Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  news

  When the phone comes up in his hand, he has thought out this death of his ahead of time all by himself. For a second, it’s like huge, empty-headed stagefright, and no lights dim but the day pursues him with all the light of all the people he can’t become. But it has been given to him, this, and it is an awful thrill. "Thank you," he remembers saying just now to the man who was phoning as they had agreed, and he meant it. The human voice at the end of the phone line has done the best it could, authoritative and professional, a man, a friend with whom he might still try a set or two of tennis in the early evening under a pillow-like bubble on a city pier. Isn’t the news positive? The news has a future so pressing that his first thought was that he didn’t need to do anything. That is what he doesn’t need. He doesn’t need to do anything. But he doesn’t have time in which not to do anything. His thought has a funny side to it, and he weeps.

  He is weeping for the first time in he doesn’t know when, standing alone in his home, his apartment, knowing his front-door buzzer will go any minute. Not having enough time in which not to do anything. That was why he started crying: he has interested himself and knows it. Amused himself, as a parent tells a child. He has wept suddenly but, despite the news, not tragically. He has interested himself and he smiles. It comes upon him, the widening of that smile in the life of his face. He’s going to keep the news to himself instead of giving away his life, damn it. He snorts the snuffle in his nose, feels his socks inside his shoes.

  He dials his first wife, listens to the regular sounds and when another woman’s voice answers he remembers she is away and he hangs up. What if he were to tell the strange woman the news? Just a moment now; hold still. He smiles as if he is his own oldest friend behaving familiarly. He is bewildered, but he knows it. Some other being is here with him and it comes to him that it is not the angel of death because he doesn’t believe in angels. He has to wait here in the apartment, he can’t go out yet; but if he doesn’t, he is finished. But outside he is going to be embarrassed by the plain weight of what he now is. He will be thinking about every step he takes. Learning to walk again! That’s pretty good. He weeps. Destination unknown.

  He dials his second wife and sees that a child of his might answer and today he hangs up. He feels good. He doesn’t need to do anything. He has to do everything. He doesn’t need to do everything. He doesn’t have time to do nothing. Has he ever done nothing? The buzzer is going to go in a minute, and there is someone or something else not unfriendly but interesting here in the apartment. His girlfriend is going to phone, and he is looking forward to that. He has arranged for her not to know, but though he doesn’t think she knows, he has always loved her for knowing things even before she knows she does, and so today when she asks him how he is, she may not mean merely his whole beautiful and beloved being and self. She will tell him what time to meet her.

  "Could I have that in writing?" he joked with his friend, who then trusted him enough to say, "Going to hit me with a malpractice if I’m wrong?" "I hope it won’t come to that." "I hope we’ll talk."

  The buzzer bursts and the thought comes to him that his doctor could have less time than he. And with this thought comes the thought that when life comes down on top of you you might imagine, just imagine, dying to get out from under. He has interested himself again, he has done just that; and as he opens the door to the superintendent’s daughter, he sees that he has been interesting himself for a long time.

  She has her father’s heavy toolbox and she stands with her shoulders back, confident as a licensed electrician. "It’s in the kitchen, Carrie." "I know," she says. He has seen her so regularly over the years that her pale brown face looks much the same as when she was six looking up at him in the elevator, vivid with her kinky black braids and large skeptical eyes. In those days the mail got delivered by the super’s wife, who was Austrian.

  "Can’t sit around and wait for you to burn the house down," Carrie says over her shoulder. "How come you’re not in school?" he says. "Had one class this morning. I go to the Community College." The phone rings and he takes it in the kitchen. He points to the double-socket fixture where the refrigerator normally plugs in, and takes the wall phone off the hook.

  "How are you?" his girlfriend asks as if it is fifty mornings since she set eyes on him.

  "What time will you be finished?" he says, and his girlfriend pauses familiarly: "You O.K.?"

  He stops, because sadness hits his throat and is about to embarrass his voice. "No, as a matter of fact."

  "So what’s going on? You mad or something?"

  He isn’t going to tell his news to someone else in front of Carrie. She finds the circuit-breaker box. She has on pale blue overalls and a small black-and-white disarmament button pinned to one shoulder strap. She returns to the shorted socket, looking him in the eye as she selects a yellow-handled screwdriver. He says into the phone, "Actually, I’m raring to go"; and, getting out the words, he then does feel mad. Carrie smiles slightly, unscrewing the socket frame. He holds the phone out to her but she pays no attention. "Hang on, I’ll take it in the living room." He lets the phone dangle to the floor and feels curiously accompanied into the other room. "I’m on again," he breathes.

  "What do you mean, ‘raring to go’?" says his girlfriend. Some small object falls in the kitchen and Carrie mutters something. His girlfriend wants to know who’s there with him, and, feeling in two places at once, he tells her. She asks how long Carrie will be. "Didn’t her mother die?" That’s right; a few years ago.

  "I want you to know something," he says. He hears Carrie in the kitchen, tall and proud; he feels a presence near that other kitchen phone, maybe the enlarged reception, nothing more. "I am mad," he says very quietly.

  "What about?" his girlfriend asks.

  "I’ll tell you when I see you."

  "Oh, great," she says ironically.

  "I love you," he says.

  "I’m very glad to hear it."

  "I miss you," he says, and can’t go on.

  "I think about you all the time, even when I’m with you," she says.

  He feels, curling into his ear, the possibility that the kitchen phone is being listened to, like a speaker. He is going to die and he doesn’t give a damn how it comes out when he says it to her and to other people he loves, but he is not going to say it at the moment. It is here with him but he almost doesn’t know where.

  His girlfriend gives him a place and a time; they say goodbye; something drops in the kitchen. He sits down in an armchair and is unable to weep. "I’ve got to get out of here," he calls to Carrie. "I won’t be long," she says, preoccupied. He thinks about his children, he gives it up for the moment; he knows he wants to see them every day as it is, to feel them come and go near him; he knows they are not overwhelmingly disappointed in him. He thinks of his two former wives, neither of whom regarded him as especially thoughtful. He sees them but has consigned their names to another room and is interested in this brutal feat. The brunette will remember him as an entertaining splitter of hairs; the blonde will think of him as the absent father of her children. He will not be around to miss them but he knows they do not expect him to die like this. When he phones them, he often hears a precise degree of impatience coupled with mild fascination, perhaps at what moved him to call.

  What do you owe someone else when you are going to die shortly? A phone call, comes the answer, and he smiles but does not weep.

  "I forgot something," says Carrie. She passes from kitchen into foyer and pauses, detained, at the front door to look back at him.

  "Does your father cook in your family?" he asks.

  "No, he’s out at the airport all day. My sister and me do the cooking," says Carrie. The door slams. He doesn’t want to leave her here. She’s like family, but he doesn’t want to leave anyone here when he goes out. He doesn’t want to go out. He does have time in which to do nothing. He once upon a time in fantasy thought he would leave home if he was going to die. Be sure not to get tucke
d into a hospital. Go to an island beach to feel the water move; go to starve decently, or starve death out of his bloodstream.

  There’s still someone here, and he finds himself in the kitchen putting the phone back on the hook. Carrie’s toolbox is on top of the stove. He is not about to phone his first wife and tell her. It is a failure she would have to share like marriage, and he puts his hand on the phone and knows that she loves him. How does he know? It’s only himself telling him. When he was with her, he sometimes preferred his own company. Sometimzsl

  His girlfriend will not accept the news; she will touch him with her hands. She will want at least five more opinions, and she is right. She’s a fighter. His thoughts are no good to anyone. He inventories all the chairs and tables, pictures and rugs and lamps, three small Irish harps and two American Indian shields made out of hide from the hump of a buffalo, and he thinks that they will be here when he gets back and that were his thought made audible it would turn from words into laughter. His daughters and his son will live many nights and days with their father’s death, countless moons burning through the sky of their sleeping eyelids. Is it the presence of the superintendent’s daughter, even her absence, that keeps him from thinking about money, his job, his girlfriend’s face in deep, fortunate sleep when he will secretly and silently talk to her and she will sometimes answer him, though she would not believe this. Is he thinking more trivially than ever? Is he thinking about nothing? is that it? He weeps and laughs quietly, quietly, as the front door opens and Carrie must see him in the living room as she passes from foyer to kitchen.

  "I gotta go," he calls to her. He loves her.

  "I won’t be long," she says, a pale black girl in the kitchen replacing a short-circuited socket.

  He has to get his keys, his wallet, his medicine; has to brush his teeth, go to the bathroom, phone his son to ask how a college interview has gone; has to put on his shoes, put in the small silver cufflinks his girlfriend gave him, write a couple of checks and put them in envelopes, find some stamps, phone for theater tickets, put some albums back in the record cabinet. But this is not the nothing he has no time for. His eyes water at the thought, which is of interest no doubt only to him. Something drops in the kitchen. "Can I help you, Carrie?" he calls. "Are you kidding?" she says. "How you feeling?" she asks. "A lot better," he hears himself say. "That’s nice." "Hey, where’d you learn electricity?" he calls, but he doesn’t go into the kitchen. "You don’t have to stick around," she calls back; "I can lock up."

  In his bedroom he finds a five-dollar bill. He hunts for a stamp under a soiled blue handkerchief and something drops off the side of the bureau. He sees his hand in a mirror as he bends to the floor to find whatever it was. It’s a cufflink and it has rolled all the way under the bureau. He almost calls Carrie. His heart turns upon a point of pointless anguish while the cufflink waits. Something tells him to stop trying to move the bureau and, blindly with a gray oblong of laundry cardboard from one of his shirts, he sends the cufflink shooting clear out onto the rug.

  When he is ready, he goes to the kitchen and gives Carrie the five dollars. His fingers touch her palm. "You didn’t have to," she says, happily. "It’s appreciated," he says. "Anybody can do it," she says. She plugs in the refrigerator and it hums.

  "I’m afraid there’s a leak in the flusher pipe by the toilet handle," he says.

  "I’ll leave that one for my father," Carrie tells him knowingly.

  "For some reason I don’t want to leave you here," he says.

  "Some days are like that," she says lightly.

  "This is a big day for me," he says.

  "Good," she says, and smiles at him.

  "Yeah," he says.

  "Go with it," says Carrie.

  "I found out I was interested in myself," he explains. "You did?" she says. He laughs and so does she. He sees for the first time what he will be leaving.

  "Do you find you have enough time to do all the things you need to?" he asks.

  "There’s never enough hours in the day," she says, as if she might have heard it from an elder. Something in him looks for an extra hour. It is an interesting search which he decides not to share with Carrie. "What do you do, then?" he asks.

  "I just find that extra hour."

  Something moves all over the apartment and comes toward him. He wants to tell her his news. There’s something he mustn’t forget to take with him. It is what made him laugh. It is what he is leaving. He doesn’t quite have the thought yet.

  "Is it because something unexpected always comes up?" he asks.

  "No, I wouldn’t say that," says Carrie, and looks at him. "It’s always the same." She brings the top tiers of the toolbox together and latches it. It has a large blue-and-silver sticker on the side with a picture of a wrench and the words I MAKE MY LIVING WITH SNAP-ON TOOLS PLEASE DON’T ASK TO BORROW THEM.

  "That’s a fantastic toolbox. What did you need downstairs?"

  "I had to make a phone call."

  "So where’s that hour? Where do you find it?" he asks, as if she will be able to tell him.

  "It’s in here," says Carrie and points in the general direction of her heart.

  "Oh, there/’ he says, let down. "What do you need it for?"

  "Nothing much," she says. She hoists the toolbox off the stove. "Listen, I got to go," she says.

  "I know," he says.

  On impulse, she shakes his hand.

  known bits III

  r. Sometime you got to know before you do. But it’s still Doing, because it’s building. Told this to Grace Kimball, first-name basis, and she agreed, because she always takes time for you. Told her other data but not key policy change Gustave and me initiated of opening message envelopes if deemed necessary whether large envelope or small. This was what the show in the warehouse-theater said, I told Grace: you better check what you’re carrying around with you before you get there, because it might be bad news and people don’t go for bad news and if it’s on the heavy side what if it’s a tinder box as the mother of Jim Banks would say, and you don’t do anything?

  But Grace said the Hamletin was sposedly a gay camp—not to worry, you’re all right, darling—while Cliff came off the phone with just a totally shrunken T-shirt with SANDSTONE on it on, said Maureen was coming up from Florida for a visit and thought the plan to light-rape a random male could be actualized for the occasion of her visit, and Grace hugged me and asked if I’d like to be a tryout and how old was I and I kidded her, What year is it? and she said 1977. What if victim suffered heart attack, J.B. asked G.K., who replied, handing over envelope to be delivered at once to women’s organization sponsoring and graphicking her next Love-an-Audience slide-lecture, It could only enlarge your heart, Jimmy. Cliff asked, How’re you doing? Do you flow-chart your week’s business on a space grid? He explained.

  But I had explanations for him that I cdn’t speak out: (1) if arriving at red light in left lane of north-south street at intersection with cross-street that runs left, then bike can run the light if any car instead of crossing intersection turns into north-south street momentarily blocking potential intersection-cros-ser behind it; (2) but if arriving in right lane at same red light, bike may turn like pedestrian to cross to left side in front of vehicles stopped at light, and then proceed as in (1)—and if, on approaching same light on right side and fellow vehicles have not quite come abreast of intersection, bike may curve over to, in this case, left. In general, bike makes possible the charting of many flow-curves reducing distances along blocks of city grid. Gives most routes a curve through flow, yet not to make J.B. ever forget his friends, such as old geezer outside T&W who helped him get up, and old lady who minded bike, who would understand J.B. later view (when Independent Messenger Unit established though prior to new location not run by Spence/Santee) that sometimes possible to build when in motion and only when. And since business goes on in present location or at future base, "place of business" is not same as business—business is not place. But what is business? G
ustave could only laugh, had weird laugh potentially not good for business. He met saxophone player doing gig on subway—same one as before—who identified self as angel from outer space requiring legal tender to establish self in present planet; but Gustave said that Spence/Santee had called Jim Banks an angel.

  Gustave laughed. J.B. said he liked being called Brother, as Grace Kimball did as did sometimes Mother, though J.B. had no brother or sister. But Gustave said that maybe retard messengers were all angels and Spence/Santee said "they" knew things "we" didn’t. Bike lanes beginning to prove curved sometimes and may be taken away. Where’d you learn to ride a bike, cab driver yelled at me, at J.B., and there wasn’t time to say learned in secret in trashed lot in Brooklyn that they took away one day.

  s. Lane is in mind of operator, and in mind is always more than one lane, is lanes to one side or both. And since operator and sometimes bike operator, with hopefully body-signal, shift lane and think ahead, lane is how you think and so lane can zigzag, can curve, and you look ahead like psychic consultation and see lanes not parallel, or parallel but not straight, maybe not even on bulging and potholed north-south avenue white-painted sometimes, and even if parallel-painted the lanes you really track they parallel the m/nd right up onto the sidewalk like when a tall white woman in a black coat with bright fur collar like a fox glitters her eyes at me when I’m passing at speed, when she don’t know me but the man with her does but didn’t seem to look at me, he has sport coat and hat on and scarf and like man in cab that passed last week with Spence/Santee in it but is not that man but the one who wore black pinstripe strolling in Central Park with Lady Luisa the singer loving him but now as I passed the tall lady with the fur, this man laughed and said (to her), Parallel!, or words to that effect which when spoken do not need to be opened like potentially hazardous envelope carried from Lady Luisa’s pad uptown (where probably this same man’s foreign voice was heard probably back in bathroom or someplace singing) down then to singer Ford North’s pad (with sofa out by elevator like moving) (though envelope handed examined and added to and handed back by same red-to-gray-bearded man already last week seen beside piano in warehouse); to foundation then, where received by girl Amy who went away, and Xeroxing whoom-whoom was heard, and came back with envelope to be carried direct to warehouse, but Gustave he phoned at that moment right there to foundation hoping to catch me but then could not speak except to say Wing, Senora Wing, and I could not speak because envelope was moving slightly in hands and kind Amy was on the watch and I had problems in terms of saying the correct words, especially with Gustave laughing weirdly at his end so hands shook and Amy came and held one and said it was chilly. The foreign man who was in the cab with Spence/Santee came out of office and was bald and said to me, She is a girl with the most true grit, and we all laughed at that. Amy said to him, You were saying about the void. . . ?