Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But, what are you staring at? said an all-purpose voice, a few short years later when Mayn and Ted (agreeing they needed a vacation) found themselves in the same hotel bar moderately amused by their light, disintegrating discussion of what was technically known as "hardening" a land-based missile by sinking it into an underground silo: lo, a process which (who knew?) the next century might extend to what the well-tanked thinkers down the street called "soft" targets such as cities, if there were such by then (i.e., either distinct from a densification along the seaboard, or after a "greenhouse effect" due to pollution-rich atmosphere above, lidding the healthy glow of our Earth breath below, till our destined glacier melted down and the ocean went up and swamped Philadelphia and its boating clubs along the river there and Venice-ized New York) — for the now western-wear photographer and infor-mation-transacter Spence had answered (for him pretty point-blank) Mayn’s this-time light query What are you staring at? with the same words with the you stressed, and Mayn shrugged it off this time without the actually more irascible Ted’s help, Spence was so sleazy, well there was something about him that just wasn’t worth putting your finger on: but who cares if the Devil’s up-to-date barter-economics drew the line at making unrefusable offers here, because Spence was in another room downstairs making his own deals.

Yet again, What are you staring at? was Mayn’s line and as warped as his retroactive view of his mother — not worth talking about but if it ever came up, her tragedy, ununderstandable as it was, he talked of it naturally but said out loud that he knew nothing really about it, about the awkward marriage and the annihilatingly downplayed disappearance as if the war ending was what mattered like being strong, and hardly heard Spence say, "I never had a family to speak of — or maybe you just remember yours — you certainly got me guessing — I mean, I never had much in the way of family, O.K.?"

— You mean it was natural to talk of it, or he talked of it in a natural voice? we hear the multiple interrogator like a multiple child having to ask—

— Well "What are you staring at?" was what, long ago, ball in hand, he came back at his mother with:

… for his mother, the Sarah of his remembered moment, had been staring in Jim’s direction as Bob Yard, somewhere behind her, hallooed high falsetto cum deep feckless baritone brashing his way across the beach toward her and her alone, Jim understood, while she was really staring at Jim yet at the horizon over his shoulder too: oh shit, Jim knew she liked him even if in Windrow he stayed clear of the house most of the time "from sun to sun," though he lied when he joked about her practicing and even wanted to hear the interruption no the interrupted phrases of her violining cross slowly, backtracking in order to go ahead, halting upon a gap, her whole self or life, or just music, get it right, go back, go back, go back again and get it right not at all like voices in the evening bursting now and again through the pillowed atmosphere of the roomy house in Throckmorton Street only to disappear like hallucinated messages into what might as well be Jim’s mere thought process, which was like his grandmother’s house.

What are you staring at? said Bob Yard directly above her, a little bent over like in a cave. His charcoal eyebrows vanished under a straw hat as he looked down at the woman who laboriously sat up hunched and swung half round to look up at the noisy man in green chinos who was now not talking, unless he was humming words that Jim didn’t hear.

Up the beach Margaret and the old man were approaching in heated conversation — the oldster maybe not so much older than Margaret — and Bob Yard squatted beside the harshly pale woman — Sarah’s shoulders helplessly conversing with the profound sun, her dark hair defying his arrival, glossy hair, straight hair, her face bending kind of stupidly away from Bob, and her body — her body! — hunched like she didn’t have headroom—

— stupidly? or struck dumb?—

— so Jim knew what his mother was like: she was not just beautiful— and at the very moment when she was warped by an indifference, her look aimed — aimed at him? — so that with Brad and Sammy (who grew younger) and the endlessly plunging breakers pushing Jim to throw the goddamn ball and get the game going, he found himself to be a man:

a man twice told — (he wouldn’t voice that one to Ted no matter how close they were, in i960, 1963, 1972, or 1975, when Ted got sick) — but why Jim was this, he didn’t just know, but knew it was her looking both truly at him and yet around him, while Bob Yard raised his biting voice a notch, "He’s that crackpot Indian hustler-scientist from the old days or a relation maybe— isn’t he that old pal of Margie’s she talked about that helped her out when she was in that tight spot in the old days? He was sitting on the front steps like a veteran when I drove by" — which was why Bob Yard said he had driven down to the shore on impulse (nice day, here’s this old friend of Margaret’s — or is it a relative? — or the old friend, that is — looking for her because he took the train up from New York to Windrow, didn’t phone; said he doesnt) —while Sarah bestows on the man in chinos the intimacy of very cold indifference, but answers — but as if Bob wasn’t there: "Margaret’s romantic adventures are catching up with her" — Sarah’s plain words, but what did they mean? had the oldster appeared here to tell Margaret something? or maybe to ask her.

No wind to scatter the controversy, we add, to convey the potential lightness of the picture, and at that moment Jim had to shy the ball at wonderfully wall-eyed Bob Yard (who seemed like a north pole to Jim’s mother’s south, though not in direction, in some bump of touching and unpleasant barrier), but Jim didn’t throw it after all. The voices of the bathing-suited mother and her chance visitor rose tightly, but in their duet had only a funny sound (like strange vocal cords, not human maybe); and Jim imagined them to his chagrin fondling each other, to make up after this raising of voices. How could he? Because he could see that though his mother had been right here in his sight and, earlier, in the car on the way here — the dark blue Buick with the breezy straw upholstery and the knob on the steering wheel that when Jim was Brad’s age he would sit in the driver’s seat and grab — she had been "here" all the time: yet some scene between her and the principal Windrow electrician, Bob Yard, had come before what Jim was witnessing.

She turned away from Bob Yard who stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, and she looked past Jim, catching his eye so he knew he was part of that extent of sea that, when he turned to see what she was looking out at or looking off to, proved to have a slow freighter passing from right to left he could tell by the bow and stern (he had never seen a convoy, they must not come this close to shore); and facing what she was looking at, he let go a pure, healthy sigh, knowing that he hadn’t been breathing and he would breathe for both of them — live, play, eat; and the words of his grandmother and the old man in white sneakers she was with came to him like the target within the larger bull’s eye, and—

And he heard — he hears his half-pint brother Brad like he’s getting out of hand with a parent (which he never did) insult him and later he doesn’t recall how — that is, the words of the insult — except that they made Jim feel cornered.

Except no one can make you feel anything, says of all people the interrogator who has heard these words underwater in a health-club pool or during an intermission at an obscure tryout reading (pre-production) of a new opera, a private opera, pressed upon a major basso by his young beloved the composer where the interrogator had thought to find someone to interrogate after the show; or in a therapist’s anteroom, underwater or not—