Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  It’s certainly mortal, said Mayga.

  No second chance, Margaret had said.

  The day after Brad’s Day, Brad asked what happened to the other lion’s egg. Brad wanted Margaret to buy him a new raincoat too, and Mel said he would buy him one, and Jim said it had been for the funeral, but Brad knew just what he wanted and it didn’t have the epaulettes—

  —but, said Mayga, who had to go—and the following week left for good—you were thinking all the while that—

  —that (it’s wrong, it’s in absolute error) that when I was away at the Quirk farm working that summer or until shortly before V-J Day and all of this—my mother was home, she was there—and I came home for two days, I forget why, and that was when—

  —You mean you had something to do with it? (You might have left your imaginary news notes out, but—)

  —Of course not but you know you remember the Prince going away and his mother reviving—

  —Almost entertaining, all that scattering of half-tales.

  —It was thought up to be almost entertaining.

  —But you came up with this detail.

  —But the Prince ... did his mother die when he eventually . . . what did happen to him? (did the Navajo have princes?) did he come home? or become assimilated and become a guide or a mass weaver or a sporting-goods tycoon?—surely not the first American Indian tycoonic or a doctor, a doctor (but Mayga wasn’t flippant, wasn’t good at it, but wasn’t being it here)

  —The Prince? Oh he was tragically wounded by Harflex of Choor, as I recall.

  —A wound need not be tragic.

  —Even a mortal one need not be tragic.

  —I don’t agree, but his was mortal.

  —Of course.

  His heart was opening and closing to Mayga, as she got off the bar stool and looked at her watch because she didn’t want to go, though she already knew what time it was. She had something else to say to him. But instead, "And Pearl Myles?" They both laughed.

  Funny you mention her. She wound up on a paper in Minneapolis.

  She didn’t.

  It’s the truth.

  Trouble-shooter? said Mayga.

  They don’t got no trouble in Minnesota—only in New Jersey.

  So they have to shoot a long distance.

  How far is Chee-lay from Peru?

  Chile’s distance, said Mayga, is from the U.S.

  Anyhow you’ve had your share of stability there.

  Give us time, said Mayga.

  Time is money.

  I have it!—give us money!

  What did McNamara say before the Lima coup last year?

  Ted now came back from a pay phone somewhere, a bit holy in his walk. Jim could not believe some of the stuff Mayga had listened to from him, though she talked, too.

  This was almost the last that Mayn saw of Mayga, though they met later that night, the first and last and only such meeting decided on by sudden phone call from Jim though it seemed mutual, like strange friends who have only corresponded or have not seen each other in twenty years—and after that (though it might have been after the 6 P.M. cocktail earlier) he really never saw the lady again. At close on seven, she had gotten off the bar stool, not a drinker, not a lady-drinker, a lady with a way of looking down her shoulder at you or at something vaguely poignant at the far end of the room maybe; wore dark, warm-styled clothes with a dash always of ancient brightness, a yellow sash Mayn remembered, or a bright blue hat the color of a French workingman’s jacket, or one time orange shoes that showed off her legs which in the manner of European and perhaps South American women she knew without knowing. She said, after kissing him on the cheek (then, after an instant’s thought, on the other cheek), "Dinner with three difficult and powerful people—my husband’s newspaper business—which becomes regrettably mine though I never as you know need to take notes which makes me much more attractive company yet there’ll hardly be room at the table for me if General Clay comes, but he will not wish to interrupt these large gentlemen talking about his commission although they knew that even when John Kennedy came back from Vienna high on foreign aid after sitting on a couch with Khrushchev, the investment money would come through Washington, not from it. And Jim, as for your Defense Secretary the Computer McNamara, urging a beeg welcome for Latin American military trainees here, his words to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on this ‘the greatest return on our military assistance investment’ were, T need not dwell upon the value of having in positions of leadership men who have first-hand knowledge of how Americans do things and how they think.’ "

  Ted asked, a year and a day later, if Jim recalled those words verbatim, but he had to admit, he said that the lady on occasion would talk like that and it was a pity she had not lived to be President of Chile.

  They were, of course, briefly joined by the little laugh like the shadow of a nod or like a loud breath or two from bar’s end of the free-lance photographer and information dealer Spence, always an isolated incident on the move, and with the mist that settled or rose in Mayn’s eyes came some blind gap of crap or fight that would blot that presence whatever it was at the end of the bar—the business they were in? minus some nice woman they used to have a drink with once in a while? or some business that was in Mayn, protected by him like a host for all the world the way those clothes kept Spence just the way he was for well over a decade, the often fringed buckskin jacket and string tie or some other decor up there around the neck, the beat-up shined always expensive (Mayn thought) boots and the whipcord jeans (or denim or slept-in colorless velvet jeans) and the lank hair just as light as that little set-shot artist back-court guard on the Toms River basketball team who you could never stop from eddying away from you, Polish, whereas Spence (whom Ted hardly noted except to ask why Jim disliked him—Jim shrugged as if to say he pretty much ignored the "Spence factor"—Oh, said Ted, Spence would have had to be invented if he didn’t exist already—"Concockted," laughed Jim—"What’s he got on you?—have another?"—"Probably enough to know I wouldn’t care if he found I’d over-expensed a business trip or was seen examining a Colt revolver in a Manhattan gunshop"—"You’re clean," said Ted)—Spence, yes, might have borrowed origins temporarily the way he could rent or loan news—now how the devil did you loan news? what happened to it when the information was paid back? was it a swap for other items? but you couldn’t loan news, it stopped being news: while Spence seemed unchanged for over a decade during which you would seldom catch him at a press conference yet typically he knew of the plane crash of a rich executive relation of Mayn’s two-time boss the Argentine who owned a string of papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania seemingly before it happened while to Mayn’s friend Ted who saw and was curiously stopped by Spence at an Easter conference of Third World economists who were largely complaining (as Ted reported back to Jim) that America wasn’t drinking more tin or doing more bananas, Spence professed astonishment at the story (news to Ted) that was going around, that the presumed-incinerated rich Argentine cousin was not dead but playing clean-shaven golf under an assumed name beside a green-bean plantation in the Cameroons. The "loan," Jim tried to explain to Ted, was in a slight lack of indelibility to be found in the item, but Ted said no matter how good your memory was, the news often had this quality of, well, history—he sounded like he was joking and Mayn only said that Ted told with special verve those stories he felt little more than amusement about: whereas (Jim did not audibly add) years before—and a year and a day after Mayga’s last drink at the hotel bar—Ted felt much more about their first woman "President of Chile" (Jim knew) while saying almost nothing more than "What a waste," which meant nothing very specific about what Mayga, "that newspaper publisher’s wife" (Spence once with sidelong or was it smiling confidentiality inquired of Mayn about), might have wanted out of life but Ted seemed to express a sadness at the circumstances in which Mayga (as no newspaper would so wordily, if truly, put it) "met her death" plunging from a cliff during (or to be precise, at the con
clusion of) a walk near Valparaiso harbor only a few days after Jim had seen her, though Ted had run into her the morning she had left for home and she had given him a book (She gave you a book?—Sure, she’d finished it. It’s Henry Adams, you know, the Adams family—you want it? I’m not sure Adams ever finished it either.—Who?—Henry Adams). And who was it that in some isolated incident had told Mayn to read that same author? The Mayga death would not leave him; or anyway it did not. No doubt because they had wanted to make love that last night in Washington suddenly after months of friendship curtailed just shy of comradeship (yes, that was it); and there was a friendly completeness about the night and that was that, but a month later it began to feel as if it had been some completion foreknown.

  Well, if so, then in her mind; for not in his.

  Perfectly understandable, then, that hearing Ted with his firm view of history as commerce cloaked in the small talk of sporting drama and moral health and divided mostly between the Ordinary, who gave the power, and the Worst, who took the power by being also dumb but so colossally so that their complements and client audience the Ordinary just watched them bestride the Earth like statuary bridges of fine, fixed networks of public utility when actually such busy, blood-like action coursed through these structures that the Earth risked explosion and worse still leakages that would permanently stain—oh hearing Ted go on about the Third World wishing we’d sprinkle more bauxite on our breakfast in the morning ‘stead of home-spawned plastic snowies, and more natural zinc, wood, and diamonds in our brain resectioning ‘stead of the new orluminums and solid-state love-informations, Jim was put in mind albeit contemplatively of that isolated incident "Spence" looking for and finding somewheres to happen, since it had been right here (not only in the Easter conference in question but) in this hotel bar snickering like a breath of impedance at the tribute to Mayga as Woman President of Chile, and then with an impudence so incredible Mayn could just about disbelieve its content, "She said you left your notebook out on purpose"—when it was such a distance from the warmth between Jim and Mayga one day he told her about Brad’s Day and environs down to the end of the bar that he never thought Spence was listening.

  Today, this very late afternoon, perhaps in honor of the dead lady Mayga, they were in many places in that conversation and Jim Mayn said it was a mistake to go to people for what they couldn’t possibly provide, produce, or give you. Ted’s father, for example, had an excellent sense of humor but little kindness in him. Jim’s had little humor, from what one could divine after upwards of a hundred years, though how many Mels there were was no doubt someone’s guess—probably one Mel. Right you are, responded Ted, right you are; except any person has one thing to give and you’ve been given it if you don’t know it.

  It was time to call a halt to these festivities, such as they were, and Jim observed that the one thing Ted came up with agayn and agayn was interesting news items re: Third World.

  And who was it who in some isolated incident had told Jim to read Adams, Henry Adams? The rear of his brain just above and independent from the balance part has a sluice let into it out of which and in pour and are dumped things (definitely things) and maybe nothing is lost, as Alexander used to think with a book in his hand, oft recalling some fact from Margaret’s own early "travails"—so that she, rehashing that old time, would sweep it away with her hand and an exhaling, whispering sound of dismissal—who cares now?—about a homeless quite presentable Mohave woman who with her Ojibway "wife" (that’s right) had almost got them both killed by the Utes they stopped briefly with and had wound up among these Navajo, and this Mohave woman wore men’s pants and wasn’t allowed to sing ceremonials but had amazing veterinary skills with sore horses and anemic sheep and understood the wild pigs, she said, and was accepted as "the husband" though not permitted to do what hunting that community of Navajo went in for though did spend time among the men yet never, as in another Indian people, discussed her "wife" intimately with the men. (The weaving, said Margaret, was extremely well done, tight and flat, though for my money the Navajo patterns weren’t a patch on the drawings, horse and haunted landscape drawings, done by a part-Sioux part-Cheyenne holy fellow with these pale gray eyes almost white eyes over and over from one single sight seen in a dream when he was twelve, pretty sad chap in the early nineties of course.) (But, said Alexander, the weaving and the pictures were two quite different products—yet for Jim’s grandfather history was not only a catalogue but, maybe somewhere in his snoring sleep just before he woke up hearing Jimmy being taught by his grandmother off in her room in her bed to whistle or in relations never to be flushed from their coils and crannies coins and flex of feeling, a romance, and Alexander had in the winter of ‘93-’94 met at a campfire by a Pennsylvania river a band of itinerant unemployed who told him of Coxey’s Army of the poor that would set out on Easter Day to march on Washington though Alexander was back home by then—where was the romance?)

  Jim thought you never knew how much got left out of Mel his father’s obituary for Sarah and how much in the very niggardly nucleus of that black-framed box on page 2 actually crept in. Like time of death, when no one after all could tell: so "knowledge" in the absence of evidence, what was that? You never knew what Jim himself felt because he told Anne-Marie he wasn’t all there when he had the copy of the New York Times in his hands, for three lines of information appeared there, three mornings after—after what? the drowning?—and he wasn’t all there when, the next afternoon, without touching it he leaned on his grandparents’ dining-room table, one hand on either side of the weekly issue Margaret had folded to page 2—("Well I could have told you that," said Anne-Marie, with married humor while stirring chocolate into two tall, cold glasses of milk)—

  Jim told Marie that his mother had no middle name. Marie said that girls didn’t. Jim said without thinking that his mother hadn’t been exactly a girl. Anne-Marie did have a middle name but she said she didn’t want it, it was "Maureen"—from a famous sharp-tongued horticulturist great-aunt on her mother’s side—her father liked "Marie Maureen." Jim had a middle name which was Charles, but boys always did.

  But his mother didn’t. She had been strolling past the monumental brown-stone Presbyterian church one afternoon, one of the few times Jim recalled taking a walk with her. (One of the few? said "Marie" (he tried out the name), Well, maybe one of the two or three, said Jim.) In fact, he had only happened to meet her and he was on his bike, so he swooped up a little steep driveway ramp, cut along the sidewalk, and slowed down to "a walk" beside her where she was whistling softly some music. She looked at him in a darkly friendly way without saying anything and asked him if he liked his middle name Charles (which she said as if he might have forgotten it) and before he could answer she said that his father’s middle name was Honesty (which the way she said it he almost believed) and she told him she had been scheduled, before birth, to have a middle name but "your grandmother" dropped it, and she had tried using it as her given name the spring and early summer she was studying in France and in French it sounded really like her—Marthe, Marthe, Marthe. But she ran into a violin student from the Middle West whom she really liked in the middle of the night in the pitch dark in this dormitory she lived in outside of Paris and when she heard his voice asking who it was (and she knew this was Robaire, Robaire, Robaire) she said her real name, "Sarah," without thinking. And she particularly recalled this because he had been at a recital of Saint-Saens and had met an American violinist named Spalding who was going to be famous, and when "Robaire" had said to him that he himself thought you made your own luck, Mr. Spalding had said to look him up in New York, though he wouldn’t be there for a few months.

  Where did you and your mother go? asked Anne-Marie (Maureen).

  Jim and his mother had gone on a little further, and she had asked how fast he could ride back to the church and return to where she was, but when he raced back to the church he got yelled at by three of the guys who were walking along the sidewalk with their baseball mitts,
and he stopped for what he later thought was only a moment but when he recollected his projected round-trip and wheeled away back up Winderhoff Avenue seeing only—he didn’t know what, porches, tree trunks, a man far up the street fixing a flat —he pedaled on and on but no mother. He had lost track of time.

  —Jim thought you never would know what got left out because I’m not about to ask Dad how responsible he felt, and what he thought about the fact that she left only the note to the boat owner saying she was "kind of sorry." He couldn’t ask Anne-Marie about Mel’s responsibility, and then, a month later when he knew more, he couldn’t ask her or Mel how many people knew about us, that is, the number of boys Mel was in fact the father of; or why Mel never got into a fight with Bob, although the shoes on the porch above Jim’s head (upon his head) got amplified in our view to a threatening weight, and he couldn’t at the long, days-long moment of his mother’s death, if there was one, believe in a time ahead when these things could be talked of apart from the Sunday wonder and stunned fluency of euphemism in a room where the absence of the dead parent gave Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl and the clothes and hands of others the same independent molecular substance as the whole-wheat sandwiches on the silver plates that Mel told Margaret he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but the thing was, as Jim confidentially pointed out to her, his hand on her shoulder, that she had sliced off the crusts which she never did because she used to say, Eat ‘em and they’ll give you gold teeth!—