Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Spence laughed and asked how Ray Vigil had found him here, though he knew.

  "Or should I say Spence?" said Vigil. "Because it turns out I knew of you before we first met. So you are the Spence I heard about. Listen, I heard Santee knew where the child is."

  "What are you doing there, Vigil?"

  "Watching the cars go by standing in a pay booth with an empty can of grape soda on the floor and a non-reusable straw coming up out of it. Sounds pretty noisy at your end, too."

  "I keep the windows open," said Spence. "Did you know this is an unlisted number?"

  "The lady at the foundation gave it to me," said Vigil.

  "I don’t know where the Cuban’s child is, and I don’t even know where the mother is," said Spence, and the sick woman watched him hang up the receiver.

  It came to them together that they each were coming full circle, if that was ever possible, and she was in a new line of work and interested in life all over again almost, although he had never known her but he could see this was true. How had she known enough to find him? This hardly mattered. He had found her and she found him to be not the person—there on the street outside the foundation—that she had thought, from his intro, and then he told her he had heard of her through Mayn. Which was indirectly why she was in New York now from Minnesota. Hearing about her was, he said, like actually hearing one-time words of hers. What did he mean by "through Mayn"? they both wondered. Listening from the far end of a bar for years, he said. Which bar? More than one: D.C., Houston, Colorado Territory; and, right here, an Argentine joint near a saxophone store. And listening with much better ears than the guy Mayn would sometimes be talking to.

  Heard so keenly that once Mayn had been heard to say he had not heard something—the last of a sentence—of hers—of Pearl Myles’s.

  Which one?

  Something said to Mayn’s father in a cemetery. How begun? Beginning, said Spence responding happily, that she had been "shocked to hear ..."

  When was that? she asked.

  You were getting out of a pickup truck.

  She laughed, then, as if at everything, at having thought him Brad Mayn because he mentioned learning of her presence at the far end of a phone call an hour ago and had known her instinctively when she came out of that old foundation and looked at the sky—a woman strong and inquiring, maybe five feet eleven or six feet, in a red tailored suit and a black cloth coat with collar that looked like a sexy cross between a marmalade angora cat and a fox that had outwitted all but the smartest team of Minnesota hunters (part Indian, part Anglo!), she was funny on the subject of clothes. She kept her coat on in the coffeeshop on the corner across from the mainland-Chinese clothing place— they had a window booth, she and Spence—and she told Spence what, he told her, he half-thought he had already envisioned, the camping trips she had taken near the greatest of inland seas though she had never felt the warmth of a trigger in the crease of her index finger’s second joint, while naturally she had her ups and downs though living more and more practically in the same house out there for thirty years.

  Jim’s grandmother got mad as hops at her once, and Pearl felt reduced to a primal mass of jelly, the woman had this firm, Victorian charm and would sit you right down and bring out a tea tray with the biggest cozy in the world stitched with blue patterns and ask you what your pet hates were and whether your people had traveled. But in the middle of all this act of hers she had some painful trouble—maybe it was just all that character she possessed— and she would get short with you. Pearl had said once that she shared the lady’s sorrow for the death of her daughter Sarah, and she didn’t like Pearl’s saying that. Those people kept the lid on their feelings really by seeming to show them but so confidently so elegantly you know that the job didn’t get done. But the morning of that earlier day when they eventually went to the cemetery, Margaret looked like she would kiss Pearl, this relatively unknown teacher from the high school who had come uninvited to the house at a time of crisis and saw a strange light in that hall mirror coming from upstairs but from within the mirror too, and suddenly there was Margaret out of the kitchen, and Pearl Myles remembered grease on her fingers and a real leaning of the lady toward her as if to embrace her and kiss her without having met her. Pearl Myles in redecorating her home years later—in fact two years ago— had gotten so confused and fascinated by lighting that she likely had "redone" that entire time of her life, mirror and all (she laughed again). She was in Minneapolis when Margaret got sick and committed suicide some years later.

  She knew the family, Spence said. Oh she remembered a low-pressure zone in her orange juice now that he mentioned it—("it?" murmured Spence)—that day of the cemetery.

  Not the funeral, said Spence.

  No, it was when the younger boy had a fit of grief. And Pearl Myles heard from a local lady who had it from the father that the boys were having a crisis at home that morning and when she got there and stood by that mirror the grandmother Margaret came out with grease on her fingers and like to have kissed Pearl, the teacher, and then didn’t kiss her. Was Spence close to Jim?—but hadn’t he said he was his—? —no, she was fuddled by the city the last twenty-four hours but maybe by why she had come here, which could have been business but wasn’t, for she had not found what she needed for her home in New York or Minneapolis and so she had done the next best thing, which—she laughed—and so did Spence, funnily enough—which must sound like . . .

  She paused, and Spence, delightedly, said, Words, words, words!

  Oh, you are a scholar, Pearl sighed ludicrously and then lifted her cup for the "Greek devil" in the white shirt and black pants to raise his eyebrows and nod to both of them.

  As a matter of fact, no. Spence knew where his bread was buttered but was no scholar though if he had it to do over again he would—but did Pearl Myles know that New Jersey family well enough to know . . .

  Well, she had dreamt of that mirror and then put in a phone call to Mel Mayn the following morning, but . . . "know" what?

  If there were other . . . surviving children, Spence said.

  She had to wait a second and look at him . . . someone had been with Spence on that phone call, and that person knew her, she had thought: but he knew her, through Jim—but who knew that she had had an appointment?— or was she imagining that? What was it, in some fatigue she did not actually experience that was in her, that screened what she was picking up? Spence knew time, and it was wonderfully slow, here. Slow enough for him to stare in a friendly way at this quite young woman of about sixty and trace a day that began in a pay booth near Mayn’s home calling the Chilean economist at his, turned away to Turnstein & Wing’s where there was no Wing, sloped upward to the office rejected by Jimmy Banks where Dina West had tried to give a little hell over the phone, and wound up variously here, north of Mayn’s but suddenly closer to that New Jersey town with the code name than to the Chinese shop across the street. He told Pearl Myles that he understood time now, and she put the back of her hand on the cold glass of the window and said that now she understood what she had been feeling a moment or two before. And that he had changed jobs, too. He said he wouldn’t say that. But they watched each other and turned, as one, to see an Asiatic woman come out of the Chinese shop, change her mind, and go back in, and they had a quick, quiet laugh about that. Pearl Myles inquired how he knew the Chilean economist and Spence replied that they had a mutual interest in an American company’s actions in Chile.

  But it was this family he was into.

  Oh yes.

  And as to surviving children, he knew of course, didn’t he, that the brother Brad was an illegitimate love-babe by another, but had grown up as Mel’s beloved son; they got along. Spence knew this. But she hadn’t thought about them for years, but something rubs off. Oh yes, said Spence, he himself had been insulted earlier today by a man who—another Chilean—

  Oh yes, she had heard of him (as if there were only two in New York!).

  —who Spence thought had called
him an insect though the word might have been "insult" (Spence an "insult"), but we ask for these things, hit our head up against a stone wall in order to get somewhere and find that we thought we were only observing but were much more than that. Pearl knew what he meant and asked him if he had been to the Statue of Liberty but he hadn’t. He asked if she knew Spanish, and she said New York really was like this, with people running into each other and then talking without any actual reason to begin with. Spence thought there was real value in it, he had found a part-Sioux businessman in the Utah desert and they had discussed the commercial possibilities of a nondescript bush only to learn in the course of what turned into a whole night that they were brothers in knowledge if not in blood, that each knew of a woman named Manuel who had healed with the balm of this desert bush’s pod a Salt Lake City Mason who spoke Japanese so synergetically (Pearl smiled and smiled and nodded rapidly) that he had grown to sometimes look Japanese though very brief-spoken. And before the night was done, Spence had forgotten both the "bush" business and a legendary pistol that had been his original reason for meeting this part-Sioux-part-Mormon carpenter-businessman Santee. However, Santee then found that Spence knew both that the Japanese-speaking Mason had been killed for guessing in his own very medication and recuperation the link between that dry bush and the oil of whales, and that the famed botanist with rock-oriented corrugations on his bike wheels, who had been modestly mutilated by a father-son team of saguaro-cactus exploiters very likely responsible as well for the Jap Mason’s death, was loving colleague to an itinerant Chilean zoologist-woman who at the top end of a ladder once cast the famed double Moon, like a destiny, on a handgun that later could not stay in one place and that Santee-Sioux’s grandfather who somewhat earlier had almost certainly carried it across the Plains to the Rockies had always said there was a thing in that pistol strangely hard to find, so precious in value as to be, like what the South Africans call "future platinum" or the southern Indians of Argen-Chile "wise silver," the true unit of value.

  Mena! exclaimed Pearl Myles and Santee-Sioux (in Spence’s voice) simultaneously, and Spence had added "from that musical family" a split-instant before Pearl Myles added that that Santee was cousin to an Ojibway who was why she thought she was in New York, certainly not to buy a giant thousand-dollar lamp designed by Alvar Aalto with tiers like a fir tree (wonderful in its way, too).

  They waited, knowing that this was the Soon through which they would come to be silent in some other way. It sloped gently through both their minds—as if they didn’t need to worry about it because the slope was the thing and in charge—that they were drawing near to one another because something quite beyond them was the matter, and the matter even in a good way. Let the world’s interrogations go on outside this big pane of street glass, go on and on; and for a moment she told him how her husband had been very young when she married him and they were both affectionately (or something) repressed, or (you know) shy and were just right for each other, really cared for each other sexually, and when he hadn’t wanted to share her with a child she got nauseated with sex and felt guilty at denying him, well they really enjoyed it but she couldn’t help herself. Years later, neither of them was so repressed but it didn’t help. Spence said he thought she had skipped something in there but he wondered if something like all that had happened with his parents. She asked why. He didn’t know.

  A fury came through him, she told him.

  (On the way somewhere else, he thought.) He said, What?

  Yes, through his shoulders—shoulders like magnets, did he know that? Sure, sure, he knew that. Well, she was going to leave him two phone numbers where she could be reached. Yes, through—through—through—all the many thongs of cowhide fringe ready to move, underneath that hair of his, she said.

  They shook their heads laughing skeptically, while sunlight slid away and came back (via speeded-up dawn). On the way where? she said—now why did I say a fool thing like that? (I know, he said.) (You’ve got my number, she said, a bit intimately.) Buffalo hide, please, he said, and, glancing at his watch, pressed the date button.

  They talked some more, but she said he wanted to ask about something and he said it wasn’t what it would have been if he hadn’t run into her.

  And how it happened didn’t matter, she added, and he nodded as if he had added it, which by running into her he partly had. How old was he? she asked, and he didn’t know and used to think it didn’t matter, and then uncomfortably asked, Which Ojibway was Santee-Sioux a cousin to? and she said only some faraway part of him cared, which was true (though he understood out of next to no experience at all that it sounded like a New York woman), and he tried to crack a joke, Are there any more surviving Ojibway cousins?, but she said, Ojibvva; but why had he asked about surviving Mayn offspring? she had to know.

  They looked away from one another, the long-time Minnesota woman in appearance as executive as her current physical position coat-on, boothed, and windowed, was more visitor, her companion as sandy-faced a buckskin-fringed itinerantly ageless trader as a hinterlandsman could imagine erroneously was no New Yorker, and they saw the Chinese woman leave the shop across the street listening to her companion eagerly talking. I think I know that woman she’s with, said Spence. She’s got a baseball cap on, said Pearl. Pirates, said Spence. You don’t make it sound like urgent news, said Pearl Myles. It probably is, said Spence, but I feel like I’ve never seen her in the flesh, and he leaned back in his booth, placing his fingers on the table, but finding not a keyboard but only Pearl in front of him.

  She was asking for it but nonetheless said, Well, was this one of those rare moments in life or were they two doing business or about to? He said she had asked him how old he was and who were his people and he didn’t know, they might as well be Californians who introduced whales to the Great Salt Lake. She hadn’t asked him who his people were but thinking they were the whale people or they were a last-century private meteorologist of New York who dreamt of a new weather and then passed on his dream like the Good Advice a Bolivian-general client of Spence’s had had from his own assassin-to-be and swimming-pool contractor, namely "Pass it on," took Spence sort of out of himself like when this lady across the table from him had seen, she said, one day that she would make up her own lighting for her house, having found nothing that did the trick on either side of the Mississippi.

  Presently, the Devil stood at their table frowning at them with deepest attention and with no other customer in sight—a large-straight line in their peripheral vision, an example, though of what? of recent Greek immigration?

  Pearl said that when Spence’s client the Chilean economist and she had talked he had said Spence was a New Yorker from way back and he had praised Spence.

  Too far back, said Spence—so far back his mother and father merged in the distance.

  When Pearl and the Chilean economist had first talked—

  On the phone?

  Yes, long distance. He was friendly but it was tense for him.

  Well, you know his situation, said Spence and then smiled at some awkwardness they both may have understood.

  O.K., said Spence deeply enough to be noticed, why had she phoned him? And Pearl wondered out loud if he wanted to get into this and when he said, Sure, it gave them both pause, and like a couple of lovers she said he had been after something else she thought—further surviving offspring of the Mayn family. Why had she phoned the Chilean all the way from Minnesota? Spence asked, but— Oh, he had phoned her, she reported. This is some nightmare, he smiled as if unused to speak or think of nightmares, etcetera, plus the fact he had to be in two other places right now.

  How did he have your number? Spence asked. Oh, such things could be explained, was the answer. As easy, he in turn asked, as turning away from where you were focusing and bending over backwards to be friendly only to find you were being pulled this way and that back into what for years you hadn’t known you didn’t want to be in any more? but—

  You poor thing, she sa
id, I heard you were the smartest. He just made her remember giving Mel’s father-in-law two phone numbers of hers the day of Margaret’s funeral.

  But Spence didn’t know what he was doing here; he was supposed to be at least two other places by now, and Pearl Myles smiled and said he was not free to go, and the Greek pillar withdrew as if temporarily.

  And if there were more Mayn offspring, where did they come from, and when?

  Well, Spence had always said he was only an observer and now knew for sure he was being turned this way and that in the course of—but someone would throw you a curve if you asked for it, and the issue of further Mayn offspring was what Spence suddenly had come to think he had been sent to settle through some obstacle course of all these years, and now he really did have to go, if Pearl would only let him (they both smiled). For she, she said, had gotten drawn all over again into those strangely silly circles of—

  —of news, Spence abruptly and sadly said, and they laughed again, discovering each other again as if this scene would pass the whole afternoon and turn it into evening.

  Yes, of news—that doubtless he knew she had worked in and around for years, telling high schoolers about vigil sidebars (—what’s a vigil sidebar? asked Spence) and contributing items by the dozen here and there, and eventually her marriage busted up, she added for some reason. But she had known of the Ojibwa named Santee—

  —she hadn’t said he was called Santee—

  —because in other days she had been drawn far enough into the—

  —isn’t it funny, interrupted Spence again (as the Greek proved again to be standing at their table), that in the midst of all this there are people who may get killed and it may be somebody’s doing . . .

  —she had to go, too, but let her just get this out: in other days she had been close enough to the Mayns to catch in passing the fact that the suicide-mother’s sister lived in Boston and was active in music as a sponsor not a performer, and feuded periodically with a very rich sponsor (Life Patron, was her category) over the matter of ticket pricing and allotment climaxed by a terrible skirmish over the matter of the Metropolitan Opera’s spring visit; so the scuttlebutt regarding the diva’s dramatic weight-loss brought to the long quiescent attention of Pearl Myles the fact that the Pride’s Crossing dowager’s son was the diva’s devoted Park Avenue G.P. lately most uncomfortably billed as a specialist in ulterior weight-loss regimes of such threatening grandeur that he was getting the wrong sort of name: but having long ago stepped out of it, Pearl had found herself back in it: in what? extended family junk or queer tragedy? endless local peacetime in a medium town or some plan that was receding out of hand but who from who?—back in it again, she recalled now going to the opera one mild night, driving in from New Jersey when the Met’s dark old barn stood southwest of the Public Library and she had a ticket from the math teacher’s sister two rows behind Sarah Mayn and her younger son, Brad, and Sarah whispered in his ear and at intermission put her arm around him, brown velvet short sleeves, and she kissed him and he stretched. And though Pearl had been out of that for so many years and lately engrossed in lighting design right down to nice clusters of hidden forty-watt bulbs, she found it all adding up again—or dividing and dividing—and one morning she found she knew that this Ojibwa healer had been enrolled at the diva’s doctor s expense in a state aeronautical program and since Minnesota is not normally a great state for New York City gossip a little goes a long way and before she knew it she—