking of Jim Mayn.

  She hardly knew him, but in his wife’s mentions of Mayn the rather lone new but old arrival, Gordon had found a tremor or shift that Norma might be unaware of.

  What had Gordon missed? He had missed something—another life, no doubt—and that was why he was taking an expensive leave of absence which his firm did not understand. He had missed what? It was why he was where he was. He had almost forgotten how to think; or that was what it felt like in the morning and in the evening, and yet that wasn’t it. He noticed the year now when he read the Times in the morning, they were past the middle of the decade of the ‘70s.

  The doorman came back and placed both palms on the elevator door, his nose against the diamond-shaped pane, trying to get into the shaft it looked like.

  "She’s coming now," said Mayn. The doorman stepped back, giving the elevator door a single bang with his fist.

  Gordon said he was glad his own daughters were too young to drive; he wouldn’t keep a car in the city. He listened to himself say that indoor parking cost as much a month as a room in an apartment, and what did the Motor Vehicle tax on a newly purchased car come to now? Mayn said that his daughter had a car in Washington. Gordon thought, A white Cadillac! Mayn said, The government takes so much, it’s almost too expensive to work. Still, thank God for withholding.

  Gordon pointed out that they withheld too much, and he recalled that once he had prepared a speech on taxation.

  Mayn asked who had delivered it, had Gordon been in politics?

  No, it was for a contest at the rather traditional boys’ day school where Gordon attended grades nine through twelve. There were different categories and you could enter only one. Declamation was one category: you recited a poem. Public speaking was the other, but speech had two categories, prepared and extemporaneous. The extemporaneous speakers tended to be Jewish and kept up on their current events like sports fans; they were given topics fifteen minutes before they had to go on.

  "That’s the way it ought to be," said Mayn.

  Gordon had taken a load of information from an article in a magazine of his father’s, and when he went up to deliver his prepared speech from memory he looked left and right and didn’t know what in hell he was doing giving a speech on a subject like that. Where was the point of it for him?

  Mayn wagged his head agreeably and said he couldn’t help him there.

  In the elevator Gordon invited Mayn to come in for a drink. Mayn was saying, "Well ..." when they arrived at his floor and the door opened, and he asked Gordon to have that drink in his place.

  There was no mat outside Mayn’s door and there was a point of light in the peephole. In his foyer was a rolled-up rug with a tag attached to it by wire. Gordon listened for a sound. The light had been left on in the foyer, and the peephole’s metal flap was stuck to one side in the open position. Mayn said there was a hanger in the closet, and Gordon said it was O.K. and dropped his raincoat on an old white metal lawn chair, and Mayn draped his coat over Gordon’s.

  A mild, astringent scent of paint carried faintly into the living room, where a window was a few inches open. Mayn excused himself and disappeared into the kitchen. Gordon heard water spluttering out of a faucet—into a metal sink certainly; it droned and bounced like tinny rain. Mayn left the water running in the kitchen and appeared at the far end of the living room, disappeared for a minute, came back to the sound of a toilet flushing, passed out of sight, made some metal-on-metal and metal-on-wood noises, turned off the water and reappeared with a small pitcher and an ice bucket; he seemed to have evolved from a life that was far from here. You can go home again if you have several homes.

  Mayn had one of the few three-bedroom apartments in the old building —said he had lived here with his family. Gordon could see the suitcase where Mayn had left it in the foyer.

  Mayn poured for the two of them. Gordon urged Mayn to have a Medeco lock installed in his front door. They sat in the living room. Mayn hadn’t mentioned Gordon’s wife Norma, not that he should have. There was not much furniture in the living room, and Gordon liked the effect, although his frankly erratic feelings lately gave this living space for a moment a curious play in his mind. Either the furniture was being moved in or it was being moved out; but Mayn had recently moved back in and so the furniture, what there was of it, was certainly not being moved out, but Gordon had the feeling, as an unemployed observer, of a living space that contained a lot of different times. There were three large, detached, tree-like plants in tubs, but also there was a long, trailing, ivy-like growth that looked familiar, in a pot on a shelf above eye level. It was distinctly more present here in this room than the three big plants. Later, Gordon noticed another large plant, and maybe there were still more.

  How had Mayn kept this place so long when the landlord didn’t give sublet clauses? No problem, said Mayn; Gordon didn’t follow it up. Gordon said, Come to think of it, he didn’t know anyone on this floor. Mayn said he had had two sets of friends in the apartment over the last few years, and he had come back, and left, and come back again.

  Gordon inquired what it felt like, coming back, and Mayn knew what Gordon meant and thought a moment and then shook his head—he didn’t know how to answer and he said "Like remembering about my family when they lived here ..."

  "What they didn’t know?"

  "Or didn’t say."

  Mayn lifted his glass as if to drink. Holding it before his mouth, he observed that he had never lived anything like this, never gone back. He had always done the opposite.

  "You lived here with your family," said Gordon and the odd, slight cruelty he discovered in his remark seemed to contain what Norma knew about Mayn that Gordon didn’t know.

  "There’s a man in this building who lived here for years with his parents," said Mayn; "and when he got married, he moved his parents out and moved his wife in; he moved his parents over to Brooklyn, as I remember, and now he lives here with his wife and daughter, she has a friend named Valerie and they’re always yelling at each other in the elevator"—"I know them," said Gordon— "and when his daughter gets married ..."

  "Imagine the dreams you get in that apartment," said Gordon, but then he felt he was really talking about his host living here in this apartment, in this three-bedroom pad. "I mean the vibes."

  "I
don’t remember dreams," said Mayn. "Never have."

  "Well, this is the old homestead, for sure," said Gordon.

  "I do get end-of-the-world daydreams after I’ve had a few drinks," said Mayn—"a few too many."

  "How does it end? Or do you have to protect your sources?" said Gordon, and thought he shouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

  "I can’t remember," said Mayn. "Probably someone forgetting to tell someone something." He sipped his drink and looked away toward the lighted foyer where Gordon could see the valise standing. Mayn seemed to speak, then, from a distance. The good thing, he said, was that in the end-of-the-world he was beyond it; that is, in the dream he skipped his own death.

  An uninvolved observer, Gordon said, and Mayn, having sipped his drink, looked at it and said that to tell the truth he thought it was when he hadnt had much to drink that the dream came.

  Gordon didn’t want to just agree, and he said that schizophrenics have end-of-the-world fantasies.

  "Listen, there are lunatics out there that the doctors never dreamed of," said Mayn with tired authority.

  "You’ve seen them in your travels," said Gordon, who knew there was nothing between Mayn and Norma but guessed she was quite taken with him.

  "I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn.

  "Yes, I know. My wife told me," said Gordon. "Fast-breaking history."

  "Pretty slow-moving in my case," said Mayn. "Strip-mining leases in the West, disarmament contracts in the East."

  Gordon said he had had a dream the other night, if Mayn was interested, of climatologists joining forces with nuclear "fissionaries" to explode the cloud cover that makes Venus a greenhouse.

  "Nuclear what?" Mayn laughed.

  "But with your dreams of the future," said Gordon realizing to his surprise that he was persisting, "isn’t history breaking so fast that you have to anticipate it?"

  "What gave you the idea I was on intimate terms with the future," said Mayn.

  "I didn’t say you were," said Gordon.

  "In fact, I doubt if I’ll be there when it happens," said Mayn. "I mean the end of the world or the chain reaction when they set the atmosphere on fire by mistake."

  "But I’m serious, I read the headlines just like you," said Gordon. "What’s going on? Why are things falling out the way they are? Is it greed? Corporations? Generals? Is it everybody’s death wish? Is it that we can’t remember our dreams in the morning?" Gordon felt smart and foolish.

  "Greed and death wish for sure," said Mayn. "I don’t know about the other thing you mentioned. I do seem to recall that U.S. Grant couldn’t stand to watch the man—what was his name?—risking his life crossing Niagara on a high wire."

  "Grant was better out in the field. He didn’t know what he was doing when he got to the White House," said Gordon, who knew what he was talking about.

  "Grant was a vegetarian," said Mayn, shaking his head with friendly hopelessness at Gordon. "Wouldn’t eat a chicken, said he couldn’t eat anything that went on two legs, and he couldn’t stand rare meat, he’d seen so much blood when he visited his field hospitals and saw those kids—he had to have his beef done to a crisp."

  "I thought he was a vegetarian," said Gordon. "That’s better as a story than as history."

  "Oh, I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn. "I wouldn’t give you a dime for my view of history if I had one. History is words."

  "That doesn’t sound like a newspaperman," said Gordon, who had again said more than he had meant to or than he’d known he would say.

  "You’re welcome," said Mayn, as if Gordon had thanked him. But it had hit home, and Gordon, who could entertain himself, thought Mayn was sorry he’d asked him in, and he wondered how long Mayn had been away and if he left the light in the foyer burning. It was how Mayn uncrossed his legs and how his polished wingtip shoes, rich with wear like furniture wood, gripped the floor parallel and squarely. Also, there was the valise visible in the foyer. The man risked danger, Gordon felt.

  Then Gordon saw Mayn stand up with a quick force that said that he was not going anywhere. What, asked Gordon, were the big things in the tubs, because Mayn didn’t seem like a plant man. Gordon thought someone strange might come in and threaten Mayn, but Gordon needed to talk.

  Mayn took a look at the three great plants and pointed to another Gordon hadn’t noticed, a smaller one with dark, shiny, tight, strong leaves. "That one I happen to know is a jade tree, a young friend of mine named Barbara-Jean gave me that; said she thought I needed it to stand up to the three monsters. I don’t, to tell you the truth, know what their names are; my daughter and my son—well, really my daughter—had them sent here when I moved back in."

  Gordon liked Mayn. It was too late to ask for wine, which hadn’t been offered. He said he wasn’t ready for a refill. Mayn came and sat down. He brought with him a long stretch of time, and Gordon felt less unemployed.

  "If you’re away a lot," Gordon began but he didn’t go on, and with a shrug surveyed the room and the lighted foyer. Mayn looked at Gordon. Mayn’s hair was solidly but darkly gray and thick, the eyebrows not at all gray, face and chin very square; the eyes through largeness or the illusion of largeness, or through some lighter tint, were more a real color than Gordon had ever seen brown eyes. And he felt—yes—that the man would have felt downright alien had he paid any closer attention to what Gordon said. Or what Gordon was. For Gordon really wasn’t saying anything. He returned the wise or heavy look of his host. Gordon had ventured into this apartment for a casual drink.

  Mayn didn’t know Gordon, and yet Gordon felt his life visited by Mayn like a whole way of looking at things, a friendly abstention, powerfully non-intrusive. It was the sensation of the drink and it was the sentiment of memory and it was another day away from work. Gordon had to like Mayn, and he now saw that his self-sought unemployment would end in a few weeks or months and he would go on living his life and it would change for the better. What had Mayn to do with it?

  It came to Gordon—and came to him later as he then realized he’d known it would—that the one man, Gordon, knew he had taken the opposite view from how he usually saw his talk in all its intelligent volume, and so he thought he’d talked and said too much; and the other man, Mayn, who didn’t care what another thought of him, had known he was going to think he’d said too little, and had let this narrative go on from a man he didn’t know; which in turn wasn’t a matter of this fella Gordon subjecting him to something, much less mastering him—not at all, quite the reverse—but a drugged, sluggish (he had no right to be tired) feeling that he let his half-invited guest jumble his story, well lift one whole side of it from time to time so all Gordon said slid down toward one edge: a jumble Mayn let happen as if he were being a man to a man letting him talk—yet really offering an ear that was void. Oh Gordon was only guessing, but he felt sure of all this. Not that Norma really knew the man—she had only met him—but she had conveyed to Gordon some shadow that was now Gordon’s own intuition of this man in front of him.

  "You would like another," said Mayn.

  "Yes I would," said Gordon, and finished his bourbon.

  "Knew it," said Mayn, taking Gordon’s glass, and the words stopped whatever spell had sent Mayn running through Gordon’s past a moment before to set out on Gordon’s future without Gordon having the chance to say goodbye.

  Gordon spoke and did not stop for a long time. It might have been stupid. It was five-thirty when he began, and Mayn, this former tenant who had resumed residence in the building, asked a question or two and once got up to refill their drinks.

  But Gordon talked straight through for what turned out to be an hour.

  Why did he do that? Were they both wondering? Perhaps they both had the time. And when he stopped at last, he might in doing so have been anticipating the unexpected sound of a key in a lock that would have stopped him anyway if he had not already just come to the end.

  It was more a school story, and after he was into it he would get uneasy telling it for the first tim
e as if this was the hundredth (as it also was), but dismayed more because he’d thought it out so many times but now didn’t know how to end it. Gordon was taking an unpaid leave of absence from his law firm, but what he told Mayn was that he had taken a deep breath and had quit his job and was taking inventory; but Gordon didn’t need to hear himself tell anyone else, even a stranger, that if it was more than a vacation and less than real unemployment, he and Norma and their two children couldn’t live for too long without his working, and although his firm would take him back or he could always get a job—always, always—he also knew a college classmate who had lost his job as vice-president of an insurance company (or was it president) and seven months later shot himself.

  Mayn asked a couple of questions that sounded like he was hearing things (or was it Gordon hearing things?). Gordon’s father? Gordon’s grandmother? Quakers? The height of a wall surrounding the roof of an apartment house in Brooklyn? Brooklyn Heights could seem a long way away from Manhattan on a cold, windy, rainy late afternoon.

  This is what you do when you’re unemployed, said Gordon; you keep to yourself or you bend someone’s ear—someone who’s just come home from work. But when you begin you lose the beginning, as if maybe there never was a real beginning. You take up the piano. Not the violin, it’s too hard.

  Mayn said he didn’t understand "when you begin you lose the beginning."

  This particular business started with Gordon skipping fifth grade, but he had been in fifth grade for more than a month. But he had skipped just the same as if from fourth to sixth. And the event would be fully as important as his far-sighted father could foresee.