Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Sorry," she had called before she knew it, and the word looked back into her: "Sorry I missed," it said to her, sounding like she meant also — for she did—"Sorry I don’t know what I’m doing, acing, double-faulting…" And before she could bounce up on the baseline tape at her left toe the one ball she had and serve at fifteen-forty, Dobbie had said, "What do you mean, ‘sorry’?" — fired it over his shoulders as if it wouldn’t affect her upcoming serve.

So she walked off the court. The friends called to her, "Freya? Freya?" Dobbie called out, "Hey!" So she called over her shoulder, "I’ve got a cramp, I’ll be back."

But she did not look back, which was difficult, until she had passed around the house and into the kitchen and then looked forth secretly through the green-leaved windows above the sink, one of them open, to see what little through their friends’ trees she could see of the bright sport on the tennis court, but then she became absorbed in the empty kitchen.

Until she didn’t hear Dobbie in his sneakers, for here he was behind her, she knew a split second before his voice carried as well the decision that she was not sick as the words "What was that all about?"

Without an answer that could be fair to herself, she said, "Oh, not turning around."

"So I could catch one in the face?" he said. "You don’t want to be watched while you serve," he added, "you don’t want to think about it too much," he was saying over her shoulder; but he often didn’t turn around, and she would not remind him but it was not even years we’re talking about, it was Saturday now that she was working, now that she had a job Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday that had been so high on her list of necessities she couldn’t see anything else on the list and now looked forward to Saturday as a day off from her own job not his, freedom to do what she had not been free to do during the work week when she had also been free, words did not explain all this freedom (her job was finding words!) — and this Saturday coming here was not what she wanted to do, yet she had gone ahead with it anyway. Dobbie arriving in the driveway of this large half-timbered house with an all-weather tennis court off through the trees, though it looked like ordinary clay, and a fairly clean pool beyond it, Dobbie getting out of the car, walking toward the house, calling for some reason, "Coffee’s on" and stopping when he realized she was still in the car, but not looking around (catch her moving!), calling back over his shoulder, "Let’s go," while she sat staring through the tinted windshield, able to not move, gripping her new forty-nine-dollar racket like one-potato-two-potato by the handle sticking up through her legs, the head on the floor of the car between her feet, her sunglasses propped against the windshield on top of the padded dash, where they still are, no doubt, the top half catching the green hood of their leased car, the lower half the warm black imitation leather. She had felt compelled to open the door of the car, as if he’d never again hear her from inside the windshield, she felt her right sneaker sole on the gravel shift the little stones first slightly forward and slightly back, she was standing, she had been standing, the open door between her and Dobbie, who now walked on, rising on the toes of his strong legs, only to hear her say, "I don’t know what I’m doing here," when he stopped again, looking still forward, tilting his head back slightly to look at a bedroom window, using time always.

"You don’t want to think about it too much," he said over his shoulder, and a familiar face had appeared at an upstairs window and she smelled roasted coffee.

So that — her hand upon the Acme juicer two sets and a few games later — she knew he would open the fridge door now in order to be doing something in addition to whatever they were also doing, which for a second must have been, unless he was deaf, hearing the pock and answering pock, which was what distance did to a close-up ping, of a long singles rally going on behind the trees.

"You don’t want to think about it," she said over her shoulder and fought hard against thinking of herself having a romantic misunderstanding two-thirds through a mellow old film, her proud, lovely back turned toward the male lead — her proud, lovely, vulnerable back, for everyone including their older child (child!) was saying "vulnerable" up to last year (wasn’t it?) but no one was saying it any more.

So she succeeded here in fighting off romance, and felt only that Dobbie had come unnecessarily into a kitchen where she was. He asked if she was going to do some juicing.

Why did he have to be here, why didn’t he go away into the shade of the trees, the blue-green of the swimming pool, the comfort of the car. She heard him saying, If you can sit, why stand?

She wasn’t sorry she’d walked off the court, she said, said it awkwardly, stonily, heavily, much more significantly than she wanted; but, seeing this, she saw that it wasn’t homicidal pique as she had been thinking.

Oh, he was saying, they were easy to beat after you left — with the fridge door, she was certain, still open — one against two, he said, why he’d been masterful, they were so out of position they were hitting each other with their rackets by mistake.

She all but laughed, but she didn’t, he couldn’t get to her. They both knew he was trying.

It was not homicidal pique. She wasn’t out to kill him. All she wanted was to rearrange him. Put the parts in the Acme juicer pushing the red oblong plastic pusher-plunger steadily down till it was all the way into its slot and for a moment longer juice streamed out the little chute into your glass, sweet pale celery, blue cabbage, dynamite beets, sweet carrot, apple, grapes, coconut, pear, if mixing veg and fruit didn’t screw up the enzymes and give you gas.

Until looking out the kitchen-sink windows she saw their friends saunter toward the house, leaning toward each other, giving each other a push, a jab, and knew she’d forgotten everything for a moment except looking for her husband out the window when he was behind her.

And, hearing him hum, she did not know what she’d turn into but knew he would not save her from it; and turning gracefully round, she could predict that he would look as he did yesterday standing on the city pier with his production crew and a helicopter making a racket rising behind him and three cops watching and an unidentified beauty and the free-lance salvage diver he was making a documentary of in a wet suit behind him standing on one leg to stretch off a flipper.

She was late, and Dobbie looked her in the eye while the sound man talked to him, and Dobbie had nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying loudly to her, "You knew when we were shooting," and she was glad to smile and shake her head at him like any other person — he knew it was her lunch hour, now she was working — and she had been just in time to see the diver surface and climb the ladder. The same man she’d seen on a Saturday morning in his apartment telling the camera of his need to be free, stepping back from his stereo and turning to the camera as the record dropped, Delius, Handel (don’t smile), Bach, yes a long way from the work he did for the police, yes, what he had to come back home to, while Dobbie — who kept to the man’s work and did not ask questions about what he would eventually let viewers of the film see for themselves — Dobbie she knew would splice in and play against the man’s quiet, hard, flat voice footage of an apartment where no matter how hard you searched you would find no children, although the unidentified beauty on the pier was so young, why who knew who she was with?

Dobbie did not let go of this little scene of theirs in the middle of his documentary: Where had she been? — he knew he was being dumb — where had she been, for God’s sake?