Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Norma felt exposed.

It will come to you, said Gordon, when Norma said she didn’t understand something, and he wasn’t kidding.

"After what?" she asked, and heard, "What?" in the phone receiver, for Gordon was home and she didn’t have to ask about wine after all but if she didn’t she would have nothing to put in place of the question except what was happening. She was half giggling half gasping, and the man outside the booth rapped twice. She got a hot stoniness from the quick oversalted cheeseburger she now didn’t recall chewing, Grace was into chewing — Norma did not usually say "into."

"When are you coming home?" she asked, knowing he was home.

"For Christ’s sake, Norma, you—"

But she was crying anyway while the late light enlarged her and the space between question (Had she taken the checkbook?) and answer (Yes, she had) filled up the booth so she would not be able to open the door, and the man waiting to make a call would give up.

He is a black man in a gray pinstripe suit and for a moment he looks at her, wrinkling his forehead, looks away but in a friendly way that says he feels time spent in eye contact is time taken away from Norma’s phone business which she must conclude before he can occupy the position she now occupies. Is everything stopping?

People passed. A guy in jeans tapped the glass with his knuckles as he went past, she felt a breeze across her front. She was breathless, but she saw she wouldn’t stop, she had to cry through, spill through, and even if the name of her body was not known.

So the light changed and the policeman’s horse moved ahead, rocking the rather gigantic police rider so he looked handsomely like that was his job — to rock well. She turned past all the moving faces outside and looked in a direction opposite where Gordon was and saw sun glare in windows across Park.

Gordon said, "Who is with you?"

Her breathing rushed, and she wanted to say the building is a eater-cornered mistake and the Neighborhood Council woman Kate said the building is going to get a prize which didn’t make any sense.

"Is anyone bothering you?" said Gordon.

"I’m wasting this dime," she said. "The Council got some money, Gordon."

"You’re not still at work."

"I don’t think I even have a quarter," she said.

A sound came to her from the receiver and it said through her sinuses that it was a sound neither at her end of the line, where she couldn’t get her breath to ask if he needed anything because he was doing his usual tonight, nor at Gordon’s, where eggs would be hatching into omelets soon — but rather that it was between them.

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future.

And Gordon said in that sure way sweeping away all difficulties (certainly those stirred up by her), being himself able to do so, "What’s the number there, I’ll call you back. Annie’s out for dinner. I’ve got something to tell you but I can’t until you get home — it’s what I mentioned when we went to bed last night." This was slow, slower than the sunset. But her life eluded her faster than the slowness was slow.

So she started with the area code, thinking the black man outside the booth was kind — he had a kind mouth she wanted to say to Gordon; the black man had — she was saying, "Two. . one. ." saying she was sorry she was slow, she couldn’t get her breath, her voice was—"two."

Then when he said, "That’s the area code," she said, "I’m sorry, that’s the area code, I can’t speak now, I can’t think," and Gordon said, "O.K., Norma, only the numbers after two one two."

She gave them, and then she was cut off before she could hang up. As if she had been looking at him again, giving him one of her looks according to him. She waited for him to touch her, her feelings, and instead she was in touch with what he was thinking, never he with her except to screw the top on.

The spasms did their own gasping, she had no make-up on, she had cheeseburger grease at the root of her tongue, Gordon would phone back now and sympathize, and maybe she would introduce him to the black man who was waiting. The black man had a mouth he pursed as he looked again at his newspaper folded in one hand — his other held an attache case. She smiled and he looked at her. The phone booth was his if he took her with it, and her joke fixed his smile suddenly and he looked at the phone box register and shook his head, and the phone rang as she pulled the folding door and stepped free, saying, "You take it."

It rang again, she thought she had some sugarless gum in her bag, she reached back into the booth to lift the receiver an inch and hang up but she only put her hand on it. She gracefully dipped out of the booth, the man saying, "Are you sure?" and she walked away into a green light. She found a Kleenex in her bag and pinched it to her eyes without breaking stride, while he called, "It’s for you." She didn’t turn back, though she was crossing to the north side of the street needlessly, but wondered if the black man’s voice would come across the phone to Gordon. Gordon could be kind, but the black man had looked too kind to discuss her with Gordon, while Gordon was not so kind he wouldn’t tell her bluntly to think why she felt the way she did.

O.K., think back to Rhoda’s saying, "It’s different for you, you don’t have to work." Think back and see where your feeling is coming from but maybe what was there first.

While you look ahead and don’t have time to think. Certainly not that you wanted a son who would wear little red sneakers and talk to himself. And you would probably treat him like a prince.

The tall girls were out in their hot pants for the rush hour, and a big blue car with a cream-colored Jersey plate stopped near a restaurant doorway. Norma looked at a girl’s stilt-high, head-small behind, a girl who also had a large mouth, when she looked over her shoulder, a large mouth with pale lipstick almost white. What were they doing here? This wasn’t where they normally were supposed to be.

Three men wearing On-Strike placards stood across the width of the sidewalk. She would have to read the newspaper now because she had to be well-informed. Gordon had given up on her, she liked to think. Gordon, when they’d all been walking home from dinner, the men in front, Norma and Gordon’s friend’s wife behind the men, had been hailed by a girl, "Going out tonight?" and she and the other wife caught up and she told Gordon he ought to price them, they were neighborhood people, but he said, "They’re just interested in giving blow jobs," which Norma had an answer to but it would not be funny, he was always there ahead of her. But maybe there was more room on that point than just for him, and she’d said, "Maybe they like it," which she didn’t mean, and she wondered if he had heard. Or could hear. The Council’s new money, for instance. It dried her eyes right now. No one looked. No one looked away. She would not tell him she was on salary. He could ask about the Council’s new money. Let him.

"It will come to you," she thought, and the tall black pimp who stepped out not quite into her path in black, high-heeled boots and a high-crowned, insanely wide-brimmed hat that looked made of muskrat from one of the windows way over on West Thirtieth bent and tilted his head affably and said, "What?"

You will pass the Jewish restaurant, the Chinese, the Indian, the hotel, the church, the stationery store with the cleaner across the street. The girls and boys stand on the steps across the street, the steps of the acting school, waiting to go back in. Norma, you will come home from work by a route so invariable that the apartment house will come to you. The city thinks for you.

Gordon was inside her; but no, she had not wished the gap between the aches in her head and lower back to go on without her, so she hadn’t turned west on Thirty-fourth, but had gone down a block — then over to Park, then down then over a block but the gap was not just waiting for her as if it were last night in bed; it was with her now with the two pains that it was between. It was to be thought. She had to believe she had achieved a thing or two, this thinking that she kept with.