Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The long and the short of it is that he was at present a therapist on an informal basis, with a few patients. That was the first and last meal we had together, a thought that came to me as I imagined what they were serving in the cafe car of my regular train. I had not asked what his qualifications were, though I had seen in his study a framed certificate from an institute of pastoral (I think it was) psychotherapy. My time was limited but we met quite often. What did I know of him? He had his share of sorrow. What more could one say? Well, that he was droll and, if not magical, self-contained. Mostly — for he declined to be an oracle — he said humdrum things like, You want to take some time for yourself. I sometimes thought I didn’t know what to say to him; but he was there, and I paid for the hour, though it was usually less. Well, it was supposed to be fifty minutes and it was usually at least that. I will say that I felt it was my time. There, that’s what I meant to say, banal as it comes out.

I had had the time to talk with the young man in the terminal who would not go away, but I was here in my car instead. I knew that the Bhagavad-Gita was a Hindu poem, a sacred text I was almost certain. Come to think of it, I knew it was conversations between two persons, a god and, I believe, a warrior. I had not felt called upon to read the book. I knew pretty much what I would find. My personal view is that there are many gods, and when we organize and rank them we go too far, we ask too much of them.

I saw my fellow passengers with such clarity that I might have suspected I could enter their bodies if I had not felt the opposite. A black woman in a red coat unwrapped a candy bar and watched a girl with a scout-green knapsack on a metal frame enter the car. Two mustachioed youths sat down, lighted cigarettes, and got up and left the car. An older couple — two older couples — sat in the far half of the car facing my way. A flaxen-haired woman who looked like my wife and had a slightly broken nose glanced across the aisle at me, held my glance, and gave me a smile. A man in a white helmet had wheeled his bicycle along the platform and was arguing with a conductor. Two men wearing glasses settled down with heavy-looking loose-leaf notebooks and, exchanging names of men they knew, talked for all our benefit as if the train were already rumbling along. A black woman entered the car, found the first black woman, and sat down with her. One had an old Macy’s shopping bag, the other a brown canvas bag like a blue one of mine in which I carry athletic gear.

The doors closed, the train moved, and I felt I could see anything I wanted to see. The man in the helmet stood on the platform like a trooper, his bicycle pointed in the direction our train was moving. I heard what sounded like a cat’s angry squall at a distance and knew it was someone’s zipper close by. The train’s movement was like the tunnel we were moving through, and the loud voices of the two men with the notebooks talking guidelines receded.

I hummed a chorus of an old tune, "It’s Just the Nearness of You"; those were very likely the only words of it I recalled. The flaxen-haired woman across the aisle smiled, and I asked her if it was going to be a good day, and we seemed to find that funny.

I reported to her that a young man with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita had tried to convert me in the station, and the woman asked why I assumed he was trying to convert me. But then she raised a hand gently and said, "No, no, of course he was."

"Wait a second," I said. "You didn’t mean that."

"Oh I guess I didn’t know why you were telling me," the woman said, and looked down at the cover of a magazine in her lap.

"What are all these people doing traveling out to Westchester at half past eleven on a weekday morning?" I said.

The woman opened the magazine as if we were old friends, in fact as casually as my wife would turn the page of a magazine if we were traveling together — indeed just as she had done on the one occasion when she had come with me to visit the man I was going to see today. I swung my shopping bag from the seat beside me to the floor. Well, I was not quite empty-handed journeying out to see this after all wise and interesting man, but perhaps he would have a laugh or two in store for me.

The flaxen-haired woman looked at a page and barely glanced at me so that she seemed to be turning against the resistance of that small, abrupt angle where her nose had been broken.

I had bought my wife a Christmas present on the way to the train, a last-minute inspiration. Standing in the crowded subway I had felt time warming me, exciting me to a point of common happiness — holiday time. On the subway platform as I had gotten off, a man was singing. But he might have been screaming, to judge from the pain in a woman’s face as she climbed the stairs. He had been singing well and singing for us all. I had wanted to speak to him, give him something; but that wasn’t his idea.

I had my wife’s gift in a shopping bag. I had my doubts, which I don’t have when I buy things for my children. My doubts are that nothing I buy my wife can express my feelings for her. I love her looks and her humor. I fear my reactions to her moods and her commands. She is a hard person to shop for, and the nightgown or brooch I buy her can’t match, let’s say, the hand-carved, bass wood canoe paddle my wife produces for me on Christmas Eve.

That was worth telling the man I was on my way to see, for maybe once upon a time he had had the same experience. I would not wish to pry. Certainly not into the tragedy that had come to him apparently around the time I had first made his acquaintance.

Often I had bent his ear so that we didn’t know where the time had gone. I had told him all my stories. Once I had killed a burglar with a half-full bottle of apple juice in accidental self-defense and had had to go to court and could not believe that I had done what I had done. Another year I had hit a school crossing-guard, an unmarried woman in a yellow slicker and a pert, novel type of cap, who had stepped like an actress or an apparition out from behind a rental van as I approached an intersection and when I hit her I seemed to knock her back into the slot she had emerged from. My father had had a long, hopeless illness but had then shocked us all by suddenly dying. It seemed to have been a hard life all around, but I couldn’t believe this, and I was at least glad to hear myself say so to the man I was traveling out to see.

He knew me, I guess, and it was a pleasure to talk to him on these visits I paid him from time to time. I asked him if he would retire completely. He didn’t know. I suggested he come into town for a play I would get tickets for, but he felt he would rather not — as if it weren’t a good idea.

In the train window, the tops of the trees made a movie of the low winter sun. They divided endlessly the distance between me and where I was going.

The flaxen-haired woman smiled at what she was reading. The conductor told us the next stop over the loudspeaker. I thought that from time to time you have to come up with something. My host had said this.

My wife had asked to come with me in April soon after I had met him. She had sat in one comfortable corner of the room, the study it was — and she was both between me and my host and beyond us. A memorable visit. In amicable fashion, we had gotten onto my nature and my wife’s periodic spells (to put, no doubt, too explicit a label to it). We could not decide if she had been frozen out by me from time to time, or what. What the devil do I mean we could not decide? A bell had rung and our host excused himself and was heard at the other end of the house saying, "Put them there," loudly as if the person was coming in from outdoors; then there were scuffing noises and a faint concussion. Our host didn’t come back and I pulled out an old medical text and asked my wife if she’d like something to read, which for some reason is a joke between us. Our host came back into the room and stood at the door rolling his head at us with mysterious humor, secretly powerful, even if not for us. We resumed, and presently a clock struck somewhere. The clock had made us aware of the house.