"It was the post office."
"No. Just a piece of paper. I signed for you."
"Thank you."
The manila envelope has been sliced open and scotch-taped back. He needs a hot shower, and while he pictures Norma picking up his mail while he was away and visiting those plants, and he imagines where Flick is and what he is responsible for, he sees his own last name, no more, on the return address, upper left, and draws the sheaf of pages, forty or more, up out of the envelope and sees that his daughter has given herself back her given name, as (he recalls in a sweat his own words) "perpetrator of an amazing load of verbiage, Daddy."
It is about something called Effluent Pollution Reciprocal Involving Both Water and Air, and it is by Sarah Mayn, and he almost fails to get off at his floor, he’s electrified but because a wilderness of feeling hugs him like painless chest pains in the factual, explanatory lines. She could use a blue pencil, but he is frightened by the prospect of some form of truth, its real weight in his daughter’s grown life more than this other unpleasant business of how and why it was intercepted and then, this evening, returned. The envelope is coming into this old apartment of his for the second time, not the first. He finds on the last page gas chambers and gas ovens and wonders by what steps she got there; but he wants to get there himself the right way, he’s skimmed so many books, half-finished them. But sweat along the bridge of his nose swells in the corner of an eye and he is looking for his keys and thinking about his divorced wife Joy and feeling someone wants him to explain why it came apart, why it didn’t work out, if that’s a fair way to say it—and he can’t, he can’t explain, he can’t explain, entering the apartment—that is, he doesn’t know why he isn’t with her—he’s looking at his adored daughter’s typed lines, and he can see only between them for God’s sake, all that space between them: for God’s sake he hears some voice say in his brain, for God’s sake so sentimentally empty he could vomit.
He can’t explain why it fell apart. How’s that for maturity?’
IN FUTURE
She wanted him because she felt he would love her. He loved her because she was beautiful and funny and saw through other people even to what was beyond them. But she said, Sometimes I don’t think you want to be loved, sometimes I really think that.
He thought, Well, that’s O.K. You have to ask a lot of a woman.
Sometimes he didn’t think.
He told her he loved her and sometimes told her why. She made him feel newly returned. She understood this.
And he told her stories, some asked for again, some never the same, some that developed into others, some that she (though not their romantic, huntress daughter and hard-headed, retiring son) eventually found odd and threatening and became indifferent to: stories about a diplomat named Karl who carried a small Japanese pistol against his ribs because the secret of it being there at a conference thrilled him like telling on himself; stories about how Andrew Jackson rode a searing streak of lightning at an Algonquian rite of miscegenation and proved his courage but divided his brain permanently in two, or how once he loved a village attorney’s daughter from western New York who understood better than any the disappearance of the stone mason turned printer William Morgan who had threatened to publish a comic testament exposing Masonic secrets; stories also about the East Far Eastern Princess who paid a visit to the American Indians and flew in on her giant bird that was to become impossible because it missed its own food and took to eating Navajo ponies.
He told her a whole lot of stories while often claiming to know very little and be an authority on nothing, and some stories he didn’t understand and at least one was incomplete in his telling if not his soul, and his daughter came upon her own conclusion to it; in the beginning he told his wife about himself, fell silent, touched her arm, her waist—cracked a joke. The two of them amused each other. They got along like people who don’t need to talk too much, though they never took long car trips together. Never say never.
But they would blow up like other people: she when he said she was too damn good phoning his father twice a month; he when she accused him of just tolerating an unusually young navy captain who held down a desk job overlooking the Potomac and visited them when he was in New York.
He was content for her to be a housewife if she was content, but more than once said she shouldn’t permanently give up her job. But they knew that when she went back to it another job would be there. The next job. So they didn’t believe in forced unemployment.
When she married him he was a newspaperman based with a New York task force—that general area—and might not travel a lot. But she knew also that he might. And he was what she had been looking for; he had character and downplayed his knowledge and was physical and humorous to a fault and faintly tragic, but when you are in love you maybe don’t spell out all the details at least to the other person. But maybe this is untrue and you are so open you say anything at all.
Years passed and the two of them looked back, they didn’t always look ahead. But then it was often the other way around, and they lived in the future, which came often enough.
But what came first? What drew her to him or him to her? Easy. Not hard to think about.
They were about the same height, or almost. They weren’t at all incongruous, but their frames were different. She was slender, he was broad. She was tall, like her sister, and her legs were alive and noticeable through whatever she wore. Sometimes she stood with her arms sharply akimbo near a doorway.
Her eyes would hold him a moment too long, then drop with an invisible blink to his mouth. Her eyes were straight and explicit. She smelled sometimes of the lightest lavender rinsed through the cold skin of apples or diluted into, he felt, the spaces of some dry drawer holding a cardboard box of sachet (though he never looked); and it was just a hint of lavender taking him away from itself to remind him of what he could not place beyond a second of very green, almost sweet apples he recalled, which she also smelled of and which he did find—found like a less sweet berry in the smell and taste of her perspiration (as he once years later told to one other person in a rare moment of pinpoint intimacy).
She admired the dark hair on his wrists that went up under his striped shirt cuffs; but, strangely long afterward, she noticed a birthmark on his left wrist under his watch strap, a speckle of pinpricks like a cluster of freckles or tiny moles; he had hair on his wrists and some dumb recklessness in how he paid attention to her, her face, her reactions, and he had the lumbering walk of a man who might be smooth and rhythmic in sports but to her it meant shyness and a slight chip, though she would almost never point out this shyness, but he knew she knew him, as if he’d read her mind, yet found there her belief that he would not hurt anyone—she pretty much meant physically.
She had purposes, and she knew he felt these. He could be boisterous and stubborn, although an eavesdropper on the two of them alone would not have seen much of this in him.
What came first?
She gave him hell the first time they went out, but this did not come first. They had met in New York in a Russian place uptown where a friend of hers spent several nights a week because she was in love with a somewhat doomed, very middle-aged Russian family man who sang deeply to a guitar, sang like a deep-drawn bow across a bass viol—and wore a red, high-necked blouse with Cossack brocade on it so he might have scars on his neck. He had long lines down his face and it was from these lines that the lean face hung. Her friend’s love for the Russian was painful because he was nice to her. And he had shown a quiet deference to this young man Jim Mayn. Mayn was the name.
The first time they went out, it wasn’t at all uphill, but she gave him a hard time; she knew apparently so much more than he about the President’s lower intestine right down to his tan pyjamas and the semi-classical favorites he listened to, while downstairs in the hospital conference room the presidential news secretary was asked if there was still no one-word description of the President’s condition; and this heavy-set guy Jim Ma
yn smiling at her across a table at a Cantonese restaurant in New York had actually seen the President the preceding Thursday night laughing himself silly in a Washington hotel full of photographers at their annual dinner; and when she said the man must not run again and the whole thing was ludicrous, this heavy-set, strong-looking man she liked drank his beer that they had brought into the restaurant in a six-pack and he said Oh Eisenhower, Stevenson—and murmured in song "Pay me my money down"—it didn’t matter much as long as they could get two cars and a power mower into every garage, and a transistorized hearing aid into an eyeglass frame now. (No matter what you know how to do, you’re not going to phase out the strontium 90 from your milk.)
So she gave him hell—an insider, the cynical kind, do-nothing—and then she shook her head when he shut his eyes smiling like a blind man, and he shook his head, saying, Don’t be so damn hopeful about things. And they were both shaking their heads when he opened his eyes upon her amusement and said she reminded him of his grandmother in a 1900 photograph posed on a bicycle in straw hat, puffed sleeves, long skirt, dark bowtie, one discreet toe on the grass.
She asked if this was a compliment, knowing it was.
He said his grandmother had taught him to whistle.
I can imagine, she said, wishing she’d thought of something better to say, her eyes bright, seeing him for herself, her slow smile made witty, to him, by the pinch of her teeth in her lower lip and then her tongue. And at this point they were aware of time passing—he, of the excellent dark, rather coarse hair held up in back with a comb, and "her own eyes" (which their largeness and somewhat hard though momentary fixity made you identify them as) now turned upon her own hand lying along the table; she, of his large, sluggish or sleepy eyelids, and her hand, and the hazy blue and dark brown of his tweed jacket sleeve; and she suspected he had maybe two more or less under control girlfriends at present and was thinking something like How long till I make the grade, and will I have to ask her?—but then saw she was thinking the question from her side, and out of nowhere she said, Learning to whistle is like kissing, I mean learning to kiss—I mean if you learn from someone you love. It could have been dumb, her speaking so—but it wasn’t.
Then he didn’t call; then in vain she called him, and this was 1956. And then the next night—a Thursday—he called from Montauk and she couldn’t hear the sea so he held the receiver away from his ear for her to hear, but she did think that this independent man was not with anyone, and she was quite sure she smelt unsmoked cigar and garden mint over the phone and wished that she had put her hand out to feel his arm when they had had dinner. He said he would be back in New York the next day, and for a moment they both knew he had said it frankly. She ran her hand through her hair and he asked her what she was doing.
She said she was thinking how to put off a client tomorrow morning.
"Just tell him he has to wait," he said.
"She’s an architect," she said, "and her client’s getting impatient, that’s the thing, it’s this new light the Japanese copied from the Italians and it’s been ordered but it seems to have taken a long time, and now two real-estate guys in New Jersey are going to manufacture it a lot cheaper if we can wait. It’s the lighting business."
"What do you mean ‘seems’?" he said.
She felt some parts of them touching and she leaned toward him.
He said, "Is her client a woman too?"
She laughed, she knew she had tickled him.
He said, "You know me," and he said words he hadn’t known were coming but came from long memory as if he were off in the future, "I want a woman to get everything that’s coming to her."
She said, "O.K., I’m laughing, but you’ll earn that."
"Easy to get into, hard to get out," he at once regretted saying and knew he would remember. But "Hard to stay out," she answered, knowing (as she told him next day) that at that moment on the telephone he had got the grip of her eyes, or (as he knew but never told her) the memory of such grip thrown through his body like a passage of time. He was used to her at the same time that he didn’t know what to expect.
Her name was Joy, a name he wasn’t crazy about. But, though their love had its silly, dependent side, he was no good at thinking up those nicknames like Leafie or Needles, Nuzzle or Lark—or Sorry (his father’s for his mother Sarah) or Sam, his brother’s name for his wife—Sam—or, for a while, Joy’s name for him, Ghost, or Ghostie. It was from the song "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and it was he who had sung it to her in a whisper while the black pianist ("Negro," then) had played it in a pre-inflation French restaurant with buttery, average food (quote unquote, James) the second time they went out, though afterward they called it their third Chinese meal, and at the end of the song he said, "Let’s go."
Once when he visited his father in New Jersey he ran into old Bob Yard down at the Courthouse—Bob Yard, black-eyebrowed old part-dog, part-goat, part-horse, the electrical contractor, an Elk, like Mayn’s father, nothing else in common except that neither of them saw much of Jim from year to year. Bob liked to nag and jab with his penetrating voice like looking for inside info that he had himself all the time, and this time Bob asked if Jim had a picture of Joy; and Mayn happened to have a passport shot (in which Joy looked disturbed as if she were about to be transported somewhere). Old Bob—Bad Bob—held it up against the sun. His prominent front teeth and the eyes a little close together though not "bad" looking made him look stupidly like Mayn’s father but with a narrower face: "Your mother would have liked her," he said, "I can see it in the eyes. Your mother’s approval."
"In Joy’s eyes?"
"Your mother’d know how to say it. Your mother turns over in her grave hearing me speak for her. She had it coming—all the times she wouldn’t speak for herself."
The tongue came out and licked the lips. "Turns over with gratitude as if she was alive. The combat boys said it during the War: ‘Nobody dies.’ Though she might not say so."
Beyond the Jersey Central crossing, two men in dungarees came out of the firehouse and stood looking downstreet and one of them was Earl Haight with the red beak of a nose that had been red from the time he was a kid— Earl, from Mayn’s high school class, father a County Jail guard aiming to be nominated for Justice of the Peace. The other man outside the firehouse was Ira Lee, the Indian whose family had lived in the same narrow frame house for years at the power-company end of the black section. Mayn’s grandmother had taught Ira to garden. Crew cut former halfback. Mother a long-fingered halfbreed Creek from somewhere in the mid-South who had cleaned sometimes for Mayn’s grandmother. Father a Saconnet descended from the famed woman chief of that small, not originally nomadic Rhode Island tribe.
Bob Yard brought the photo down out of the sun. "Jimmy, you were smart not to stick around," he said. " ‘Course the paper, you wouldn’t have kept it going, no one could"—and Mayn heard the Jersey r roll through him like a hundred familiar greetings on the family porch three minutes’ walk from here, less than fifty miles from New York, "Get it steady," said Bob Yard, "cook for you, have some kids, get it steady. ‘Course you guys moving around, you get it steady anyhow. She cooking something for you?"
Mayn had to scowl like a smile or laugh. His father didn’t talk like that. Not that with old Bob you talked openly about everything. Mayn was way in the future staring back into the past wondering if his own father had been unfaithful to his wife’s memory even—words made you laugh and history fell apart into tales and isolated mysteries threatening to be trivial. But his father wouldn’t talk like Bob. Mayn didn’t care if his father was a prude or wasn’t.
Joy could be romantic, and she knew he was too, though she played to the other side of him, the part that wasn’t one with her. But the romantic in him was that he didn’t give a damn, though he didn’t say so. (Their daughter one day years later at a restaurant said, "You and Joy didn’t talk things out, I’m almost sure of that, I mean like me and my friends do.") He took Joy to Bermuda once o
n two hours’ notice, a pretty dashing but a rather funny thing to do to her, though to tell the truth she’d felt like it all day; and he made abrupt statements to her that made her go moist in the eyes (like he’d dreamed of someone like her when he was in high school, senior year, long before he knew her, he meant it)—she felt paid back too much, why was that? but she thought he meant daydreamt because he always claimed he didn’t have sleep dreams—(he liked, he said, the way she came into a room as if she were all by herself and going to be) and when he told her once that he was happy with her, it almost made her cry (she didn’t tell him) and later by herself it, or something, did make her cry. He didn’t give a damn about anniversaries or candlelight on mahogany, but he would buy her two dozen yellow roses, lay the soft greenly crackling cone of paper on the hall table as if it were not to be noticed even after they were finished hugging and kissing. He’d hardly ever written her a love letter, didn’t give a damn about old letters except ones he could quote from, couldn’t play house with his bride, though did tell about his family and his hometown, and Joy (he was asked to believe) recalled what he said sometimes better than he recalled it, though he’d tell (and remember) specially about his grandmother and her house down the street, his haven— for she had told him weird tales about the West and taught him to whistle.
But he didn’t give a damn about blanket chests—or a spinning wheel seen once through the fire-bright window of a New Hampshire inn; didn’t give a damn—or was not sentimental—about their first TV in 1959, an Admiral (and why did he think of it?); and he liked but could take or leave a cave painting they’d brought back from France (without the cave!)—a working honeymoon—yet he did care more than he showed about her favorite record in 1956: (shepherds calling across a valley; a child invisibly hearing a country lullaby; southern sun coursing through someone’s vibrant objection to a wife) Songs of the Auvergne. Sure he liked music. Listening to Dvorak when he’d come home from a trip, he said he knew she wanted to take flying lessons; and she was amazed he knew, and he said, Oh he thought she’d mentioned it (but he knew that it had come out of the blue—he put it out of his mind). She told him he liked the "coming" part of coming home, and he realized she was right. There wasn’t time to mail postcards from where he went, so he brought them home with him. He wasn’t sentimental about snapshot albums or possessions (his, hers, ours), or the soft green and cheesy chalupas at a restaurant on the corner that reminded her of a family place in the north end of Chicago, though a pan of oven-toasted and salted almonds their first Christmas brought back his mother’s furtive eyes with such a dryness of the mouth he forgot he had told Joy she used to make them and he didn’t recall till weeks later, so the mystery of the parallel stayed real. He wasn’t sentimental about Joy’s dough-bake Christmas-tree ornaments lying brightly colored in the cardboard box on the rug one December day he came in from La Guardia Airport to find no one home and in the middle of the living room this flash of green, red, turquoise, gold—a gold elephant, a blue dancer, a dark green shining-shellacked fir tree—but of more interest was a damp towel he sniffed hanging on the shower-curtain rail—flesh-rubbed—a message the skin of his hips took, that was lust in an absence he chose for a message—but more a presence than a real message; and she was so "there"—so "there" now—in how sometimes she watched for him to make the first move and then it didn’t seem only his, or his at all. He could run his hand down her back all night through the last button of bone into a spread softness doubling itself in curves back and forth larger than fingers or hand—and down her side and into the soft, sharp dip above her hipbone that sent his thumb inward in a small arc to touch tendrils only to find eyes glistening in the near dark, and her hands were better than his, you might say, even to when she’d lend him one of her hands to move from one place to another. And Bob Yard said Mayn’s mother would have been grateful for this marriage—marriage of love, he really meant, though those words of Bob Yard’s, not himself a sentimental man, brought back eyes that would have seen what the elder son saw in this person Joy, who he thought saw through other people clearly yet saw through them even to what was beyond them. (Say that again, slow.)
Women and Men Page 158
