Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

I turned to see on the other side of the trees a car pass in each direction like curtains closing and opening at the same time. I looked at the other front door, with little oblong windows on either side of it. It led to the main part of the house, a one-story suburban dwelling. I pressed the one bell again and didn’t hear it and realized I had never heard it and then remembered I had heard it once from inside. My feet were cold. My wife was lying on her elbow, thinking less hopefully than I about the past, her hair down, shaking her head and smiling. I could very nearly see my host, and he was looking at his watch and saying to whoever was with him, "Wonder where he is."

What was happening had never happened. I stared at the bell, which was in the corner between the two front doors, and in the corner of my eye I felt appear and disappear in one of the narrow panes running vertically beside the right-hand door a face, and I could have sworn it was a woman. I rang once more and peered through the glass beside the right-hand front door to see what I could see. A carpeted foyer. The end of a living room maybe. Part of a window looking onto trees at the north side of the house. I stepped back.

Everything had passed out of my head and I had no idea what was going on, until then the right front door unlatched and swung open, and there was my host in broad daylight — hair not too thin, freckles at the temples, faintly wall-eyed. He was shaking his head, or he was rolling it, I don’t know what he was doing but he had been amused before he saw me and he was feeling just as good now. His eyes were misted and attentive. He was a different man. He had on a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. Along his jaw and cheeks was a silvery sheen of stubble.

He’d had something to drink, and his leisurely, slow speech hit me like a code: "Do you know I phoned you?" He’d had a few drinks. He chuckled as slowly as he talked. "I tried to put you off, but I didn’t remember in time."

I said, like a person of lower rank, that no one had gotten the message; and at once I saw this was an odd thing to say.

"My family arrived last night. From California. . from Washington." He flipped his hand out to the side. "I didn’t expect them until Christmas Eve, and they got away earlier and phoned me and—" he threw out both hands, happy with fate.

I said something like What the hell, sorry I didn’t get the message.

"Didn’t get the message?" he wheedled, and he chuckled as if I had come up with an idea he hadn’t thought of, and he frowned unsteadily. "Well, come in and meet my family." He stepped backward, and I stepped into the foyer with my cold snowy feet and felt huge.

This was the other part of the house, not where the study was, and I had lost something, which, it came to me, had been my opportunity to go on waiting.

I followed my host out of the dark foyer into a living room that opened to my right. And although what I had lost was my purpose, I found in the accident, in the awkward foul-up, a polite power.

My host was introducing me by my surname to two young men in their twenties, his sons. The introduction didn’t take long. Behind him, from somewhere at the far end of the room a tall, dark-haired young woman appeared as if drawn out of hiding. There was a door there. She must have been in the room talking with them. She was the woman here. All that curly hair of hers seemed playful in its abundance.

The son on my right did not get up but raised his hand to shake mine. The hand was hardly waiting to be gripped; it was where I was not. A scar like a seam cut down across his forehead and finished at the bridge of his thick nose. The second son, whose equally pale face was bearded and who wore a gold ring on his ring finger, took a swift stride or two toward me, gripped my hand, and stepped back. Beyond him the father came to introduce me to his daughter, who came forward and shook my hand as if she were shrugging. She wore bluejeans and a large, luxurious ski sweater, dark green, with a high neck that came up under her chin. Her hand was cold. Her face was very tan. I started to say the dumb thing that had just come to mind but didn’t say it; she blushed; I realized her hand was cold because she had been outside.

I had left my wife’s present in the taxi.

The three young people were being given what I had envisioned as my time, and they didn’t want it, I mean they didn’t want mine. Their father was feeling no pain. They had been talking about who I could possibly be, before their father had hauled himself up to go confirm his suspicion. But before that they had been talking of a whole life. But he must have known exactly who it was ringing the bell.

I said, "You all haven’t been together in quite a while."

I was a little angry, partly about leaving my wife’s present if not the thought that went with it in the cab. Well, they weren’t saying what was on their minds, and I was in this as if I and the father between us had brought them out. These serious young people. He knew me very well. The girl looked at me as if out of a tableau. She and her brothers were three serious, invaded faces. They seemed young for a thirty-five-year marriage. Nothing could be said until I left. Yet I could say what I wanted, for I always did here.

I knew what they had been talking about, knew it as certainly as I found a freedom in my embarrassment. But then no, I did not know what they had been talking about. I thought of the woman who was absent from this room. She came to me as if I had seen her.

"I’ll call a cab," I said.

"Oh no," my host said slowly, "I’ll drive you, I’ll drive you."

I decided that the door at the far end of the room must lead to the kitchen and beyond it the garage, a car, a lawn mower, a ladder.

"It’s better if I call a cab," I said and felt in my eyes looking at the fire on the hearth a warmth of excitement beyond my politeness.

"Oh no, I’ll drive you," my host said. "It’s not far to the station."

His children looked to me. Their father knew me. They wanted me to disappear, by cab.

I had a grievance. The clock struck a quarter of, and there it stood on the mantel; I’d heard it many times from a distance.

I knew where a phone was, and I nodded and left the room, and my host came shuffling along the carpet behind me. I found the way from the foyer into the other wing of the house. I went into his study and he said, "Where you going?" But just as I reached for the phone on the desk I heard a car horn close by, distinctly stationary, and instead of the phone in my hand I found I had made a fist. I turned to my host, and the car honked again.

"I had some pretty good stuff for you," I said.

"Good stuff?" he said, and smiled and rolled his head. My words had come back to me.

"I’m glad your family’s here," I said, feeling sincere.

"They’re delightful people," he said, as if that’s what they were— people. "I can’t tell you what delightful people they are."

"You’re not going to like what I’m about to say," I said, "but you should have tried harder to get in touch with me."

"Damn it all, you’re right," he said, and smiled with good-humored understanding of what I had said.

"Well, you don’t need visitors today," I said. I meant extra visitors, but then I didn’t mean that either. I saw us in a car, and he was playing games with the white line.

"Your time isn’t your own," I said. "No," I said, "I mean if you’re going to give time to someone, you don’t want to give it away. I mean, it ought to be still yours. How about that?"

"That’s pretty good," said my host.

"It wasn’t what I was going to say," I said.

"I know," he said, and he seemed more my equal than a widower or a man with a few drinks in him or a man made happy by his grown children returning to his household the first Christmas after his wife’s death.