Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The man in the T-shirt has reached him. The man with the nose passed a bill to another man when the couples racked up their cues.

Does the girl want to play? (She wants to go; he didn’t have to ask; then the noise says, Ask, ask, ask). The music parties up, and Mayn holds her and slow-dances her down the bar, curving along people. He can listen to her thoughts later, irritated or all the rest she is capable of, and he sees in himself after this two-day junket two or maybe three years during which he hardly runs into her but then he does and is still fifteen to eighteen years older.

Winning’s not the issue on the green baize. Lousy break, the balls resist, did the table get concave? Mayn goes, but the table is still a mess after him, and when the man finally busts it up, a pink ball slam-drops at the far end while the cue ball having fought its spin bends onto a cushion and banks back home to drop at this end. The guy is angry but has gotten to Mayn but doesn’t know where: where is the girl? she’s not here but coming back, her hips slightly swaying, her glass held up like a toast, and as he looks sideways at her from the table, her eyes see past the glass and she says, "I’m here," and pauses and takes a sip.

Something will get settled by the game. Four or five clean shots shape up ahead, dangerously possible, you see a clean run composite, a spread of objects, the land, history, get it over with. The girl speaks suddenly of New York, while Mayn’s playing, a woman she met at a swimming pool who played billiards with her husband every other week at a tavern and one night looked down her stick and beyond the ball to that chalk thing on the rim of the table and her husband’s hand picking it up to do the end of his cue and she knew she would leave him. (Bet it was pool they was playing, said the man in the T-shirt. Secret of concentration, Mayn adds, taking a shot. What’s that? the girl asks. Doing two things at the same time, he comes back at her.) No words for his belief that he knows the New York woman already; or is it that he will know her, through this girl? (I feel like I know her, he mutters, and recklessly cocks to line up his following shot and she doesn’t name the woman but, You probably know people she knows, she adds with some soft meaninglessness that fully excludes Mayn’s opponent — though she’s getting to be a celebrity in feminist circles.) He’s pounced recklessly but takes his time lining up, the green baize swells in an uncanny middle unless he is half-drunk, and the balls are going to just follow the slope to the pocket and lucky for you you don’t claim you personally caused all these dead shots — you are sensing a downright flesh closeness to the girl but it’s talking to you like a happy plural toxin monstrously claiming strange stakes yet not yet the wonderful girl here but some payoff for being able not to dream, is it he’s in a couple of places at once, embodied in that woman the girl has mentioned? though not sexwise exactly, he doesn’t know but damn! some heart and ears and hands and loss lie between them, and this discovery sends a charge of used euphoria, no drunk dizzy spiel, up your brain later recollected as the right side which means love or work, you forget which.

The man with the void in his eye stands close behind him like the joker in a friend’s basement one year who would bump the base of your cue at the moment of execution. One day Mayn rammed him back, a heavy volt to the chest. Kid sat down and started crying, breathless, he was fifteen or sixteen, stopped crying and started gasping. The man in the T-shirt is pushing more than joking.

Now I look at the trash out by the garbage can and I think what am I missing if I don’t see the paper tomorrow, day after, don’t see one for a week? What am I missing? The dog charts? Not a suckin’ thing.

But you’d like to be quoted, Mayn goes for the man’s sharpening edge.

But forget the man’s solar plexus, make the shot. But what does the girl think of the man’s saying a word he wouldn’t use with some other women who are in the tavern? She’s in a chair with her legs crossed, having a really good time somewhere in her head. The man is pushing a little more, but where?

Mayn’s weight rides on the left side of his left hand, four fingers fanned like a tripod on the green baize, the cue slowly sliding forth again, again, probing or pushing, the distance between the chalk-blue sky-blue button and the white ball, then resting in the fork between forefinger and the tight-arched thumb.

Tell me what am I missing: news today, history tomorrow. You could spend your life reading the newspaper, said the man.

Mayn grins down target but for the benefit of his girl. Her speech, family more than college, and the way she carries herself unmarried and making good money (and to the man maybe smoother and older-looking than she is to Mayn) lets him with his void in eye say (with only the first letter changed), "fucking" where if she were a regular here he might not.

The cue strikes through the steady sounds; tip jabs the white ball low for a stop backspin; the blue jumps for the corner, smacks the back of the pocket, rolls up into the air and, rising, falls out of sight rattling back down the alley to clack the wood of the tray at shin level. Before making the next shot, speak. (The green baize has developed a slight hill in the middle.)

You have to know what not to read, man.

The man laughs. Mayn speeds up; he looks into a distance and is where he looks. Where was he? He can see only back. He’s falling but the bills in his shirt pocket are stuck to his cigarettes and his shirt.

Before they left he asked the man if they usually played for five bucks.

Mayn said they were going; the man wanted another game; Mayn asked if she wanted to drive. No.

They drove back over to Cocoa Beach past fewer lights now, and she was beside him asking if he’d seen the hole in the other man’s throat who had given up his seat. He’s so near to her, keeping his eye on the road.

Fewer lights. Most selling something. She agrees quietly. The woman upside down with dried blood all over her but the wheel spinning was impossible. Like different time schemes. But the girl didn’t hear, did she? Yes, with one ear. She got beaten up, said the girl. But she was driving him, said Mayn. Quite a while before the accident, she said.

Mayn parked between two motels. Or so he later thinks he recalls. In a public area where some giant local kids, four of them, powerful-looking if you cared (and more than four of them, the males, plus a couple of girls, blonde like the boys), stood around two big bikes watching Mayn and the young woman.

Put all six or seven of those kids along with their machines into a compressor, come out with not a new race but — Jean’s name, voiced on the beach as if he hadn’t been told: she thought she had said Barbara-Jean, which her mother still held out for. She doesn’t smoke, she points out. Forgot to leave her shoes in the car, which equals Mayn forgetting to take the ignition key. Beach so long that (sure, she agrees with him) they’re walking the coast of Florida.

Has he ever been down to the Everglades?

Only thought about it. (She made it sound like ‘‘Tomorrow.")

What is he doing here, she wants to know, if he’s not covering the launch? Nostalgia for the last one, he smiles. Worried or irritated, she is thinking and he feels it right up into her words: Well, what was his overall. . aim? (she doesn’t really finish). Not to make too much of what I find out, he tells her: maybe leave things as they are.

You have power, though, she replies, but the precision and forthrightness of her voice spread her meaning so all he knows is she feels something for him.

He told his kids a story about the Big Dipper but they couldn’t — (How old are they? she asks calmly, womanly) — they couldn’t see the Bear; and to tell the truth sometimes neither could he; or believe it. Let’s see: it’s 1973 tonight. He ages his son this side of twenty, his daughter never see twenty again. (You’re joking with me, she says unamused.) American Indian story updated so the Great Bear unknown to the Great Spirit learns how to use the Big Dipper in order to drink more, faster, and when the Bear invents a way to tip a jug of honey so it pours into the Dipper, the heavens instead of coming apart wait and wait for the space-cold syrup to flow so that as the parts of the sky reach rest, a cleft appears like an inverted spigot.