Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The need to think things through; to build not on gap of what was wrong — and what was that? Found no daylight between two cabs gridlocked and experimented with cement ramp onto sidewalk — for wheelchair cases— and found space between trees at the curb and half-crippled young guy with silver walker, and space between him and kid on roller skates playing her harmonica two hands for beginners, so had space to think, to flow, to build on.

Gustave has brought foundation account into independent messenger service and does not wish to use bicycle. Compu-Grafics are thinking about moving from Turnstein. Felt watched, but not by Santee, who waits on phone in headquarters and again says, "Spence," after long pause. Sehora Wing’s words still in mind — no envelope needed. Answer to old lady still in mind— she was kind. ‘This is your key," said Santee, with speckled wrists; "will you lock up?" He’s going around to the theater and then out of town overnight. "You understand?" he says. It came to me, it came to me, and was more than messages, even messages that I as sole proprietor of business might have to intercept in case they were dangerous to me. It came to me that I saw Santee by the light of my skin, and I could do this wherever I turned, and could bend around obstacle in lane. When the double-parked truck is ahead in lane, vehicle in next lane speeds up so you can’t move out of lane to avoid truck. Could not explain this to Gustave, who could use it even with subway doors, but may explain it at meeting of union of retarded messengers organized by Kimball’s friend Maureen. Santee’s feet suddenly not heard no more, like he stopped on the first flight down and waited.

Senora Wing’s words hold: "You know somebody who is going to Chile under cover of darkness, the land of Chile in South America, someone who has been a prisoner." Spoken to tiny woman with yellow light.

Desk drawer open showing manila envelope. What’s wrong is not something missing but something present in the way. Place belongs to Santee, but business belongs not to Santee, but he thinks so.

The business belonged to me. I found a double-lock on door and turned it. I opened desk drawer further and took out manila envelope. It was addressed to "Ray Spence" and inside it was two photographs: one was of two guys in green shirts and pants standing with a tall, bald man in a white suit, and they were all smiling; the other was an old picture of a young woman in a big hat standing beside an African pigmy, the picture was all yellow.

Santee was really Spence. Something was going on at the theater, and the opera singer Luisa was involved. I was afraid to use the phone. I had said to the old lady, "Yes, I am." I pushed the desk drawer back to what it was. I went over and touched the bicycle. Some people remove their fenders. I turned and fell down. If I had a few teeth out, my jaw would get permanently smaller. The sound of Spence’s voice was unknown, like. The need to think things through.

Instead of using the phone, I left the office and took the subway home. I met my mother at the supermarket. She called to me across the street. I crossed. She give me a kiss and a hug. Georgie there handing a joint to a white girl. "Where’s you bike, man?" Georgie asks. Mother says, "He can’t ride no bike." "Where you keepin’ it, Jimmy?" Georgie asks. I opened my mouth and tried to speak, and light was in my mouth and I saw I could speak if I wanted but I decided not to. I kind of stammered. The girl laughed friendly. "He’s ridin’ up and down Park Avenue on his bike," said Georgie. Mother laughed and took my hand.

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future. A thought that she was not dependent. The City, which generated its own noise and change, would not give her this. This thought. She must give it herself. Slowly, if need be. Did she think? Her feet weren’t so sure.

The pretzel man was standing between the push handles of his silver bin with its umbrella. He spoke to her and she smiled. The gap of some brief charge in herself she had no clear feeling for was the shape of a toasty, salt-roughened pretzel. But who would knead her lower back and rub her head where two aches kept their distance from each other unrolling straight ahead like motions? Funny, really funny, this emptiness or gap between the two pains would not change direction if she did, but had its own way and, like her other life that she would not want to live, would go on downtown without her — that is, if she and her upper and lower back pains turned west into Thirty-fourth Street as she almost always did.

So instead, feeling a smile in her cheeks and her teeth pinning gently her lower lip, her tongue at the corner, she kept on and heard the pretzel man say behind her, "No hungry today."

Couldn’t anyone read her thought? Her face could be pretty, but, she thought, pretty dumb, no secret. But whatever this year’s tax form said, whatever she read in the face that she was going home to now whether or not he was home in person, she was not dependent. Here she was on Park Avenue going home, a New Yorker, a person moving down these bricks of a beige sidewalk. People talked to each other on their way to the subway; she worked ten blocks from her home.

She was being leaned on, she didn’t look up above to her left at what her downward slope was taking her past; it would stop in a moment — the new office high-rise. Now here came a black man in a beige suit, and as he passed her he smiled, and she looked away from his neat nose to the green-and-brown handkerchief puffed out of his breast pocket. It matched the wide green-and-brown tie tied in a large, loose knot.

But she was supposed to be in a hurry, and she wasn’t getting anywhere. Her body had a name which made it foreign and unknown to all the things on her way that had not been told it. The traffic got louder when she tried to think. Would she buy a bottle of wine? The store with "House" in its name diagonally across the two-way pull of the avenue was not the store she had had in mind. She was relieved to be alone. She didn’t exist. Yet she had heard her name, heard it called through the now-turned-up glare of rush-hour engine fumes. So she’d looked back, back up the slope of this block, feeling its slope. She’d halted, awkward, to turn and see a bald man run across in front of a cab to make the curb on this side to reach a girl in a long, fine, brown poplin trenchcoat whom he hugged and patted on the small of her back so her behind was visible below and he curved his hand slowly down over her behind and the girl let go the handle of her shopping bag with a stick of French bread leaning out of the top and the bag dropped to the pavement and stood and then fell over. And the man’s harsh, husky voice seemed to say, "Hi," while he pressed his nose and teeth into her hair, and it was the voice even in all this grind of day that had called, "Norma," and though she wasn’t sure and was looking at the girl whose face was hidden because they might share this name Norma that she’d never "felt," she turned away as two oranges rolled out of the girl’s bag. The man smelled of shoes, slightly burnt food, acrid cloth — and celery, didn’t he? — he might have been under her nose.

Blocks ago she had passed a long skirt in a window on Third Avenue, and she wanted it; but she could not reach for the door handle, she could not get herself to go in and try on the skirt, no price tag, and she had to wash her hair so it would dry in time.

An orange rolled past her, and sidestepping it was a model in denim shirt and khaki culottes who threatened not to see Norma or the orange — what did she see? Whatever the model saw up ahead in the direction of the pretzel man, in the direction Norma had come from, seemed to help her see nothing; the girl was round-shouldered, it looked good on her, maybe it was not that she was tall, taller than she wanted to be, but that it was late in the day, and the forward curve of the thin shoulders looked so good Norma felt a palm brush back and forth across her own front, her own palm or Gordon’s palm that had once done it and stopped for some reason though not he but the rich boy in school in the desk next to hers called nipples clam tails. The model swung by with a little smile on her wide mouth, her touched-up eye shadow very dark, her portfolio skimming the sidewalk, she was operating moment to moment and didn’t have to think if she was going in a straight line to wherever she was going. Two men with newspapers under their arms parted to let the orange run between them, but a Puerto Rican delivery boy from Norma’s supermarket on Third Avenue went down for it and underhanded it to his friend who got it in one hand and with the other bowled it uphill right at Norma, who turned to see the man beyond her who was kissing the girl stop to bend down and snatch the orange just before it would have rolled into the bag alongside the bread. Then he righted the bag, dropping the orange in, and Norma passed the two men with their papers and then passed two older women in tiny hats and red wool coats who held, each of them, a folded evening paper, and the Puerto Rican boys broke off what they were saying and the one Norma knew nodded fast and said Hi, and his eyes dropped, she thought, to her mouth, where she was forced to recall lines deeper and longer than dimples.