Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Sir, do you live here in New York?" the young man asked. He held a book to his chest, a holy book with a title I recognized. I wished him a merry Christmas. "Do you live in New York?" he asked, and I heard in his speech great spaces of our country that are not New York. His hand grew upon my arm, and I reminded him that I had wished him merry Christmas.

"O.K., but I don’t think we’re getting through to each other," the young man said. I looked down at his pale hand on my arm and said that at least we were still talking. "That’s right," he grinned, and I said indeed I did live here in New York and at this moment was leaving it.

He asked me where I was going. "It is the journey that counts, not the destination," I said, and withdrew my arm.

"That’s right," said the young man and touched my arm again.

But then I fell into a habit I have been ordered to break — a shorthand that somewhat privately brings together past and present: "I can’t come to your wedding," I said, "I’m busy every night this week."

Whatever he thought of this — a private joke, sarcasm, madness — he smiled with an understanding I am all too familiar with. Another young fellow had accosted me Saturday on a cold, festive street as my wife and I peered at a menu through the fogged window of a restaurant. He had had three girls in tow and it was he who had asked me to his wedding. He was marrying— and of course I knew how to believe him — Jesus Christ at midnight. We smiled and nodded, my wife and I; all six of us, I think, smiled.

But this morning I was alone. The young man with the holy book gripped my arm like a blood-pressure test. The Bhagavad-Gita was what he was holding. "Can I talk to you?" he said, as a son at a certain time of life might think of saying to a distant father.

I threw up my elbow in his face and he let go.

I approached my gate that had "11:40" in large white numerals below the name of the train. At the gate I turned and looked back. The young man was showing a blonde lady a passage in his book.

I was early for my local, but I had an unbelievable number of other things to do, and today, whatever I had in common with the man I was visiting, I had little if anything to say to him. "And yet — and yet. ."I already heard his words, this elder acquaintance of mine who in his slow humor betrayed only a very mild interest in his own affairs.

If he could see me now. Here I was, moving away from the very gate I had approached, and moving toward where the young man and the middle-aged blonde stood discussing the Bhagavad-Gita. It is, I am sure, a religious book. But I have my own notion of gods. I am no god; I won’t go for that. Nor to my knowledge are any of those close to me gods. And yet, as the older man I have mentioned would say— and yet. My notion is that there are many gods. No problem.

I passed near the young man and the blonde woman, and the woman looked up and smiled at me. I heard a child crying, and I heard another child, on being prompted, say, "Hi." I heard a man say, "So sue her — sue her ass." I swept the great echoing station, picking up more than I knew, noticing at the end of one row of marble ticket windows that were now devoted to Off-Track Betting a notice that did not apply to me, for an organization that helps gamblers. The man I was going to see had known a gambler who came to him with strange pains in his fingers. My host did not tell jokes, but he told very particular stories. It seemed that this gambler had been strolling down a street in Anchorage, Alaska, with his recently widowed sister-in-law and had run into another card player, a recent settler there. He had introduced the lady he was with, but only by name, as she afterward pointed out to him. What she was not to know, however, was that behind her back a few evenings later at a crisis he risked her — bet her as his own wife — against the settler’s powerboat no less. An old story, no doubt. But she had never learned of her stake in the boat or in the proceeds of its sale, and the gambler came to love her and they married and were happy. This despite his habits (though he had a regular job now) and perhaps at the price of a ritual anguish in the nerves of his fingertips four or five times a year, one of those times the anniversary of that game in Anchorage.

"Lucky at cards, lucky in love?" I had suggested.

"If that’s how you see it," said my host.

How then, did my host see it? He shrugged, but then he said, "Oh, smart at cards, smart in love."

What had that gamble to do with love? I thought then and later. My host added that he and the gambler had concluded that telling the wife the truth about that game in Anchorage wasn’t what was called for and wasn’t even a good idea. The truth was that the gambler and his wife were having a little trouble at the moment and she was a bit bored with life.

Once more at my gate, I thought of my wife in bed, answering, not answering. I was almost certain my elder daughter had read the Bhagavad-Gita. She talked of getting her own apartment. Our second daughter, much younger, had been my idea; her birth had proved unexpectedly easy. I wasn’t thinking straight, and yet to come out and think this thought could mean I was. I was going to get on my train.

The dispassionate man I was going to see had a habit of prefacing a remark with "You’re not going to like what I’m about to say." But while he had his idiosyncrasies, this was not one of them. My wife was also in the habit of telling me I was not going to like what she was about to say. But unlike the man I was going to see today, she was almost always correct in her warning, her prediction. I say "almost" because, having warned me that I would not like what she was about to say, she would sometimes stop and not say whatever it was, on the ground that I stopped her from speaking her mind.

Not half so much, though, as I stopped myself. For who has the time? I must speak for myself. Not a renouncing individual, I had renounced fighting with her. It was necessary to my renunciation that I had not told her.

I sat in the no smoking car of my train among newspapers left by commuters. I had a good empty feeling. I was hungry, but didn’t want whatever they were peddling in the cafe car. Christmas was going to be bearable. The somewhat elderly man I was visiting was not exactly a close friend; I was paying him this visit because I thought I ought to. I had nothing special to say to him today. As I’ve said, if he had taken himself seriously he could have gone far as a business consultant. I’m repeating myself.

I had met him at the bar of a business-lunch restaurant downtown through a journalist friend whom I hadn’t seen for months and haven’t since. A bright, windy day a couple of blocks from the harbor — and the brass rail I put my foot on and the polished wood under my elbow and the golden rust flecking the great mirror behind the bar might have inspired even me to take the day off. I recall that they were discussing their grown children when I appeared, and the journalist said he didn’t see his as often as he’d like but he guessed it was partly up to him; his friend here was retired so he had less excuse. Semi -retired, my new acquaintance said. Well, you’re not packing a stethoscope any more, said my journalist friend. When he left the bar to sit down with, as I recall, two well-known economists, each with a full, reddish beard, who instantly began studying their menus, he shook hands and for a moment held in both of his the hand of my new acquaintance, this somewhat elderly doctor who had come into Manhattan to see his lawyer that morning.

What happened was that the doctor and I had lunch, and the fish was watery. I told the waiter he had ignored us, he’d been taking something out on us, what was it? and I told my companion that I had been using my squash racket on court lately like a shillelagh and I had no idea how many blood types were represented on its raw head, and what did he do by way of being semi-retired!