Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

This dark, round-ended thing under her nose is prodding at her.

She opens her mouth to it, the TV reporter is not being stopped, he has cheeks that talk as fast as his dark lips, he’s got on a muscular T-shirt with the date on it, 1977, not today’s exact date but good enough, he’s asking about her kids, does she have other kids at home. The mouth opens wider to cry and Mayn might feel nearer and nearer while not moving, and will she take a bite out of the mike, the eyes in agony. But then she doesn’t care what this thing thrust under her nose can do to her. And before the cop can say, "Let her through," why you get hit.

Bludgeon against the cheekbone, it hits you under the eye, the left.

It’s the mike, not her hand. Her hand was what swiped the mike, swept it to one side because it occupied a position already taken up by her intent. Knocked the mike practically out of the Eskimo, no, Indian newsman’s hand.

But before she could do this you’d leaned to catch her muttered words, and you got jostled, and you asked, "Is he headed for Santiago?"

Got jostled from behind. Which tipped you into the mike’s path. And you were taking up position already occupied by the mike when it slammed your cheekbone. It struck so hard you felt the metal mesh stick in you for an instant as short as the ending of a life — as short as your life. And you remember a phone number, only the numbers a man vouchsafed to you half an hour ago, and the landscape flown in bulges up off its grid so that for the moment of the mother’s frightened, angry words, you know that the bulge was always there and the grid as snug as abstract can be upon the sphere, the sphere, where that landscape lies.

"He ain’t going to come here," the woman said, but in the split-flash before she batted the mike out of the park, her eye knew Mayn.

She is rushed away by the space in front of her toward the glass-paneled area and she doesn’t toss her head at Mayn: but him she was answering, and not the man asking, "Do you know where your husband is? Did you have any advance warning that he would escape? Is he involved in a plot against Castro, is he headed for Florida? Has anyone contacted you about your little boy? When were you told that your daughters were being brought here for safety?" Your hand’s on your cheekbone, a smile on the rest of your face asking Harry — that’s the detective’s name — if a guy name of Ray Spence has been around, looks like a fairly well-dressed drifter, sometimes a fringe jacket, boots, pretty good clothes but he’ll never make it as a person, pony tail and maybe some suspicion of beard. No one like that in evidence here to Harry’s knowledge. What’s Mayn doing here? Couple of cons, one outside, one inside, both knew the Cuban. What’s the chance he’s not anti-Castro at all? Good chance, Harry answers, as if it doesn’t matter. Routine break maybe — but they’re all political nowadays to hear these guys tell it. But when did the kid disappear — before the break, like they said? Light from a ceiling lamp crash-lands onto Harry’s large, muscle-boned face lifted up in fatigue and some not convincing profession of exasperated who-the-hell-knows, and for a reason Mayn wouldn’t claim to know but it seems to be drawn from the man by Mayn, drawn in trust or as if into a fine, irresistible gap of unknown shared experience, Harry takes his light, bright-checked sport jacket off a chair and tells Mayn with the most direct quietness in the midst of the noise that’s out of place at eight in the evening when nothing’s ordinarily happening, "They didn’t give out the news of the break for eight, ten hours; the kid was taken right about the time of the break, it couldn’t have been the father and what would he want with the kid anyway?"

Mayn thanked Harry, and the landscape moved in again, rented or priceless who cared, it was not just arriving, it was on the move, steady, and Mayn knew this as surely as he knew he was on the move, no stopping, and — no sweat — a way’s been found for rest to come between him and the landscape, which is composite anyhow, though American all the way — wide as hell but with that lengthwise aim, and it arrived and could not get round him and was slowed by him. Harry came back and told him the blonde policewoman Mary had had a call for James Mayn a while back, they didn’t take calls for newspapermen, she’d said, but the name lingered. A woman calling, was all she knew.

"You got something for us?" Harry asked, looking like he was leaving.

"Nothing together."

"So shovel it over to me, I’ll take it as is."

"Any clandestine movements of nuclear waste into the Northeast?"

"Sure, sure, I can see it in my mind’s eye," said Harry, and they emerged from the stationhouse under the arc of a football thrown from streetlight to streetlight.

"What’s one more anti-Castro exile?" Mayn said, and the phone number in his head came back with landscape.

"Do you ever hear from an inmate named Foley?"

"George and his economic plan for creativity in the prison of the future."

"He mentioned you in a letter."

"He’s written me one or two."

"He mentioned our Cuban fugitive and a visitor he had."

"In a letter to me?"

"Maybe you’re not opening all your mail."

"Maybe I have help."

"You met the visitor in question in Florida, where some Cubans are not anti-Castro."

"But only seem so," said Mayn. "Foley is a dreamer and a scientist, not political."

"He expressed an opinion about the unconscious of our fugitive after a heated discussion in which they switched opinions several times on the subject of worker control of factories and prisoner control of prisons."

Mayn said he didn’t recall receiving that letter, and Harry laughed. Harry asked him where he was headed, but did not ask for a ride. Mayn pulled away from the curb wondering why he had not looked Harry up, and why, too, he had left the Chilean economist unencountered for so long except through the information received from Amy. Though from Norma, too — about the wife, Clara. He had liked the man, been put off by his knowing Spence, kept him in mind, in reserve — potential.

The city went with him down below the entrance to FDR Drive, which he did not take, down Second Avenue into richer lights of East Side restaurant territory where under sidewalk awning, hard by latest enriched newsstand, fruit-and-vegetable immigrants raise right out of sidewalk plots of blue broccoli and well-priced green grapes, mealy tomatoes and hydroponic watercress plus those spongy basketed ivory-colored squares lurking in water which some future between here and Moon he used to be stuck in is racing against time to create more cheaply, and he had decided not to tell Harry to check his Chilean connections in Manhattan and Washington because Spence had already been advertising rumors into facts.

The mike had been bare, the mesh’s grid still with him, the way it stayed with him in the stationhouse. "Tough mother," the blonde had said, her hair drawn back against her temples by two steel combs. The bruise on Mayn’s face, isn’t there a law saying she had to get equal treatment? Dark warps of hair, tight-slanted down her forehead, made her eyes look closer together. Rican rouge, dark sunsets. Behind the gleaming lips of her mouth, white teeth, gaps of silver; gold, too, from eating the surplus carrots from your old wives’ tale that carrots give you gold teeth (even if you didn’t want them). Her kids were on the other side of a milk-glass-paneled door at the end of that muddled hallway. Who knows what she sees? Them dead, sprawled. Left arm, right leg, put back together the wrong way, like a lake of sand, a mountain of fluid, a household inadvertently launched by Congress. She lives half her life for others. Which half is surplus and to whom does her value belong, maybe her husband, two or three times visited by the Chilean economist, whom Spence, as if inspired by Mayn’s absences, will draw further in, until the cultured, austere, somewhat exiled, somewhat tragic economist won’t be jogging in the park any more.