Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  A dream like an obligation you wouldn’t put your finger on whose stripe of tooth-and-nail action bled apart on waking and went away, and the residue was this sense. Not a feeling you could really see, like Joy staring when she was embarrassed or nibbling her lower lip if she thought she had an edge. And nothing so real as light reflected off the balls of his smudged fingertips when she read the Sunday paper over his shoulder.

  A Sunday morning, a Manhattan apartment, Mozart with his five happy instruments on FM, coffee still in the air, a ham in the icebox, Joy in her long-sleeved nightgown, frills at the wrists, thinking (he knew) of going out for German potato salad; Flick practicing her flute behind a closed door, low and insistent; Andrew old enough to get out of the apartment by himself taking his football to meet Dick or Larry in Madison Park among the sheepdogs and dachshunds and poodles and profound dappled bassets, patrolled at the perimeters by one or two snakelike dobermans too thoroughly bred—while back in the apartment sun smeared your polluted windows high above Manhattan which is still Manhattan even high up there, and Jim and Joy looking out from where he sat and she stood behind him.

  No, they recalled each other; and recalling each other they were together. Common enough, after all. Except how they did it. How it happened. How they thought it happened, or knew that it did.

  For here was what it was (an analyst in Boston told Joy to get it out of her head, it was just intuition or leftover intimacy, let’s get back to how and why, but, quoting the analyst to himself, Joy says O.K. but maybe not every event has a cause, maybe not the silent anger during the last haircut!—but then what’s intuition? comes the question from the void) well, theirs was the recollection of the other person plus knowing that right then the other person had it also or had had very recently, maybe a minute before, or would have very soon after you did, three hundred, three thousand, or—in the song learned from him which he had learned from a girl in Geneva, Switzerland, that Flick their left-handed daughter one day stroked on her guitar—ten thousand miles away, Flick who accepted what she heard her mother say about this "knowing" of her parents’ though it wasn’t the sort of stuff she would really believe, right.

  But being both of them strong people, they would doubt that what they felt happen actually did happen, some communication or other. But hold it a moment—for a little life-promoting, species-preserving exercise, try doubting that word strong used so easily.

  Living with someone for a long time like twelve years doesn’t mean you can’t someday lose track of the person scattered like a passage of time all through you, a petition unvoiced. Refractions, Mayn said of his life or that of others. (His daughter remembered later.) Yet when he and Joy were in touch two or three times a year, they knew.

  That is, they thought they knew about times in between. Yet why so awkward to talk of? Embarrassing, as if splitting had been a catastrophic mistake.

  The hook-up between them? an unknown word between them, word was what you got before you wrote, write if you get word.

  Communication between Joy and Mayn? Explain the odd message units passing between them any way you wanted.

  The desire to drop the other a line came like a sudden information, came while one-handing a bottle of mountain claret in a mountain motel in Colorado or driving slowly past a colonial cowpond in spring twilight, and they each knew that the desire to drop the other a line couldn’t be hope that things would change between them. They could have gone to bed just like that, probably. If they’d been snowed in, or caught in some future emergency in a city. Or en route, needing a bed for the night. A friendly scalp rub. A friendly hand. A friend, maybe. Your arm under his head. Laughing about getting turned on right after coming. But get back together? They could not. The thought was laughable, so maybe so was bed. The thought of getting back together was as tritely elusive as failure tried to be. It was, then, real at least. And it was preposterous.

  Together they recalled each other repeatedly. They communicated but rarely spoke on the phone or any other way. Joy told Flick like a joke.

  Communicated, O.K., but how? In their few letters?

  A letter might be instantly answered. Oh it would be.

  Unless it was from her and he was away. Out of the country.

  But after such an exchange, the chance of another on top of it would sometimes discover itself, and they would know at whatever degree of distance from one another that they were a little put off by this prospect.

  Of incest? No, nor falsehood.

  Repetition. With increments.

  Graduated, he thought, graduated from First Marriage, a long enough one, graduated from an earlier hour of intimacy. His heart wanted to stop: for then, graduate angels, he heard her saying on the phone. And he exclaimed, You answered my thought! do you know that?

  But then he couldn’t speak.

  Go on, she said. He said, You answered my thought, the graduated part.

  Oh, she said, with a bug in her voice, weren’t we always doing that?— or have we gotten better?, I mean now that we aren’t together.

  Just the opposite, it seemed to him.

  His body got enormously heavy. Bone-tired. More slow than tired, promising to give up and let him go on ahead, hands heavy as they were said to be under hypnosis. He shouldn’t have let the marriage go, and yet then she was saying—she was crying a little, she rarely wept but when she did cry she’d been able to without missing a beat or breath of her conversation. Was it an act? What if it was, it was real (it occurred to him). Tricky? she once said, Why I owe it all to you—but now, you haven’t put on weight, have you? maybe I wouldn’t be so bone-tired, she said (so heavy, she thought), if we could just answer our thoughts and not have this phone that makes me think of you inside me—tongue, nose, big nose—inside me—she guffaws against his ear—"Ear!"—and has to cough through tears.

  Go on, he says.

  Ear bones, she coughs, every one, right down to the lobe, kid.

  He felt so heavy the flesh was pulling away and he was with her, yet here.

  Repetition, she said.

  We’ll try it someday, he said, not knowing what it was that he had let go, a household, a hug, an inner kiss.

  He knew she was thinking of his hand slipping down her ribs.

  Sounds like some experiment, she said: that shouldn’t be repeated.

  But the event, unforced, did just that. Repeated itself. They’d sense together an embarrassment. They’d know it as surely as they recalled her biting her lower lip when she was sure she had him and she couldn’t lose. Or him shutting his eyes when he couldn’t win. As surely as they recalled his call from Washington the first week of July one year when they were married to say he couldn’t join them in the country the next day because of the airlines strike and Joy saying with the slant in her voice down which they slipped like dual sinners, Take a train, Take a bus—when she knew that the strike was an assignment: yet one that someone else could have covered, she hardly knew the people he worked with but she knew that (and she knew a lot about his work and would talk about it). Yet the children—it was the children who were most disappointed that July day; and he knew this and the slant in her voice that was her irritation for not showing more disappointment herself—because she didn’t know how much there was—and she looked through the dry ovals of big leaves up against the window, rhododendron, and to the left the spruce trees, two of them—no, three for heaven’s sake—three, at three in the afternoon, and she looked beyond them into the leaves of the trees down by the pond and through these into the stippled pattern of glare off the pond—it was three-quarters of a mile across and it was called a pond—and she said into the phone, "It’s nice here." And she thought they ought to buy the place, thinking, It’s only the two miles from the village, which wasn’t what mattered—but then she heard the kids yelling, and Andy Injun flashed past the window and Flick came rushing by the house, and Flick stopped short, wondering among other things what she was doing playing with him, her long, fine hair combed out
down to her bare ribs, hair across her cheek, and she looked into the window at her mother holding the phone receiver against her head and looked with a blankness Joy wanted her husband there to fill, blank like the children’s two curiosities sitting one winter morning so unfairly at the kitchen table with their father when she came in the front door with last night’s clothes on—so unfairly late when they should have been off to school—and in Washington (with voices behind him) he said to her in New Hampshire, "I can see Flick and Andy, I can see them, listen I see Flick through the window where you’re standing, hey for a second you weren’t mad."

  "Oh get out, you only knew because I told you," she said.

  "No you didn’t—you were telling me to take the train, and you were thinking of buying the place. You could run it as a non-profit home"—the words came out like that.

  For your old age, she’d thought; but there in her ear—knowing she hadn’t said a thing about buying—she had felt him as if he were standing behind her, saying, as he now did say, "No for Christ’s sake excuse me, I only meant maybe I couldn’t get back if I didn’t go away. How’s that?"

  "Lousy," she said.

  "I need a haircut," he said, thinking of that Ray Spence, his hair as long as the Beatles’ then, and his speckled hand coaxing a goatee he had grown, looked right through Mayn when Mayn said a grim hello thinking of Spence’s hair, not his deals—sometimes she told him it was time—"I feel grubby, itchy," he said, and abruptly he was not so much in her ear as in front of her: not some male to be photographed for a frame on a wall enclosing a room—though she’d seen them do it both ways, woman in all her skirts seated, man above on two feet, but now he was seated in this photographerless pose into which she would put the two of them once every month or six weeks for many years in the city—hair the same matched with the same scissors, times collapsing into the same mindful hands playing above the same immemorial head in the city, and in the country in the summer, in New York, New Hampshire, come to think of it Brussels for a time that she had unilaterally terminated after the school in the person of a large-breasted teacher in a white blouse had repeatedly tried to make Flick right-handed—and in these poses Mayn was always in front of her, the wide head of coarse, grayish hair, a dish towel tucked into his neck, or an old sheet like in a regular man’s barbershop, for she’d taken her son Andrew to the barbershop on wide, prosperous Third Avenue that his friend went to, Andrew tight-roping the curb of the sidewalk, rising up on his sneakers as he did when he and his father and sister walked hand in hand through a slower-moving crowd from the subway to the Stadium, it was an exaggeration of the way everyone might walk in health and happiness.

  In the barbershop Andrew wanted his mother to be not there yet not to leave.

  It was like acquiring genuine qualifications under pretenses, and the next time, before his father took him to the park to play ball and then sit on a bench eating hot dogs and ice cream while his father recalled one of his own grandmother’s Indian stories about the giant Choorian bird that, like an intercontinental transoceanic steed, flew its mistress the Princess Nay of Manchoor to the land of the American Navajo and Pueblo but, in the absence of its accustomed food, ate the chief’s horses until at last he had to do something about it, Andrew was able first to take his father to the barbershop as if introducing him to a place where Andrew was known—knew the ropes, knew the drill—and so Andrew was glad to find his barber unoccupied and go directly to the chair where, standing, he could say that only he was having a haircut, not his father. (He said father.)

  Whereas Mayn favored a barstool. That is, in a bar.

  That is, if he was going to be talked to from the side or behind his back. Maybe she was right, maybe he had been massacred by bad barbers for years before he met his wife. Saved my life, he said one Sunday Lucille was there for breakfast. You owe her that? asked Lucille, looking down her nose and through a fresh bagel she was about to bite. You’ll leave her if you lose your hair. But that wasn’t it either (the bad barbers)—for he had felt massacred by good barbers, the alien size of the steel, sounding between the low, stationary voice and the traveling touch upon his soft head, each abrasion between the shears sealed by that higher-pitched tsit raced by the music breath of the blades opening, inching. Joy had thought of cutting his hair, or he had asked her to take over, they didn’t recall who started it. He lent her his head to practice on. She was pregnant with Flick, they both recalled that. He dreamed she was chipping the hair with a tool he couldn’t see and he woke up in sly self-defense when the pieces began coming down on top of him.

  Nearly twelve years of his prematurely gray hair piled up around them so now he needed more than the eyes in the back of his head that she’d said once she knew he had because he had thought he needed them.

  Oh sometimes he thought that was all he had, the eyes in back. She laughed; she couldn’t help it.

  But come on, she said—while he receded again (or was that her expanding with some fit of contentment?), receded through the years of living together, it was several years now—"Come on be serious," how had he seen the two things behind him?—seen her lick her lips and the tear push out onto her lower lashes?

  "Leave the eyebrows," he said, and wanting to lean his head, eyes and all, back into her—wherever those back eyes were (she having withdrawn her long scissors, he felt sure)—he must have made some move he did not feel, for she was laughing about those eyebrows in the back of his head, "Don’t lean back!" But he was sure he hadn’t moved.

  "Aren’t you there?" he asked.

  "I’m there," she said.

  But come on, how had he seen Joy lick her lips, and how had he seen the tears weighing upon her eyelash?

  He panicked. Why had he known these things? Were they some waste?

  Panicked the way when he’d waited for a man he had hit to get up off the floor and the man didn’t, and the panic wasn’t that this was the man’s apartment or a man named Martin Wagner might find his nose had turned more than a corner and left him with a future headache he would not be able to feel in the morning (and it was already morning)—it was a wild space in him flown in by Joy and this guy made of nights spent here—probably panic not about that but the time through which had happened slowly what he hadn’t seen he couldn’t take until there it was. The ultimate push-up the man on the floor seemed attempting, or words out in the open he couldn’t take back; he’d been around, he wasn’t so shockable, yet there he was on the future end of a thick cube of time you saw through, looking back on how he’d awaited a love that was still there on her side too. And was this how, later, he panicked at seeing (when he could not see) the lick of the lips and a grand tear weighing on the eyelash?

  Then he saw why.

  It was that he’d known what she was thinking. So of course he could see what her face would do. Was he awaiting a terrible loss of her that would bring him some news? What a jerk!

  He in front, she cutting his hair right behind him so that with the small of his back he could butt her tight belly as if its hardness were its largeness and he with his reverse face could come only into nosing tangency with it while it went on its way—on with its thought. Her thought. Which he did not presume to know. But couldn’t stay away from. That is, he was minding his own business and she was snipping—still learning—and they were discussing his father: of how, a full ten years after the family paper run by his father and his uncle had folded, his father had said this other son of his would never have kept it going if it had been still printing when he was old enough to think about taking it over, never in a million years, not with more county business, not with a connection in Jersey City or the State House.

  "As if you’d been the one to let it fold," said Joy.

  "Well, I would have—he was right."

  "He couldn’t know."

  "I’d delivered enough of his bread-and-butter job printing to know the future."

  "That’s what I’m saying—"

  "I know that’s what you’re s
aying."

  "Wait, I haven’t said it," she objected.

  "Make up your mind—"

  "Not in so many words I didn’t say it, but it’s what I meant. He was making you responsible for what had already happened to him years before because carrying the paper obviously wasn’t in your future—not with the weekly competition—they tripled—and getting the farmers around the county, and the advertising."

  "Your scissors are soothing."

  "Experience is."

  He could feel her almost drop the subject.

  He said her name.

  He leaned back but missed her. She was looking at the job she’d done. She was looking at him. Looking into the back of his head that he knew she would heedlessly nick someday, if only a paper-thin cut—as if the music in the next room were being played by her upon his scalp, and she could heed only some thought that, let’s say, she shared at that moment with him.

  A record ended and they heard a fire engine getting louder, and a new record dropped softly.

  ‘‘There’s a lot to my father."

  "Come on, I know that."

  "Well, not that much."

  She laughed.

  He’d brought up the subject. Put an idea in somebody’s head, get it back with interest.

  He heard her breathe, and she wasn’t thinking how to even out his hair, she was thinking he’d said this instead of what he felt about that man—as a father, a husband for his mother. Mayn had felt her sympathy but in the exhaled breath he felt the quantity of her knowledge of him, the sheer neutral amount. And he was about to say, well, he’d had his share of choices, his father had let him alone. ("Sorry this is taking so long," she said.) But Joy began to cut his hair again while they both knew that she might push at his weaknesses—until they went away!—and get at him, but not the way Mayn’s younger brother Brad did, who needled brother Jim with what the local electrical contractor Bob Yard had said in the barbershop, in the atmosphere of sleepy talcum cut with a dash of sweet hair tonic, and Bob had said Jim Mayn was too damn independent, a wise bastard to boot, too smart for his own hometown—until Jim let Brad have it, which was what Brad had wanted all along, to be told he was in a rut and had never known enough to know he seriously wanted anything, he was timid—while (wait) in his own business smarter and better than that old cable-throwing fuse-screwer Bob Yard any day of the week. Maybe their father wanted the same treatment but never got it.