Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —which she never did, said Mayn, and granted she did say "that’s a hell of a lot to make me do," I think she said that—

  —damn right she said that, said the daughter never flinching from (well) someone else’s life, but she meant "taking her back": that was the "hell of a lot" she meant, and I think you knew that, Dad.

  No . . . no—which was how Mel habitually responded to someone’s opinion, even on special occasions a cluster of facts reported to him, such as that Sarah when she played the piano, which wasn’t her first instrument, was able to see places she had never been to, markets full of red beets in a Polish village, the Chicago wind from the north raking the lake into white flesh, grouped skeletons down a mine, and when Brad looked at Mel saying gently, No ... no ... his brother Jim fighting mad, said back at Mel, Yes. Yes. Yes, to which Mel answered Jim, What do you mean? How do you know? Whereupon Jim seemed to surprise Mel by saying, I was there when she said it, she said it to me and Brad—upon which Mel was just able to smile, Well if she thought so . . .

  You can just about take an insult from an adult who will at least not decorroborate what you have testified when he, or his relief, inquired who’s doing the script for the opera-ette we’d cited entitled Hamlet?

  But Alexander, whom Flick came to know in his ninety-second and ninety-third years (concluding postscript years, not twilit so much as noisier, que brujo, what din, as he lost his sight and turned the radio up and up and discovered music all over again—Alexander no more meant to insult Brad by removing the Densmore book he had loaned to Sarah a decade before than to dishonor Brad’s Day (quite the reverse) by bearing upon his person a simple smell of peanut butter from his supply downtown, which was neither here nor there:

  The Indians of course lacked peanut butter, or the demand for it, to begin with, though the jojoba bean, a very buffalo among vegetables, not in that they used all of it which wasn’t the feat that totaling a buffalo was, but in that the jojoba got them through many a weekly problem, from shampoo to the generally unknown desert fish fry, when these deep-underground travelers found their way or it found them up into the warmed waters of the high cacti, raised the level and brinked the pressure of these standing reserves and ceremonially leapt from cactus "eyes" we name them, openings sometime occupied by owlbirds, one at a time unless we include the biggest-ever elf owl that Mena the itinerant zoologist had seen, plugging that particular hole clearly, yet, in the dusk, darkly when contrasted to the visible but illusory wash of moon-stark dawn-lumen literally coating the cactus trunk as the real light otherwise diminished: for that elf owl would not have budged for a pressure of fish risen inside that cactus except to fly at the eye of some night camper Anglo or Indian glinting in the flash of jojoba oil awaiting that desert fish fry so unknown even Mena had not witnessed it (hence the importance of judging comparative descriptions), and the Hermit-Inventor of the East said he had not witnessed it but Marcus Jones was more to be believed, a plainer, less potent figure so that when little Flick ran off outside to see what her younger brother was doing around or under that house where Alexander still lived though now with supervision, the name of that west-renowned botanist who found, and found names for, even unknown growths of locoweed so that his feats of broken-ground bicycling south of Salt Lake City and, monumentally, still south, are overlooked, brought from old Alexander, who was just turning the radio volume dial up again a generous exclamation, Oh Marcus Jones! (as if to say with distant softness, My old friend!) he was real, you know, that was him, with his field work in Colorado, you only see that book in French, (slowly) last day of April, the air perfumed you know, the sunny white flowers and the silver stems of the poisonous loco, and the Spanish bayonets, reaching an eminence, lights across a mesa—

  —he remembered that? the thirty-odd-year-old grandson inquired.

  But only that, came the reply, all else is gone, like your daughter just now, and the volume dial turned delicately while the man in carpet slippers who had been bald through four decades "quoted" a mass of dark rocks . . . gigantic walls half ruined, some ancient cathedral . . . good stuff, lifting sadly in the wind its proud debris notched and made jagged or something by the puissant hand of time—Ute Pass by horse, and so forth, and I have no reason to suppose your grandmother didn’t really know him, he was out there in the late seventies and the eighties and he’s up at the Sperry Glacier in Montana twenty, thirty years later—but in the late seventies he changed to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at Kansas City ... is it possible that Colorado is more beautiful than Iowa? he asks, and you don’t have to go there to say with him you bet your life.

  Upon the sinking of Sarah’s teeth into the outer-skinned chocolate of the Clark bar on into the honey-colored brown-sugar-crumble inside you would not build a broken marriage, or a self-destroy scenario either. Yet you won’t go so far as to say you’d have ruled out Sarah’s leaving her husband one way or another. Taking the boys with her? Hard to imagine her taking Jim; in the end he would not go. Why is another question. Not loyalty to Mel. Nor to the town, for what is loyalty to a town? get out your hose and have a speed contest outside the fire station once a year against fire companies in English-town, Toms River, Holmdel. Grease a pole and set the duck or flag at the top. Loyalty to a place and time: Jim would have been able amidst the madness to say I’m not goin’. And in his heart would be, Not yet. But then she had gone, she had gone. He couldn’t have foreseen it, could he? Not in the drugstore the Leona Stormer day of the enforced sharing of the Clark bar. He just saw Willy and Wally pass by the bright drugstore doorway in the downtown direction running in step and he knew where they were running and he didn’t recall what it was all about: years later, fallen forth into other lives, he lighted Mayga’s cigarette, an American cigarette for a change, and he said to Mayga that he could see his mother’s mouth, teeth, infinitesimally nose-crossed eyes watery still, but no fingers. Mayga told him he’s so precise on what’s not there, while she waves away her smoke and not into but away from his face. Oh, you see, I was feeding her, that’s how I recall it. Nonsense, said Mayga.

  Oh Christ, you’re right, he said. Let’s, she said, get back to the libration-space future you’ve already had. Let’s get, he asked, back?

  But if these sole things were there to turn to instead of the something identified as real that Margaret a trifle throatily (especially for her) said existed there in the cemetery where they had stood on Brad’s Day before the others moved Brad’s Day to the cemetery, there surely were people to turn to if he wanted; but he couldn’t. He couldn’t want. And not just Byron Kennett, who put his sensitive arm like water around Jim’s broad, strong shoulders and said, If Jimmy ever needed to talk . . . well By was comfortable like a fly winging softly in a calm room.

  Do you mean, demands the duty interrogator, that the effeminate Byron man was like a fly, was comfortable, was a room in himself?

  We can’t answer—for we changing from angel into Jim sometimes find or hear only the moment and the words of its impulse, we’re not explaining.

  But there were others. He made a one-quarter turn and it was Brad staring at him from a nest of garden hose a-coil beside the house: "You goin’ somewhere, Jimmy?"

  (Why naturally.) "We’re havin’ pork chops tonight."

  (Kid brother; no mean chef; acting like a mom, but nothing like theirs, who knew freedom and wouldn’t ask where you goin’ and Jim would never catch her sweeping his bedroom floor.)

  And there’s Margaret: he made a half-turn in the leaf-windowed silence of chewing down a kitchen doughnut, and she broke her mood and whanged a n’innocent fly off the white icebox (real icebox on porch, pale-brown unfinished wood with inset panels and two big sections, upper and lower, what timeless comfort that icebox with butter and apples and he didn’t know what in the lower, and a great cake of ice mysteriously and ceremonially alive, a treasure that never needed to blink its eye)—well, this was a summer later and he had a job down ‘t the shore swizzling Tom Collinses at a hotel with a
long, long sanctuary porch of rockers where the older ladies sat in their white unbuttoned sweaters, he liked the people on that porch and he came out with his tray and walked to them and they enjoyed especially receiving their drinks watching the wind ruffle the American flag on the pole, he knew that was partly it, while the sun settled lower off to the extreme right, around the bay.

  And there was Bob Yard, with whom he did talk, and a lot, and some about Sarah. But then how can you? You just do. Except in Bob his mother came out quirky, and not even ... he did not have the word in those days, and sexy wasn’t the word . . . "sensual," he said to Mayga later, realizing as he did so that Mayga was "sensual" less mysteriously than his maddeningly gentle wife, Mayga was "there"—he let her be—and he would go to bed with her if he suddenly asked and she wanted to but he never stressed it, and then they did go once, and then it was valedictory, which is very very risky, like looking for special large last words on your deathbed and not settling for what you already know, but no, it turned out to be friendly and miraculous, no doubt the Grace Kimball that Mayn later heard about and came closer and closer to would have said Exciting one-night stand for crying out loud: but it wasn’t anything like that: it was love: and he loved his wife, too: and it was another form of . . . well Sarah came out exciting, behind Bob’s memories told frankly sometimes to Jim, the son of Bob’s illicit paramour, my God!, are they talking?—well, why not?—quirky and exciting and, yes, magical: and Bob did not know about when she went to France for a few months in 1925 in a carefully supervised program for music studies at Fontainebleau checked out by Margaret so that little but the music was left to chance, and that time evidently meant a lot to Sarah though Boulanger and other mysterious teachers were what Jim recalled her talking about when he didn’t know much about music or care, at least about the violin—he came, eventually, to care about cabaret piano, the super-involved departures and the root simplicities of it all such as the first, perfectly scale-like six-syllable progression of "She dances overhead" (followed by "on the ceiling near my bed"), "Dancing on the Ceiling," a very sexy song half-clothed in the airs and imminences of romantic touch: and one day in Paris Jim woke up knowing that Sarah’s feeling, hardly communicated to him, about Fontainebleau in 1925 or so, was unchecked in him at that moment in a large bed under a comforter in the vicinity of those very few articles of rather heavy dark hotel-room furniture and the sound of cars revving that could not touch him because he was looking at the curtain veiling the ironwork of the narrow balcony you could hardly step out on, and he was due at the airport in the late afternoon and thought today, yes, he would go further out and take a look at Fontainebleau—it was on the way to places that he picked up, according to Joy, his wife, what he really had to report—or left it (he retorted, because wasn’t she putting down his profession such as it was?), and the French journalist he was supposed to be meeting at the airport who wanted to ask him what would happen to top-priority French plans for ballistic-missile submarines if the Russians were to wangle out of Washington an agreement to reduce general western strategic strength changed his schedule and went with Jim to Fontainebleau and during that visit asked many things, had Mayn ever opened Henry Adams? ever been down to the Maginot Line to have a look? try Brittany in January, see Mont Saint Michel and eat very well—but never mentioned a submarine till they were on their way to Orly after a fish lunch that left Jim liking France and still wondering exactly where his mother had lived, he could have checked, it was a school: Jim had never, he realized, thought about his mother fondled by a man or sinking her teeth into a (Clark bar) neck or shoulder, Jim had only his own experience to go on at fifteen, but it was pretty good, he thought about it in a lot of pictures that didn’t easily go away but also didn’t think about it at all, was in casual shock, it was pretty good, better than he grinningly let on to Sammy, who chose himself a girl nobody thereafter would have dared call a pig (which she wasn’t), but she certainly was plain (as the older generation would say it) a very plain girl who also said kissing his way was unsanitary but Sam loved dancing with her slowly with his right hand firm at the downward limit of the small of her back just where the flesh flared beneath clothing, though, as Sammy reported, nothing much was happening—he liked Margaret, that was her name and she had thick, raspy red hair and got brown not burnt-pink at the beach like her brother, who played tennis and got razzed by the guys behind the fence of the town court for playing a fruity game, spring being bad enough but fall too. Jim had never seen his mother undressed and whatever he pictured out of Braddie’s dream he himself didn’t see his mother bloated, salted, or wafted deeply and coldly by the Atlantic Ocean out and back, out and back, though he half-saw her in her panties a few times, hips a little larger than he had expected, shoulders defenseless (—It is true of women, says the interrogator; Crap, we say to him, in your country all people are defenseless).

  (On the contrary, the currency is at last defended, thanks to your remarkably durable republic—with panties on, but turned away): only in his mind if he was honest, her back to him and he didn’t see Bob Yard in the daydream and knew him to be somewhere where he would never see Bob’s face, Didn’t remember the first days at school after Sarah’s suicide; felt he could—but didn’t want to, possibly. He did miss his mother’s . . . privacy: what a thing to miss! he had his own, and plenty of it; and one day twenty years later he wondered what his daughter’s ever sharp view would be of her father’s mother doing that.

  So he didn’t turn to others, the ones that seemed logical to. But Sammy was the only one he remembered like a daydream in retrospect coming up to him and saying, I’m sorry. And he shook Jim’s hand and there were tears right under his old eyes but none in ‘em. Jim and his mother never cried. Well, obviously Jim—that is, didn’t. And this was something the grandmother stated, one time, and it was true enough. Three girls wrote notes to Jim that went out of his head though he recalled the notepaper, one with rabbits on it in the margins, the others with little pink and (/or?) yellow flowers. Anne-Marie didn’t write him a condolence (he learned the word) message, but came to the house the second day when there was still some awful expectancy, and she walked into the living room where Alexander sat and Margaret was in the kitchen and Mel and Brad were there (long before Brad’s Day—a month to be approximate) and Jeanette Many was teary and Byron Kennett and his mother were alternating on the theme of who could have predicted it, and Anne-Marie coming forward reached and hugged Jim and then she kissed him three kisses on the mouth, each one longer, which could not create anything but silence, hence acceptance—jokes would have been out of place; then Anne-Marie took Jim’s hands with a happy smile that brought courage for the unknown, not sadness—dole—for tragedy, and she said softly, "I don’t want to stay here, but I did want to give you a big kiss. If you want to take a walk, come over. You know what I mean," which was all she meant. He was part of her life, she part of his, but no real sweat at all: maybe it meant she wasn’t going to get tied up with any fellow for a long time; Jim never did find out if there was an answer like that with Anne-Marie, they just weren’t together later on: but now they were, yet with a happy knowledge he took so for granted it forgot itself, like the inequality of his not giving a damn when he found Brad going through some papers and stuff he’d brought back from the shore —until later (in Anne-Marie’s case, twenty years later, and then he tried to understand how they had been so warm and cool at the same time; it was sex (going all the way), respect, a slight subtlety on each side; but in Brad’s, the unequal, case, maybe a couple of days later) he found some joint of his mind wham! remembering for him:

  In the daydream of retrospect—to continue, to continue, to continue, to get anyway to this end at the risk of being less and less (than) succinct—his mother’s bare back was to him as we have known him to say to Mayga and to his much-loved wife, and he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find his mother’s—oh yeah he couldn’t find Bob Yard in this, the daydream, who was so vivid, so l
iving, as opposed to the bare back and elsewhere directed shoulders and hips that were full of oh full of—

  —you cannot easily say, said Mayga, for who could?

  —something, said Mayn quickly, that’s it, thanks, kid, expectancy, full of some expectancy that—

  —this is your mother? did I say "expectancy"?

  —sure, sure, and I’ve got the words now, but—

  —You had the experience then, said Mayga, never rushing him but giving him or taking from him a lessening of time, as if she would look at her watch, ah her watch, her watch—

  Oh he wasn’t remembering stuff he hadn’t remembered, for he had always had his mind inside this time of his life; that "true" daydream had come, there wasn’t much to know about it.

  They all laughed at a thing he said, bartender, Mayga, Spence at the end of the bar that always seemed underground or optically curious; a bearded man with a newspaper; and another bearded man just entering from the hotel lobby, who laughed for no more reason than to join in or lest the joke be on him if he didn’t, or out of good spirits, though when he sat up beside the other bearded man and they at once began conversing in tight order it wouldn’t have been good spirits, no, upon which Ted appeared from the lobby with, for a change, a real grown woman at his side, not one of his gals who always made such a rotten impression at first and eased into their natural grain later in the evening when it might be too late—but what did Jim say to make them laugh?

  —full of expectancy, the room the day Anne-Marie Vandevere kissed him "in public," for Sarah might still be found, and full of expectancy, that strange bare back, in the daydream somehow, missing Bob Yard, a daydream as still as if the dreamer were she and in motion, opening the front door with the upper reaches of the house as empty-feeling as the front hall, familiar with its mahogany table, mirror, carpet with Persian prayer rug on top of it, his new raincoat hanging outside beside the mirror where he’d left it forty-eight hours ago after returning discreetly from the shore, and the paperweight as blunt and uninstrumental and as ugly and second-hand-looking and never really old as ever—a hall (nothing underlined) the same as it had been a month ago when Sarah had departed in her own direction, he looked at the pictures on the hall walls seeing them more than when her mother Margaret was there; and, electing to go (to bound but not to bound) upstairs, instead of to the kitchen, he took two stairs, then one, then paused like a back-diver adjusting his balance, and knew that the absence of Bob Yard from the daydream detail of the lady in panties only and with her back to him, his mother’s shoulders he was quite sure, and dark hair, was hard to get out of his head and he had been entertaining alternative explanations as the source of the daydream forty-eight or so hours ago—what the hell might as well play detective to the hilt: (entering house, starting to throw off coat off both shoulders at once is hit in face and midsection arms pinned)—sheer story!