Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So he didn’t turn to others, the ones that seemed logical to. But Sammy was the only one he remembered like a daydream in retrospect coming up to him and saying, I’m sorry. And he shook Jim’s hand and there were tears right under his old eyes but none in ‘em. Jim and his mother never cried. Well, obviously Jim — that is, didn’t. And this was something the grandmother stated, one time, and it was true enough. Three girls wrote notes to Jim that went out of his head though he recalled the notepaper, one with rabbits on it in the margins, the others with little pink and (/or?) yellow flowers. Anne-Marie didn’t write him a condolence (he learned the word) message, but came to the house the second day when there was still some awful expectancy, and she walked into the living room where Alexander sat and Margaret was in the kitchen and Mel and Brad were there (long before Brad’s Day — a month to be approximate) and Jeanette Many was teary and Byron Kennett and his mother were alternating on the theme of who could have predicted it, and Anne-Marie coming forward reached and hugged Jim and then she kissed him three kisses on the mouth, each one longer, which could not create anything but silence, hence acceptance — jokes would have been out of place; then Anne-Marie took Jim’s hands with a happy smile that brought courage for the unknown, not sadness — dole — for tragedy, and she said softly, "I don’t want to stay here, but I did want to give you a big kiss. If you want to take a walk, come over. You know what I mean," which was all she meant. He was part of her life, she part of his, but no real sweat at all: maybe it meant she wasn’t going to get tied up with any fellow for a long time; Jim never did find out if there was an answer like that with Anne-Marie, they just weren’t together later on: but now they were, yet with a happy knowledge he took so for granted it forgot itself, like the inequality of his not giving a damn when he found Brad going through some papers and stuff he’d brought back from the shore — until later (in Anne-Marie’s case, twenty years later, and then he tried to understand how they had been so warm and cool at the same time; it was sex (going all the way), respect, a slight subtlety on each side; but in Brad’s, the unequal, case, maybe a couple of days later) he found some joint of his mind wham! remembering for him:

In the daydream of retrospect — to continue, to continue, to continue, to get anyway to this end at the risk of being less and less (than) succinct — his mother’s bare back was to him as we have known him to say to Mayga and to his much-loved wife, and he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find his mother’s — oh yeah he couldn’t find Bob Yard in this, the daydream, who was so vivid, so living, as opposed to the bare back and elsewhere directed shoulders and hips that were full of oh full of—

— you cannot easily say, said Mayga, for who could?

— something, said Mayn quickly, that’s it, thanks, kid, expectancy, full of some expectancy that—

— this is your mother? did I say "expectancy"?

— sure, sure, and I’ve got the words now, but—

— You had the experience then, said Mayga, never rushing him but giving him or taking from him a lessening of time, as if she would look at her watch, ah her watch, her watch—

Oh he wasn’t remembering stuff he hadn’t remembered, for he had always had his mind inside this time of his life; that "true" daydream had come, there wasn’t much to know about it.

They all laughed at a thing he said, bartender, Mayga, Spence at the end of the bar that always seemed underground or optically curious; a bearded man with a newspaper; and another bearded man just entering from the hotel lobby, who laughed for no more reason than to join in or lest the joke be on him if he didn’t, or out of good spirits, though when he sat up beside the other bearded man and they at once began conversing in tight order it wouldn’t have been good spirits, no, upon which Ted appeared from the lobby with, for a change, a real grown woman at his side, not one of his gals who always made such a rotten impression at first and eased into their natural grain later in the evening when it might be too late — but what did Jim say to make them laugh?

— full of expectancy, the room the day Anne-Marie Vandevere kissed him "in public," for Sarah might still be found, and full of expectancy, that strange bare back, in the daydream somehow, missing Bob Yard, a daydream as still as if the dreamer were she and in motion, opening the front door with the upper reaches of the house as empty-feeling as the front hall, familiar with its mahogany table, mirror, carpet with Persian prayer rug on top of it, his new raincoat hanging outside beside the mirror where he’d left it forty-eight hours ago after returning discreetly from the shore, and the paperweight as blunt and uninstrumental and as ugly and second-hand-looking and never really old as ever — a hall (nothing underlined) the same as it had been a month ago when Sarah had departed in her own direction, he looked at the pictures on the hall walls seeing them more than when her mother Margaret was there; and, electing to go (to bound but not to bound) upstairs, instead of to the kitchen, he took two stairs, then one, then paused like a back-diver adjusting his balance, and knew that the absence of Bob Yard from the daydream detail of the lady in panties only and with her back to him, his mother’s shoulders he was quite sure, and dark hair, was hard to get out of his head and he had been entertaining alternative explanations as the source of the daydream forty-eight or so hours ago — what the hell might as well play detective to the hilt: (entering house, starting to throw off coat off both shoulders at once is hit in face and midsection arms pinned) — sheer story!

He felt he had been preceded, and often thereafter. Someone had been there ahead of him. Well, he had been delayed getting there. Pearl Myles ("Pearl," as the class called her offstage) had asked for an imaginary news story (evidently nothing happening in town), what a contradictory assignment, said Mel (his father), to whom Jim could not say that with all his own practical physical confidence he left that classroom and stopped, bumped by a couple of guys, and stood nauseatingly alone for a moment losing everything to something, but what? and then he knew it was embarrassment, mortifying, over his mother: and not that it was suicide (recalling Alexander crying in the kitchen very, very briefly, with the words "How can those boys stand it? — why, I can’t accept it, I can’t accept it ever, Margaret, not ever") — but no, it was embarrassment at her being not present any more—

Letting the family down, responds some former interrogator, and rubs his chin and glances "out" into a closed-circuit screen where those "presently" contained in the local stadium that can "seat" a hundred thousand (and stand more) are playing soccer, but he gets no confirmation nor does he himself need any that he is correct in his judgment of this woman whose name temporarily escapes him.

A woman also in a raincoat who when Jim thanked her for stopping asked if he was wet and when he said he wasn’t sure if it was raining, she stopped her wipers and together in the front seat as they accelerated they watched a mist grow on the windshield which was "rain all right," Jim said. She sat pressed back against the seat, keeping the wheel at arm’s length well almost. She asked where he lived, whether he’d had a good summer, wasn’t it good we’d had the atom bomb, that is, to use — and what was his favorite subject, or was it too soon to tell, or was it always the same subject. Something had to happen, which was why Jim had decided to revisit Sarah’s point of departure. Something. Anything. For nothing was happening at home, except Brad came into his room and asked about this, that, and the other like touching things.