Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"It’s my lunch hour."

"Right, right."

"And I’ve been having lunch."

A woman friend with an impulsive voice and a hearty manner had helped her by listening to her. She was probably two or three years ahead of her and she encouraged Freya not to hide her light under a bushel. She told Freya, "Empathy, that’s what they don’t have. In the old days, I’m panicking or I’m taking something too personally, and my ex says he knows exactly what I mean, he’s getting a promotion from his territory back to the front office and all he can think of is his mother praising him to other people as if he weren’t there in the room or his father interrupting him sometimes in the middle of an idea and saying, "That’s what I’ve always thought!" So Freya wanted to get out and start using all this information that was being shared. The woman had said to her, "You thought that panic was yours and now it’s his. That ray of light at the end of the tunnel was your life, you thought, but — nope— it’s his, too."

She walked over to the sound man she’d known for years, stepped over his cable. Dobbie followed, she heard him talking and did not answer when he changed his tack and she heard him say behind her, "Is everything okay?"

She stood beside a piling above brown water, the city around her. She was between the sound man who was small with an Abe Lincoln beard and a cop in a bright blue shirt, a cop with a big mustache. And she felt behind her her husband under the waterside sun so close to her, to her shoulder blades, her neck, her ankles, that she could have fallen or been pushed in.

"Oh Bill," she heard herself say to her old friend the sound man, "you always were a sexist flatterer."

Behind her, Dobbie as if there were no crew no set no documentary-of-a-free-lance-diver said, "Is everything okay, Freya?" as if he knew her so well, as if he knew her so well.

So at last she turned to him, saying, "Still there?" only to see in his face — so she at once looked past him over his shoulder at the girl talking to the diver who had his glass face-mask high on his forehead where the black rubber helmet came down and who was looking at Freya, who he could not know had just caught fixed upon her husband the director-producer’s face— a stony mask of grief, of loss, not to be charmed away by the whistle of a tug or the sharp wash of its wake against the pier pilings, or the line "I don’t know you any more," from a romantic movie.

But he recovered himself sufficiently so that next day, in someone’s dream kitchen adjacent to a private tennis court, he was able when she turned abruptly to him where he stood by their friends’ closed refrigerator, to show the same deadly face — so that, many women though she now knew herself to be, she did not sing.

Gordon met Mayn as they came out of the wind and rain into the lobby. The new man was on, although you wouldn’t know it; he hadn’t come out to open the taxi door for Mayn nor had he pulled open the lobby door but stood safely behind the glass panel on the other side and nodded and grinned as Gordon and Mayn came through and Gordon, who didn’t really know Mayn, held the door for him and Mayn had a word with the new doorman in Spanish. Gordon recognized tiempo, "weather," but not, he thought, the rest, though he heard mas temprano and knew he ought to know what Mayn was saying.

Mayn carried an old pale-leather valise which he did not set down as they waited for the elevator. It hung from Mayn’s hand and he might have been about to board a train. Gordon was a couple of inches taller than Mayn, a couple at most, but Mayn was broader than Gordon and stood with some final, strong balance that was power that came from patience.

The unusual dark shade of Mayn’s uniformly gray, thick hair didn’t look like a younger color mixed in, and his square, roughened face made you think he couldn’t be quite as old as he looked, which might be forty-five or fifty. The elevator floor indicator stayed at 5, and the new man came and pounded on the elevator door, put his nose against the diamond-shaped pane of reinforced glass, and tried to see up the shaftway. He shrugged and said that it was coming, and went away.

While waiting, Gordon and Mayn talked of security in the building, the boiler, and a general shift in weather patterns toward extreme warm and extreme cold winters in alternate years; also snow tires — in particular, radial snows. Gordon and Mayn re-introduced themselves. Gordon didn’t really know Mayn, but Gordon’s wife Norma, who had greeted Mayn once in Gordon’s presence, said Mayn was a nice man; he had lived in the building once upon a time, had left, had now come back to the same old apartment which he had somehow kept, and was often out of town. According to Norma, Mayn had bought an old white Cadillac for his young daughter who worked in Washington. She had not received it with quite the sense of humor her father had hoped for. Or so Norma had told Gordon.

Gordon at forty-four had taken a leave of absence from his law firm. He had to think, and think also how much this leave was costing. He kept thinking of himself as around forty. He had listened to Norma speaking of Jim Mayn.

She hardly knew him, but in his wife’s mentions of Mayn the rather lone new but old arrival, Gordon had found a tremor or shift that Norma might be unaware of.

What had Gordon missed? He had missed something — another life, no doubt — and that was why he was taking an expensive leave of absence which his firm did not understand. He had missed what? It was why he was where he was. He had almost forgotten how to think; or that was what it felt like in the morning and in the evening, and yet that wasn’t it. He noticed the year now when he read the Times in the morning, they were past the middle of the decade of the ‘70s.

The doorman came back and placed both palms on the elevator door, his nose against the diamond-shaped pane, trying to get into the shaft it looked like.

"She’s coming now," said Mayn. The doorman stepped back, giving the elevator door a single bang with his fist.

Gordon said he was glad his own daughters were too young to drive; he wouldn’t keep a car in the city. He listened to himself say that indoor parking cost as much a month as a room in an apartment, and what did the Motor Vehicle tax on a newly purchased car come to now? Mayn said that his daughter had a car in Washington. Gordon thought, A white Cadillac! Mayn said, The government takes so much, it’s almost too expensive to work. Still, thank God for withholding.

Gordon pointed out that they withheld too much, and he recalled that once he had prepared a speech on taxation.

Mayn asked who had delivered it, had Gordon been in politics?

No, it was for a contest at the rather traditional boys’ day school where Gordon attended grades nine through twelve. There were different categories and you could enter only one. Declamation was one category: you recited a poem. Public speaking was the other, but speech had two categories, prepared and extemporaneous. The extemporaneous speakers tended to be Jewish and kept up on their current events like sports fans; they were given topics fifteen minutes before they had to go on.

"That’s the way it ought to be," said Mayn.

Gordon had taken a load of information from an article in a magazine of his father’s, and when he went up to deliver his prepared speech from memory he looked left and right and didn’t know what in hell he was doing giving a speech on a subject like that. Where was the point of it for him?

Mayn wagged his head agreeably and said he couldn’t help him there.

In the elevator Gordon invited Mayn to come in for a drink. Mayn was saying, "Well…" when they arrived at his floor and the door opened, and he asked Gordon to have that drink in his place.