Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "It’s guys like you made me want to go into newspaper work," said Mayn looking around for another familiar face, finding it.

  His child is halfway to school, he likes talking to her; she listens, then turns her attention to something more urgent; he has passed the renovated brownstones—some pink or white—they look childless here between Second and Third, opposite the massive brick blank of the phone company’s operations building, its windows steel-meshed against the morning’s prison of noise outside; it’s his neighborhood—call it Murray Hill, give it a name to remember (sounds like it was changed). Now he passes going the other way. The three heavy guys in windbreakers stand around smoking, there’s a king-size cylinder of beer on the curb and a Danger sign propped in the middle of the sidewalk—a crane as high as the six-story building makes people going to work raise their eyes but they mostly don’t look all the way up at it, it’s parked there and a man in a gray felt hat sits in the cab talking down to the men on the sidewalk, his hand appears along the cab window, he could use a shave, he’s got a plaid wool shirt under his windbreaker and he’s wearing gray kid gloves, Mayn feels the soft, tight give of the leather in his own fingers, it’s in his inside pocket, his small notebook. A gigantic switch console once slow and scaleless lowering against the sky stands in the crane’s truck bed and two men are looking down out of high windows in this building. Far up on company time. They’ll live in east Brooklyn, they’ll live in Queens, their kids nearly grown, wives are maybe at work, maybe sitting in the kitchen, settled in a chair on the phone to a daughter who’s discussing he doesn’t know what— last night. Not nudity you can be sure.

  He has passed the renovated brownstones. He has passed the unfinished-furniture store drawing him like a restaurant with its warm sweet pine dust, a chest of drawers in the window, a pigeonhole desk, a rocker if you like rockers if you like the curves.

  Meanwhile the Irish free-lunch bar pays the rent just; the shapes in there at this hour, the shoulders, the bill of a cap, an elbow, an anchored hand, are so dim to him through the damp glass, the place so dark, darkness some grime paid on profits of last night, that he might just get a whiff of last night’s slops, but from the sidewalk he sees himself in the long mirror passing behind the bottles.

  Along the wide avenue he’s window-shopped the imported shoe store en route to the TV repair. And here’s the small sidewalk office of the plumbing contractor where he tried to buy a steel access door the super couldn’t find for Joy for a ceiling with an old leaky pipe up inside it—the fat woman under a bare bulb will always be on the phone at this hour staring through the plate glass on the lower right of which is JOBBING PROMPTLY ATTENDED TO. He’s passed the kraut deli with a steel tureen of grass-sweet, mealy pea soup to take out. And everywhere the new restaurants appear and fade—one an antique shop that kept some of the stock when they converted to spinach salad and quiche; he’s passed the A&P where women on food stamps buy hamburger rolls and giant Pepsis and you can get the cheapest good unground coffee anywhere but how old are the beans?—a coffee broker once bought him a drink beside the most beautiful lake in the world and attempted to find out what he knew about the tobacco lobby in Congress so he was hypnotized by the man’s multilingual indirectness but kept waking up wondering who this "we" was he spoke for; Mayn knows about weak coffee out of town that you can see down through, and Bridgeport’s ravaged waitresses, and midwestern high-school kids in aprons, and western cowgirl hostesses, they come by again with more steaming globes of it black, but transparent at the edge of the cup. He can reach Manhattan more or less—he’s passed the bakery with its layers and stacks, brown, sugar-dusted, glazed—where crisp butterflies and brown-and-white pignoli-nut cookies touch the tongue hinges as the immigrant eye is touched by the glue-slick apricot, peach, strawberry tarts glittering so toylike they could be a month old. He’s passed the Moravian church with the black-and-gold historical plaque and spiked iron railing where they bend No Electioneering signs around the spikes, on Election Day, and where a friend of Joy’s goes to O.A.—Overeaters Anonymous—where the A.A. "meeting" also meets, and a Senior Citizens coffee group rounded against the backs of the chairs, and a trash-recycling headquarters Joy calls Jesus Saves, and he’s passed out quarters to the bums against the railing who until he gets near them are nodding in serious conversation like personnel waiting to go on duty, and getting away from them he finds himself stopped looking into the New York sky which is cold and possible, pressing down upon you some chance of neighborhood, his and hers, between them shared though more by Joy who’s here more than by Jim, who can’t save a marriage.

  Indians and Pakistanis move in, and one shop might hold spices, T-shirts, plastic luggage, and rock records—in suspension—or like in a big old suitcase; the neighborhood will absorb these shiny-haired brown men—he sees their future here—who walk with their feet out and maybe a step ahead of their females and under their overcoats wear white shirts without neckties (like orthodox Jews, but unlike Jews unbuttoned at the neck). The neighborhood will absorb them and their soft women, while they don’t seem to live here, and maybe they don’t—while carloads of them will career out of Park Avenue South and run large old cars into spaces between a dark restaurant and a brightly colored sari emporium, and maybe you see a whole costumed group standing beside a car with its trunk open or its hood up, always one or the other. Strong marriages.

  The newsstand has gone out of business on Thirtieth Street, he sees; and so he’ll buy his paper in the women’s hotel off Madison, the occupied lobby at this hour he doesn’t want to think about or look at, Joy said it refutes the syndicated astronomer who says We are not alone—well that’s not "Mother" at her funniest—she gets herself a magazine here or maybe late at night a pack of cigarettes out of the machine, she’s not the type to smoke, why does she? it’s incongruous—"it’s not your sort of hotel," she said, but she knows him for an old cocky blood who’s got all this extra amiability he can give them, they’re women, women in housedresses sitting smoking; and Joy almost understands this in him, rouged women on canes, women in slippers staring ahead, watching the Middle Eastern desk clerk waiting maybe for something to do, or in easy chairs they’re turned toward small side tables with a lamp lighting a tabloid newspaper that spreads open down off the table. An odor of scent passes through him like the music tuned from the front desk, and he smells as if down the elevator shafts or out of the dark phone booths (doors folded half open) last night’s canned beef stew, women neither alone and independent nor not alone, and the vacuum cleaner starts up right behind him and he sees he’s stepping over the hose, while a woman as old as a grandmother watches him approach and holds on to a walker (wading in rapids, shivering in Chicago, slowing as if to thicken against the wind) and when he nods, she says at her own tempo, "Five and a half percent, six percent, six and a half percent, seven" so that if Mayn observes every possible detail of this world, he might never get home—but the man at the newsstand counter, his hand clamping his pack of cigarettes down on the counter next to his paper, says he’s glad to see him.

  He’s passed the sculpture-materials store, and the offset printer’s who’s leaving the business to his Bahamian assistant next year and retiring to Lake-hurst, New Jersey, where the Hindenburg blew up. Passed these places often—often slowly, walking with small children (they knew where your hand was without looking), as if those certain presences have been left in the daytime absence of stories he told at night—mostly tales of the East Far Eastern Princess, her giant carrier bird that took to eating Indian ponies on a visit, or the Inventor of New York who did pathmark work on wind stress for high buildings and never got credit, who went west and met the Navajo Prince when he was in love with the East Far Eastern Princess but just as the Four Worlds were materializing together the Inventor had to ride back to New York because in his absence it was disappearing even though he had invented it, maybe because he had invented it rather than discovered it.

  A hand reaches for Mayn’s on one
side and he for another hand on the other side. And now, after years, it’s because of the children that on the harder days these streets have seemed less a neighborhood than ways to elsewhere, so that he might despair and wrongly—and despair of giving his children something else even though all this is what they know they have and they are busy, and they haven’t the chance to forget all that he knows. But, since they are his memory’s guarantee, it’s also because of his kids that these blocks have made a neighborhood that sometimes when he opens his eyes can’t be residential, but then is. Just as he wonders if the children have anything to do with it all, when Joy stands at a window staring at the decorated beauty of high, turn-of-the-century office buildings and textile warehouses or cutting rooms, underwear, whatever’s inside, with round-arch windows and blue stripes and flowery pediments and scrolls and other decorations the names for which he doesn’t know staring up from the street ten or fifteen stories the way he used to think about New York fifty miles away when he was in high school, and above all that architectural decoration and the overhanging rims of the roofs a sky that on a day like this you’d never believe is better for astrology than astronomy, but it’s Joy at their own high window looking out and she says, "Those water towers, those sawed-off silos, you know something, I have no control over my life."

  His wife this morning has said that Flick is nine and doesn’t have to be walked to the bus. He knew that, didn’t he? she said.

  Flick objected and asked him to help her wedge her house-shaped lunch-box into her knapsack—"He does have to walk me." She remembers what’s what.

  "He doesn’t," said the boy in a soft tone of discovery staring at the spoon gripped in his hand, a monogrammed spoon that belonged to his father’s grandma—staring at it and turning it, staring and turning his neck so slender his plaid shirt looks man-size, the dark mole clear and small below the hairline.

  "I think he does," said the mother, seeing through the conversation, and on the spur of the moment tossed her husband, ten feet away in the hall, a yellow apple which for an instant he felt his teeth slowly, slowly, neatly bite into in mid-air but he has taken it without thinking, in his cupped fingers, and in a trice it stands on the hall table beside bill envelopes that need stamps.

  "You don’t own him," said Flick. "Yes I do," said Joy. "Does she?" "She only rents me."

  "Your hair’s gray," said his daughter reaching up to smooth it at the ear as he bends down to her hand.

  "It always has been," says Joy, who sees him take up one of the envelopes.

  Joy never liked mailing things. They laughed about it. He said in the presence of a friend that Joy turned it into his obligation, and the friend said it should be easy for Joy to figure out what was behind this feeling.

  Andrew has turned abruptly to watch, grinning, and leaves his cereal, goes into the hall, grabs the apple, and flips it to his father, "Hey Dad, can we go to the library today?"

  His father grabs him as if to get hold of the question and wrestles the small, ambushed shoulders into a hug. "If I’m back from lunch," he seems to have said before.

  He’s passed the new library, second floor just for children. And now he’s walking over the crusts of snow, and a dog ahead has balked and is being dragged but won’t go further, it’s the salt on the pavement—the dog’s paws sting. Salt was tossed all over the pavement in front of this office building, tires slithering, a cab door sounding not quite shut, a black man’s breath into cold air, his breath like engine steam above his two-decker trolley of coffee and Danish halting for him to reach around to yank open a glass door, and in the brisk fantasy of this morning in this commercial residential point in Manhattan—residence used to be good business but no more, says the landlord—Mayn remembers that Joy has started having the paper delivered —recalls on another street a few minutes ago following a young woman— well, not following—but following her too closely, she was swinging her butt but she was moving right along yet was going too slow for him though he couldn’t get past her what with the garbage cans and the tree plots, and she turned her head to catch him in the corner of her eye like an animal—he smelled her powder, her morning perfume, whatever.

  He’s almost home and loves his wife. She’s ahead. What’s the matter with them?

  A new couple stayed till one, their girl-child is now in public school again and they’re rich enough to believe in it—and Joy said that she thought the man, who was very presentable and well-educated and was in the aluminum business and praised Women’s Lib (—bib, crib—), had wanted to be treated like an invalid. Their child at six had greeted the arriving soon-to-be-nude women of a workshop and had made the gossip column—first name (basis) only. Joy knew them from the library where she and they had reached for an opera album at the same instant.

  The man’s feet—extremely big to say the least. And when he had put his drink down he had held on to it unless his wife was talking. His wife had talked about him, and there he was, temporarily, in the room. She shouldn’t have, both because the guy might just have been not there (Jim later said) and because she seemed to make him materialize there (Joy later said).

  "Invalid maybe," said Mayn, "and he did have a helluva cold, but she’s sure talking about him instead of something else that she won’t put her finger on, and it isn’t anti-Semitism in Space."

  "I like talking to you, Ghostie."

  "I think I’m drunk. Well, she’s bored with him but she thinks it might be her. In the kitchen he asked me if he hurt your feelings asking if the rug was genuine and you’d said a genuine imitation, and he asked if there was anti-Semitism in my business and he asked if one thing didn’t come on top of another too fast in the newspaper racket (he’s humble and sensitive and insulting) and was there any continuity?, and I was going to say Yes, but he suddenly said, like he was explaining something, that he had to change his life—before we knew it it would be the seventies—and then—"

  "He laughed very loudly," said Joy. "I thought you’d told him a joke and he was the kind who doesn’t remember them well enough to tell them— we heard him laugh out in the living room, we thought you’d said something, and she said she hoped Tom wasn’t telling you about the models he makes, and then she said she’d bought him ten pairs of socks on the spur of the moment this afternoon, his mother bought him six pairs."

  The light is now red—how’d that happen?—and Mayn won’t hurry— models of what?—no two of the four of them had gotten around to that—the cars seem to wait, he can’t fly, he considers limping—that is, across against the light. Last night he heard "Ghostie" for the first time in a long time. It’s been a short walk, he hasn’t gone far. She will bend her head to one side combing her hair at night—that’s what she does, the circles of coffee in his gut melt the path to her—he has stood over her holding her shoulder in his hand, as she bends her head resisting the clutch of the brush with that look of arranging something inside her head that she can’t always see. Seeming as if she has an idea what is wrong with the world around her which might be the people very close to her.

  Maybe she won’t take angry action on what she knows.

  She is ahead; he sees her out there. She can report of herself more than she is willing to know but of him knows more than he for one is able to report. She is funny and beautiful and she wants to let Jim know without words that she knows he thinks this of her. Andrew and Flick’s mother who is quite a character to them had a job before she had them. Before she had a job she had a home with a father in Chicago who, with his large, inky-black mustache, entered the house at a violent, silent run knowing his first wife was busy upstairs. She preferred upstairs and managed always to be there. He pounced on the piano, however, and plunked a few bars of "Meet Me in St. Louis" knowing she would not come downstairs but would be waiting for him when he crept wickedly to the top of the stairs until one day he found her dead, her hand held in Joy’s sister’s. Whereas for his second wife he would also play, but she could never be trained to stay put but could be seen
plunging silently downstairs before he was safely out of the second bar of Albert Au Revoir’s "Banana Waltz." Kind of a depressive man, besides. (Had enough? Joy asked, and could eventually communicate this question without words by dropping open her mouth and glazing her eyes.)

  She is funny and beautiful. She is not Jim, no matter what their marriage (he once observed) threatened them with.

  Once on a morning like this he didn’t have his key and she opened the door in a big towel, her half-peeled banana in her hand, and she said smiling, 4’Oh it’s you."

  He knows what’s happening. But not why. Does she want him to be away less? He doesn’t know, and the reason is that he asked; and she answered Oh yes she wished he were away less. But what he wanted to hear wasn’t to be heard in her answer. Ask for her touch; fine. Or ask her which of the people they saw socially she’d be content not to see again; ask her why she lets the phone ring at least twice even when she’s right there, ask her why she said hardly a word when he brought the salvage diver by for a drink—and she’ll say she shut up because, because, it was the absent presence in the diver man’s talk, the man’s very young girl friend, whom he discreetly bragged about in the shape of her record collection, O.K.?—or ask Joy if she originally expected to be happy having made a good match, or ever thought of getting off under the bathtub faucet no hands like Lucille and her workshop friend, or has ever run amok; ask her why she gave up smoking one week while she asks you—call it him—if you smoke after intercourse and answers her own question (I haven’t looked); or ask her to shut up—or be asked to shut up when he tells Joy she should go back to work; be asked once when silent, having been silent for a minute, having been already asked to be. As if some unspoken answer had matched what he’d wanted to hear in hers at other times. But for all these successful askings (no complaints, take care) you still can’t ask her to tell you not to travel so much, and expect to get the truth. You hide your heart in this apartment like a Christmas present not yet wrapped or—for she hides hers sometimes too (yet that prior you is also she)—like a plumper tummy in a Danskin leotard dusky like old-fashioned stockings, while he, the deployed emplaned husband hides between here and there like the shadow or chance of one end or the other, yet seems to be only at one end of the other.