Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He told her a whole lot of stories while often claiming to know very little and be an authority on nothing, and some stories he didn’t understand and at least one was incomplete in his telling if not his soul, and his daughter came upon her own conclusion to it; in the beginning he told his wife about himself, fell silent, touched her arm, her waist — cracked a joke. The two of them amused each other. They got along like people who don’t need to talk too much, though they never took long car trips together. Never say never.

But they would blow up like other people: she when he said she was too damn good phoning his father twice a month; he when she accused him of just tolerating an unusually young navy captain who held down a desk job overlooking the Potomac and visited them when he was in New York.

He was content for her to be a housewife if she was content, but more than once said she shouldn’t permanently give up her job. But they knew that when she went back to it another job would be there. The next job. So they didn’t believe in forced unemployment.

When she married him he was a newspaperman based with a New York task force — that general area — and might not travel a lot. But she knew also that he might. And he was what she had been looking for; he had character and downplayed his knowledge and was physical and humorous to a fault and faintly tragic, but when you are in love you maybe don’t spell out all the details at least to the other person. But maybe this is untrue and you are so open you say anything at all.

Years passed and the two of them looked back, they didn’t always look ahead. But then it was often the other way around, and they lived in the future, which came often enough.

But what came first? What drew her to him or him to her? Easy. Not hard to think about.

They were about the same height, or almost. They weren’t at all incongruous, but their frames were different. She was slender, he was broad. She was tall, like her sister, and her legs were alive and noticeable through whatever she wore. Sometimes she stood with her arms sharply akimbo near a doorway.

Her eyes would hold him a moment too long, then drop with an invisible blink to his mouth. Her eyes were straight and explicit. She smelled sometimes of the lightest lavender rinsed through the cold skin of apples or diluted into, he felt, the spaces of some dry drawer holding a cardboard box of sachet (though he never looked); and it was just a hint of lavender taking him away from itself to remind him of what he could not place beyond a second of very green, almost sweet apples he recalled, which she also smelled of and which he did find — found like a less sweet berry in the smell and taste of her perspiration (as he once years later told to one other person in a rare moment of pinpoint intimacy).

She admired the dark hair on his wrists that went up under his striped shirt cuffs; but, strangely long afterward, she noticed a birthmark on his left wrist under his watch strap, a speckle of pinpricks like a cluster of freckles or tiny moles; he had hair on his wrists and some dumb recklessness in how he paid attention to her, her face, her reactions, and he had the lumbering walk of a man who might be smooth and rhythmic in sports but to her it meant shyness and a slight chip, though she would almost never point out this shyness, but he knew she knew him, as if he’d read her mind, yet found there her belief that he would not hurt anyone — she pretty much meant physically.

She had purposes, and she knew he felt these. He could be boisterous and stubborn, although an eavesdropper on the two of them alone would not have seen much of this in him.

What came first?

She gave him hell the first time they went out, but this did not come first. They had met in New York in a Russian place uptown where a friend of hers spent several nights a week because she was in love with a somewhat doomed, very middle-aged Russian family man who sang deeply to a guitar, sang like a deep-drawn bow across a bass viol — and wore a red, high-necked blouse with Cossack brocade on it so he might have scars on his neck. He had long lines down his face and it was from these lines that the lean face hung. Her friend’s love for the Russian was painful because he was nice to her. And he had shown a quiet deference to this young man Jim Mayn. Mayn was the name.

The first time they went out, it wasn’t at all uphill, but she gave him a hard time; she knew apparently so much more than he about the President’s lower intestine right down to his tan pyjamas and the semi-classical favorites he listened to, while downstairs in the hospital conference room the presidential news secretary was asked if there was still no one-word description of the President’s condition; and this heavy-set guy Jim Mayn smiling at her across a table at a Cantonese restaurant in New York had actually seen the President the preceding Thursday night laughing himself silly in a Washington hotel full of photographers at their annual dinner; and when she said the man must not run again and the whole thing was ludicrous, this heavy-set, strong-looking man she liked drank his beer that they had brought into the restaurant in a six-pack and he said Oh Eisenhower, Stevenson — and murmured in song "Pay me my money down" — it didn’t matter much as long as they could get two cars and a power mower into every garage, and a transistorized hearing aid into an eyeglass frame now. (No matter what you know how to do, you’re not going to phase out the strontium 90 from your milk.)

So she gave him hell — an insider, the cynical kind, do-nothing — and then she shook her head when he shut his eyes smiling like a blind man, and he shook his head, saying, Don’t be so damn hopeful about things. And they were both shaking their heads when he opened his eyes upon her amusement and said she reminded him of his grandmother in a 1900 photograph posed on a bicycle in straw hat, puffed sleeves, long skirt, dark bowtie, one discreet toe on the grass.

She asked if this was a compliment, knowing it was.

He said his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

I can imagine, she said, wishing she’d thought of something better to say, her eyes bright, seeing him for herself, her slow smile made witty, to him, by the pinch of her teeth in her lower lip and then her tongue. And at this point they were aware of time passing — he, of the excellent dark, rather coarse hair held up in back with a comb, and "her own eyes" (which their largeness and somewhat hard though momentary fixity made you identify them as) now turned upon her own hand lying along the table; she, of his large, sluggish or sleepy eyelids, and her hand, and the hazy blue and dark brown of his tweed jacket sleeve; and she suspected he had maybe two more or less under control girlfriends at present and was thinking something like How long till I make the grade, and will I have to ask her? — but then saw she was thinking the question from her side, and out of nowhere she said, Learning to whistle is like kissing, I mean learning to kiss — I mean if you learn from someone you love. It could have been dumb, her speaking so — but it wasn’t.

Then he didn’t call; then in vain she called him, and this was 1956. And then the next night — a Thursday — he called from Montauk and she couldn’t hear the sea so he held the receiver away from his ear for her to hear, but she did think that this independent man was not with anyone, and she was quite sure she smelt unsmoked cigar and garden mint over the phone and wished that she had put her hand out to feel his arm when they had had dinner. He said he would be back in New York the next day, and for a moment they both knew he had said it frankly. She ran her hand through her hair and he asked her what she was doing.