Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— and in some rush of faith so that she tapped her candlelit fingers on his wrist (the waitress tilted her head cheerfully at them and they decided on flan for the lady), he told her about a red convertible automobile equipped to negotiate a New Hampshire lake, and a tiny sailboat with Mayn’s two children sliding around this in fact man-made body of water slashing in close to the piny shore, sliding out toward a point where a whole lot of Indians got trapped by some other Indians and incinerated like a fortress guarded by a meaningless moat—

— and you and your wife?

— they had loved and admired each other—

— ah; well people don’t get divorced only because of that —

— but he had left her.

Often? she asked.

Yes, he smiled.

For what?

He didn’t say, Business. . or To prove we’re like other people (though the blonde lady said, Ouch, in the pause).

But we’ll probably. .

Get back together again?

Now that you mention it, no; she is there year round now. We used to rent.

Mayn and the woman laughed with warmth and tension, in the knowledge neither was content to agree the reasons for separation were "usual" reasons, we all knew what they were (if you call separation without catastrophe real separation!), but in the evening of a day a year and more later, after he had elected not to take Larry into his confidence even in the quite other matter of a displaced, semi-incognito Chilean economist formerly of Dr. Allende’s full-employment, long-rooted, short-lived regime, he heard the woman’s voice in his phone receiver in the middle of the night and struggled off the peak edge of Ship Rock where he would have dreamt then (if he ever dreamt, but he did not) that he was, if her cheerful voice that brought him to that edge had not also woken him in the sharp, rainy light of a New York apartment he had once lived in and rented (and now clandestinely owned), she was in New York and in trouble, she thought, because of a man named Spence who had phoned to call himself an acquaintance of Mayn’s and to ask if she had spoken yet to Mayn’s daughter because their mutual involvement in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something called national technical means capability for verifying placements of missiles, could conceivably put them in jeopardy, and it was likely that Spence would ring her again.

But what was doing in New York?

Whether or not, with the insulting barside queries of that nosy Spence in memory mushrooming like an inspiration to recall everything else until Mayn became that southerner who near the moment of Lincoln’s election observed that if a Yankee pointed a pistol at him he would ask him how much he would take for it—"You mean your grandmother was pursued eastward to her very doorstep by that Indian what was his name?" — "You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat?" — he Mayn still felt that that history of his mother’s getaway—"I am going far to see the land," she had recited, plus other lines — or more anciently his grandmother-to-be staring up at flowers growing down out of a haunted ceiling above her bed in an 1893 Omaha boarding house and her father’s contradictory instructions to "Go west as the man said" (the man who ran that paper in the city? — Greeley?! No the crackpot who stood behind her in 1885 at the historic pre-ruin of the uncrated Statue arrived prepaid on Bedloe’s Island), yet her father (who hoped she would carry on the paper someday because as he said to her beau, Alexander, she was a reformer even more than a writer) said at the same time, "You’re to be with your Cousin Florence the entire time you are in Chicago and that includes when you are back in your hotel writing copy" — all that stuff, although he kept circling back to it only to find it wasn’t quite there any more, made no less sense than the twenty-five-year span promised (like interest) for regrowing the vegetation shield stripped by the geniuses who’d rented the mine from the Indians (and called it on their signs the "Indian" mine for Interest does not lie) to feed the coal-into-"natural"-gas-"if "ication project by the Lurgi method which Mayn learned in five minutes and consigned to one plain young sentence declining to contemplate the perfectly good principle that what’s true of (yea, good for) the part may not be true of the whole— until with a start that was not all him, Mayn felt the ache of wings in his back (a shade more credibly than any conclusions he and his distant loved son had reached at breakfast time as to why dreamers thought their dreams conveyed the future), Mayn we say felt a long, halyard-vector (call it) slung from far off bugging him with its maybe hundreds of thousands of miles of calm meaninglessness so that he understood again not only that his position in the future could be real but that he had been assuming without evidence but not with faith that nothing dreadful would happen to Larry, this troubled young (be O.K., though) fellow Larry: but then as if he were responsible yet could not be responsible for the boy, there came to Jim a fresh free dose of void— though without any of those gross little margins of witticism history’s humor — a prevision that Larry was doomed, and soon.

Naturally, it passed through Mayn’s mind that his mother might have passed into another life, not died at all — a second, a third, or yet another life. He did not discuss this with Margaret, who, in so many words, had said that she just could not accept it, the fact, the fact of Sarah’s doing this. Meanwhile the boy lay awake with the shape or symptom of the repeated fantasy lost within him saying to himself, "She said to go away, but she went. So her advice now means, ‘Go away from home like me’ —more than it means ‘Go away from me.’ "

Jim was not deranged and so he was able to be amused even at fifteen at the thought that he had made her go away. It wasn’t a true thought, and he would have it from time to time. That is, he was aware enough of life to know he would have it from time to time.

Meanwhile you have to come up with something, said the older gentleman with whom I exchanged views from time to time. Economical of words, he would have gone far giving business advice. Maybe come up with something now, I said; but the last thing you decide is what to put first. True enough, said this older acquaintance of mine, but who knows what condition you’ll be in on your deathbed?

He would listen, and then he would speak. I had an odd way of seeing things, he said.

Well, what did that mean?

Oh, he said, smart, but a bit turned around. Cart before the horse? I said. That’s the idea, he said; first things first. But the last thing you decide, I said, is what to put first; that’s what the French mathematician said.

Are you a French mathematician? my elderly acquaintance asked. And one day I asked myself that question verbatim. But I have heard that one should stop talking to oneself; or so advises one of the religions, I think. Does that mean talk to others instead? Well, I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go. Have you told her, my elderly acquaintance would say. Have you told him? my wife would say, of whomever. I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go.

A hand gripped my arm and I turned to the young man detaining me. The train terminal all around me seemed freed of its morning rush hour, but the terminal wasn’t going anywhere, while I was. An old girlfriend of five or six years ago had come to mind with such perilous decency and sweetness that, if I kept moving across the marble floor uninterrupted, I might reach her voice; I was thinking of her, she was wearing bluejeans, then a plaid woolen skirt I had paid for. The hand gripping my arm was like the foreground sound I heard against a deep mass murmur in the station.