Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Her father died when she got home," the "rich-American" van chauffeur said to me—"Charles heard that she got married to someone, Charles it was his canvas chair you sat in," he said to me, and I didn’t use the only comeback I had.

That is, I sat on the couch-bed until I went to the icebox and opened the one beer and Ruth and I shared it, it was all alone in that icebox with a white jar of marmalade and a couple of puckered mushrooms.

That is, when I said to Miriam that it wasn’t all that long spent in Ruth Heard’s apartment, and I said I think she was packing, she took down a framed photograph off the wall when I was going, the glass was cracked. Miriam smiled not like she knew there was anything to know, but like it didn’t matter—

— that is, I later recalled seeing this but it not registering, and (if you’ve got a minute, Jim) the moment when I recalled seeing but not registering that she didn’t care was the moment much later of her accidentally getting to me with the message in the clean-carpeted income-tax office, with a half-bald guy in a windbreaker beside a desk, his elbow not too calmly on the desk, waiting for some accountant to come back from the key-locked John (is the City still like that?), and Miriam meanwhile with me there, picking up the phone so cool, reaching for an office ballpoint like it was a handkerchief to wipe a kid’s nose (a ballpoint I asked for, with a smile, and got with a shrug but no smile from smiling Miriam), and I took it, I mean what she had to give me then and accepted what had happened to us, I would live (right?) but the Chilean economist now, Jim, let me be frank with limited data, let’s say it is the truth you want about him, but whether or not you are this other person Spence who I hear the Chilean’s wife is after for threats against her and her husband, shouldn’t you let him lay? — I mean in decent obscurity, I mean what’s the use as I said to young Larry who writes me such letters, Jim, that I almost forget to read between the lines and said he would give anything to go back to age fifteen with what he knows now at eighteen (smile) which is like me thinking I’ll write all this down someday, though perhaps that won’t be necessary since others, few though they be, share portions of my information, for I have found that Larry too has made the acquaintance of that loner the inventor who in the eighties and nineties changed the world by making feasible his much-beloved alternating current with its fantastically higher voltages plus their long-distance transmission against the hostile opposition of Edison and his DC faction who, our loner-genius knew by intuition, had pushed AC on the New York State prison people when electrocution came in as a means of discrediting AC. But you wanted to know if Miriam came to see me, and I believe I said I am selective. My cup runneth over with your interesting questions—

— like, the Chilean gentleman between us has enough trouble, am I right? and more trouble I couldn’t use for there’s a limit to the trouble you can use and if it comes to you in your warped life what are you going to do on the principle of Give Back More Than You Get?—

— like, I thought about Miriam but did not see her because power is in restraint; called her up on her birthday and on Sunday it’s no secret I was by then in a holding pattern and didn’t know what I’m waiting for, not the rich-American school-tour chauffeur who does one day run into me in the street and it might as well be Ruth M. Heard, until I hear what he tells me and I need to slug him, kill his face — you’ve had that feeling, tell me you have— on account of he’s pretty dartin casual about Miss Ruth, while I remember everything, the little I have to the wall, her father maybe (at remember, like her taking the framed photo off that point in the afternoon I could almost have asked), and leaning it up against the other suitcase not the one she’d put her foot on so many swirling, surprising, clear minutes ago—

— that is, I could have accepted what happened to us, and lived with what she had to give me—

— that is, in the tax accountant’s office I heard Miriam, a year before the rich Anglo-American van-chauffeur ran into me on Third Avenue—

— lived without her — and without her saying, George you ought to get married and settle down; and without you, Jim, saying, Now which one said that? — Ruth M. Heard or Miriam? — when you know damn well Ruth wouldn’t say a thing like that, she said to me the last time I saw her, Get on the road Foley get out of this spot you’re in—

— that is, since you insist on asking, the prospect of settling down with old girlfriend; laboring in a vineyard of worn-out brake pads and (irritable) valves and walking into sunsets that need to be changed every fifteen hundred miles — having some kids who at different rates walk up the widely slightly curving steps of the church on Sunday with their Aunt Iris and won’t be allowed to go near granddad’s electrified waste units, oh the whole bit—

— that is, she didn’t say so much that day but this was the kernel and it ain’t popcorn, Jim, just like the danger to your Chilean friend whoever you are, Jim, ain’t prime-time TV cops and bombers treasury agents and vice-smugglers, current events before you turn in for the night sponsored by automobile commercials and Sir Horny-Loin Plus-Burgers preserved by psycho-colloid solutions, prime-time kidnapped tycoons sending an arm and a leg back the long way to the main office of their bank attached in a revolutionary new way to prove they exist and confess to long-standing surplus, no Jim this is real as the absence of information about Juan’s little brother who disappeared into the open-ended construction site and as crass as the van chauffeur who met me the day my ramshackle history fell in and I stopped waiting—

— that is, for Ruth to add to what she’d told me, for I could add my own conclusions to what the van driver who after all had not been there told me about what happened during two hours I spent in Ruth M. Heard’s semi-vacated apartment which I would not believe

— that is, I said to him, You’ve been talking to the Hungarian at the bicycle shop — Kallman — Oh do you know Kallman? says the rich American light-mover van chauffeur, Kallman gets around for a bike grease-monkey, said the van driver, who still had his face, it was still alive, I had not killed it—

— that is, Kallman had told him about that afternoon raincheck walk-home, the van driver — and the last words of his I recall as I turned angrily, precipitately, away to get away from him, was his saying, No he knew Kallman, everyone who saw the future of bicycles from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth knew Kallman, but Kallman, don’t tell him I involved him in Ruthie, he never said a thing to me about you and her—

— that is, those two hours—

— that is, the van driver had had more to say, which he no doubt went on saying at length long after I’d split—

— that is, I did not wish to hear his personal reminiscences about my substitute teacher, her qualities, her frankness, her suspicion of brevity, her relations with the official tenant of that last apartment, and her supposed words about me—

— that is, although I had agreed to take the afternoon-evening shift of a car-rental agency (downtown branch) on trial, I cut it pretty fine by going to Kallman’s bike shop which had grown in size since I had last thought about it, to confront him with having told others about me and Ruth but he and his partner and three assistants with T-shirts with French and Italian sayings on them were spread out, confusingly dispersed, across the showroom and the repair department so that as if entering a room so full of furniture you’d spend all your time deciding where to sit, I saw that Kallman, swarthy, muscular, eyes flashing with the humor of a well-rested stud, had laid out for me an obstacle course of glistening wheel spokes and frames of all colors and nations that he might look like he owned when the fact was that the bank owned his bikes and his future of such colossal interest charges that a man like him must receive monthly rebates on his by comparison negligible automobile loan charges, because here was a man who Miriam had once told me always obtained on his personal savings commercial paper rates which is hard to believe, and I called to him across the cement floor of his showroom so sharply the wheels of a foreign racing bike near me (as near as the upside-down car in Florida you told about) would have begun to spin if it had been standing upside down on its seat and handlebars like one over in the repair area no doubt being tuned up or one up on a platform that Kallman with one eye on me not knowing my policy was never to attack first, was describing to a fantastically tall lady in loose overalls and an old-fashioned leather skull-tight aviator’s cap, with whom he suddenly then left the bike and made his way grinning, mouth partly open like he was about to speak, as if he knew from my loud, abrupt greeting across the storeful of merchandise that was more beautiful than Miriam, more finely tuned and whirringly out-of-reach (I remember then understanding for the first time) — that I didn’t have time to stop, I didn’t really have the time for him; and knowing me through all that interference, knowing what I had to say, Kallman stopped for me, maybe however not knowing of me what I knew of him, that his direction might have been mine; and his smile, his grin, was not Miriam’s smile of delicious amusement, and before he could get near enough to try and sell me something, I was telling him —