Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And then Jim thought he had seen that same piner kid of the truck ride a month before at the movies. You really knew it when you got near a piner kid in an enclosed space, not that they had the money for a ticket to the movie, even though they probably watered their bodies in the lake from time to time. Didn’t that kid go to school? Jim had seen a woman with hair flat on her narrow head washing clothes, and there was a little shoreline of foam like Mantoloking seafoam—but with mud and roots. But it probably wasn’t the screwdriver kid, that day in the movies so soon after Sarah’s death. After Brad’s Day Jim saw the kid’s face and the back of his head several times, but it wasn’t him. It was in Sam’s long backyard where they played touch football that was practically tackle and Jim left the game and ran up past the beautiful old red brick house to the picket fence but it wasn’t the kid slowly hiking a bit surly along the sidewalk; or it was coming out of the soda fountain and looking across the street at the window full of overalls and there was the kid with a dirty sailor cap but after getting practically hit in the middle of the street by two cars passing each other, Jim saw it wasn’t the same kid, this one was taller, without the rangy shoulders; or it was the jungle in Guadalcanal, hand to hand, get him before he even has a chance to pick his weapon up, his father and Alexander had been reading a book about Guadalcanal, man to man, you didn’t have time to ask questions, you’d heaved your last grenade back on the other island, Iwo Jima, Guam, one of them, launched it with all you had, which was your discus arm if it didn’t get sucked away by the same grenade it was propelling by the slinging mode—so that that hand without time to ask questions felt like the future but the War was just over, and Bob Yard didn’t talk much about it any more, his brother-in-law came home intact, his niece elected to stay in the WAVES for three more years having become an expert typist with a better chance to travel now than during the War, and Jim’s father who seemed to be developing a bulbous chin dragged out the deal to unload the paper until one night in Jim’s senior year Mel asked Jim if he himself would have considered hanging on to the paper, all other things being equal, and Jim said he wanted no part of it (which alas was only part of what he had had or had meant to say) and his father shrugged and said what he maybe hadn’t meant to say but might well have felt, since he had already been left once, to wit that that’s a big reason he decided to sell out. To which Jim quickly said, "Oh thanks, Mel, thanks, that puts me in my place, I had that coming, sure I did." (The first time he had called his dad Mel.)

  No newspapers for him, not that the Democrat (whatever they said about Jackson and the bank) was a real newspaper; it had social notes on relatives who came to spend a week or a friend from New York or Reading, Pennsylvania, though not Margaret’s funny-looking old tramp of a man whom Jim first saw on the beach at Mantoloking the day Bob Yard had come and had that unsuccessful conversation with Jim’s mother more or less one-way where, on that black towel of hers, she lay irritated and still, but the old guy would talk and talk in the car and stayed with Margaret and Alexander a couple of days at least but Alexander kicked him out because he upset Margaret after Mel wanted to run a note in the paper but Margaret preferred not to and the man was known to Jim as that Inventor from New York though Jim never asked him his real name, and he wasn’t quite the same as the Hermit-Inventor from 1893-4, but was his decrepit nephew carrying on the good work, Margaret said, because you had to, and Jim asked him what he did: It remained to be seen, he said; it was partly just living, but it was unpredictable—he had invented a smallish machine that randomly invented new shapes there was motion for, but no formula yet, and he had carried on his forebears’ work which was beginning to look like learning not just to control the weather but in a new way to live with it, partly through seeing its relation to the interior activity of the land, even mountains far away, and so he was moving toward maybe a new weather, which made him practically unemployable but he had a small "competence" descended to him from an "ancestor’s" patent royalty which enabled him to maintain the "family railroad flat" in a city that—but Jim sometimes, when he bothered to think about it, wasn’t sure what he recalled and what inferred—so that the piner kid was maybe one-quarter made-up, and had forced him to share the pickup truck he had, briefly stolen the afternoon of Brad’s Day; and he was pretty sure he recalled the Hermit-Inventor of New York saying he had been given what equipment and training—mostly self-education—he needed so if he lost the struggle he could only blame himself—the very words, almost, that Mel said, the day of the final and crucial football game when Windrow was definitely the underdog as Jim pointed out to Brad, whereupon Mel said all that about having enough training and equipment so if they lost the game it was their own fault ("equipment" a crazy word), the already semi-retired father saying the sentence like words he had been given and was bound to say, so that at the time of another war in which Jim did not participate he knew he would hear those words if only because automatic packaged phrases are future phrases, a thought that Mayn passed on to his unlucky and largely unknown though loved friend Mayga, the Chilean woman—passed it on and passed it off as no thought at all but she asked him please not to dismiss it as a thought, but he could count on her to take seriously a lot of what he found to tell that he would only very occasionally get soused about—that is, drunk and loud, though not fighting mad, for if you tear someone limb from limb you might hurt that someone, he said, and although once during his married years he did in fact go for the jugular (‘‘after the jug?" said Ted, who was readier to believe Jim than some layer of his brain gook could accept). Well, to the late Mayga, and perhaps once to his journalist-colleague Ted, who was with UPI for years and knew everything (which was what he said about Jim), he explained that this type of evening’s undertaking (that is, to get thoroughly drunk) marked an effort to prove that some of these other thoughts which would persist actually then more strongly though less coherently were dependent on an inebriated state of mind and were dumb and a delusion.

  But he couldn’t have told Ted as he did Mayga about his position in the future, because he liked Ted, knew Ted knew he wasn’t the type to go on like that; wouldn’t believe him, or worse would think something permanently (not odd but) wrong with him. Which future are you going to worry about anyhow?—the upcoming election or the state of the dollar four or five years from now? You control the immediate future by reducing unemployment by not slapping controls on.

  The recently bereaved boy Jim Mayn took to dropping in on two old (in fact late middle-aged) ladies who stopped being surprised when this boy who had mowed their lawn until he lost the job when he went to work on a farm the preceding summer came in and sat with them. They had hardly known his mother. Their piano was out of tune; he tried a chord and was asked to play and couldn’t; they talked horses, they would argue whether a gigantic trotter named Native Hanover who’s with all the other champions on the wall outside the bar of the hotel downtown had done in fact all the things they each thought they recalled, or were they remembering two or three horses; they knew times fantastically, and once Jim asked how long they had been living together, he’d forgotten for a second they were sisters, but he might have asked that dumb question because he had felt that they wanted him to go—their bathroom had a crocheted-or-something thick pink cover over the toilet seat and smelled perfumed. He visited—always unannounced—a doctor who lived over by the military school, who played the organ at the Baptist Church accompanying himself in a heady tenor when he didn’t, he said, even believe in God most Sundays; a couple of times when Jim showed up he had a feeling that he had interrupted the doctor and his wife and their daughter who was a year younger than Jim—the son was away at boarding school in Pennsylvania: "Let the Quakers see if they can do anything with Hank"—in the midst of discussing perhaps some rotten thing they had all done or the doctor had (because his family seemed so nice, though Jim liked him)—and he got up and went out of the room saying he needed a drink. He was the first grownup to ever offer Jim a beer, when he was still
fifteen. And Jim took to dropping in also on the Bob Yards, and she would ask little questions about his grandmother going in to New York to look at material at Schumacher’s and had they gotten tired of Brad’s cooking yet? She was better arguing with Bob and laughing at his exaggerated stories from downtown: there was a dimmer switch on the market like the lights in the movie house and someday you would go away for a wild weekend in the city and your house would light up in the evening and turn all but one of its lights out at, say, midnight, and look like it was being lived in, even project two moving figures up next to the window ("Doin’ what?"), while you were dancing the night away or attending the horse show. Bob was practically the first to have a television set in Windrow and Jim thought the Notre Dame-Army football players looked like squat dolls or soldiers but you knew it was real, and it was a fascinating trick that had been put over on that whole scene that you felt could—or should—only be told about by the announcer. Nobody asked Jim something he couldn’t spell out himself.

  Now that, wakes the interrogator, is so empty a statement it is downright bracing; what is the humidity outside our chambers?

  Jim fell forward, sent away. But by whom? For it was his (only somewhat sickly) mother who had "passed away" (as Pearl Myles put it of her own mother’s death, discussing what, where, and when matter-of-factly for the class; her mother having passed away less than four years previous or, as Jim with a sour smile hidden in his heart swiftly calculated, not long after Pearl Harbor!); fell forward, as not even he could quite know, borrowing Bob Yard’s pickup truck (this time legitimately) one afternoon of his senior year, but we, who were always potentially part of him, knew and would claim credit for saving his life that afternoon if it were not some section of our own, not to mention that of a farm kid in a baseball cap driving a bare bodiless chassis the wrong way out of the street behind the Courthouse as Jim, with the right of way and Ann-Marie Vandevere braced beside him in the same seat that Anna Maria Pietrangeli had occupied with proud arms crossed over her breast the week before, floored the pedal only afterward to be in a position (thanks to Bob Yard’s brakes in the days before inspection) to know that at that instant his errand had been less to kill that vehicle in front of him and its exposed operator than to pass through it with an angry (not "irate") vision that if he’d been given what his force for a moment demanded would have propelled him and the severe and passionate blonde girl with him through that thing—that "thing" he’s driving, that dink, that fuckhead—by way of a mere rearrangement of the matter making up said unwary obstacle without altering it in any way but the experience of these molecules that made secret space for him and the girl and Bob’s vehicle to pass through yet paralleled by a memory felt in Jim’s shoulders and knuckles and calves that this was no way to get out of town. The kid’s life was spared. The so-called Hokey-Pokey Man, who peddled his homemade vanilla ice cream by a little horsedrawn wagon at dusk, told him his mother had been one of the nicest persons he had ever known; a lot to live up to, he said—an Armenian, but not quite the only one in town, said grandfather Alexander—some Armenians are gypsies (some gypsies are Hungarians), but the Hokey-Pokey Man has that fine head of white hair and a square head like Mel’s, only smaller—he’s no gypsy—

  —We knew that anyway, said Margaret.

  Jim reported to his father what the Hokey-Pokey Man had said, who incidentally must have recalled how much Sarah loved vanilla ice cream as deep a vanilla taste as heart of nutmeg; and Jim’s father said how most Armenians were Catholics. Jim didn’t get it, but wasn’t in the habit of asking his father things; but when he reported his father’s odd remark, Margaret, whom he never talked with any more about her old hole-in-the-sky stories, told him Catholics considered suicide a sin. Jim just said, "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," and Margaret retorted, "No second chance there." And Jim added, "Maybe there’s no heaven." "Maybe there isn’t," said Margaret. Margaret laughed and went to give him a hug, which he more or less went along with. But it made him hopeless—how could that be?—and he said what seemed to come between them: "Well, they never found her." Not that anyone was really looking now, or raking the briny floor for a person he felt like he knew somewhat less now, though Brad for God’s sake recalled stuff about her from before he was born—maybe the little bastard really was more her son—such as that she didn’t want any more kids but after Brad came along she was glad; and that she had been a great surf swimmer in the old days, fearless and stubborn, until later she hardly ever went in. And she laid out her writing pens and ye olde music-copying implements on the drop-leaf desk in the musick womb—the next room, a room full of possible and future music, and Jim fell forward (it felt like forward) through furniture, people, walls, power lines, hilly roads—and, and—

  Is she clear to you? asks the interrogator, faked into a second career as listener—and who, he adds, are you?—it’s suddenly not qua-t clear; in the modern city they have just adopted one of our own venerable methods of causing pain in order to elicit information; yes, a youth approached a park bench containing a couple who were either of different sex or same, and shot them through the leg with one shot, and (which was his original "touch") only then inquired what money they had.

  —and Sarah wrote little letters to Alexander her father though he was just downtown and if he replied it may have been by word of mouth. "This is a great-grandfather desk," Jim heard her say to little Brad and she smiled at Jim who appeared at her doorway and she went on speaking to the baby of the family: "that’s a grandfather clock because it’s tall and old and it’s been telling time for a long time" (she reached to release the arm of her metronome and let it swing back and forth, then stopped it—Jim in recollection couldn’t quite see her principal audience, which was Brad—where was he? he was standing by her desk); "but this is a great-grandfather desk because that’s who made it, and over at Margaret and Alexander’s house there’s a grandfather pistol" while she smiled at Jimmy now and then and would say, "Oh Mel, you are so goddamn polite," like she was against him; or she would kid with her "baby," Brad: "Now what was your name? I forget, was it Benjamin?" (‘Wo," cried the child)—"Was it Jackie? was it Sammy?" ("No," cried the child and developed hiccups from giggling and couldn’t say his name)—"Oh /know: it was Emily, that’s your name"—("No," but he’s too young to say, That’s a girl’s name)—"Oh I remember, you’re Brad" was said at last, like sheer invention at the last burnt-out moment when we’d run out of potentially erroneous facts.

  There were ladies in silk blouses with dark chiffon scarves inside their instrument cases and such; but, never forgetting her sister in Mass. who didn’t get along with Margaret and Alexander and rarely (though with some considerable annualized ceremony) visited, Sarah came more to life with the male musical contingent whether or not they actually made the music or sustained it. Here were Barcalow Brandy wine, a would-be singer with a natural performer’s name whose family owned extensive orchards and other properties in the county and who wore sport coats you’d never see in any store and a scarf around his neck like an actor, Jim thought; and Byron Kennett, who wore silkier sport clothes and, one secret shocking week, went to state prison for a while, where his mother’s dancing shoes could not penetrate, and who could play the cello and did so out of it seemed love for Jim’s mother, not for the cello which in a way didn’t even belong to him though against his will it had been left to him by a maiden great-uncle who had desired to exert some strong influence upon this only child whose father had left his wife and son otherwise fairly well fixed. The truth was that Jim didn’t much want to go near that room with its sudden empty or shouting or laughing halts in the music when someone had missed a note ("Probably turned to the wrong page," said Mel one evening when Brad reported that the music group had had a bad argument over a few missing notes, etcetera, "pages stuck"); yet Jim would not have wished those late afternoons or Saturday mornings to end; because —he didn’t just know why—because his mother didn’t turn toward or away from him but was in t
hat room sealed by an agreement arrived at—aha!—between Jim and the intermittent music itself: but not an agreement not to enter; for he could, though didn’t because the music (chamber music cat’s-cradling and/or sawing up and down and around) gave the house a comfortable good sense, whatever that might mean. And when a fellow named James Mayn came, years later, to tell his wife Joy (to try to tell her, though then with oddly little strain) what he hadn’t known he knew, that his tone-deaf father Mel had to keep replacing a thermostat with a mind of its own (though Joy didn’t want to hear the make of thermostat it was and a detail or two Jim couldn’t have helped recalling), all part of a conflict between Mel and Sarah, who claimed that her catgut tightened up unpredictably so that during the cooler months she couldn’t keep her violin or her big viola tuned (at which the Interrogator’s knee jerks picking up a poignant sexual slant as when a condemned, in, after all, industrial process of being electric-chaired, sends back upstream through the cables his own unequal but distinct charge that changes the warden’s hand if not his being for some rest of his life e’en though he knows it not): meanwhile the brink-like brevity of Mel’s news item that Sarah had "passed away," together with such elements of her life as time and names might sum up, capped the event so Jim later felt he had not known where the event was and while respecting his father’s not unloving conciseness, he looked for news to fill the gap and found it in the future inside him, even to some nothing fantasy that he was in the future with everything Go and under control, looking back—throw in a space settlement and balanced atmosphere brick by factual brick, etcetera—but . . .