Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And so Joy and Jim, Jim and Joy, sat at the kitchen table without their girl and boy one December night. (Looks like Jim must have been home!) But wait: here’s Lucille, too. And it’s not night. But it’s the kitchen table— kitchen sink, white light, brilliant new brown-and-orange linoleum. And Lucille has trapped them in an entertainment that shows no sign of ending, it’s all ending, and so the situation is this: Sally, who could never tear herself away, you know, partly because her parents had bequeathed her the faith that you never get something for nothing, is getting five hundred a month from Buck for the next five years, right? (and after that a dollar a year, which is another story, which as it turns out we won’t be coming to), but Sally will lose the five hundred a month if she spends more than twenty-one days per year with any man, cohabiting or just company for dinner. And I (Lucille) called Buck one night and told him he was afraid to let go and he should take a look at his girlfriend, scarcely out of high school so he must hate women, right? Right! he said at once, he must hate women, that’s half the population, and he gets off the point telling about a Christmas birthday present this kid just gave him wrapped up in newspaper, you know, but an unusually beautiful newspaper collage was the way the wrapping turned out, and I said don’t get off the point, the point is Sally and this twenty-one-day arrangement. Buck gets huffy. She was the one who wanted out, he says.

  But Buck, you should really let go of Sally.

  Let go! he says, and for a moment he knows there’s nothing more he can find to say.

  Yes, let go. You think you’re being a good daddy to her but you’ve tied her up for five years in this chastity prostitution and the only alternative is secret affairs as if she were married.

  Two days a month, says Buck, is good for her health.

  More like two nights if you divide twelve into twenty-one.

  That’s the only time she does it, anyway, says Buck.

  Things might have changed, Buck.

  Things have, Lucille.

  Why don’t you drop the alimony idea entirely? she says to Buck.

  It’s Sally that wants it, says Buck to Lucille (which is me, and imagine me putting my hand gently on his arm over the phone).

  It’s both of you that think you want it, I suggest to him, and I think he feels the hand on the arm, he’s on the attack but he’s got his cheek on his hand and lying on his stomach and he’s beginning to feel the massage.

  Suppose, I say, I get in touch with Sally and tell her how you feel about the alimony.

  Go to hell, he says. But they have the same lawyer; you know Jack Beebe, who takes notes on envelopes wherever he is, whoever’s talking, and since Sally thinks she’s setting up her own little catering company, she’s been having dinner with Jack at her place and one night Buck phones and Jack picks it up but Sally grabs it away from him and Buck wants to know what’s going on and Jack disappears, and Buck tells Sally he thinks alimony is beneath them and doesn’t she? And she asks him if he had her favorite charity in mind as a substitute and he wants to know who’s with her, and she says someone incredibly nice and she’s really busy, Buck, and in the silence filled by the music and, as it turns out, Jack Beebe’s breathing on the extension, Sally is heard to say, Buck I don’t want the money, if you want a witness if you want to draw it up I’ll put it in writing, and in the pause with three breaths on a two-way hook-up (two male lawyers and one lay woman) Buck is upset enough to say like a kid in a small voice, "OX., Sallums." And she hangs up and starts crying and is comforted by Jack at her end.

  Then before they know it, they decide to take a vacation in England go to the theater and to Scotland, and Buck’s going crazy not putting two and two together and asked me to dinner but it wasn’t possible but then we did have dinner at a Greek restaurant and I said I hadn’t seen Sally, and the upshot is that Buck draws up a paper one night which his girlfriend is probably too young to witness and invites Sally to cancel all alimony payments and he puts thirty thousand dollars into Sally’s bank account so everyone’s happy, but Jack Beebe doesn’t want Buck’s money because Jack wants Sally and they’re going to get married but Sally has given Jack an ultimatum, she won’t marry him without Buck’s money. And so they’re getting married but Sally says basically she’d like to just borrow a husband for twelve months. And that’s not the end of the story, kids.

  (Mayn’s own true wife observed of his unfailingly courteous handling of women that when she saw a man rude to women she would at once think he didn’t like women, as if women—whom she sometimes heard her husband call "girls," even when not out with the "boys"—required her husband’s special treatment.) Fit this in.

  And so, to return, Joy and Jim sat at the kitchen table one December night late facing each other, wondering who would go to bed first, their fingers near but fixed and heavy. She wondered if the apartment house would go coop, and he asked if she was interested. His hand was around his coffee mug, her hand lay on her purse, a leather purse with a brass snap.

  He was going away for two days. Plenty of shopping days left.

  He asked her what she wanted this year. He put it quizzically enough and with a plainness of feeling, he thought, but they both knew she liked surprises.

  She thought a moment—or waited—and said, "It’s something practical but obvious."

  He had to think—and he knew he wasn’t too good at presents. Her purse was worn but he wouldn’t get her a purse. Flick could, though Flick was almost twelve; she could, but she had big ideas. He wondered if Flick was asleep. She slept with such abandon, while her brother slept with huddled concentration.

  "I’d like to buy you all a house in the country."

  "Sleighbells and woodsmoke."

  "I mean the house was always your idea, but I mean it."

  "We will."

  "It seems far off."

  "We will."

  "But you want something practical and obvious for Christmas. Is it something that you have and you want a new one?" He was just talking.

  She got up and she heard Andrew snorting horribly.

  They laughed at the noise, and the noise softened.

  They were scared, and the fear passed between them, according to the void.

  He couldn’t think in the midst of what must be her thoughts too. She’d made a fist around the purse. "Obvious, you said. Is it visible? Can I see it?" he said.

  Joy sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten him. She looked at him like a zombie and she said mechanically, "If you were more observant, you’d know."

  He wanted to be dead for a moment. She was offensive.

  What drew him toward her? He’d lost time.

  "If I were more observant—" he began but ran into such interference he didn’t catch up with the words he wanted, and in their absence he half rose and reaching out lifting onto the balls of his feet he struck at her with his open hand as she pulled back.

  Off the top of his head he struck at her, and the kitchen bulb turned them into bilious kooks who might have drunk too much and woken to some such fact or other—but they’d drunk a third of a bottle between them and three hours ago.

  Her look at him was still empty, but not void.

  He heard himself say (getting up), "Why did I do that!"—getting up maybe to try again, this time not to miss, but he was so sure of something else that he hung there on his hands leaning at her, his eyes like mental cases all by themselves—she saw through them into his head but emptily, uncryingly clear through his head to a point beyond him—his eyes vomiting drops of dumbness, imbecility—he was sure that he had said, "Why did I do that!" —said out of his murderous belief that if he should ever hit her he would have to leave but said too because she, who had pulled back just an inch enough, had thought those very words he had said.

  Had thought them first. Or at the same time.

  They were both crazy, but no he was protecting himself thinking that.

  "Give up," she said—had he heard it in the future and now could hear in the present? "Ple
ase give up."

  That was all there was to it.

  That was it.

  But later, during weeks when she was getting ready to leave, she asked him questions about himself. She asked how his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

  "Who knows?" he said. His brown leather grip stood in the hall where he’d left it hours and years ago—well, that was a cheap comparison, two to three hours was the time—if he was confused, the lease was one reason, for he’d been thinking about holding on to the lease of the apartment as an investment (though the landlord would let him out of it), holding on to it as if because he’d seen in the elevator that very night a woman (but it wasn’t that she was a woman) who’d recently moved in—into this building he’d spent so many years in—a friendly woman in the elevator, short fluffy hair, smiled right into him but no man-baiting bullshit, but with beside her the tallest Oriental he’d ever seen, and standing beside her as if hung from the elevator’s ceiling, a metal plate you would push out if you were moving something too high and then you could look right up the dark glimmering shaft as if you might fall down through its greasy hairy skylight—new to the building the woman was—was that it? it should have made him in his present state of mind want even more to go, get out, be forever away from the apartment house—but he was confused, too, because he was repeating and repeating the information he’d just received that Joy had gotten Flick a partial scholarship at a boarding school in Vermont not too far from their town in New Hampshire, an "academy" Andrew called it humorously because in the fall he was going to public school, which he said could be worse because he’d have in his class two of the town kids he’d played with every summer as long as he could remember, and one of them had a snowmobile. Andrew became more sweet; he was more than bright.

  "I mean," said Joy, "how did she teach you to whistle?—did she tell you what to do with your mouth?"

  "I don’t think she ever told me." He spoke deliberately, slowly.

  "You just do it."

  "Well, I do remember it was in bed early in the morning, I was four going on five."

  "My father was cooking me breakfast by then," said Joy.

  Mayn looked at her with a question she felt they couldn’t use, which was—and he picked it up—You sure we ought to be doing this? Isn’t this a bit too charming?

  "And I would stay with her some weekends and I’d crawl into bed with her, my grandfather was in another room sawing wood with knots in it, and her gray hair was let down in plaits"; and he thought he smelt apple, but maybe it was hearing the doves outside in the morning air and the house floated upon the day; "I remember her soft skin."

  Joy looked at him as if to say, You’re speaking differently.

  And his grandmother and he had giggled over his attempts at whistling. He knew the true sound was there somewhere in the void and he went for it. Her pale lips puckered. Her eyes watched his lips until she couldn’t help laughing and then herself couldn’t have whistled if she’d wanted to.

  Nor could he. Until one morning he could. He’d woken her up. Her back was to him. She turned over and right then she smelled of oatmeal and what he maybe didn’t know then was witch hazel, and she couldn’t get her eyes quite open or she could but didn’t see yet, and then when she did she woke up—right there with him—woke up with a smile at him puckering and trying so hard he saw his own nose—or was he five?—looking down below her face so as not to catch her eyes and he wet his lips again. And at the instant when she would have giggled, even with admiration, a couple of things happened: she didn’t laugh, number one, and number two he found, held between his lips and his tongue tip that moved up and down behind his teeth, a free space of air and sound that he could do what he wanted with, and he couldn’t now recall what tune he whistled—maybe "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"— but he was proud and smiled with his cheeks, and they giggled facing each other while he heard his grandfather, whom he loved to listen to the radio with, snoring in the other room, pillowed head shining as it did, even in the long dark, big nose up in the air. "You can whistle anything now," his grandmother said.

  And years later—not so many years later, and well before there was a Flick or an Andrew for him to retell a couple of her stories to—he’d written her a letter when she was very sick, but he’d gotten into it, recollecting the whistling they had done. He’d described all the whistling he’d done since. All the cities he’d whistled in. Across the landbridge connecting the coasts. The bathtubs and the nights, the classical records he’d whistled to, and the cabs he had heard doormen whistle for, and whistling he’d been doing at a street corner sometimes only to break off and wonder why he’d been whistling, and two beautiful girls that a group of sailors had whistled at in the rain in Tacoma. He wished he had that letter to his grandmother Margaret, their letters had crossed. She had filled her letters with news but had given the town the name she herself seemed to have inspired him to think up when he was very young, and they would look each other in the eye and he was stuck on his autobiography that everyone had to write for eighth-grade English and that she’d said not to get into a state about because it would come soon enough, and later his grandmother Margaret always referred to Windrow when she wrote to him and, with one lapse, used that name to no one else.

  "Are you going to unpack?" said Joy.

  "Who screwed around first?" Flick asked him one evening in New York, no longer in a mood to reflect upon an amazing grandmother she’d never known—her grazr-grandmother.

  Flick was eighteen and he was probably going to South America in a couple of weeks and she was in a brief period of not being in touch with her mother in New Hampshire, though both parents wrote her every week. The waiter would probably not have been curious, but the waiter had gone away, while the father was telling the daughter that old Bob Yard the electrical contractor who had wired Flick’s Uncle Brad’s house and the town’s streetlights all the way up to the cemetery but not including the traffic intersection near the race track had never relinquished his war story of the man who died twice in the Pacific and, coming to, after death number one, correctly predicted that six American ships would be sunk by Jap suicide pilots in the battle for Leyte Gulf and that we would stop the Kamikazes only with the granddaddy of all bombs—then died again for good with a magnetic halo shining golden over his belly.

  Flick said anyone could have predicted the bomb: it was just bigger.

  Mayn said he never knew if Bob Yard—Bad Bob Yard—believed the story, he wasn’t the type to believe it though Mayn’s mother might have believed it; Bob was a horny old wolf, but his wife thought he was a scream and they had an understanding, which meant that once she ripped a tuft out of his head (save it going gray), but the understanding must have included her and his, his and her, absences from home, and his words (shaking his head) that they were both getting on—at which she laughed looking to Jim he thought for agreement that her husband was droll—"getting on in years, I mean," said Bob, and they both had to laugh at that, and because crazy as it or they might be they did sort of get on together.

  Flick said she would have shrimp kebabs.

  Her father was trivial, then? But then he got the grip of her eyes like a memory and she smiled and said it would be nice down where he was going, it was summer, she seemed to remember. And he said come to think of it her mother and he had had an understanding that worked best at a distance— which got him a laugh that was a bit off—but then out of Mayn came the unforeseen notion that over the phone the diaphragm waves retained a remainder of message units that did not get translated back into words at the receiving end but just went on. He had some of that stuff surprisingly in his head, and it made her think of how her mother had sometimes called him "Mayn," and once in a letter he’d consoled Flick for her supposedly barren imagination by telling her that the void was not just a regular void and empty but was full of all that we did not expect of ourselves—which actually surprised him, that is to find himself saying things like that.

 
; He told the waiter they would have the grape leaves and some roe, and the waiter said, "Taramasalata," translating it into sharp, frank approval.

  The waiter went away.

  "Who screwed around first?"

  "It was officially mutual, I don’t see how that happened," the father said; "but on the other hand, it wasn’t much. From time to time we both felt our hearts weren’t in any of that stuff. A shrink—pardon me—"

  "—very funny—"

  "—asked her if she’d ever cheated on me and she walked out of his office. But she came back because she wasn’t sure if it was the word ‘cheated’ or the surprise, and she knew he was better than that, he was a good man even if he used stupid words—well, square. You know. And there was cheating."

  "I know."

  "We were cheating ourselves."

  "Oh, great. Of what?"

  "I don’t know. Frankness? Because we were more afraid than silly, can you understand that?"

  Flick tipped up her glass and finished it and seemed to drop it back down to the table. She made him feel he was pausing and making her wait.

  "Sometimes I was afraid I’d find you all dead when I came home."

  "From where?"

  "Anywhere."

  "Like Washington or out West?"

  "Or someone’s apartment."

  "I remember you called from Washington and Mom cried when she hung up."

  "You know something, I always got the grip of her eyes when I phoned, it went right through me like a memory you know, it felt like a passage of time," he was saying, thinking of when he’d once felt this but hadn’t said it.