Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

2. The singers broke off and were yakking like they’d been doing it all along, and then the piano stopped and Lady Luisa said, "I know this music from somewhere. It is imitation something — di ." And Mr. North laughed like he was singing and said, "Are you accusing my young friend of—"

3. But then the very small woman who had consultation with Senora Wing who predicted she was going to take off her clothes came out onstage and wasn’t wearing the trenchcoat but had overalls and a red shirt like the red socks mother gave me, and had a big hammer. "Is that sheetrock you ordered really coming today? I’m all set to—" "I cannot allow the rehearsal to be interrupted by a piece of sheetrock!" cried Luisa ("My dear/’ said big North), but the small woman with the hammer said, "You stopped singing. You were talking."

4. The man at the piano stood up with red hair and beard and we did not know him and he said, "Sheetrock be damned; we need the rest of the score." Gustave said to me, "I saw him before." Suddenly, the little one saw us.

5. A spotlight came on and moved around between Luisa and North, who argued how he was to carry a letter across the stage and whether he would open it on one note or on another note but he couldn’t wait too long. The older woman in the fifth row said why not hand it over and then take it back and open it, and North said, "Who am I to hand it to? The man isn’t here." Luisa started to cry and stopped and was mad and said, "He should open it before he comes onstage; he is saving his own life by reading it before someone else reads it." The woman next to Amy asked Luisa if she wanted a cup of tea, and Luisa said, "If we don’t drink it we get a terrible headache," and they both laughed, and the small woman acted mad and pointed at us.

6. They all looked toward us at the back, and Gustave turned to look back also, and I knew that what I had seen on his head before he put his big cap back on was blood, and I was not sure he understood that the policy change was that we would have to begin opening our envelopes when we deemed it necessary for IMU security.

7. I feared for my bike and remembered riding down Fifth Avenue with light behind me like making me a new person, and I turned to tell Gustave he better hand over the music, but there behind us was Santee/Spence smiling and in position nobody’s going to take away. We were going to have to build on more than outside known fact. Santee/Spence said, "Delivery? I’ll take it, Gustave." Behind me, I heard Luisa singing, "Oh speak no more, no more against me, O gentle son O how the wheel becomes me, O heart in twain, I have no breath to breathe my life out—" cut off but very beautiful and I was not thinking what my mother would think any more, only that I was scared and thinking.

He pulled away from his father’s house, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father, who had never after all died, might be closely related; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch here and there in the house at times so unmindful of a car, a dark blue car he could swear had followed him, that he hardly wondered what was on his mind but recognized that he was content and his father was curious, and he had never been content like this with his father that he could recall.

He pulled away from his father’s voice yet took it with him downcellar, and the still surprisingly crisp voice from the kitchen above him, a square-headed, heavy-headed voice, called down, "Jim, did you turn it right three full turns before you stopped at 12, because you have to do that before you turn right to 11."

He wasn’t going to get into an argument with his father, not on top of the rather happy stuff that had obtained since he’d arrived two hours ago. His father called down, "What did you say? You won’t find them in the closet I’m pretty sure, but look if you want."

The diary volumes weren’t anywhere, so maybe they had been taken by the bookseller who had come looking a week or so ago, but he would not argue with his father on that one either. Mayn dialed left to 28, pulled the lock open and turned it out of its latch loop; he looked into the long, so narrow closet made seemingly out of more space than there had later proved to be, and, by the hanging light bulb behind him, he saw nothing but beautiful bottles, shadowed by their very shapes, the raised imprints dimly deepening or lightening colors that closeted their dust in some widow-web-spread network rigged where time was no object and the blues and purples and browns and greens were subtly preserved beyond eyesight.

He had pulled away from his father’s question "What do you want with those old books?" for his father was bound to ask again, but his father wasn’t asking, Is that why you came for a visit? because the son had answered, "I think they would be of interest to your granddaughter," and he remembered voicing once to a man in jail the considerable truism that the message bearer is never neutral.

It was just a visit to an elderly man who was his father and who appreciated the phone call from Washington; not that Jim wouldn’t call, but it gave Mel something to look forward to, that is, he said, besides the afternoon paper and the television with the news of a prison break (all the essential news of the world, Jim!), just a visit to an elderly man with a heavy, squarish head and magazines on the dining table and homemade cinnamon applesauce by the half-gallon in the refrigerator ("which people seem to call the ‘fridge’ now, Jim"); a slowly sagging, quite old man in a white-buttoned black cardigan sweater once much blacker when visible through the large street window of a modest weekly newspaper office years ago downtown; a man who lived above a dry, cool cellar full of objects including a thousand books that might never have been read even by his late father-in-law, the grandfather Alexander who, when he used to come uncomfortably into this house, would sit uncomfortably in the Windsor chair in the living room which had lately acquired a shiny white cushion advertising the race track.

He would always pull away from his father yet the truth was his father had been the least prying of parents; but this time he did not pull away. He said, "Oh, I miss my family, you know," and was as surprised to say it to this man as to say it at all.

"I know," said his father. "One way or another you miss them, but it’s only for a part of the day, as far as I’m concerned." His father didn’t seem to feel it odd that Jim had spoken so to him after all these years.

"I mean, I would have seen less of them anyway: Flick and Andrew growing up and going to college and Flick with a job and so forth—"

"But you hurried it up a bit by leaving yourself," said the father. "I happen to think it was a constructive thing you did, from what Flick told me — she said she was thinking of changing her name back—’course I never see Andrew—"

"You think I do?"

"He still serious about figure skating?"

"So I hear."

"How are you feeling generally?" his father asked, and Jim thought of the diaries downstairs and knew they weren’t why he was here, and could not help believing that his father thirty years not-too-late had asked him this warmhearted medical-sounding question like you’d ask a contemporary you felt easy with; his father admired his deep bronze tan acquired in six days and maintained by four hours’ talking to a businesswoman at a ski mountain cafe yesterday.

Mayn mentioned the apartment he had moved back into — base-of-operations sort of thing — and his father didn’t tell him it was unwise to go back to where he had lived with his wife and children once, investment or not; Mayn spoke of some nice people he had met, a woman named Norma, whose community volunteer job had suddenly been funded by a foundation so she was suddenly salaried at a crucial time in her life when she wanted a paying job anyhow, wanted more than needed; but want is need, and the outfit proved to be one Mayn knew of—