Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  He felt he had been preceded, and often thereafter. Someone had been there ahead of him. Well, he had been delayed getting there. Pearl Myles ("Pearl," as the class called her offstage) had asked for an imaginary news story (evidently nothing happening in town), what a contradictory assignment, said Mel (his father), to whom Jim could not say that with all his own practical physical confidence he left that classroom and stopped, bumped by a couple of guys, and stood nauseatingly alone for a moment losing everything to something, but what?, and then he knew it was embarrassment, mortifying, over his mother: and not that it was suicide (recalling Alexander crying in the kitchen very, very briefly, with the words "How can those boys stand it?— why, I can’t accept it, I can’t accept it ever, Margaret, not ever")—but no, it was embarrassment at her being not present any more—

  Letting the family down, responds some former interrogator, and rubs his chin and glances "out" into a closed-circuit screen where those "presently" contained in the local stadium that can "seat" a hundred thousand (and stand more) are playing soccer, but he gets no confirmation nor does he himself need any that he is correct in his judgment of this woman whose name temporarily escapes him.

  A woman also in a raincoat who when Jim thanked her for stopping asked if he was wet and when he said he wasn’t sure if it was raining, she stopped her wipers and together in the front seat as they accelerated they watched a mist grow on the windshield which was "rain all right," Jim said. She sat pressed back against the seat, keeping the wheel at arm’s length well almost. She asked where he lived, whether he’d had a good summer, wasn’t it good we’d had the atom bomb, that is, to use—and what was his favorite subject, or was it too soon to tell, or was it always the same subject. Something had to happen, which was why Jim had decided to revisit Sarah’s point of departure. Something. Anything. For nothing was happening at home, except Brad came into his room and asked about this, that, and the other like touching things.

  Jim got a hard-on but his new raincoat covered it. She never asked what he was doing hitching down to the shore on a rainy September day, or what his name was, but they laughed at a billboard and five Burma Shave signs that made up a sentence, and his hard-on had gone down all by itself as warm, though, now as before, and a boy and girl happily huddled in the jouncy back of a pickup truck they passed; the woman drove Jim an extra eleven and four-tenths miles and though she wasn’t old her nose looked tired, like some stuff or material or other, while her cheek was soft and tan; and when she shook hands with him when he got out he liked her tits filling her yellow silk blouse and after she made her U-turn they waved. No one need ever know he’d come to Mantoloking, and then he got mad, being alone, and wondered if he could get in a few good jabs at least at Bob if they had it out. You could call it hate, and he cut off around and through to the small road, and up through to the beach that was bright without the light of brightness. Jim wanted to swing at somebody (maybe just play catch). Then he saw that it was the future, this decision to investigate the place where he suspected there was nothing, nothing to be found. A man was fishing. He knew the man. The woman would not have waved had she thought Jim was a detective. The cottages back on the bay side were many of them still not boarded up. The man turned about, with his eye on the end of his rod like it’s alive, and came suddenly through but slowly and methodically hurling his line far out, beyond the second swell back of the first breaker—"comber," Mel his father had called it, and somehow Jim always remembered remembering his father who did not swim calling it that (though he could, undoubtedly, swim).

  You might have an accident if you lived alone and you’d rot in your room and you became luminous. The man was a brother-in-law of the man who owned the gray dory that needed a bottom coat in August and probably still did. Jim knew this so well. Jim didn’t know the man to speak to and figured the man didn’t know him and had no reason to change his judgment in this regard. The man was built like Jim, or like Jim was going to be—that is, broad, stocky though not less than more or less medium height. Jim had not wished to listen to the subject of their eventually finding Sarah much less go and ask Lester Coombes, the jowly, long-legged chief of police down at the Courthouse. His mother was here in the sand.

  She was on a towel in the sun and he saw her fingers, her hand thrashing as she threatened him with his name as if she would actually do anything if he fell upon Brad, and, moving toward the man who now cast again as rain again fell, but the man passed the least additional second aware of the other person approaching, though from the direction a mile from here of the bend and the breakwater and the pier down came two, three walkers slowly as if they might never get here—Jim passed over the exact place where he had stuck like a pole at an angle in the sand though he would never have hurt or anyway murdered his little brother, who would have his day beyond all this feeling after Sarah’s going, a feeling that could well be the crap about eternity the minister "put into words" (as Barcalow Brandy wine in a black suit with this time a tie like one of his horse- or Indian-blanket sport jackets, done in a Windsor knot—"He surely put it into words")—so it must have been there and might be "Still out there?" he said to the man in boots and olive-green slicker reeling his line. "All winter if you got the circulation for it," the man said and at his voice some dumb gulls yelled against the breeze, and an image of his mother went away, but he’d been getting this foreign one with panties and bare back and Bob Yard went away with her—where? over to get clams or ice cream at Mantoloking pier? clear down the coast hugging it as far’s you could go?, but he thought they had never done that kind of thing together, at least she played badminton a few times with Mel who moved well and had a wicked wrist. Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, look out, you’d get in there and go so deep you’d never stop falling, long’s your rate of descent was controlled. A swarthy man walked near them out of nowhere, dark, "darkened by some centuries-old desert," Jim one day recalled the scene for Mayga, who was made uncomfortable by this particular (circa-VJ-Day) slice of the small-town Mayns, and he knew it and later felt that he had guessed why fifteen (sixteen, seventeen) years before knowing Mayga whose conversation, occasional as these drinks together actually were, might get him feeling unfaithful, and her discomfort made him secretly mad this time quite a while after the U-2 but Spence was at the end of the bar, one of the few actual times Spence was there, when Mayn said what the boy (a smaller shape of him, or was he, the grownup, the smaller?, they were in each other for good and sure and goddamn sure) said to the man fishing, who each time Jim looked at his face seemed to look back at Jim though he didn’t, "Did you ever know anyone who drowned out at sea?"—"And never washed ashore?" said the man, and bobbed his rod and kept reeling. Yes, had the man ever known anyone that that happened to?, but he said, No, not known, though he thought it wasn’t as bad as many deaths, and, as if changing the subject, the man said, "Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that." And Jim, abandoning private detection though glad of his raincoat because of the wind even rainless, asked if a body would sink and later rise, or what, and if the man had seen bodies come ashore, and the man half turned to speak, then turned to look at Jim (or like a silent version of when Mel was saying to Jeanette Many, "It was a mistake"—"A terrible one," added Jeanette so quiet you had only faith that you’d heard her—"She didn’t die, she didn’t die, Jeanette, she didn’t do that" (Jeanette’s long and amazingly narrow hand on his wrist) when Margaret entered and said gently, "You mean maybe she didn’t know what she was doing; but remember, she did it, not you," so that Mel looked up in surprise, the editor of the Democrat, crying again, and said, "Do what?"—that is, the brother-in-law of "the boat" Sarah had in some fashion used was saying, by not saying, You’ll live with whatever it is; and you can.

  So that after passing
back down the bay-bungalow road up to the pier and breakwater and asking nonchalantly if the police had ever questionedpeople about the woman who committed suicide and the man had laughed, a commercial fisherman, and said there was things that matter more and wasn’t the boat found a ways down Barnegat from here?, owner was lucky it wound up on that spit—police found a note in an airmail envelope (man laughed but)—people are people, the boy flared back and the man in sudden defense of what he probably did not know stepped forward, and Jim thought of stepping back, but the man said, "What’s the matter kid, eh?" and although Jim did not know a good answer he knew what to do, without knowing.

  "You bastard," Jim shoved the man in the chest so he moved, and Jim ran, he didn’t recall even turning to run. I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people it seems. The man had boots on. In motion, it was no contest, except much depended on the man’s unwillingness to go beyond a boundary that was in Jim’s mind, and it was a measure of the man’s rock-bottom interest in the event. But Jim felt the same even when the man gave up and Jim wasn’t hearing the great whishing silences between when one boot hit the ground stride for stride and when the next. But Jim ran like the halfback he was, because detectives didn’t run, they stepped behind something. (Ted: He ran like a Seminole through the woods with Andy Jackson whooping after him. Mayga: He ran because he wanted to get somewhere else! Spence, end of bar: Ran like your little brother trying to keep from getting beat up. What’s it to you, Spence? Oh, man tells me his story. Other people’s families, you know. Stick to your own. Wish I knew where they were. Breaking my heart, Spence. You ain’t got a heart, Mayn.)

  Someone says (and it’s a multiple child that is growing up staggered): The boy meant not only that his mother mattered but so did the man in front of him. He shoved him, which is like pointing except the thing you mean is too close up but it’s better than having to wait till you know his name.

  Well, what’d he do? asked Sam the next afternoon. Stopped running: he musta got a hernia in those boots, he was just standin’ around fartin’ enjoyin’ life, but he was a bastard.

  Yeah, he musta been.

  So you went down t’ the shore.

  Yeah.

  I’d agone with you.

  That airmail envelope, Jesus, said Jim.

  The guy laughing, you mean.

  Yeah.

  He’s a bastard, yeah, said Sam, who knew about Jim all Jim had to tell and that was a lot, though not Margaret’s Indian crap.

  Jim came off the pier running easy, and passed up along the bay cottages. After a minute he walked and cut through to the beach again. He always recalled the horizon the hot day his mother stared at it irritated and alone upon her familiar black towel and he had to look away from her to see what she was looking at. But now the gray receding sight threw at his eyes a wake of sharp wind, and he knew that the man on the pier wouldn’t have talked like that if he’d known who he’s talking to. But is that the way it is? But here on the beach with the wind asking nothing but hitting the eye like a chemical not quite healthy given off at great speed by the horizon, Jim knew there’s two systems, and the man on the pier would have been O.K. if he’d been switched onto the other, which his grandmother surely knew ‘bout ‘cause she blinkety-blinked around between the East Far Eastern Princess and the Margaret who got more freedom running off from Chicago in ‘93, and then onward largely alone to the meat packers of Omaha and the loco weeds of the stony West, than Sarah ever got when she came of age because Margaret was a suffragette but not notably at home; but if his grandma knew the two systems she must have known she must have known, she must have known—have to get to the point, said Mel, when Brad to whom Jim had spoken of the odd brevity of the little "box" about the dead piners asked Mel what Jim could not ask— have to be concise, succinct, compact, terse, pared-down, compressed, succinct, short, concise—

  —she must have known (as Jim found the other man, the fisherman brother-in-law, gone, and felt that this trip to the pier and back was coming around in cold, dumb circle ‘cept more a doubled half-circle round to the pier and back again that could have been a full and single circle only by sea, by having a sea half), she must have recognized the other possibility (and Jim looked quickly around him, we already remember, for he in us and we in him have needed help who are relations but relations that sometimes we have yet to have or that loom away in the offing, which must be a sea term we almost remember—help seeing in the absence of the other man a sign that this might not be just where the fisherman had stood) that, as the Navajo Prince learned upon acquiring that pistol shadowed by the double moon, a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer had been given it on the deathbed of a white man who gave it as an evil charm while lying that it was donation to the T.D.’s clown art of acting out awfully their worst nightmares and daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out all except the fingertips whose whorl prints showed the path of the winds at the time of creation—and if she didn’t recognize that secret possibility, well Jim was all by himself anyway, in his raincoat that he liked the deep pockets and crisp fabric of, and was turning away from the scene not of the crime because there had been only the starting here, though a leaving of the note in the unstamped airmail envelope for someone she hardly knew who hadn’t kept an eye on her taking the boat out through the low surf, or how had she done it?, well she did it—

  She had help, came a voice from bar’s end—

  —She left the suicide note to the owner of the boat, for crying out loud?

  —But you didn’t stay angry at your grandmother Margaret . . . (for Mayga didn’t ask why he’d been angry)

  Oh no, said Jim, shaking his head humorously, we were pals, and I was going far to see the land, as Owl Woman, remember her?, said, while back in my house (what was it?—no takers even from bar’s end) the songs are intermingling (he laughed open-heartedly), and Margaret pointed out how I was doing some of the intermingling, I remember because later before she died we had a similar reckoning up—I can hear her on Brad’s Day walking all the way back with me from the cemetery saying I never told you anything about a second origin of that pistol, the first one was perfectly satisfactory, or you found it so when you were a little boy—for Jim had asked if it was true that the Princess’s prospective mother-in-law got better when the Prince and Princess cleared out, and the resurrection led back to the Prince’s pistol which really belonged to a lot of people for even Harflex of Choor had had it in his hand and after saying cruelly and angrily, Why did she have to go telling him all that stuff?, he added the Thunder Dreamer’s connection with the pistol and Margaret said with equal irritation, I never told you that—

  And it would have gone further but, shaking his fifteen-year-old fists out to sea, and roaring and screaming, hurting his throat, he never remembered what into the wind or winds that blew some damp self into his dry eyes, his mother gone, leaving not a crumb of ice-cream cone, that nice woman, and taking nothing with her not even that half a humid pickle in its paper on the thwart of an everlastingly damned dory which should have arched its gunwales and told her No, don’t do this, don’t do this, lady—a man’s voice from behind Jim called and he turned to see the brother-in-law fisherman beckoning and he went sheepishly but when he got to the red-slatted sand-drift fence in front of that beach house, the man said, Aren’t you the Mayn boy? asking a fact that Jim wrote down in his notebook verbatim that night. Aren’t you the Mayn boy? (as we ghosted him prolixly, to be in the very difficulty of what it is to be) but giving what Jim ever after knew was almost love, from a stranger, a stranger with no hole in his head and no double moon in his brown eye and cheek stubble, inquiring if Jim would join him in a cup of canned Manhattan clam chowder, but who asked Jim what he knew he’d been asking to be asked—so that it wasn’t until he got into the front hall at home in Windrow two days later, and stared at his new raincoat that had been hanging there since he got home from the beach almost two days before, that his daydream of a near-naked mother (never turnin
g around yet turning and turning and turning in the sea like just a body) returned together with, again, the absence of Bob Yard and the emptiness of this house especially where he went, seeing the panties, the spinal line, the shoulder not now bent to the ear as when she played the violin, the fiddle, but straight and lost, waiting, waiting, while Jim took the stairs and slowed waiting to hear something was waiting up there so it’s too little to think about coupled with too much, like twenty lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snowbound he had to memorize by next week (not only memorize but remember!) when he didn’t like poetry period: So that when he heard a rustling upstairs so that he might tell the fine drift of its air, a window open, an opening when all the layers of the atmosphere lined up each its slit, crevice, or chink which explained that cleft Margaret had told him of, when cosms of the sun (and apparently the Hermit-Inventor of New York and the Anasazi ancient agreed on this) ran instantly down but what they did had not been clear, or not as clear as in retrospect the next day the news of the Normandy landings had been clear in words and on the map in the Newark paper and then the New York Times with headlines and paper and ink all as authoritative and packed and soft as a Christmas present, the map Jim had (on the page it was printed on) snatched from under the nose of Brad who wasn’t touching it with any part of his body (You ain’t readin’ that): yet was the rare atmospheric cleft (now successfully explained as Jim went softly up the stairs of his home some two days after his detective round-trip to Man-toloking) an opening for the cosms to draw up the life of the Navajo matron with the hole-in-her-head? or to prepare for that night of the day when the sun itself would not and would not go down until at last in darkness the double moon came to reveal the Princess’s sometime bird rising and hovering, as only the Hermit-Inventor of the East witnessed and told later to Margaret, to attack the lion drawn by the future’s odor in the eggs of the bird’s strictly diamond-shaped nest but lost both its quarry the mountain lion and the lion’s prey the egg or the matter inside it sucked by that speechless cat at the long instant when it knew its own inner essence to be that of the egg—