Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"You know what I mean."

"This was my first holdup. I want to tell Michael and Alex about it, O.K.?"

"We’re not even sure what happened."

"I know what I saw."

"In the bathroom?"

"In the restaurant."

"But before and after the holdup."

"And during."

"But we can’t even agree whether it was a knife or a gun."

"You can’t agree."

"Look, let’s go back and ask the waitress."

"Mom."

"Why don’t we phone them when we get home?"

"That’s fine with me. I don’t know why you don’t want me to phone my friends."

"It was my first holdup, too," she said, taking his hand and squeezing it.

But as soon as they got home she went and ran herself a bath. It was what she should have done in the first place this evening when she came home from work. She was so tired it had to be in her head. She stepped outside the bathroom and closed the door. The water pouring into the tub seemed larger at a distance.

She listened for a moment and went to the bedroom door. She knew Davey; she pictured him. She heard him open the refrigerator, and she was sure she heard the freezer door unstick. She did not hear the refrigerator door close, but she heard a plate rattle in the closet and a kitchen drawer open. He was looking for a spoon. She heard the voice of a baseball commentator come on, and a moment later she heard Davey’s voice, talking fast and excited.

She was sitting in the tub, leaning forward to turn off the water. The door was open a little, so she heard the voices in the living room.

Davey called. She called back that she was in the bathtub.

The voices continued.

Then it was only the baseball commentator’s voice, rising and falling. She let it stay where it was. Somewhere in the silence around that voice, an icepick was being hammered into a stolen, rock-hard avocado. The hot water was almost too hot to dream in. She’d had the money for that avocado but would rather shuttle herself by astral projection to Boston/San Francisco— not that anyone was there any more.

She heard Davey’s voice again; it didn’t sound the same. It sounded as if he were phoning the movies for the times, but the call went on longer.

Then there was only the TV again, then a knock on the bathroom door, which moved, but Davey didn’t come in. "You were wrong," he said. "It was a gun."

"Well what do you know," she said quietly from the still tub.

"No, I’m only kidding, Mom; they wouldn’t tell me."

"You spoke to the waitress?"

"No, he wouldn’t let me, and he said they weren’t discussing the matter."

"O.K.," she said very quietly.

"Hey, don’t go to sleep in there."

She thought she heard steps cross the carpet. In a moment she heard Davey on the phone again. Which friend would he have phoned first? The picture wasn’t clear. He was closer to Michael; their lives had some big similarities, like his father not living with him.

The bath seemed to become deeper and deeper. Her legs came up in a revolving jackknife and she did a two and a half, a three and a half, an unheard-of four and a half, the way she would do slow-motion somersaults underwater at the deep end of a pool in the summer while Davey would hold his nose and do underwater somersaults with her, though he couldn’t really stay down.

She didn’t want to go to sleep in the bath, but she was damn well going to. If she’d taken a bath when she’d gotten home from the office, they would never have had a holdup. They would have had broccoli and melted cheese, and green noodles, with garlic (which Davey now liked). And strawberry ice cream, which he had just been eating anyway.

She might have been asleep when she heard Davey call from the middle distance, "Are you asleep in there, Mom? Are you O.K.?" But she felt she had had her eyes open. She didn’t want to talk about the holdup, didn’t want to think about it. She closed her eyes. The water didn’t have quite the hot fixity it had when she first stepped cautiously in. But it was good to her and she let the questions called to her go unanswered. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. She heard Davey come across the carpet, and though she heard the door move, she didn’t think he was looking at her. She felt the water stir subtly about her; she had willed it to move for her benefit. She knew he had gone away. She massaged her dry face, and her knees broke the surface.

She listened for a while. The TV was still on. She heard Davey’s voice, its quality of inquiring esteem for the other person, its habit of waiting humor. For a second she thought of her son’s, any kid’s, inspired account of a brush with violence— And then you know what happened? — and she smelled in her soap, melting somewhere near her leg, a sweeter apricot smell of freesias. (They had tried to charge her six-fifty for a small bunch last week at the supposedly wholesale flower market.) Within the scent of freesias there was a hidden, earlier, heavier vein of sweetness that she now identified as aftershave but didn’t want to think about. For some moments Davey hadn’t been speaking, or not so she could hear, but the TV was still on, so he hadn’t gone to bed. And yet the silence beyond the TV wasn’t quite silence. He would be getting away from all the city noise this weekend. A lot he cared about the noise.

She got herself out of the tub, and against the wash of the bathwater listened again. She ran her arms damply into the sleeves of her terry-cloth robe. She pulled open the door and put her wet foot down on her bedroom carpet.

Have a nice evening, lady, the flower man had said. Have a nice life, he said. The pale-apricot-colored freesias were doing pretty well on her bureau. The man had let her have them for six dollars.

Halfway to the door leading to the living room, she was on the point of calling to Davey that it was time for bed, when she heard his voice. "I don’t know whether I can," he was saying, and then there was a pause. "Maybe I’ll ask her." Then, "I will ask her; I definitely will." Then, "She’s O.K." Then, "Fifteen dollars, including my allowance." Then, "Yeah, I love you too." Ann knew the voice at the other end of the line without hearing it; but she owed Davey his privacy even after he said goodbye and hung up. The commercial between innings ended, and the deep-voiced, happy commentator was back on.

She stood in the living-room doorway. Davey was sitting over near the entrance to the front hall beside the phone. He could see the game only at the narrowest angle; he could hardly see the screen. The light gave her back herself naked on a rug and not alone and feeling upon her curved body the lunar radiance of the TV preserving her love.

Ann went to the set and turned it off. "Time for bed," she said. Davey just sat there by the phone. They had divided the evening between them.

She had to give them both a break, so she said, "You didn’t need to call collect." They both knew what she meant.

"How did you know I called collect?" Davey asked.

"I’ve known for a long time, but you really don’t have to."

"Thanks," he said, and stayed where he was, still dressed for the restaurant.

She didn’t tell him not to thank her. "You’re welcome," she said.

"So are you," he said.

"So are you," she said.

BEGINNING TO BE HEARD

Yet we didn’t need to go outside the home to change, we had a set here and one in the next room where a child is doing homework and some of it on the screen, so we have dual screens if we can go back and forth between the rooms fast enough.

To stretch a point. On dual screens wall-eyed twain. ("Bleeps," adds the interrogator in some South American brogue, meaning blips, meaning points, we know by new intuition having internalized the interrogator. Points of light on a vintage radar-substitute we picked up at God prices everybody and her uncle can charge.) Not content with one set. Some inner leap between two separated screens being essential before we end the century in question seated upon the shoulders of Einstein-over-Euclid-man, if not over the shoulder (read soldiers).