Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

His father wanted to know what it was.

Well, she says it’s like fiction. Probably selling herself short. I guess it’s environmentalist.

He felt he and his father were pulling away from each other, and when he had tightened the three screws around the globe’s circumference, he came down off the stepladder in one stretching step.

No, he had flown from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, hopped to Washington and had rented car on spur of moment thinking to make stop in Philly to make purely speculative inquiry, but drove straight here; car’s not his, could have taken the Metroliner (not here direct, of course), but he’d felt like a car. "You don’t look like a car," his father said, and he could hear twenty-five years ago his father singing when he was a bit nervous or unhappy, though the off-key melody made him always sound like he cared about everyone in the house, which curiously Jim Mayn had never thought before.

He turned to his father as his father turned away and sat down with a grunt. Nowadays, his father observed, a small-town paper gets all the news it can handle from your electronic terminals. That was true, said his son, they carried the machines around in suitcases like astronauts; he wanted to get into something else but it was his trade. Andrew’s college expenses were about it, now.

His father asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He said, Nothing to talk about — well, Andrew didn’t keep in touch; didn’t feel like it — and some curious stuff going on right now but mostly it’s a guy getting into my hair for some reason, probably my fault, involving people I know; turn away from it, it doesn’t exist, almost. His father said he knew, and Mayn told his father he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t being pulled into some hard-to-explain activities involving a cluster of other people’s supposings that became something maybe threatening even to a man with as slow a fuse and as low adrenalin as he; but that wasn’t why he had stopped on the way back.

Mel said, "Funny but your life tells you every few years or so—"

"— I don’t believe my life tells me anything."

His father said O.K., O.K., turn it around and put it your way, but—

He asked his father who this bookseller was and his father said to wait a minute—"stock taking was all I meant, I mean your marriage didn’t — I don’t know what went wrong but I didn’t have to ask you about it, you’re a good man and you felt that on balance you had to shift gears—"

The son laughed and ran water in the sink experimentally and then yanked open the icebox door and found a beer.

"— and now a few years later you’re taking stock of how you’re doing: I tried to do that when your mother died, and I didn’t get anyplace except Brad and I got closer, and I started eating better, in fact I developed quite an appetite, and I recognized I liked this town — what was it you and your grandmother named it?"

Mayn said he had left for Hartford and points south the morning they reported the prison escape and hadn’t looked at a New York paper since.

"Well, Adlai Stevenson said, Stick to your profession, whatever else you do."

Maybe that hadn’t been too clear to him, the son observed, and sat down in the other kitchen chair, beginning to sense why he had come to see his father.

"I had a strong feeling in my heart about you that you would survive and you were always there even if you didn’t get in touch, and had wound up by some circuitous route several rungs up but in the family job, and I held myself responsible for your mother, no one else."

This was a longer set of words than the economical obituary he had set up in type for Sarah as if it had never been written by a living soul, and his son told him so.

Mel laughed: was Flick serious about returning to her given name; and what was she doing in New York? Jim said that she was serious about everything; however, the difference between toxic pollution and her boyfriend was that her boyfriend made her laugh. Mel listened deeply, and asked if she was enjoying the old white Cadillac Jim had bought for her.

If you pulled away the parts of Mel that were above his forehead and below the bone of his chin, you would have remaining a man of indeterminate age, eyes you might never have looked at closely to understand that they wanted help in engaging yours — forget their color which was mostly brown with some pale brown threads of orbit targeting a place potentially of pain-free interest far beyond you or behind them.

Mayn kept saying things that weren’t why he had come, yet often these were answers to his father’s genuine questions, which in turn did seem to be why the visitor had come.

Slow going into a tourist’s brief "Story of Geothermal," through some question whether the St. Louis World’s Fair (really just "Fair") was 1903 or 1904 because if ‘04 then Italy could have advertised there its small, virgin dynamo driven by the first steam well. This was at Larderello near where third-century Rome exploited that mysterious steam field: yet had not your Sky lab astronauts—?

— that was Skylab 3, replied the aging son.

Hadn’t he attended the last Moon launch? his father asked.

Yes indeed, and Skylab a few months later.

He hadn’t spoken about Skylab, said his father.

Skylab 3’s same Skylab different crew.

Yes, his father knew that.

They photographed some hot spots in Central America.

Heat-sensing cameras, his father believed (who for the years when Jim would make duty visits with the wife and children would ask Jim’s children before they would go over to their great-grandfather’s to play in the backyard if they could eat two hamburgers apiece and Flick would always say Yes— but had never to Jim’s ear asked Jim like now with an urgency which after all was only a warmth of being curious yet flowed jointly this private afternoon from Jim’s need: which was quietly, inarticulately, to go inside some imaginary polis complete with kitchen and cellar housed amid a warped map of demands waiting far and near, connected by others even if he had declined to do so, and now nearer than New York, for he saw the blue car pass once and imagined correctly that it would be parked by a high, grassy curb down near his grandparents’ house or back near the Baptist Church whose horrendous purple stained-glass window against white Victorian-shingled gingerbread seemed to glow outward at you with some light of determination from inside)— It was the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, he said, whether that’s 1803 or 1804, because I’ve run on the track at the university there that they built for the Games, I think, because it’s three laps to the mile— Well, the Purchase was ‘03, said his father, who knew a lot about the Civil War. Well, grinned the son, his memory jogged, the Fair was ‘04 because a man Margaret met on her way East hoped to organize a balloon experiment there, or maybe it was the St. Louis Fair itself he hoped to organize. Your grandmother got a lot of mileage out of that trip West, said his father.

His father persisted: where were the main hot spots?. . any chance for New Jersey to—?

Well, the New Zealand area was a regular thermal wonderland, we overtook them in ‘72 and Italy the next year for number one.

What about the Russians?

Well, they’ve got a small unit in Kamchatka.

His father wanted to know how it worked, and he told him, adding how nuclear explosives in the "ploughshare" method could fracture rock, admitting us to the heat that from piped-in water will make steam to be piped out while trapping the radioactivity down around the hot rock level, if you want to believe that.

He and his father rose from the kitchen table and Jim went downcellar looking for the M. H. Mayne diaries he did not find, turning from time to time to address his invisible father who was standing almost directly over him in the kitchen above. ‘To the best of my knowledge," he heard him say for the millionth time.