Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The woman’s face is seen and not heard. It is with Mayn, as it was before he saw her. The flesh and bones have got fixed inside his own face. The opposite of his own son’s flesh and bones the day they got fixed outside his; it scared Mayn more than a bomb or that deep vapor of a dying man’s breath. The day this boy named Andrew was five. The subway platform between the Brooklyn-bound and Manhattan-bound tracks, the curved white walls of tile inlaid with green and brown and blue tiles for the name of the station, the curve making the tunnel a tube that you — Mayn — once as a child imagined was a tunnel endlessly of these glimmering white tiles like the Holland Tunnel between New York and Holland — the vending machines — for a second your five-year-old son wasn’t there, and then for more than a second. People pushed past to board the train. For the train had come in. He had had some money in his hand, his father looked around for him there on the IRT platform, and then the door began to slide — the two doors in the days when both doors functioned — and the father turned from the mirror of the vending machine— for where was Andy? — and the doors weren’t in motion any more, except in the car where they were fixed. And Andy’s face was on the other side of the streaked glass in another city that seemed the only city moving. Children no hedge against inflation: for look at the figures: a private foundation where the young woman Amy works with the Chilean economist in order to survive in a manner that cannot but allure Larry toward the experience of loving her too much for her to give it back makes public that in one year sixty-eight New York children under sixteen were murdered, and of these thirty-six were under seven, half were black, a third more were Puerto Rican. The Cuban mother’s hedge against inflation is knowing what comes next now. You have your bruise, and she is far away, surging down the hallway through Spanish and English. She knows what comes next. She’s got to get to her kids. To get her kids. They are not overhead in the laboratory of an orbiting kitchen, nor in a tin ashtray beside a Press Pool telephone shouldered to your ear while a known child, who is in the mind before it gets transformed to frequency and wired home to form a report, is sweeping up a mine in the next field before they plant. So his mother searches elsewhere as if she isn’t looking for unexploded devices but just lacks the eyesight to see her son off to one side here, whom she’s really looking for, that is if he’s not under the soil like a coin you run your metal finder over in the dark while the friendly dogs chase each other back and forth between you and others. Stare out the moving window at the landscape that gets flown in from assignment to assignment, and you be fixed. Stare out a window at a steep green and white and brown valleyscape of shacks brightly rising from the edge of a city full of foreign sun. Caracas. Brazil. South.

How could the wife Joy react to his losing their son on the subway, when the son had been found at the next stop in conversation with a small elderly black man in an army jacket and a pith helmet and spurious ribbons? Joy reacted by walking around the living room as if it were tipping the way it was for her husband. As if she wanted to call the police now. And then she was crying at his side, but not in relief.

The landscape travels with him, throw in a Statue on a movable island, he doesn’t return the car tonight, he enters his building with the hitch-hiker’s phone number on his mind, cracked and peeling walls as if the charts on them get revealed as the walls disintegrate; the simultaneous reincarnation his young friend Larry will explain soon turns Mayn’s heart again to some ludicrously ancient threat which the statute of limitations exempts Mayn from, so the threat is inherited by Larry, and the doorman Manuel is standing in his way speaking Spanish, which Mayn returns.

It is a heavy nine-by-twelve envelope containing what Flick said was coming.

"Thanks. Thanks."

"I figure it’s important."

"You didn’t leave it lying around the mailroom. Thanks. When was it delivered?"

Manuel hesitates. "This evening. Two hours ago. I signed for it."

"Special delivery? Couldn’t be."

"Some guy. I signed for it."

"It was the post office."

"No. Just a piece of paper. I signed for you."

"Thank you."

The manila envelope has been sliced open and scotch-taped back. He needs a hot shower, and while he pictures Norma picking up his mail while he was away and visiting those plants, and he imagines where Flick is and what he is responsible for, he sees his own last name, no more, on the return address, upper left, and draws the sheaf of pages, forty or more, up out of the envelope and sees that his daughter has given herself back her given name, as (he recalls in a sweat his own words) "perpetrator of an amazing load of verbiage, Daddy."

It is about something called Effluent Pollution Reciprocal Involving Both Water and Air, and it is by Sarah Mayn, and he almost fails to get off at his floor, he’s electrified but because a wilderness of feeling hugs him like painless chest pains in the factual, explanatory lines. She could use a blue pencil, but he is frightened by the prospect of some form of truth, its real weight in his daughter’s grown life more than this other unpleasant business of how and why it was intercepted and then, this evening, returned. The envelope is coming into this old apartment of his for the second time, not the first. He finds on the last page gas chambers and gas ovens and wonders by what steps she got there; but he wants to get there himself the right way, he’s skimmed so many books, half-finished them. But sweat along the bridge of his nose swells in the corner of an eye and he is looking for his keys and thinking about his divorced wife Joy and feeling someone wants him to explain why it came apart, why it didn’t work out, if that’s a fair way to say it — and he can’t, he can’t explain, he can’t explain, entering the apartment — that is, he doesn’t know why he isn’t with her — he’s looking at his adored daughter’s typed lines, and he can see only between them for God’s sake, all that space between them: for God’s sake he hears some voice say in his brain, for God’s sake so sentimentally empty he could vomit.

He can’t explain why it fell apart. How’s that for maturity?’

She wanted him because she felt he would love her. He loved her because she was beautiful and funny and saw through other people even to what was beyond them. But she said, Sometimes I don’t think you want to be loved, sometimes I really think that.

He thought, Well, that’s O.K. You have to ask a lot of a woman.

Sometimes he didn’t think.

He told her he loved her and sometimes told her why. She made him feel newly returned. She understood this.

And he told her stories, some asked for again, some never the same, some that developed into others, some that she (though not their romantic, huntress daughter and hard-headed, retiring son) eventually found odd and threatening and became indifferent to: stories about a diplomat named Karl who carried a small Japanese pistol against his ribs because the secret of it being there at a conference thrilled him like telling on himself; stories about how Andrew Jackson rode a searing streak of lightning at an Algonquian rite of miscegenation and proved his courage but divided his brain permanently in two, or how once he loved a village attorney’s daughter from western New York who understood better than any the disappearance of the stone mason turned printer William Morgan who had threatened to publish a comic testament exposing Masonic secrets; stories also about the East Far Eastern Princess who paid a visit to the American Indians and flew in on her giant bird that was to become impossible because it missed its own food and took to eating Navajo ponies.