Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"That was what he was thinking of when he first came in."

"Hey," her son remarked, looking toward the far end of the room, "that was quick. He came right out." Davey stared intimately or absently into her eyes, so she knew the man was approaching. She felt the vibrations in her feet and her chair.

As the young man in the leather jacket passed and she smelled a smell she couldn’t quite place, her son looked around over his shoulder and watched the man leave after pausing once more, as if the brass doorknob in his hand had made him remember something.

"Did he get through to the person he was calling?" she asked.

"I don’t think so," said her son, as the waitress came to their table and the man left.

The waitress told them what there was for dessert. The boy turned around in his chair to look at the table by the window, where there were some fruit tarts on two plates. His mother knew he would have mousse. The owner was standing by the cash register, and the waitress excused herself and turned to him. The owner raised his hand and pointed with a finger that seemed to have just pressed a cash-register key, and she went back toward another table. She returned with a twenty-dollar bill and a check.

Music got turned on and off. Ann knew Davey was aware of her mood; otherwise he’d have forgotten their little discussion about the weekend except as part of a general mulling-over that he probably didn’t spell out.

They were going to have chocolate mousse and apricot — no, strawberry — tart. The waitress went to the kitchen, the owner right behind her.

"Alex’s mother swam the English Channel," said Davey.

"She did not," said Ann. "That just isn’t true."

"All but two miles, coming from France; if she’d been swimming the other way, she would have made it."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Alex said so," said Davey.

"Well, I doubt it," his mother remarked.

Behind him, she thought, was her dessert, on a table; behind her was his dessert, in a refrigerator in the kitchen. The two of them might be having the littlest of fights; no outsider would be able to tell. The young man with ginger hair appeared again in the doorway and entered the restaurant.

"Here he is again," said Ann softly, looking Davey in the eye so that he turned around and stared at the man, who looked at Ann, who, when her son turned back and put his elbows on the table facing her, said to him as if she were talking about anything but the young man, "Maybe he’s suddenly developed an interest in the waitress."

"Atom," said Davey softly, embarrassed.

The young man was waiting for something to happen, she was sure, but it wasn’t clear what.

"Can I have a taste of your mousse?" she said.

"If it ever comes," said Davey.

The young man strode past them toward the rear of the restaurant.

"What’s he doing?" said Ann.

"He’s got his hand on the phone and the owner’s telling him not to keep coming in here using the phone."

"How do you know?"

"I can tell."

"Well, what’s he going to do about it?"

"It’s a free country," said Davey. "I’d call the police."

Ann laughed and for a moment found she couldn’t stop — it was all over her face and in spasms in her abdomen. Davey smiled with grudging modesty at his remark, keeping an eye on the far end of the room. Ann started up again and stopped. She drank some water as if she already had the hiccups. "You’re good for a laugh, kid," she said. Her impulse to laugh had passed.

"He’s talking to the waitress," said Davey.

"What is le patron doing?"

"You mean the owner?" said Davey. "He’s talking to the black guy in the kitchen."

"Where is our waitress?"

"She’s talking to the guy who came in. Or he’s talking to her. She smiled. At least, I think she did."

"She what?"

"She doesn’t have my chocolate mousse."

Ann felt the treads coming along the carpeted floor, and the waitress and the young man in bluejeans passed, and the waitress went to the cash register.

"You see?" said Ann, and Davey turned to look. "She is his girl." For the man, who had his back to them, had put his hand lightly on the waitress’s shoulder. The waitress wasn’t doing anything.

"You might just be right," said Davey, glancing back at them and seeing what his mother meant. He shrugged.

"Or his sister, maybe?" said Ann, who turned instinctively to see the owner, at the back of the restaurant, step out of the kitchen.

The ginger-haired man now brought his other hand up and gripped the waitress’s right arm just above the elbow, and she jerked her head around to the right, as if the street door were opening.

"No, I’m wrong," said Ann, and Davey, hearing her voice, turned to look and half rose in his chair as the man standing behind the waitress at the cash register drew her back and pivoted her away from the register and around to face back down the length of the restaurant, as if, breaking the restaurant’s privacy, she were going to announce that there was a call for someone — or no, that there was a fire, no problem, or something had been lost, or the place was being closed down and the money would be refunded. And as he spoke, sharply and low behind her, there was a close moment not of ventriloquism so much as intimate agreement, when his command seemed jointly to be hers: they were about the same height, he was the roughly dressed brother or consort, and the composed life of this pleasing place derived from his behind-the-scenes industry.

His information that they were to go into the bathroom was as clear as the angle Davey’s half-risen body cast in relation to his mother facing him and to the close pair on his right, three or four feet behind him.

She said, "Sit down" — was it that he was trying to be brave? — but the man, having spoken, looked away from the rest of the restaurant at the two of them and particularly at Davey, as if he could do more than speak. Ann felt the chill. And Davey was not sitting down. He had pushed his chair back and was standing up, turned to the waitress and the holdup man.

His mother had, she felt, received for them both the news that they were all going to the rear of the restaurant, into the bathroom, which was the place where you waited out this mandatory drill, which was to see how well it could be done. There must have been words; why they were so low she did not know, but what was happening was clear enough. Davey stepped away from the table and stood contemplating the young man and woman up against each other, the one somewhat hurried and scanning the room, the other rigid, and Ann for a moment didn’t reach for Davey, in case the man did something. The man was saying, Hurry, with his eyes.

In one movement she rose and stepped around the table, hearing others behind her moving — she couldn’t look back quite yet — and she got Davey by the elbow, his arm firm but not muscular, and drew him with her away from the waitress and the man. The man’s hand, his left hand, was definitely up against the waitress’s spine, and his forearm had seemed turned, as if a knife handle was gripped in his palm.

Ann had her leather bag on her shoulder. She was startled not to remember taking it. She had her arm around Davey’s shoulder. The five or six customers ahead of them moving politely, as if there had been a power failure to be patient about, were people she’d hardly noticed when she’d come in. Now, following them, she found them even less real to her — all except a blonde woman in her fifties with a lacquered bouffant — less real to her than they had obscurely been in the privacy of her dinner with her son. Tonight Davey had the view.

She remembered nothing and prophesied little, but she had seen finality in the alert glance the young man had given Davey. It didn’t matter who Davey was — he was a person who happened to be there and then, from out of a field of chances. And a sudden killing in self-defense followed their backs as, the last customers to file to the rear and turn right and crowd into the bathroom, she and Davey were followed in by the owner, who shook his head gently at her and the others and raised his palm — as if any of them were going to do anything.