Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Her stuff was where she’d left it last night if Gordon had not put it away. He used to joke about putting it on his toothbrush. She felt in her speaking mouth that she had to think now on account of what had come to her — what he had communicated to her last night when all she could do was receive it, the thought, and hold it, but minus the future which had come this morning — but she had taken the white-and-blue tube of Ortho-Gynol out of the medicine cabinet but had put it back down on the sink remembering a night when she’d left the top off (next to the toothbrush) and she and Gordon had laughed about it in the morning.

The cycle of the household was where she’d left it this morning. Automatic morning that was once blind, blurred comfort. But automatic, too fixed to have room for a something it was waiting for, and Gordon didn’t hear her this morning when she took her pain from last night and with it the sound of his bath running and closed the front door behind her.

And so, ahead, she saw the apartment house, the restaurants (not the Jewish, which was in the block she’d skipped today), and the hotels, the church, stationery store, appliance store across the street, and the cleaner whose late Genoese father had been an actual tailor across the street on her side long before Norma had thought of New York. Once into the elevator she would be at the door of the apartment faster than she could think.

This morning the two pains, headache and lower back, received the two women coming at her from either end of the desk and room, Rhoda back from Washington—"We’ve got money for you, I didn’t want to tell you until we knew, and it’s a private source right here in New York, not federal money which is hard enough to predict but this is even crazier, apparently it’s right here in New York — we’re not asking any questions; do you understand what I’m saying? we’ve got money for you, two hundred a week" — and Kate, with a letter—"Hey girls, that building’s probably getting a prize, what do you think of that?" — she knew what Norma thought.

Norma couldn’t eat the cheese Danish that Kate put down on the desk with its paper unfolding. She had a job, though she’d been doing it for months anyway. So she ate the Danish but not lunch, and didn’t call Gordon. But at 2:30 had a cheeseburger with meat grease and juice rising through her cheeks yet did not find the gap, which she left to get bigger, until at 5:15, when she remembered she hadn’t gone to the bank at lunchtime, the shape of a pretzel sent her beyond the pretzel man past the prize building that pressed down on the old, vanished armory, and past an orange picked up by a man whose much younger girlfriend with longish, squeaky-fresh-looking hair didn’t know about the orange she’d lost. And so Norma through freedom of thought passed toward a thin, hurrying woman of indeterminate age (though Norma knew) applying lipstick to her stretched mouth as she walked along — and toward home, in all those directions that went on without her, toward Grace Kimball’s workshop where she knew she was to hear how hair is vanity so why not cut it all off and get in touch with your head, which is like your body and has something to tell you that men in 1976–1977 can’t, like Gordon now and last night, who said he didn’t care one way or the other if she went to the workshop, were all these naked gals in the workshop workshopping, he asked, were they throwing vases on a pottery wheel? and she asked if he was thinking of the old women who in his old joke were up in the Bronx sticking the city’s pretzels together with their spit; no, wait, he said, the workshop’s your business, you know what I mean — he laughed and in his awkwardness a touch of color like fondness sharpened his eyes. Yet she had to think before she met him, for he was the source of the thought, and she had to stop being incongruous, not fitting, she’d lost two pounds up to last night and before today’s Danish and cheeseburger, so her breasts might be a shade firmer though they’d never been any trouble, they were smallish she had once thought but now she didn’t know — Gordon had once said he liked them, but he didn’t hear those voices any more or maybe didn’t know what to do with them any more, her breasts, and she’d read that prostitutes didn’t take off their bras; and therefore she should speak, for she couldn’t think unless she spoke, but whichever way she turned in the one operating phone booth she could not speak properly to Gordon, though she had saved that quarter she knew was in her purse somewhere. The unit call from Gordon at home cost less than a dime, and what with her magic new salary which she would be telling Gordon about in a few minutes after a day of unfaithful thoughts, yes, she remembered them like a series flashed through the city’s blocks but who could know what she was thinking? she couldn’t help thinking of what was in Gordon’s mind when he turned away from the eleven-o’clock news with its report on surveillance of foundations to look at her, his eyes blank, his tongue poking down in his cheek for a second as she then looked away and so did he, into the screen where CIA or FBI was being spoken of, but the message was in him more than the screen, like the shadow of the armory cast upward from deep below the ground where Gordon had told her to speak French to the woman whose husband needed razor blades, well only one blade would do, and then walking past the girls and pimps along Park she had tried to tell Gordon why English would have been better, that the French were not so patient as the Italians with foreigners speaking their language, but Gordon could always argue her down, and when he’d said, ‘They’re the foreigners, not us," she’d looked away at the long-legged black girls moving their feet around recklessly and laughing to each other, but she was going to be really naked tonight in the lights of Grace Kimball’s furnitureless apartment with jars and dishes of nuts and raisins and dried apricots on the window sills and candles celebrating the separation of the men from the girls who became women not girls.

What if a man came to the door? A messenger. A retarded messenger.

Norma had no further to go.

Only a ride up.

Manuel gone home, no one on the door. Any stranger could walk in, like the broad-shouldered man in the lobby waiting for the elevator. The man from this morning. Did women imagine and men think?

She was so glad to see him that she found herself shaking her head and saying, "Anyone could just walk in here." Her shoulders rounded toward him gently. Her day had curved back to him with nothing in between their meetings. His clothes smelled. Of amiable smoke. And he’d had a drink; he had thick hair, all gray but not dull. He asked what floor, but his hand was passing over the buttons as if it didn’t matter. "As you were saying," he said — and smiled.

Again, it was kind but automatic but fast, a kind mouth with a thoughtful pout.

"You said something in Spanish and Manuel laughed."

"Pretty raunchy Spanish," the man said.

"It sounded very fluent."

Kind wasn’t what she meant about his smile. She saw that, and felt good at the thought that kind was sexy, while he said, "I have to use it sometimes, but I’m always surprised how it comes — and I better not think about it, you know what I mean?"

They were moving and she had no time now to find anything out. So she asked right out.

And he said he went back long before Manuel. Same apartment? she asked. Kept it, he said. Things changed? Guessed he was supposed to say yes.

She didn’t want to get off into rent talk; it was like car talk.

She learned his apartment—9D — like getting a phone number. She thought she was quite a person.