Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  The void will calm things down. Speaks through you like a whole thing of force and membrane neither yet full-grown. But in the person of those whom that void after all keeps moving, the void disperses time and the particles by which it is told until the equality of all things can become too much and a drag. And the nick in the back of the head that shows barely through the hair is not only a blood type but a section exacted from a singular person who might need to be saved at the expense of someone else.

  How he knows ahead of time when she enters a room—is it some throat clearing he has lent her as if she like him were dialing a phone number and getting ready to speak? or is it some warning she has lent him in a private smile he knows (and pays for knowing) is there around the corner of the hall doorway before she comes in sight?—and if he knows exactly tonight how their host will enter behind her, as if for the moment they two weren’t intimate kitchen-sympathetic. Has life with Joy made Mayn this way?

  This knowing is like some out-of-character eccentricity; he’s an ordinary guy, for God’s sake (and God would rather he’d stop thinking that)—not much of a believer—and when they arrived a while ago and the host kissed Joy and shook hands, Mayn felt the presence of another woman who wasn’t there, a wife or woman paired with the host. He did have an ex-wife somewhere— though not somewhere in the living room—but the point about the host’s kissing Joy was that his absent woman was imagined by Mayn as sticking out her hand to Mayn, kiss balanced by handshake, well a pair of couples needn’t be symmetrical, need they? yet the messages don’t quit coming; and in a Windsor chair near the fire (the andirons too far apart, the chemical log sagging and collapsing to bridge its break with a blue-green flush) he gazes at the young detective in a blue-and-red ski sweater who’s cutting his law class tonight, who’s on the floor between Mayn and the fire talking equally to Mayn and Lucille Silver who calls him Rick and questions him and he’s responding so Mayn is getting a garbled message part of which is that (which he knew already) he brought the detective here tonight and brought him like a message unknown to the bearer—well, Rick is in an A.A. group with a free-lance frogman Mayn knows, and Rick is cool for his age, his cheek crackles with shadow and color, so (Rick’s saying) he’s got nothing but respect for that guy’s homicidal instincts—so—so—so Rick (he’s saying) is about to get hit over the head, right? so he’s standing in the street telling the kid in the big white T-bird to put that thing down, but there’s someone behind Rick—Lucille crosses her legs in the corner of Mayn’s left eye and a flow of fleshly concern—flesh turned to fluid—gets to Mayn as Joy, having come in, falls cozily into her chair to his left across the white room, knees together sliding together off away from him as if she would tuck her feet up under her in his direction; Joy grasps Rick and Lucille in a look that opens like her lips which part—Rick and Lucille, who’s half again Rick’s age and twice as present to Mayn as Rick is to Joy (Mayn’s sure) . . . and when Mayn (who doesn’t seem watchful) swings his head a little toward Joy she seems to open her eyes in a glance that bears so much condensed attention out of the past so completely and painfully but, for a flash, so entertainingly to him: for example, Lucille likes more danger than the young cop knows (for, according to Joy, Lucille has twice disarmed her son—yes, literally—his father taught him to shoot a big .38 and ordered him never to carry a pistol), but Lucille doesn’t like risk quite so much as she is thought to by Jim, who likes her O.K. and distrusts her more than she knows because he confides in her once in a while. Joy’s teeth show but her tongue crosses her lip and time halts in her face as when one of her children takes a long look at her, a radiant thought that wished its way there from elsewhere in her body because a blankness at once slipped over Mayn’s eyes large enough to include the extra wine glass she has carried in here and has set down on the table beside her first glass—doubling that prior silence out in the kitchen beyond the living room that Mayn has received like rays passing through these minutes of the young policeman’s choice tale. Until a hatch falls in and all the objects in the room course into the foreground, into his eyes but not Joy’s, and there are for him no people, just objects and the space to go with them. But Joy’s tongue tip and a glint there on the lower lash of one eye give Mayn the fine word from her that please believe her whatever he thinks is going on it’s not public, what’s going on between her and the host—Mayn’s nameless witness won’t name him; Mayn is the witness—the host, the glowing, controlled man, has followed her not quite soon enough into the room and at once turns her from the cop’s rendition to tell her her father was smart to give her Texas Instruments in ‘57 even if she didn’t get along with him—but is this a tribe sitting here in this room? is this what it is? Mayn has the words ready to ask—and is he one member of the tribe and Joy another member (whose father if you want to get technical once in his cups threatened not to give her away) and Lucille and the policeman? And the man? The man’s name is Wagner and his place of work is some huge association where he keeps an eye on the pension portfolio. An "inside dope-ster" Joy called him to Mayn, and Mayn had heard it before, from someone else. Or in advance from Joy’s mind. Mayn wondered how much of Joy’s and his own story she’s put into words for this Wagner, and while Lucille, a friend in need, is asking Rick’s hours, saying married people see too much of each other, that’s Jim and Joy’s secret, Mayn drifts toward Lucille like his smell but his smell become conscious reaching her thoughts, and he says— out it comes—"Aren’t you a bitch." Yet Lucille seemed sincere in what she just said; and later when Joy bawls him out because Lucille is one of their close friends, he knows she’s instinctively getting away with it because, though it was true if not visible, he’s had that and can pay for it, and for a moment he and Joy are crazy together, though in a Connecticut motel next week he wakes to a Kansas City motel near the river, near the market too full of very raw animal-carcassed buffalo fish, and will never see Lucille Silver again because he’s kissing her goodbye, having told her in this dawn dream, for he claims not to night-dream, that for an offspring (like . . . what’s her name? . . . Flick) to have your courage shot into orbit by the dual thrust of united parents inc. is a great thing indeed unless the launch pad is unfinished or otherwise incomplete, and then for gawd’s sake don’t look back.

  Their story covered many years and it was that Mayn spent too much time away. It even once got called that—a cover story; she’d said it to him in a letter while they were still married. (He remembered it when he took his daughter out to dinner some years later, she wanted him to sign a petition to get a Philippine writer out of jail. Jail? It might as well have been the Death House!)

  He knew a handout. Some of his work was taking press handouts off a counter or desk in a busy room as far away as it was familiar and nondescript, handouts that were sometimes little more than a friendly pitch Xeroxed off an electric typewriter hustling a product (this was the point), and a newsman could put these handouts on the wire more or less condensed. But he would also go after assignments where you didn’t get a handout because what there was to peddle, to get onto the wire, wasn’t immediately clear, though he didn’t believe in what wasn’t clear, and he kept after the briefing officer of a natural-gas company who would turn away from figures like 7.5 trillion barrel-miles of various gas liquids and anhydrous ammonia being carried through more than two thousand miles of pipeline in 1961 to the claim that this firm was a "future" firm operating in a frame of reference not less than Energy itself and Related Earth Resources, and how can you be anti-Energy? you might as well be anti-American. Joy understood what he tried to do and liked him for it.

  In May of ‘60, no longer working for AP, he did with the government story on the overflights what the story did, or said to do. With itself, that is.

  Routine report: pass it on.

  Mayn was like any company man or stringer.

  So Powers, the pilot, was photographing weather—or (like a mechanical part of him) the plane was photographing weather; and the flights ove
r Russia were routine weather observation—NASA said so. Now Mayn knew—or figured—that the story wasn’t true, and he had heard that it was not true from people who ought to know but also from a man he didn’t like named Spence for whom the extreme altitude of the slender U-2 plane gave to it, gave to the plane’s glinting eye, an exponent of threatening force, a light too powerful to see with the naked eye unpeeled.

  Ray Spence was far away but approaching Mayn in the form of Mayn approaching him—that’s what Mayn felt. Well, people weren’t always credible.

  Spence told Mayn back a story Mayn had told him about the newsman who got the jump on everyone else at the explosion of the Hindenburg. Mayn mentioned this—that Spence had told Mayn back his own story—and Spence laughed, but too long and softly as if it was understood Mayn had made a curious joke. "How’s the family newspaper?" he then said. "Got any good numbers in your book?"

  But the government overflights story which everyone knew wouldn’t stick made Mayn, who was fed up with words within words, curious instead about the weather. What had NASA to do with weather and what was there to know?

  So he was in Florida and later he was in California. Not into space he said—not space, not science—not ESP—and you could throw in the Fourth Dimension (and he didn’t mean the bar in Brussels of that name for he had a quizzical way of showing off or the book store in Dallas). Weather satellite —that was the size of it. No, not science—as Joy should know, who knew him.

  You called the satellite a grapefruit. And all he was seeing was exactly how a four-pound grapefruit covered cloud belts across a quarter of the Earth. Then talking to the Coast Guard. Aboard a white weather ship about to leave for the Bermuda Triangle. Tall, thin meteorologist in the weather shack up on the boat deck facing aft, a Texan (‘‘originally"), with a German uncle in Chile multiplying bees. A German grammar on a folding chair on the rolling deck. A man in khakis with a bad black Texas mustache, no kidding, and an unconvincing habit of in the middle of his talk to Mayn calling out, loud and jolly, to any kid who came by with a wire brush or an electronic technician’s tool kit, then one who materialized below on the quarter-deck photographing a huge seagull standing on the rail. A global network of weather stations. Mayn could get into that. The man with the mustache lent him a manual which Mayn read and forgot about and later decided not to mail back from New York after the cutter had put out for weather station. This global network looked so compact, but put yourself in it and your neighborhood is endless. This thought followed him, not he it.

  Up?

  The curvature of space he would leave to other minds than his.

  He talked to Joy about the weather. So then he’d be unable to explain his interest in it. That is, to her—at least when she said, "But blue sky in the winter in New York—but in Chicago over the lake, you’ve never seen how the water goes up the sky, it attracts the horizon, it lifts it, my father used to say—why, meteorology—what do these guys know?" ("I know, I tow," said Mayn.) "What about rain against the window—" ("Don’t be an idiot, Joy.") "—against the window the summer we were at the Cape playing Monopoly?" "Look, Joy": he drew her a wind rose:

  "The length of the line shows how often you get wind from that direction—during the year, let’s say. And in another type of rose the lines thicken so you see how often the wind was strong or light or moderate." He drew her one of these, too.

  "All right, I can see it," she said.

  "Helps them decide where to put airports and buildings and vegetative wind screens and factories that smoke up the air. The wind rose shows the horizontal motion of the atmosphere. Now you know all that I know."

  She laughed at that, and she didn’t give in. "What about the wind hitting us when the car got past the mesa cliff driving down to Albuquerque, remember how red the cliff was? wasn’t it near the Continental Divide?"

  Have to ask a lot of a woman, he knew she was telling him to think. He asked her to please shut up. The one long car trip they’d taken.

  And when they had a discussion about the check he’d taken from her checkbook and she said he was a shit but gave it a tired, unimportant sound he didn’t like, he told her that she was really thinking about his being away but, hell, he could be talking about the upper air with the Coast Guard and the civilian meteorologists just as well in Boston or Portland but he was talking with them here at home in New York.

  He’d already talked to them in Florida, she said—and, home? she said. Maybe home for him—which made him laugh like the—yes, strangely like the—white pilot balloon ("pibal") that lifted for a second out of his mind complete with information on expansion and air resistance that was safely in his pibal notes—yet what she said stopped him. For wasn’t it her story that he was away from home all the time? But one day he saw (like a—like what singly neither had the words for) . . . saw like a resilience that the story was his story as much as hers, even if he would claim he’d never been wanted by the FBI like the man who among other things had actually bounced a check on the East Bank of the Mississippi which, granted, was real—that is, a snug, bright blue tavern north of Orion, Illinois, and just below Rock Island he recalled, where the river turns nearly west and the banks are south and north (whence come AP dispatches from the Chicago office to small member papers and radio stations). He pops a joke, but Joy is not put off her track, she goes to the bedroom passing the bathroom doorway through which a child can be seen sitting leaning forward on the John, a child whom the father also sees when he follows his wife angrily, who then brushes past him and leaves that bedroom passing again the bathroom doorway and the child who looks up at her and at the father. Elsewhere in time the decks of D-Day ships snap down into troughs like crevasses blown out by the Sicilian storm and as the decks drop down the silver bags of the barrage balloons snap their cables and rise up, up, so high the sound of the bag exploding is very hard to hear, isn’t it? Sometimes he couldn’t recover her face when he was away from home. Only her whole presence, watching him by just living, by being in a next room drying the lettuce or turning from a child to turn a page of the evening paper—to see anything, to skim some news—to check the horoscope, hers first, but his second, though she disliked horoscopes. He loved her; he could say it to himself and honestly tremble while at the same time he recalled her needling voice after him. "I see you going in in the first wave with your big helmet over your eyes, a gun in one hand and a pencil in the other." What’s a gun? You mean a pistol? a rifle?

  Away From Home All The Time: Mayn’s story as much as Joy’s, and it got handed down. But this sense of their shared account, this story about his jobs and their marriage, was not the same as the thing that now sometimes happened between them during these years since she had moved away with the children. (They could never have had an open marriage—bodies refracted in the light of absent feeling.) And then—though he’d kept the lease—he had moved away too, and the children had pretty well grown up, and Flick was tougher to talk to but now could be told anything, which Andrew could not. If he was even present. Once her father saw Flick kiss her brother goodbye softly, the fingers of her left hand upon the back of his neck.

  Together Mayn and Joy recalled each other, month upon month separated, then divorced. They weren’t together in any but this way; they didn’t live together—and often weren’t geographically close; weren’t in touch, or not so you would notice unless you were tuned into the void or you had high-sensitivity gear that could assess vibrations between the village in western New Hampshire where Joy lived and the motion through which Mayn’s assignments took him.

  He and she happened once to find it convenient to be in Boston on the same day and they had lunch with their son Andrew who just about cracked his father’s hand according to his father when they shook, and who wrote his sister Flick that he’d had lunch with them, the two of them together with him in a restaurant near the docks, near the new aquarium (with sharks and turtles in their own custom-made cylindrical bathysphere)—the three of them like a family wi
th an only child drinking Bloody Marys in a window that looked out on a cold, slushy street. They had converged on Boston, the mother from the country, the father from Europe by way of New York and Washington and Philadelphia, and there they were in a restaurant eating tiny bay scallops and baked potatoes.

  The son wrote his sister in that fancy style she wasn’t put off by that the parents had been "curiously good" together (so the void either smirks or it’s a long, smudged radar trace of low-pressure front)—good together—a lot of laughs was partly what Andrew meant—Joy remembering the woman down the road who had the choke pulled out to hang her handbag on until her car wouldn’t run anymore and a muscular mechanic found the trouble soon enough, the woman down the road one summer; and Dad remembering the subway years ago, losing Andrew—on the subway, that is—Dad just back now from the arms talks with another story entirely that would have been spiked if he’d still been with AP about the Viennese fearing their cathedral would sink into the ground if the new subway went through, which was at least as interesting as a tall, dark-suited delegate whom the night before one had seen with an excellent young whore in a tailored suit now the next afternoon raising his eyebrows but not his translated, rather resilient voice at the danger in Russia’s ceiling being America’s floor.

  But no, the way Jim and Joy knew themselves to be together at instants of recollection was more like a growth, a surprise someplace in the body, more like feeling, and your own bared limbs, nerves, tendons are entangled for you then to see if you can move the one part someone points to, and you can’t, or it’s trial and error, and is it that you think maybe you got someone else’s body warped in here too? Feeling, did you say?

  Feeling left over from a dream. Her words. She never believed him that he didn’t have any but day dreams.