Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Then Gordon saw Mayn stand up with a quick force that said that he was not going anywhere. What, asked Gordon, were the big things in the tubs, because Mayn didn’t seem like a plant man. Gordon thought someone strange might come in and threaten Mayn, but Gordon needed to talk.

Mayn took a look at the three great plants and pointed to another Gordon hadn’t noticed, a smaller one with dark, shiny, tight, strong leaves. "That one I happen to know is a jade tree, a young friend of mine named Barbara-Jean gave me that; said she thought I needed it to stand up to the three monsters. I don’t, to tell you the truth, know what their names are; my daughter and my son — well, really my daughter — had them sent here when I moved back in."

Gordon liked Mayn. It was too late to ask for wine, which hadn’t been offered. He said he wasn’t ready for a refill. Mayn came and sat down. He brought with him a long stretch of time, and Gordon felt less unemployed.

"If you’re away a lot," Gordon began but he didn’t go on, and with a shrug surveyed the room and the lighted foyer. Mayn looked at Gordon. Mayn’s hair was solidly but darkly gray and thick, the eyebrows not at all gray, face and chin very square; the eyes through largeness or the illusion of largeness, or through some lighter tint, were more a real color than Gordon had ever seen brown eyes. And he felt — yes — that the man would have felt downright alien had he paid any closer attention to what Gordon said. Or what Gordon was. For Gordon really wasn’t saying anything. He returned the wise or heavy look of his host. Gordon had ventured into this apartment for a casual drink.

Mayn didn’t know Gordon, and yet Gordon felt his life visited by Mayn like a whole way of looking at things, a friendly abstention, powerfully non-intrusive. It was the sensation of the drink and it was the sentiment of memory and it was another day away from work. Gordon had to like Mayn, and he now saw that his self-sought unemployment would end in a few weeks or months and he would go on living his life and it would change for the better. What had Mayn to do with it?

It came to Gordon — and came to him later as he then realized he’d known it would —that the one man, Gordon, knew he had taken the opposite view from how he usually saw his talk in all its intelligent volume, and so he thought he’d talked and said too much; and the other man, Mayn, who didn’t care what another thought of him, had known he was going to think he’d said too little, and had let this narrative go on from a man he didn’t know; which in turn wasn’t a matter of this fella Gordon subjecting him to something, much less mastering him — not at all, quite the reverse — but a drugged, sluggish (he had no right to be tired) feeling that he let his half-invited guest jumble his story, well lift one whole side of it from time to time so all Gordon said slid down toward one edge: a jumble Mayn let happen as if he were being a man to a man letting him talk — yet really offering an ear that was void. Oh Gordon was only guessing, but he felt sure of all this. Not that Norma really knew the man — she had only met him — but she had conveyed to Gordon some shadow that was now Gordon’s own intuition of this man in front of him.

"You would like another," said Mayn.

"Yes I would," said Gordon, and finished his bourbon.

"Knew it," said Mayn, taking Gordon’s glass, and the words stopped whatever spell had sent Mayn running through Gordon’s past a moment before to set out on Gordon’s future without Gordon having the chance to say goodbye.

Gordon spoke and did not stop for a long time. It might have been stupid. It was five-thirty when he began, and Mayn, this former tenant who had resumed residence in the building, asked a question or two and once got up to refill their drinks.

But Gordon talked straight through for what turned out to be an hour.

Why did he do that? Were they both wondering? Perhaps they both had the time. And when he stopped at last, he might in doing so have been anticipating the unexpected sound of a key in a lock that would have stopped him anyway if he had not already just come to the end.

It was more a school story, and after he was into it he would get uneasy telling it for the first time as if this was the hundredth (as it also was), but dismayed more because he’d thought it out so many times but now didn’t know how to end it. Gordon was taking an unpaid leave of absence from his law firm, but what he told Mayn was that he had taken a deep breath and had quit his job and was taking inventory; but Gordon didn’t need to hear himself tell anyone else, even a stranger, that if it was more than a vacation and less than real unemployment, he and Norma and their two children couldn’t live for too long without his working, and although his firm would take him back or he could always get a job — always, always — he also knew a college classmate who had lost his job as vice-president of an insurance company (or was it president) and seven months later shot himself.

Mayn asked a couple of questions that sounded like he was hearing things (or was it Gordon hearing things?). Gordon’s father? Gordon’s grandmother? Quakers? The height of a wall surrounding the roof of an apartment house in Brooklyn? Brooklyn Heights could seem a long way away from Manhattan on a cold, windy, rainy late afternoon.

This is what you do when you’re unemployed, said Gordon; you keep to yourself or you bend someone’s ear — someone who’s just come home from work. But when you begin you lose the beginning, as if maybe there never was a real beginning. You take up the piano. Not the violin, it’s too hard.

Mayn said he didn’t understand "when you begin you lose the beginning."

This particular business started with Gordon skipping fifth grade, but he had been in fifth grade for more than a month. But he had skipped just the same as if from fourth to sixth. And the event would be fully as important as his far-sighted father could foresee.

Mayn asked for enlightenment here and there, and Gordon saw the tolerant man Norma had seen, and this came into Gordon’s thoughts together with a magnetism that seized him as if all this stuff twenty-five years ago and more were easier and flowed better than the untenable future which was now. But he didn’t stop; he remembered that Mayn had covered arms-control talks and had a father in New Jersey and had recently returned, Norma said, from the Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and knew someone who’d been on the cover of a magazine — all this from Norma, who always remembered.

Not that Gordon didn’t; but here he had found himself unexpectedly in sixth grade and with a stranger. Gordon later didn’t know if he really had had in him at the time this suspicion that the event of his skipping a grade would be covered over and infiltrated by the years on either side of it and it would practically get skipped itself.

But an event when it happened: everything got drawn to it, and bounced back off it.

Understood later.

Mayn said he knew what Gordon meant. This seemed kind, for Gordon had been unclear.

As much too late as it was too late to know if the sixth-grade teacher with the rouge on her cheeks, and the quick movements, and the small, round face and dark eyes, Mrs. Hollander, had a view of life. Or what view may come and grow out of a time of horror into life again. The woman herself when she once or twice spoke of it, could speak of it so succinctly, though slowly, that her gathering distance from it could have been from the beginning a measure of time besides that first blindingly increasing space. It became overwhelmingly simple, a cause of understanding.

The roof of her apartment house had a comparatively low barrier-wall around it and one day her child, her little girl, not so little — which was why it happened — had tumbled over this barrier-wall where she was playing ball, and fallen six floors to the street where some boys were playing, and had been killed, though not instantly. And Mrs. Hollander was there on the roof and had called to the child to stop.