Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And at that instant — but God it was never at that instant, it was always long known, long prepared for, but kept in the corner of the eye as if hardly there till the mood took you to set a revelation to the words at that instant I suddenly saw —that, well, hopefully was how she had looked at him long ago — with hope for herself. Met him in an early health-food restaurant she didn’t officially manage but seemed to because the boy and girl dancers who waited on table came to her for everything, and before this bearded, logical-spoken customer had thought about ordering, this customer who couldn’t make up his mind whether to be aggressively shy or aggressively charming and recited Falstaff suddenly to her as she stood over him, and she suddenly saw he had charmed the forks and knives right off the table so she had to replace them — yes, before this customer had thought about ordering she had discovered he ran a small company that made documentary films for television, and he, if he remembered, had discovered that she did not live around there, the Village, but a subway ride away in Brooklyn Heights in a top-floor studio that was very beautiful, very tiny, and too much money, and where, he soon found, she had maximized her space by using cushions and reducing the furniture to the bare minimum although she liked to cook and not health food.

Sure the hope had been for herself quite apart from his famous parents. But she for her part had given him what, it turned out, he wanted, not to mention a lot of love. (Served him right.) So she was able to give up that job, high on her list of things to give up; and so she thought for years that he had saved her.

For what? A couple of growing children? A foggy day on a friend’s tennis court, a sunny day? Throw in a raspberry mountain in green Carinthia where the woodcutter’s — we’d say lumberman’s — wife and her children pick gallons of berries in order to crush them with liters of sugar so that thick raspberry syrup may soothe the toothless winter. For Dobbie and wife, a raspberry mountain in Carinthia and at its foot a midnight bed-and-comforter.

In which bed, lying on their sides, he before, she behind, single-file, each with the right ear to the pillow, headed both in the same direction, she pressed his welt and as it moved under her fingertip she saw that he had not looked at her because a voice in him had warned him not to for else he’d see for once who it was who had consented to be saved by him; and what then?

This wasn’t easy. She smelt smoke coming out of his scalp, someone else’s smoke, and with it faint vanilla, used vanilla, off the skin of his scalp moistly glistening in the light of a cowless cowbell — and beer — beer because tonight she had had wine because the white wine was cheap, not because it was local and good, well fairly local. But at this moment in history she wished to talk, not smell — and not the words she had just talked a moment ago like a wife setting up a doctor’s appointment because it was her duty to keep her man alive, to save him, say, from losing ten years of life expectancy with her.

And her head now curiously reached around the obstacle of him and bent round not so much to feel him where he was soft or tight as to see what he was facing in the direction of.

And at this moment hearing hooves briefly canter upon the sod out on the mountain along with the clink which she now knew was more than a memory of an afternoon cow that had gone down the mountain to those farmgirls at milking time leaving behind it only the ring and with a large upheaval of the one heavy, clean-enveloped comforter that covered them her husband rolled one complete half-turn, hand on hip, his hand, her hip, except the hip had sensed change and all by itself had rolled with the crunch, as he observed the very next morning ten seconds before they were suddenly joined for breakfast by the Philadelphia couple — that is, the hip had rolled with his roll so that the hip he reached for turned out to be not her left hip, for she had also turned and was no more facing him than she had been before, but her right hip, and now he was behind her single file and had said, "Hey," to which again, with a magic not all her own, she did not say what she had wished to say but said, "It’s not that you didn’t look at me, it’s—"

"— that" (came his voice) "you didn’t really care."

"I’m going to sleep," she said, securely wiped out by having inspired him to say what she did not mean.

Black telepathy call it, if he would only hear.

If he only heard himself think, he’d think before he spoke, though singing if you could call it that was what he did sometimes outdoors instead of speaking, but singing in place of knowing what he was thinking, and so to fill the silence which anyone knew wasn’t at all empty but full of interesting junk, Dobbie could sometimes speak too quickly with the edge of someone by turns sharply shy, actively charming, though she had never gotten around to telling him.

Though he did not sing on the tennis court.

Or at breakfast. That is, until, ten seconds after the Philadelphia couple had announced themselves and arrived to find that at the table of their new New York friends from last night two additional place settings had materialized which inspired the woman as if nothing had happened between dinner and breakfast to ask if Dobbie’s parents had had any other issue besides Dobbie, Dobbie’s wife now said the cream in her impeccable Austrian coffee was sour and disintegrating, whereupon Dobbie pushed his chair back, got up, and, beginning to sing softly, made for the kitchen holding the earthenware jug only to meet, pushing from the kitchen side, the girl with the coffee pot temporarily on a tray.

Hold it.

Cut. He was so good, so smart, at putting things, their life, together, remembering how it had been, summing up, cutting, dissolving the little scenes they had: come on, I know how you’re feeling, I know why you’re doing this: while she stared like a stone, and when he said how sad it made him when they had their differences she had to laugh at him, he wasn’t exactly funny, or quite charming, but suddenly he had her — recalling, that is, what they had done together once upon a mountaintop or were going to do tomorrow, visit the free-lance diver in his Manhattan apartment, fish-out-of-water footage. Cut.

To the kitchen of rich friends, a kitchen with familiar appliances, great farmhouse table in spring light with a green-stained chopping board and a slab of marble with flour on it, windows above the sink, the green boughs of trees out there, and among them, but hard to see, white shorts, white short-sleeved shirts of players rushing, back-pedaling, while the green leaves show of the tennis what they will and make the red earth and white-taped lines both far away and close, which she knows is what she has to want, but only flickers of the outside, a glitter of rackets, a flex of legs clearing the stretch of net she can see from here in someone else’s kitchen, why is she here inside in her bare thighs and tennis dress, sneakers on cool linoleum, feeling too good to put up with her own homicidal pique, in someone else’s kitchen that is better than her own because it asks nothing of her, why is she here staring into a huge refrigerator lit up like an enchanted robot proud of its sinister insides, and on top of the refrigerator stood the broad silver cylinder of a power juicer that will get juice out of a pit, butter out of nuts.

While out beyond the windows, out amongst the leaves and boughs, flicker blue and white sneakers, and suddenly the same legs as before hurdle the net now in the other direction — hairy, she knows from memory she’s almost sure but couldn’t care if she wanted to and doesn’t want to, and doesn’t want to be back there fifteen minutes ago looking into the sun double-faulting three times in a row — thrice — while Dobbie, at the net, his back to her, bends over his shoulder, waits at the net to put one away that never comes back at him because at this moment of history she can’t get it over and she doesn’t blame it on the sun. But then amid his silence she does get one in, an ace so modest it’s hardly seen, like a practice serve, a slicing ace, not fast but a fair ping off her easy unbent overhead swing but they’ll never know that at the instant of tossing the yellow ball up she opened infinitesimally her whole left side, her leg, shoulder, behind, to give the angle of instinct that would hit Dobbie in the head with the serve even before her follow-through was finished. Ah so — and yet the ball missed his ear by a whisker, just missed, and found the sideline tape for an ace, and he knew this, though did not know he knew; and he put his hand to his ear to feel the fuzz of her intent, so the friends across the net jeered.