Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

People brush past, and he finds one foot in the street. Three people among others. And as he jerks his face away, and a blast of steam barrels out of the street, then in animate bursts, he jolts himself with the twist he gave his neck, did she see him? it’s the threesome, a gray-haired, very broad-shouldered, stocky man is crossing with a fine young girl (much too young for him) who holds her cigarette out in front of her and touches the wrist of the boy on her other side less like his girlfriend than his married sister, she’s so clearly detached from him, if it matters, while he tries for her hand but her hand has slid up to hold his elbow and he leans his shoulder into hers looking straight ahead, and the girl thrown up by the field of New York is Amy — Amy his assistant from the office who was the one who spoke to him only hours before a phone call brought Efrain’s voice from some subway platform, couldn’t tell if the train was arriving or leaving, and here was the girl Amy with the extraordinarily good manners having converged upon him from behind and never knew and he was wanting to talk to someone and feels uncannily certain that if she, whom he liked so much, had seen him he would be in danger— why? — a dynamo would go off in his French-diagnosed ear and he would never hear it, but Amy was not the point. The older man points across the street showing them something. Has a broad tweed jacket on. But he is not so much older as he is familiar. Known from where? Stops in the middle of Seventh Avenue like he’s come up lame — but no — Cape Kennedy? — and looks around right through the immigrant with the cap in his pocket and two fifties and two ones in his trouser pocket, and the boy who might be eighteen or twenty turns his head to look at the girl Amy, who has looked back, they’re like the man’s own children, somewhat younger than the immigrant’s own children, American-quick to finger the button of that old New World so they absorbed unthinkable contradictions unthought, and the girl Amy who has looked back has seen, one knows, her bald superior from the foundation office and will not call attention to him and perhaps because of this will do nothing but continue with the boy and the man, this gray-haired man crossing eastward away from him, having come up to him from behind without knowing it and walked, brushed, right past him as if he were a marginal growing thing, a bush, this gray-haired tough-looking man taking two grown kids for a drink after a basketball game — is that it? — knows where he is going now, it’s the Greek fast-food place. (Can there be a "place" describable thus?) They approach tableau, he should pursue them, break in on them and stop what might be happening because he knows it has to do with him. He’s seen the older man before, but not from behind; yet in weather like this; yet not with that jacket. Months go by, tabled on a prison calendar isolated into days and numbers and events to be then swallowed into a flesh of unending term.

He has seen the gray-haired man before.

So? a voice shrugs. This is New York, the long run. He does not want to hear himself think any more. He would fight, now.

Efrain — he knew an Ef rem once — Efrain is not at the agreed corner. Even minus the tweed cap he may be recognized by Efrain. Isn’t this so by law of streetwise survival?

By another law, Efrain has got to be getting something tonight in return for delivering the message from Foley. Why meet like this?

It serves both sides, maybe. For what if Efrain had said he would meet him at the apartment? Clara saw in her husband’s face that he might shift to Spanish speaking to Efrain. Jobless parolee hanging out.

The Japanese clock with its yellow markers makes time itself an advertisement, and it’s not always there — do they take it away? — it’s so big! — cover it up? (he would know if so). . the long hand is past the bottom yellow now. But wasn’t the clock digital the last time he looked? If the tight-fitting tweed cap goes on now, something will happen to him. Where would Efrain scalp tickets? Back there by the entrance to the arena? The slow or endless poetry of being aware, of being conscious, will come after decades to some random rapid moment of active void of police melodrama violently making the life of awareness seem like slow suicide.

Exposed, one stays where one is. His hand — his pistol hand — is in his jacket pocket as if to keep the cap from working its way out. He is afraid. The point of the meeting tonight was him, he senses, he guesses, but how? Not the message, but him. So he is to get the message from prison (this time unposted) and in exchange gives up what?

Himself.

But this is why he is here. He is the one whose life Foley’s letters intimate. "Life" so final and indecisive-sounding a word in English. Faster than saying "Efrain." Life is what Foley could be doing. "Natural life" means no parole, does it? and once he wanted to ask what Foley had done to almost get it, but you don’t ask, and if an inmate feels inclined to tell, he will — which Foley did not, except to write once about "a guy who has a score to settle with me who stands watch, week in week out, over a row of garbage cans."

Life, then. Less than natural life. Foley got eight to twenty. Imagine not knowing.

When what he wants to know is real. What he must know is how can he be in danger and in a vacuum at the same time? It is a life, says Clara. For how long? Old New York from other years they have dinner in, but this trip reinvents their whereabouts though they are in the phone book: just in from Stockholm for a week, consultant in San Diego, semi-retired in the Carinthian Mountains of Austria an hour from Italy an hour from Yugoslavia (at your age? and the "children"?): to meet the children in Mexico City (one lie compounded to) or New Orleans, we met on neutral ground in a New Orleans garden (and the regime? asks the friend or his wife; where do your children stand? — don’t ask — a subtle lie, for he doesn’t know).

They see a play, a movie, an opera with a friend in it, two operas. He has heard tell of a Hamlet opera — a Hamlet of the Garment District with roles altered. Where does he know the gray-haired man from? They’ve turned left at the far corner where he was to have met Efrain. From England? from Chile? from Rome? from gatherings where he sits and listens and does not ask questions and feels like a Jew in a Cracow suburb? The old Nobel scientist from Florida — Switzerland by way of Florida where he lives now — stood in front of a blackboard and said there are no vacuums, and later was interrupted by a student bearing socialist manifestos, issuing garbled challenges by which the old man’s beautifully economical physics was not touched, for students here don’t cut through so — so fiercely, with cool passion — the way students back home used to — to the salient contradiction, the contradiction, the suddenly grasped contradiction! — though it is true, too, that the old man was good, very good. Better than a Nobel economist who comes to one’s mind at this crowded, empty moment who is of course right about money but about nothing else. And when Clara said on his return, "If there are no vacuums, what have we instead? What takes their place?" And he laughed until, like swimming in his employer’s pool in winter so in the long run he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop swimming, but then dizzily did, he was stopped by the famous physicist’s answer which he passed to his wife Clara: "There are only areas of low energy."

A scene he’s absent from is what he gathers across Seventh Avenue. A theater set, the cast for a moment parting like a curtain, like the space between the great charges of steam wasting up out of a hole in the street, and the fatherly broad man with the greenish tweed jacket and Amy, her bright pale hair in a single brain, and the boy, gaining the far sidewalk, swing off left, so the eye moves ahead of them to the open-front fast-food Greek eatery to a dark-olive-faced young man in a khaki jacket, trousers, beret, all khaki but for one detail and he’s standing at the counter watching the sidewalk as much of it as he can see and Seventh Avenue and theoretically the unsuspected far corner on the west side where the eye watches him, seeing what he cannot see because it’s around the corner of the restaurant’s open front on the sidewalk; so the eye unclouded by a dangerous tweed cap that’s been pocketed, and uncluttered by the aching dozen of all different simultaneous thought clustering about the half-known name of the fatherly man with the two young companions, feels this group who now on the far sidewalk approach the open front of the fast-food place where Efrain, for it is and must be Efrain, waits with the one non-khaki detail visible upon his person, and the cars build up between the eye of the immigrant beholder who ought to be building something now himself but has left it in his native land destroyed and is touring some place that turns into scenes of his own absence, a scene across the avenue: the three reach the souvlaki place Giro II (!) — someone’s head chattering away against the vertical barbecue, la par ilia, which in Chile they may even toast you with — and are visibly hailed by Efrain who eases over to shake hands with Mayn — yes — and be presented to the two young people; yes, Mayn was the name, Mayn it is, the name as sure as his coincidental second materialization walking up the Upper West Side block five floors below the window of Clara and her husband’s flat and as certain as Mayn’s first appearance in Florida days after Allende’s speech to the UN months and months ago at a point on the planet’s surface free of visual interruption so one felt oneself standing on the planet, until late, late at night long after this friendly newspaperman named Mayn (who made you think the big events were not so big nor necessarily elsewhere) had — yes — asked if he thought people were interchangeable: while an old friend sat behind them at the Voice of America table beaming Apollo 17 information to, among other targets down the long continent below this one, a large room or a next room where an old good friend at last and still for a moment in power might turn from debt rescheduling which will always be with us to copper and back again but only to substitute one for the other and never admit a tie-in no matter what a CIA economist might urge, an old old friend a medical doctor with an inflated government staff who did not himself know how soon life would replace him.