Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She and her friends listened to music. She’d lent him a piano record. It sounded like a half-magical, musing mish-mash of Debussy, Schumann, pre-War nightclub songs and barroom rag heavy on the pedal and old American songs he could not identify, only respond to, a tune from Stephen Foster maybe, or a camp meeting by a river. He’d lent her Delius and the Bach partitas he liked. She’d said little about him himself except that she had always wondered what free-lance really meant. He had volunteered the information that most of his salvage work lately was for the police. She told him a little about her friends.

Her friends thought of themselves as coming out of the sixties, but he saw they were suburban kids not old enough to have been actually in the events of the sixties. They lived together in musical apartments but they weren’t hippies. They would be fairly romantic, he supposed, though she, he felt, was not. And she didn’t preach or brag. She ate little — only live foods, she said, meaning raw. But a week ago she’d asked if he minded if she smoked a cigarette. She had enjoyed it, looking out the window, and he had smelled a sweet richness he had never tasted when he had smoked.

This sound thing was something else.

What are you trying to do to me? he said, his hands over his eyes.

Listen, she said.

I am, he said.

Her words were softer in the absence of sound, and he found that his were, too. Are you trying to make me believe this sound’s been getting into my head for years?

You’ll hear it, she said.

And then she seemed to have answered No to his next words before he’d finished saying them: You mean like tasting preservatives in a loaf of bread or a can of tuna? You want to persuade me I’m being poisoned?

He knew some chemistry, and he knew he was already made of chemicals.

The supermarket chemicals are different, though.

Yes, they were. But who had just now said so? If he uncovered his eyes, would he find out who had said the words? The supermarket chemicals are different. He could have said them himself. He knew about preservatives. But the words had come not out of him, they’d come to him; yet had he heard them said? The face of a good-sized school tuna came at him squashed to the curve of one seven-ounce can dividing his eyes. He’d lost the tock, the tock of the TV switch; and anyway now he didn’t know if the last tock he’d heard had been the On or the Off. How does the blindfolded captive wait for what comes next? He smelled her skin. It was the odor of unbitten apricot and somewhere between a peanut in the shell and nutmeg. She hadn’t known the smell of nutmeg and he’d brought her the small jar with three partly shaved nuts of the sweet spice — pits, in fact — brown outside, pale wood inside with fine branchlets of dark grain like a leftover slice of pear.

He wanted to uncover his eyes and look at her. But he kept his hands on his eyes. He felt compelled to.

He wanted to believe her, he thought. But having thought this, he saw he wanted not to believe her. Let her try something. Did spirits fly in the window to her? Yet wait — let those spirits wait in their own midair, like hummingbirds or dragonflies — yes, wait: he’d give her this much: she hadn’t said he was putting up a fight. He was sure she hadn’t said any such thing, whatever else passed between them in this atmosphere in which he now didn’t know if his TV was on or off. And this time he wasn’t out of the room as he had been last Saturday.

Last Saturday he’d been watching his first baseball game of the season; he had gone to the bedroom for the book of matches that he’d fetched her the night before — then back to the kitchen to the stove, when suddenly there had been someone at the front door; and as he went, he wondered if he’d left the game on in the living room, the sound was off and he couldn’t tell. He recognized one of the voices and he opened the door. The game had been on, as it turned out; but the point was that at that moment on Saturday the television set in the living room had been at a distance — game or no game — while tonight he was close up and with an interpreter.

The sound he now identified with his eyes closed in the palms of his hands was one he had never heard. Yes, he did hear a sound.

It was steady; that was what it was, it was steadiness itself. It reminded him he was feeling good, and so he thought it wasn’t a poison or a coefficient host carrying untoward influence or bad substance. It was there like the faintly gaseous purity of compressed air to be taken, as his breathing might draw it, in cycles of amount; but it wasn’t divisible the way drafts of air from one of the tanks on his back were; and if, hearing it now for the first time, he recalled the anesthetic wind that sometimes tasted of mentholated rubber in the first breaths of compressed air before he went down, breathing wasn’t what this was.

Because for one thing (had he said so to the girl who must still be in front of him to one side of the TV screen?) the hearing of the sound arrived all over him. What the hell was he saying! Distributed was what the sound was. From head to heel like a film of buoyancy. Or was he turning into an ear? — for the sound was something heard. And steady, so steady that it could not have been brought in here by the girl. But it was not him.

Well, he’d been telling her some of this, telling her during the last few moments. He could recall her silence. But was it that of a good listener or, if the TV was off, not on, was she now at a loss because she thought he was trying to impress her by faking it? She was past that with him, he hoped. Or at least above it. He liked her. They could communicate, couldn’t they?

Got it, he said. Had it all along.

Hey look, she said, the sound I meant is no big deal.

The sound had surrounded what he was telling her, as if it could be also a carrier outward from him. But it also steadied what he told her into a new silence.

Well, now he was not speaking. He smelled her all over him very slightly. The heels of his palms felt his cheeks rise and tighten in a smile at the words, You’re turning me on.

She had not said them. Had he?

The touch of her smell was all over him. She was closer than ever. Ripples over him were less his looseness of skin than the girl herself, dissolved toward him to preserve him, preserve even that comparative looseness of skin that was, well, mainly in the mind, skin which tightened into laughter: he was arriving inside himself, he was joyously guffawing so the warm-water kisser fish and the long cold shark and the doppler-headed dolphin heard him bubble melodiously down through his system coded words — My lady preservative!

He heard her, heard her trying to say, Hey, I just wanted you to, you know, hear it.

But she was near at hand, nearer than she knew. She was a hand, and it was conducted to him by this continuous sound he’d found in himself which yet was not him, for he was something else, its conductor.

Now he was not sure as to when things were happening. Tock goes the switch. The speed he heard went on, diminished and steady. Yes, and speed not of something.

It goes on, he said. It helps. Maybe I’m used to it, but it’s not too strong. It’s gone on longer than I’ve known you.

Or yourself, came back to him.

Just what I was going to say, he thought — but hadn’t seen her mouth open.

What has gone on? she said with audible doubt, with an emphasis that had waited a little too long before voicing the doubt.

Oh — why it’s a current. Strong, very strong.

But I thought it wasn’t too strong, she said. A current?

Like when you get inoculated, the antibodies may never need to be boosted. Like I’ve been inoculated against dead bodies that I might come up with, but that’s not the same thing; you have to have that inoculation again the next time you take that kind of job. But other inoculations, you know, they last.