Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He was telling his brother that he had spent all of Thursday afternoon and evening with their grandmother, but Brad knew this because Jim had spent Thursday night in his own bedroom down the street. He had gone away to Pennsylvania and everything had happened in his absence. He had gone away into the horizon of many years and standing in a city apartment hearing his buzzer go he blinked away the feeling that nothing had happened. "We talked about you, Brad." "You did?" "We talked about reincarnation." "You did?" "Hey, when you getting married?"

Joke or no joke, his brother took it serious and smiled sheepishly. "Grampa didn’t have her cremated. He couldn’t do it. Grampa’s writing the obituary for the Transcript." "That’ll be like an obituary for the Democrat." "Dad says Grampa made it ten times too long." "He’s already written it?" "You know him." "Where were you Thursday night?" "You were asleep when I got in. Where were you Friday night? We were trying to call you."

He forgot what he had answered — something like Asleep under the Allegheny stars, or had there been night clouds? — after supper he and his girlfriend got inside their tent. Which indeed was partly what Margaret meant once, twice, three or four times, by saying—

But it was reincarnation she meant, "Better get it now because you don’t after you’re gone," and yet he did not remember in so many words how she meant it, for what he recalled, like some sought-after obstacle, was all the reincarnation he and she didn’t mean: so that he knew then and now as if by an intuition which meant no one would have to tell him, for they could assume he would know: his hand was on the doorknob, eight-thirty a.m., Larry’s urgent voice on the other side: the door was open, the boy stood there alive with the attention and city urgency that covered all the other stuff: he was talking fast like they were standing in Mayn’s living room already: and in the gap of not knowing where his mother was and not wanting to know (any more than he would want to look at the cold face of his grandmother on this her burial day), and not wanting to think about an unthinkable (a record!) two suicides (in less than five years) which kept becoming one in his always grab-bag, humdrum head, in the gap of what you could talk about and what not, what report for sure and what not at all, for this was no politic time to speak to Larry about reincarnation or let into the open void the fact that his place had been entered and his letter to his daughter removed; in the gap of knowing his mother and grandmother were in both him and his fairly dull, illegitimate, love-child half-brother Brad clothed fitly in a suit inevitably from his girl’s widowed mother’s store, and in the gap between a long (read historic) obituary for your wife of fifty-odd years (read uxorquy; read obsequoias) and on the other hand an obit as brief as a weather report, he realized he had decided what he was going to do, as if decision were disappearing for a moment that might be years depending on your time of view, and surfacing like the very same person, yet with his grandfather advancing toward him to ask him if he was going to have anything to eat, the old man’s calm doubtless dragged out of him by the nearness of others’ very bodies, he absorbed the impulse to tell him what work he had just decided to go into and he grasped his grandfather’s arm, who said, "She loved you," and, in a better mood, remembered the slip of paper in the breast (or cigar) pocket of his jacket, for Pearl Myles had left two phone numbers for Jim to call her and he crumpled up the paper and, inhibited from trying a six-foot set shot at the square wicker wastebasket at a funeral luncheon, he went and dropped the ball of paper in, upon which his grandfather said, "My sentiments exactly," and, man to man, they shook hands again, and when Jim came out of the dining room later with a roast-beef sandwich on a gold-bordered plate, a few people had gone, though Brad and his girl were still standing together, now alone, enjoying themselves.

But hearing Larry now so upset about Amy because he now thought those keys were her only keys, and knowing as if from inside Lar’s skin that Larry was unhappy at having to suspect that Mayn, even in a friendly way, knew things about Amy or her work that Larry did not, Larry was tired because of anxiety — his father had gone out to the Island last night to see Sue, and hadn’t returned; and the people down the hall had been coming and going all night and Larry had twice looked through the peephole to see the opera singer and the guy in the pinstripe suit come back and later the guy in the pinstripe suit leave and come back in a matter of minutes — so that Mayn did not trouble Larry with any self-occupied speculations that someone had gotten into this apartment.

Larry’s repeating that he feels in his bones Amy’s in danger but maybe she was fed up with him and with being but a potential girlfriend, a chill though tender in the hand, a gray color at rest in the green of the eyes and then the green scaring the gray away as if he is the gray and according to her too much in his own head (and don’t say "one" the way you do even as a gag, One feels at times, One has forgotten, One remembers why one’s folks split but then one forgets) — but that’s a dumb way to walk out (and of her own pad); she could have felt they’re getting too close, y’know, she on the rug leaning back on her hands staring and talking, sure y’know you can get pulled away from yourself by another person in fact Amy herself had been saying that, and he felt it too so he agreed but couldn’t tell her it was her the light of his life that did that to him—

— all bent out of shape, Mayn murmured in the midst of the kid’s frank language, he didn’t know what Lar’ had asked of Amy; and Mayn took and shook Larry’s hand and Larry started across the threshold but had to get back upstairs in case of a phone call, he had his father’s new Phone-Mate turned on.

He was at the elevator. "I got the reincarnation thing all worked out. I’ll tell you when we have time, O.K.?"

The wind behind Mayn rattled the windows. "I think I had it figured out once, old man."

"We can compare notes." Larry’s real ready for the elevator.

"It’s lost. The field is yours, sir." Mayn had a breakfast meeting at a hotel uptown. Forget the whole shebang and go for a workout, take some steam and a massage at the mercy-killing hands of Manolo.

The elevator window lit up its diamond shape, and a lone rider might be inside. The door slid back. "It’s never totally lost, in my opinion. It comes back because it’s… oh probably worthless, Jim." Larry shrugged and the elevator door might have been taking him away forever as he stepped in and was shut from view.

So that James Mayn, not half so sure of everything as this celebrated neighbor, Grace Kimball, well-known warm humorous influence on downcast and even suicidal women (Norma said) cum glad theories re goddess dispersing own flesh to heal patriarchal poison — all preached in an apartment in Mayn’s building that Grace had once shared with her (ne ex-) husband — James Mayn found himself left again where he’d about chosen to be: on consignment facing down the four corners of his one-time permanent shelter, unsure which was margin, which center — Women’s Interstate Bank, or a disappearing if potentially plural, non-curseproof pistol that came to roost bearing on it somewhere a worn emblem possibly miniaturizing a plan of sunspot economic cycles with a lot of 5s in it; droughts in the American West every twenty-two years, or the Great Spirit’s reportedly Four-Cornered Ear grounded somewhat as was the radiation fog of the coast-like Plains-and-Rocky-Mountain upslope challenging the Thunder Dreamer’s progress westward to give up the dancing pistol to an ancient survivor.