Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He phoned Washington, early as it was, and realized he was thinking of poor old reliable business-as-usual Ted in a far-off time zone of California, but Flick wasn’t home. A friend had phoned a few days ago to say his wife and son — for he was legally separated — had had their apartment broken into and the super was threatened with a knife, and the thieves, like bad movers, had cracked a mirror; the man’s son had called his dad collect, secretly — the man was upset and Mayn had been too busy to talk and hadn’t called back but would. A film maker had phoned to ask him to play mixed doubles and to inquire how far they were into the lightning-mapping project and were they going to use U-25? Mayn had business in Connecticut and he had been up all night. Amy was not home or at her foundation where Mayn and Larry had talked to the watchman; and the Chilean economist didn’t answer his home phone at two a.m. And Mayn needed reading glasses, his eyes were tired, and the thing persistently existing in the corner of his eye would turn into Spence if he didn’t get some sleep but he didn’t have time, or into a mountain of mind-bending mineral slag Dina West had evoked with the merest of references: and all Mayn could think was that death leads us to reincarnation, and he had a glass of orange juice to prove his reality, and whereas normally he would have to have someone to talk to to think old things over, it was the reverse now, with Norma anyway, and he heard himself saying in answer to Ted’s "You’re pretty hard on that little so-and-so," "Yeah, we all have a little Spence in us" for Ted to carry on, in Mayn’s affectionate imagination, "Spence has more than most."

Where did he come from? Mayn didn’t even know. But maybe he would have to see. The phone rang and he reached it before the second ring to hear his daughter’s low-pitched, expectant voice identifying him.

"Just the person I wanted to talk to."

"Well, this guy Spence phoned me—"

"Long distance?"

"Here in New York. Who’s he with?"

"Himself, Flick. Stay clear."

1 ‘Well, I didn’t think it was a Senate subcommittee but I think he bothered you once or twice before."

"How come he knew where to phone you in New York? That’s more than I know."

Flick gave her father a number and said it was her friend Lincoln’s, the woman who had called him after being called by the obnoxious Spence. "But he must be on to something, Daddy."

The corner of his eye was full again. He saw the wastebasket by the desk before he’d half turned to find it empty. The hand-written pages of his letter to his daughter weren’t there. They’d disappeared during the night. He had been out for three or four hours.

"I wrote you last night, m’dear."

"O.K., that’s a good coincidence, but… Daddy — you know everything — when your grandmother committed suicide—"

"What!"

"— you told me you were away camping with your girlfriend and having a fight the whole weekend and you didn’t hear until late Sunday night—"

"What has this to do with Spence?" Mayn intoned, but didn’t want to hear.

"Did an old teacher of yours come all the way from Minneapolis and show up at the cemetery and upset Alexander?" Mayn saw the children playing in the backyard in Windrow, their great-grandfather in a broad-brimmed straw hat about to let go of his lemonade glass when the girl with long, light-brown hair races over, giggling at her brother, and takes the glass as it slips from the fingers, which wakes the old man up, who insists on taking the glass from Flick. "Did she come all the way from Minnesota?"

It was drizzling and his bus didn’t get in till after the burial, and his grandfather was uncommunicative and Jim felt horrible at getting to the house when a crowd of people were eating deviled eggs and slicing turkey and a big glazed ham and he felt he still wasn’t there yet. He told his daughter this, and her voice coming back sounded flat, like after he had left his family and would phone Joy and the children and only Flick would talk to him but with a special unwillingness in representing the other two: "And did she meet someone in the group at the cemetery whose uncle had adored your grandmother and said he would have been proud of her decision?" His grandfather took him aside and told Jim that that woman Myles had been "bothering us" again, and Alexander had finally asked her very quietly did she want him to tell her what the gas smelled like and show her the identical messages all over the living room and the back porch saying don’t light matches? And Jim had been aware of listening indelibly to what was being said but in order to get it so firm that he could consign it right away from him, but it did not all get consigned, because he remembered, but did not tell his daughter, "This time…" (said Miss Myles)—"What?" his grandfather said—"there’s no doubt. ." — "About what?" said Alexander—"About why" was what Pearl Myles had said. The voices in the living room and dining room were not hushed and they drove Jim out onto the porch as if they were a clamor sifting him, dividing and dividing him.

"Spence might get himself buried," said the father calmly.

"And Daddy, I couldn’t decide if he was crazy or not, I mean maybe he’s dangerous but he’s sort of up front, obnoxious but I mean why didn’t he ask you about that printer Morgan who was mixed up with a relative of ours? I mean, what do I care about all those people, but there seemed to be Chilean fathers mixed up with Masonic lodges past and present and two daughters we’re supposed to be involved with, but I don’t believe it, any more than I believe that a German submarine had anything to do with me that surfaced one late afternoon off the Jersey shore and helped a person escape to South America who had a banned opera in her head and was either daughter or great-niece to a strong woman who nonetheless found time to listen to mountains think or knew some people who had — does that mean anything to you?"

"I don’t know a thing about Chilean opera, but I remember the story about the sub. There was a waterspout out there the same day."

"Chilean?"

His daughter had not said escape to Chile; if she knew this much she would have picked up Chile, but only if she had cared to. The follower makes up the followee, who reciprocates: but these cannot be Mayn’s thoughts: he does not know what they mean, he knows the poignant politeness of an unknown economist at Cape Kennedy in December of ‘72, his ex tempore remarks re: astronauts and their overnight bags disappearing into space for a break from domestic responsibilities, wives, secretaries, kids, even the bachelor geologist who, however, was not the one who did a brief dance-like hop before stepping up into the white van with the rusty tailpipe; a Chilean economist who spoke of a prisoner inventing a chemistry of thought or communal-think in the void of a prison Mayn found for himself.

"Spence has to be stopped."

"From what, Daddy?"

Only Norma had a key to "the wastebasket," and she would never have taken the letter. He heard questions answering his knowledge that what he had in his power he would use. But interrogations directed not just to him. Though passing through his head, signatures of lightning that when he heard of he thought they had been in his imagination already. So he didn’t figure where they were coming from.

"He listened to Ted and me talk years ago and then he started turning up in my life. He’s not even a journalist but he’s everything that stinks in this racket." But who was Mayn talking about? He felt his daughter angry, saw her lips puff, her eyes narrow and seem to go vague.

"I mean I don’t care about some old relation of yours or your grandparents’ who described a pistol in a two-volume diary so I couldn’t care less where the diary is hiding. But now the mountain: there’s something in the mountain, Daddy. It sounds—"