Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  He still had this sneaking idea that they’d always had a perfect understanding, but he wouldn’t claim so to his daughter when she was old enough to talk to—that is, about this—sometime around the time she had discovered a lot of words, including "tedious."

  He and Joy—meeting of the minds is relative, you know; it doesn’t mean you agree, like seeing the delicate neck of your little boy looking over his shoulder at what he’s drawing and you run a finger up the neck into the hair and he doesn’t say anything.

  Relationship was the word. Relation. Each was the other’s closest relative. Closer than blood, and clearer to boot—clear friction. Not just that he on his back with his knees V’d out licked her insteps’ wrinklable arches while from below her she divided and trained his soft-skinned old beanbag either side of her soft, stuck-open breather (take a breather, sweet) while he broke the V of his knees to run his own instep up and down her ribs, pigeon-toeing under onto a softer flesh to the returning touch of separateness, each soft spot of nipple marking his motion. Well, you can’t exactly tell it, speak of it, except some other way, say indirectly, with the door closed—but where are you? For example, let them watch TV in a room or hunt for change in a dark taxi, or one lie on a bed in a hotel room while the other moves into the bathroom or out. Soft points marking motion. Life’s in parts, and some go together and some don’t, and some incongruously don’t, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.

  (She’s ahead. So’s he.) It isn’t an opening, that part of her, or not only an opening; it’s a coming out as much as an opening in—more so; an irregular bloom: he thinks rose, but no, he’s no good on flowers. But heading toward her on a loud morning in New York knowing they may leave each other but on some other hand (whose touch in him is each child’s and his wife Joy’s succeeding each other in dissolving substitution confusingly endless he hopes) she is ahead, and she is funny and beautiful.

  He knows what is happening. He sees events fall. And fall back. Away from him. Another self, she might once have been his.

  But did he see? Was he a witness? He has known so much, how can he know so little? He wouldn’t have thought he’d get so friendly with Avery ("Ave") of the big feet and the hand on the glass and the tall body that looked for air to lean on and, behind glasses, eyes that wanted like the hands to talk—Ave the metals engineer (well what are you going to do with a guy like that?) making his ungainly entrance on what was proving to be the last night Joy had ever said "Ghostie."

  They see into the future, she through him, he through nothing. She is behind him, the two of them Indian file, and she behind him like a wind that’s past. He sees into a future, doesn’t he? The children are beyond them—grown.

  And then he is there. He was there all along. A silent transfer from here to there. Truly from the future, she distinctly hears him say.

  Certain years are done with. Force that drew them swung them past one another. The years? Or him and Joy?

  Only in this way can the new mystery appear. Would he bet on it? Is it just pollution?

  Looking back, no longer together, they might try to think what came first. Three, four years after their separation—on course to new decades.

  Together they recalled each other. But they did not speak of it. Except once on the phone. That is, they did not speak of how it happened. For it was together, yet they were not together now in any but this way, he and she, nor had been for several years (though each sometimes forgets—he waking one morning out of a hundred, she dreaming and waking in the middle of the night in the country)—"and anyway I’m not alone."

  But for one lapse, the time on the phone wasn’t referred to again; they were embarrassed or they were preserving it, that is preserving the oddity, the shade of this secret communication, illicit visiting rights. She told her son, who took a scientific interest.

  But this new kind of communication was not the same thing as their story.

  They had a story that seemed to get easier to tell. It was that he spent so much time away from home that he was impossible to live with. He moved around. He traveled. He wasn’t a traveling salesman, for he traveled in order to get hold of things, not unload them. Yet get and then unload. For at times he hardly altered the handouts he received on behalf, at first, of an organization he drily pointed out to his wife was non-profit. It didn’t sell stock, like United Press which became United Press International; but his organization was mutually owned. By its members—and don’t call them "subscribers" on pain of excommunication.

  So what?

  "You liked the idea of me," he said, "you know you did."

  He’d never talked like that before.

  "You don’t have to be away so much," she said.

  "I didn’t use to have these chances. I take them when they come."

  "You could be a bureau chief."

  "In another city maybe, but not now. We’re so much better off."

  "Well, I like New York," she said.

  "But you don’t want to stay in the city," he said suddenly. "You want the country."

  "But I don’t do anything about it," she said.

  "Don’t you!"

  A frozen lake and green sunny trees were right behind him, behind his back, even though he was in a New York living room, and she looked right through him and took him along with her into summer-thick weeds under a window that were really the endless crop of furry green mint.

  Well he wasn’t proud of his job and he wasn’t at all ashamed. He had gone to work first for a wire service—and left. But later, before leaving again (in a way), he had come back for a time to work, but came from Texas to New York, where he’d hardly known he wanted to be—though everyone else wanted it. Lateral transfer from, say, Dallas to Oklahoma City, was not the policy, or not for promising young newsmen. At least at AP.

  One of the great cooperative news services, if the void may say a few words.

  He had gone to work for the Associated Press in the early fifties when the new TeleTypeSetting circuits had come in.

  TTS. It hardly affected him. More news faster. The operation worked, and so did he. It was the inevitable future.

  What would he think of this first job of his? First, that this was not exactly—that he was not—or not yet—exactly his hero Ernie Pyle reporting impressions of drought in the Dakotas or lepers in Hawaii. A man named Boyce developed a national column, but the AP didn’t specialize in bylines.

  Ernie Pyle had walked through the London blitz.

  "You’ll live," said Mayn’s father in New Jersey, though the son hadn’t complained.

  TTS meant that now a story had to go off in just one take. So it might have to be held until the last minute, no sneak previews. You couldn’t send pieces of it as you had them and then follow with last-minute inserts or new leads. More likely wait, then have to rush. Then what? Then where were you? Maybe go home, if you could.

  A fairly clear filter comes down in front of you soon enough and it’s a clandestine screen and you see through its history, a blank of words not soon enough if ever said between two married people, some desire for power over the other that betrays itself only as the desire for no-power, also a blank between what goes on outside this home and inside. He didn’t like history in high school, or thought he didn’t—dates were made to look like causes of effects—and he made his grandmother laugh with his made-up stuff about how General Jackson had a stomach ache and had a man shot whose family’s history and that of New Jersey and its view of Indians were thereby altered. Mayn did not like history, didn’t understand it any more than the fourth dimension. Well, all he meant was he didn’t know history.

  Well, Ernie Pyle now. He was remembered. His stuff became books, which sold back home. From Africa to Sicily—the engineers’ campaign, making bridges and mine-sweeping miles of beach so the guys could take a swim—in the war that you just missed. Still, if you can’t remember, you also can’t forget "the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving." A
nd the Ernie Pyle to be remembered was also the Indiana farmer’s son getting out an undergrad daily that subscribed to AP; Ernie Pyle a college editor in Indiana, received Kirke Simpson’s dispatches on the Unknown Soldier being buried in Arlington. Ernie Pyle was moved by these stories and ran them in the pages of The Student. In 1923 he was a headline writer for the Washington Daily News. Later the real Ernie Pyle rubs alcohol on his hands because he’s told to, though the friendly lepers at Kalaupapa would never shake hands.

  His words impress themselves through the white space where there isn’t any type, and in this way they pass warmly through stuttered quanta of perforations on the TeleTypeSetting tape that holds your dispatch and operates the TTS linecaster over distances hard to grasp: "the perpetual moving"— words known by heart—"the never sitting down." Sicily more than a word afloat jaggedly off the Italian toe—"go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again." You press beyond the Iroquois forests your grandmother (as if she were the smooth storyteller) read to you that also never leave you, you press on through the bare Sicilian landscape, you die and you keep moving (oh, you like the "you" in all its callused corn), you burn and shiver with malaria, you die and are wounded, have a drink, see action, occupy an empty village; you press ahead and your hand expecting anything pushes against a heavy door and there’s nothing on the other side except bad weather and Italian prisoners, a lack of resistance hard to account for unless underneath the landscape filling up with Italian civilians were to be found buried a hundred thousand army uniforms doffed at the flick of the Black Hand’s underground finger, a grand shrug of the Sicilian surface, a nod from the Mafia don answering favor with favor in response to a coded word now untraceable (they said) to the source, namely a secret creditor behind the bleakest, most northern walls in the New York State prison system, and flown (say) by navy fighter, passed (say) mouth to mouth, eye to eye, and heart to heart so that the American fighting man with Lucky Luciano behind him doing fifty-five years in Dan-nemora prison, while here and now he’s led by the Black Hand, advanced to take positions that were often not held at all. So what about it, Ernie, did Luciano help engineer the Allied success? Did the Mafia cool it for the Yanks? Ernie Pyle’s life was there in lives of other men so that his understanding of them takes the place of their future that is not at all there, while the closer they get to the front the less they know what’s going on—they’d know if they were back in New York. All they know is tomatoes hanging in the fields, plasma hanging from Sicilian trees. The front; the popping and deep chug of explosion. "Without water you’re sunk," Ernie wrote. (Mayn’s father in New Jersey liked that one!) And sooner or later "it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull dead pattern—yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo"—Troina, where American blood mixed more with German than with the mysteriously absent Italian—with the sun you imagine coming up out of Etna which is as if islanded upon the sea, but no, Etna’s nothing to write home about, no dragon, the Italian doughboy from Boston, from New York writes home about the future, Ernie Pyle knew them, he saw the engineers lay down beach roadbeds of chicken wire and burlap, he got sick, a kid called him "Pop" because he was "gray-headed," and when soon enough he died on the other side of the world in ‘45—same year as Jim Mayn’s mother—he was famous.

  But today the perforations on the TTS tape (that came in in the fifties, the void repeats) are also holes bearing dispatches unmemorable as the tiny waste circles of newsprint punched out with a loose-leaf punch onto a library table by a drifter of a journalism student whose family, whose father ("You’ll live"), ran a weekly in New Jersey that folded (joke!) at the end of the War not because it didn’t rent an AP line but because it didn’t go out and get the county advertising. The journalism student is punching holes out of clippings so he can ring them into the binder of an assignment notebook, getting them all together. And this prepares one for a job; yes, this—while his father (prematurely retired) divides himself between other people’s newspapers, the porch, eventually TV, and always the trotters (whose red earth in great deep chunks is like a friend’s red earth on the Colt’s Neck Road where the horse corn grows so thick and green the earth disappears up into it)—all is preparation for a job. Though not the only preparation for a job. Any more than the marriage union is a preparation for divorce, separation, dissolution, or vice versa, though no preparation is needed for the hammerlock a boy gets on a newly returned father or at the same moment the weight of a girl sitting on the father’s legs.

  Joy had called her husband a correspondent. He was. She told him he was crazy not to go for bureau chief. She told Flick.

  He left AP. He came back.

  He met an Argentine who owned not only one other South American country but four papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to boot, and as everyone saw it, that was what changed Mayn’s life. Later a clandestine backer of a women’s bank. A clean-shaven Argentine named Long who saw something in Mayn. Something beyond the mutual friend who brought them together, an American specialist in languages of the Uruguayan pampas, and beyond the amusing tales Mayn told Long about a friend of his father’s covering the Hauptmann trial and the explosion of the Hindenburg. Long sent Mayn where he discovered he wanted to go, and once let him get mad and resign; and then a month later after dinner with an AP traffic chief in Texas who’d known Mayn for several years, Long rehired Mayn. Joy wasn’t clear how it had come about, and in those days she seemed to act like she knew more about his work, his subject matter, what took him away, than he did, she made it her business to know, but about the rehiring she didn’t know and she saw through Jim’s shrug that he didn’t know either (except for one reason tossed out, namely that Long felt Mayn cared about the work but not a damn about the job). Well, he knew she thought she was proud of him, but then he thought she made too much of his work. (Say that again.)

  Yet he did care about the job. They each had a streak of the secretive and indecisive, Flick once said, but the proportions were a mystery. Even when Joy had told him he should be a bureau chief with AP she would say also that if ever she got out of New York she could really get into the country. As for him, he spent so much time away from home he was impossible to live with. And while they were married the phone made things worse.

  Too much time away: this story of theirs had run for several years before that word correspondent became a bad gag in the mouth of someone who liked her, who called her (Mayn had heard it) "chere" and said, "Quite," when he agreed. A young divorce lawyer with connections at the UN—well, yes, young—and "divorce"? maybe that was a trifle harsh—who said that in this case maybe there was no corespondent. There was more to him. But how could a guy say a thing like that? For Joy had quoted it to Mayn as if she wanted him to say to her How could a guy say a thing like that? ‘Tedious," their daughter Flick would have called it if it had been three, four years later, "incongruous" was another word, "illusory." She went through a period when she made puns. Some boys got into that, but not girls. But "Who did Mom inherit that job from?" Flick asked one day when she came home from school and didn’t get it—the hair in "inherit"—when her father turned his head to laugh and nearly shed his blood upon the wifely scissors working on his neck.

  Well, Mayn had gray hair when he married Joy, but gray hairs or not, the two of them had been through the wars together. That was what Mayn said. Said about her, she felt, as if she had often been one to start whatever they had then been through together. But didn’t Joy say it too? Said it to her friend Lucille. Been through the wars. So? Yet sometimes it had seemed like nothing, like the gap between JFK at 9 P.M. and San Francisco at—actually —midnight Pacific Time, and one year it was one. Blanched shadows receding off to the left along the Rockies visible under the plane’s own moon. Not wars at all. An evening out, days at home—in tune—nights away from home subtracted like bad behavior as if they didn’t count. Not wars. More like falling away from time, falling through your own vaunted resilience, through nothing—but falling. F
alling upward, even. And at home as well as in a hotel. Falling out of bed at dawn so your fall was broken by the ceiling. Jim. For Joy didn’t do that sort of thing, her daughter pointed out to her, product as she was of them both.

  The void lets out a smile, which he and she might feel as a breath of relief somewhere that what had happened to them could be said so.

  Been through the wars. A common breath let out like deep thought that was the two of them or nothing, and much heavier stuff and finer and more subtly worked out than either of them could have thought, such intellects as they were.

  Been through the wars. A real-estate hot shot (though nice guy) named Sid living with a girlfriend now, and one day on the tennis court got a phone call from his doctor asking him to come in, and they decided he had two types of cancer, one possibly they couldn’t do anything about, the other his lung, and because his former wife, who was a lab psychologist working with animals, had smoked (at him) for years, he went looking for her and found her at dinner at the Mayns and told her, no less: but no one did anything, including him. The children were in bed.