Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "But I could enjoy TV with you. Why not?"

  "Remember when the sound went off on Claude Rains?"

  "He was the judge at Nuremberg."

  "Sentencing Paul Lukas."

  "Yes, and suddenly they bleeped the sound. The judge said ‘extermination’—no, that wasn’t it."

  "It was ‘gas ovens,’ ‘ said Joy, and they laughed—which was like a moment of silence.

  "You didn’t say what was being covered by this cover story of ours." He wished that he’d called from a pay box. He’d have asked her to call him back, and she would not have said, "Get the operator to charge it to your number" and he knew she hated the expense of long-distance calls, and he wondered what that pressure would have done to this call in 1974.

  "Covered? Oh I guess letting you travel so much."

  "Would you have stopped me?"

  "Your eyes," she said into the phone, "you’ve got them closed."

  "But," he said, "if you bite your lip now you’ll nip your goddamn tongue." The cuteness got to him then, but so did such expensive knowledge.

  He heard a man’s voice behind her—but whether speaking to her or someone else was hard to tell—while she said, "Oh we know all the reasons. Pick one. Pick one angry reason. Remember how my father loved me and then kicked me out to be a high achiever, remember how your father never left your mother, or was it the other way around? it was the other way around."

  How could Joy?

  He heard himself in a soap opera, but he couldn’t see himself.

  She’d lived with him for twelve years, at least twelve years, and knew all about his family. Distance was what she had now, and she had the range, oh didn’t she! (And coverage.)

  He said, "It was the other way around. She died." Joy had always made him feel he owed her something beyond him, but then she said it, "You make me feel I owe you something that’s beyond me."

  "Listen," he said, "did you really forget about my mother dying?"

  "I agree," she said, when he was just thinking Oh why did I phone?

  So she knew she would hang up, and they both did, and he had the edge this time on account of having encouraged Flick to phone Joy tonight but now that he’d made that virtuous feeling explicit to himself he’d lost the edge, he was always in the wrong, but then he was convinced she was saying the same thing at that moment, though to a country gentleman with brown cheeks and a fair liquor budget, and a lot of books, and a rack of firearms. What was their cover story?

  Always in the wrong? But Flick with her start-fast-and-suddenly-stop voice, her quiet tension, her inquisitor’s indifference, her way of shifting to the other side of her chair like she was preparing to get at you or to leave, she didn’t make him feel in the wrong even when she said one night when he arrived in Washington and phoned her and because she didn’t want to go to the football game with him Sunday she went out to dinner with him right there and then though she’d already eaten—said like a child blurting out what she really means yet so that afterward this seems one more thing thrown into the gap of what’s really and truly felt—"But how do you know your mother committed suicide, they never found her!"

  "Oh well," he grinned at his daughter, who knew him well, "can’t blame her if she tried and failed."

  Mayn blinked and he remembered yes that in that letter that used the words cover story Joy had said things about their parallel parents and a mother who left, at least for a long time which was as good as forever—he didn’t buy a word of it—but he’d jumped ahead of this stuff that Joy had arrived at with a nice analyst who’d taken her to the theater—no, it was the young lawyer who said "Quite" when he agreed and took her to hear him argue an appeal in the old court building on Madison Square with the sculptures of philosophers, or they looked like philosophers or some such charlatans standing on top and Joy had said the carved and cushioned stained-glass courtroom was like Lüchow’s restaurant when this lawyer had taken her there for dinner—but oh Mayn had jumped ahead, plunged on beyond likenesses between parents and childhoods into what, he did not know—some accelerated coverage—until years later he now in 1974 looked back to a 1970 phone call (thinking his work used him, not the other way around, and why was he going to Montpelier, Vermont?) and thought he ought to have been able to stay married, he was so close to Joy.

  For it was the one phone call in which mention had been made of this thing that often happened between them at the distance that had sometimes seemed to work better the greater it was, but then seemed always to be the same, like a voice sprung out of the phone’s diaphragm from Paris or Chicago, it didn’t matter, it might have been Kilimanjaro where he’d never been, but this time New York had been where he’d called from—he knew damn well some of what was in his mind, he didn’t live in New York any more than Joy did but he’d just (after all these years) become a landlord, an absentee landlord—at noon he’d put his name on his late landlord’s son’s new dotted line because this quiet heir by agreeing through the state attorney-general’s office never to evict rent-controlled tenants in order to sell their apartments had bypassed co-oping, which would have required approval by thirty-some percent of the tenants, and he had begun quietly to sell off what apartments he could—a vacancy now and then to friends, or a deal like this with Mayn who had held on to the lease when he’d moved out quite a while ago and now for the time being would pay a reduced upkeep, get a good rent, and figure to resell in four to five years, and it was all very clear: here he was at the club half-dressed, he’d asked a waiter to bring him a drink and he’d reached for a phone—he kept his membership at the club though he wasn’t in town much—his hair was damp, it was wet at the neck and a drop ran down his ear, she never asked him about money, his salary or how he lived—he knew the waiter, the waiter knew him—he had the phone in his hand knowing only that he wanted to call her and knowing that she was going to call him—he knew this with absolute certainty—and knew that she when he got her would not say she’d been going to call him because it sounded phony to her: and with this in mind their voices then met and when he had said, "This is totally unrehearsed," and she had come back with "Impossible," and he, "Don’t tell me what you were just thinking," and she (at a flirtatious slant), "But you know," and he (pressing into that awful empty gap which might be just long knowledge of each other but now as if they were inside each other’s body which was a third body—or fourth—that wasn’t anywhere), "I love you—you know that" (which wasn’t what he’d phoned to say, he thought) and she, "It goes without saying—almost," and he, "You were thinking . . ."

  And then against some bitter amusement with which she kept guard, he did not continue, did not say more, for it was being said, what there was of it, and it seemed to be but one word; yet like interference through this one word he then also heard in the air between them what she would say tritely, sentimentally, dumbly four years later by phone the night he’d taken Flick to the Greek restaurant, "Women and men maybe weren’t meant to get along": something less far-reaching was what had been meant—by the meaner, that is—and her father didn’t say the angry words of contempt for her thinking that she knew were in his mind and she liked him for so then she said, "Sometimes you don’t think," but beyond the interference which made him feel alone he heard the one word as if it might go on like a vibration that goes on borne by he wouldn’t happen to know what—inertia—how would he know?—and wanted to say it to her but hell she was thinking it and more than thinking it he felt she watched him to see if his eyes shut in despair or he let out a grin and took a quick big breath which could mean he would tell her a homecoming story about an arrow of lightning scorching the crotch out of Andrew Jackson’s pants until he couldn’t ride it any more but took it in both hands and, identifying it as Indian, slung it thousands of miles west where instead of disciplining the not-really-so-red Indians it lanced the Eastern Princess’s giant horse-eating bird, wing and heart, which rejoiced the Indians to be rid of what to them was an unfamiliar monster, was alarming to the
faraway Choorian parents, but was as much an inconvenience to the Princess as the devotion of the Navajo Prince, and a challenge to the Inventor of New York who had hoped to get a ride home on the bird, which took off in the wrong or anyway other direction while the Navajo Prince with useless secrets on his person followed the Princess to the east coast only to be turned into a nocti-lucent cloud by one account or shot by the Princess or Harflex her suitor in a field looking over the town of Windrow, by an account that maybe not even Flick’s father knew nor why his grandfather was out in Pa. in early 1894 talking to union people planning to join Jacob Coxey’s march on Washington and a Pittsburgh astrologer, Cyclone, Jack London ran afoul of when he himself came on the march disguised as a San Francisco hobo—man and wife (you don’t say "wife and man," remarked Lucille who impressed Flick for a long time until her smartness wiped everything out except a miserable and witty and glittering cynicism)—and Joy would wait like an actress counting and would say O.K. she would, or he’d find it hard to give her a short answer, or any answer, to a question about his work, and she’d say "Don’t look down your nose at me," though she watched him with attention and love, which sometimes he thought were the same and sometimes not, until he couldn’t bear it and, here in a club the annual dues of which she’d more than once asked him, he now leaned back and spun round to catch her watching him though she was in his ear, and he hit a voice not quite at the instant he saw spots and had a jolt in the back of his head knocking the tray the waiter had brought though not upsetting the old-fashioned glass and while he stared at the waiter whom he knew, he said into the phone and she said to him with as perfect timing as the timing with which simultaneously he said to her, "You made me think it" and he knew he had called to know she was, for whatever reason, thinking about the one word which was a name and was the person she’d asked him pointedly about before because she’d guessed the person as dangerous and she had seemed once to have listened to this person (only a name to her) more clearly in one story than her husband himself had listened though she had never met the man and had heard Spence’s story only from Mayn and had never been near Spence, for it was Spence who had been in her mind, Mayn knew that, and the reason might be the intimate and painful night of the haircut or might be all these stories she’d liked at first but come to fear as she feared this motion sickness—no, habit—her husband had, that kept him moving though she had guessed also that his work was dangerous also to him and not in the crude and usual sense, but dangerous like dope, yes? but Spence, like a code word, had been in their minds at this moment of 1970 in New York and New Hampshire and he and Joy both knew.

  And it had been in the gap of their separation during which he had reached for the phone amid a stream of white towels, green clanking lockers, clattering squash-racket heads flickering by his chair, a clank of scales, a sweaty essence of rubbing alcohol, shaving lotion, the breath of sweet whiskey, and other words and sights altogether heavy enough so that he might have thought to see this word Spence materialize here but Mayn knew that this was unlikely in this absence of his own in which he could no more conceive of his children never having been than miss any more a real ten-year-old boy named Andrew (who’d start talking to him as if he’d never been away saying, "See, Jimmy has this dog that’s having puppies") and whom at five he had lost on the subway, and a real three- or nine- or twelve-year-old girl named Flick who listened at eighteen to his tales of—let’s tell the press it’s called—telepathic separation (though he never put it that way), telepathic separation, there’s the inside dope—and didn’t say a word, and whom likewise he didn’t live with any more—partly because the boy wasn’t five or ten any more (though he might live to lose his old man on the subway) and the girl, who was two years older than the boy, wasn’t nine sitting in a yellow wall of a school bus any more but was fourteen now and would be eighteen in 1974.

  But say the word.

  Mayn said it. Spence.

  "Yes," said Joy into the phone as if she were part of an experiment, "I was thinking it all right."

  They exclaimed at how this correspondence occurred. They didn’t know. Did Joy know what Spence had said to Mayn once when a prominent importer had committed suicide—said he knew Mayn’s mother had committed suicide because Mayn had told him but thought maybe it took a second suicide to balance the first—but "I never mentioned my mother to that son of a bitch—" "Remember you’re not very bright, pal," Joy said, "he’s given you your own stuff back so you didn’t pick it up." Well that wasn’t accurate, but he wasn’t going to argue. They joked and he exclaimed again and said he wondered if their interstellar communication was the real thing, but he said he didn’t believe in this real thing anyway, it was coincidence, but Joy said she didn’t care about the proof of it, which (he at once said) was beyond him in any event (and beyond the scientists too, he thought); still she seemed uncertain (uncertain for her), and he thought she was seeing someone seriously, it was two years since 1968, and he asked to speak to the children at the same time thinking that the knowledge he and Joy had of each other sometimes made the children not there, and Flick wasn’t home but Andrew was and asked when his father was coming to see them, he’d made a headband and a belt with the leather kit and was going to make a pair of real beaded moccasins. Mayn felt his hand getting cold and felt it on the dry compactness of kapok —the life jackets Joy had spent time pricing one spring—and he put his drink on a table, then took a quick sip and put it down again and said to his son that yes he would visit them in about two months but he would have to ask Joy and maybe they would take a trip in July, and when Andrew said he would ask Mommy now, Mayn managed to hold him, knowing Andrew thought he’d meant all four of them; but then he couldn’t bring himself to say to Andrew, "You, me, and Flick" and he asked Andrew to put Joy on again, but after Andrew said, "O.K., Dad," he said to his mother, "Dad wants to take me and Flick on a trip," and Mayn called into the phone "In July!" so that a man standing in a towel who had just said "Six percent" to another man in a towel stopped talking and looked at Mayn as if July reminded him of something he didn’t want known, say he was speculating in kapok futures, one hand protectively over his balls.

  Joy said, "You never told me you’d been in South America and I do read the paper and I guess I happened to hit on Spence because you’d said he had a bad reputation and took chances you wouldn’t take, but worse than chances; and I knew it was business you were on but I worried."

  He had believed her, but her worry had been a new kind of distance that scared him—was he, well, another person now to her?—but what did he expect? And she hadn’t gone so far as to say he ought to have told her.

  He didn’t owe her anything.

  The waiter’s bar check had had a dark-gray arc across it from the glass. Now he and Joy had said goodbye and he had forgotten to say, Give my love to Flick. Maybe the marriage had not broken up.

  But here was Flick in ‘74, and the future he had once felt divided from by these trips back home to his family was his state now.

  Yet multiplied with more than interest and fascination and capability and a push of what might have been lonesomeness if it had been all around him instead of just behind him—multiplied also into what he recognized as having been once familiar, namely being in two places at once: in the old days, one of them was that household of his parents where old troubles were reinvented every day or week and the least of troubles was his father’s getting out a paper every Thursday—and the other household was his grandmother’s down the street where he looked at albums of brown snapshots of his mother on a tricycle, his mother on a swing hung from the maple in her backyard, his mother at six and seven darkly calling with her arm thrust out into the sky; the same unusual mother who once before her own disappearance into the elements had told him of a mythical town his grandmother (her mother) had named—and then Jim’s mother caught herself—that seemed also to be their own hometown, and Jim had been able to tell his mother that he knew the name of the town, which did not
exactly enable her to die with a smile on her face because she didn’t die—at least, not then—but enabled her to smile remembering stories Margaret had told her too—albums, albums, and albums at his grandmother’s down the street where, when he stayed there and heard the doves like liquid flowers opening again and again, and the distant sleep of his grandfather, he would get up twice each early morning; the household where (in bed) he learned to whistle; and where he unearthed clippings from the nineties when his grandmother had traveled to Chicago and the West, mailing her indulgent impressions back to Windrow to be printed in the Democrat, and never let herself become an old person leaning painfully forward in a chair in order to hear.

  Multiplied now into a life he could not explain to Joy. Except in some condensed report of acquiring information, and getting at the truth. And not wasting any more words. So many covering the distance they’d come. While feeling also that a world for which the word world was wrong was happening to him like a long-range capability and he might be part of its vein and cracks if he knew more, but the knowledge brought out the coward in him if laziness was a form of cowardice; and if he would not bang his head against someone else’s table at night thinking again how he might after all have found a way to live with his wife, he could feel wasted by his freedom, he could phone the dreaded Lucille once, and he could like her, and be told to see a movie called Persona and see it and wonder if women were Lesbians, this freedom of his renewing him to be courageously annihilated in future until he became half-convinced he’d been turned into some future more fearful and less original than dabbling imaginers had already worked out. And so he would try to get away from that distant future through which he fell, by seeing such other times as perhaps had not been altogether lost and seeing them so well that they came back into being, times the world had passed through and times when he and his wife had hurt each other—had shown some soulmate kinship in how they moved apart—had even had a lot of laughs—even to finding in the paper at the same moment the morning after Playhouse 90’s Judgment at Nuremberg that the actor Claude Rains had had the last two words of his outraged question deprived of sound—kaput—because the sponsor was the American Gas Association which in 1959 supplied almost every kitchen range in America. The question was "How in the name of God can you ask me to understand the extermination of men, women, and innocent children in gas ovens?"