Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She was in the middle of Park Avenue South where the small stretch of tunnel came out that began just south of Grand Central, the bypass tunnel that made Gordon bawl a cabdriver out one night who took them the long way around.

A messenger, a retarded man she’d seen up and down Madison Avenue with wall eyes and a jaw like a shovel, limped by, carrying a manila envelope, keeping ahead of some black and Puerto Rican girls just off work in one of the lingerie workrooms and now laughing all the way to the uptown subway on the east side of Park.

But this thought that she was not dependent after all had come to her from living with him. A consequence. Oh God she knew who she owed the thought of her independence to, oh God she knew, for she saw ahead, for she knew, for then she saw Gordon get up out of his chair as the TV said, "It’s 11:23. Do you know where your package is?" Gordon was leaving the room. Then he laughed as if the joke came to him like a nutty afterthought or a belch. She was being stopped by a ragged man but looked past him at the same time to a curly-haired couple standing with a bike between them, grinning.

A ragged man in three or four coats loosely closed in plastic-wrap like what the cleaner used for finished work, and she had lost the word for this man. His eyes, against the annihilating sunlight, were the one clear part of his unshaven surface, his feet were bare, he had a white silk necktie around his adam’s apple inside his coats, and he was stopping her while others passed them going both ways. But the curly-haired young man patted the seat of the bike that stood between him and the curly-haired girl and turned and walked away, leaving his touch upon the saddle, which the girl then put her hand on, wheeling the bike off the sidewalk and getting the pedal right. So now in the gulf of blinding radiance from the west Norma saw the sun coming up, and that made her skip everything except what she heard in the gap after this unforeseen preparation coming out of the ragged bum’s blue eyes here as close as a picture: she didn’t know what to give him, she was taller than he, and she felt a blinking ahead — so she asked how much he wanted and heard his eyes with white gunk in the inner corners seem to speak again though it was people pushing past. Finding a dime, she put a wrinkled bill into his fingers and the blinking stopped but the color of the traffic-light words don’t walk was voided by the sun, and she and the bum stood alone with car horns firing at one another around them for they had stopped each other at the entrance to this Park Avenue bypass tunnel in the middle of Park Avenue traffic, she him as he her, and as she heard him speak of "Nice hair" — or was it just "Hair"? — somebody was shouting through the overwhelming light, "Get outa there, ya not supposed to be there, lady!" but cars were smoking past in both directions, she was being filmed, erased, or colossally embarrassed, and the bum took her elbow in his hand and when they found the curb from which he had come she was gasping, her eyes streaming, and she heard the same voice now above her and remembering the bottle of wine she smelled the policeman’s horse, or the odor of the bum, his body, his breathy presence. Smelled it through plastic wrap, and she turned to cross the crosstown street.

Yet when she got down to the liquor store she didn’t want to get the wrong thing. So she went on past to the two glass pay booths across from the next corner and found her dime again just as someone else whom she could not look at discovered the other phone was broken. So she aimed the dime and thought what she was going to dial.

But she had to think before she met Gordon, she had to stop being out of place, feeling that she stuck out in order to be ignored, which didn’t make sense yet it did, yet she wouldn’t know how to tell about it at the rap tonight.

In order to think, she had to speak. She could have spoken in the elevator this morning. To the gray-haired, strong-looking man in the elevator whom she hadn’t seen before who bobbed his head to her and muttered quite kindly, "Morning." She could tell he was kind, and she wished she hadn’t been in such a hurry because though she didn’t have to tell the girls to brush their teeth any more, she hadn’t washed her face — yet a soft curve of privacy at the far end of which she would touch his eyes softened her face toward him and it flowed; she knew he would have talked to her if she’d spoken first, he would have said something good with a twist of freshness and blurred by exposure to the morning. He’d been smoking, she smelled it with his shaving scent. She’d thought he’d spent the night with someone in the building — he was in shape — and she wanted to hear him right now. She was gasping again, but then when he had come out of the elevator behind her, he turned toward the mailroom and when she said, "It wouldn’t be in yet," she heard the words "Long time," but as she went out the street door she heard Spanish, and he and Manuel laughed— " mañana, " she got, but the man was regular American, looked like he was away a lot, not focusing on these walls but carrying some presence of outside.

She’d been carrying the thought then of being not dependent.

Or most of it, for she’d woken up with it in her fingertips while the rest of her was aching, and she should have said it to the gray-haired broad-shouldered man who had come into the elevator out of nowhere, she saw now that she had wanted to, she just liked him, he had on a blue-striped shirt, the lines from his nostrils down past his mouth were grooves soft as leather, and she had never seen such eyelashes on a man — who then she thought might live in the building after all because he had aftershave on. And she didn’t speak her thought to him, that she was not dependent, it was so simple God knows what he would have thought. He had added to her his acceptance of the future like prediction, and from him she added to her thought that came to her the thought that what came to her came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future. She was probably dumb.

Almost hard to say, impossible to say to Gordon, who would think her a dumbbell. Which Gordon might claim he did not think — he who knew wine, and the law, and sports; who knew Complete Works — of Tolstoy, Gibbon, Auchincloss, and Waugh, Beethoven (almost), Leonardo (almost) — and for whom if she was buying a special bottle of wine what was she doing crying in a glass booth trying by plastic pushbutton to reach a law firm with half a dozen names. She longed for music, there should be a music number you could tap out on these buttons, the buttons made high, final beeps like a hearing test. She hung up, there was the dense waiting presence outside seeming to tilt and turn the fragile phone booth so she would have to look instead of listen, she didn’t want to get away from him, and couldn’t. She was smiling automatically with her teeth on her lower lip, the gray-haired man this morning had seemed to look at her mouth, but this man now she couldn’t turn to directly. She called home, and let it ring twice, and hung up, and then she used the dime a third time pushing the numbers of Gordon’s office only to be told that he’d left early. So he hadn’t stayed home today. And probably hadn’t done what he said in the dark he would do.

She wasn’t having anything to drink tonight before going upstairs to the first session of the workshop which was fairly hard to get into. With all those women sitting around on the rug. Letting it hang out. And Norma with them. Naked as they. Rapping. Sharing information, said Grace Kimball. Find out you’re like other women, said Grace. (Not unique, then?) Learn to breathe, said Grace, learn to use a plastic speculum (easy enough) and a standing mirror. Go public. (Norma had heard the words before, but where?) Here they were Grace’s words. But not Grace herself not Grace. Grace understood how impossible Norma felt. Grace had no furniture to speak of. She had phones; books of photographs; carpet, music, worklamps and workspace; but no furniture — she’d cleared it all out, she listened to what Norma could not say along with what Norma did say — so that Norma joined Grace in listening to Norma, who wanted to sign up for Grace’s workshop but almost had not asked, in the midst of the overpowering wind of garlic that Grace "cleansed" with and had just received a shipment of from a farmer near Taos, New Mexico.