Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She said she was thinking how to put off a client tomorrow morning.

"Just tell him he has to wait," he said.

"She’s an architect," she said, "and her client’s getting impatient, that’s the thing, it’s this new light the Japanese copied from the Italians and it’s been ordered but it seems to have taken a long time, and now two real-estate guys in New Jersey are going to manufacture it a lot cheaper if we can wait. It’s the lighting business."

"What do you mean ‘seems’?" he said.

She felt some parts of them touching and she leaned toward him.

He said, "Is her client a woman too?"

She laughed, she knew she had tickled him.

He said, "You know me," and he said words he hadn’t known were coming but came from long memory as if he were off in the future, "I want a woman to get everything that’s coming to her."

She said, "O.K., I’m laughing, but you’ll earn that."

"Easy to get into, hard to get out," he at once regretted saying and knew he would remember. But "Hard to stay out," she answered, knowing (as she told him next day) that at that moment on the telephone he had got the grip of her eyes, or (as he knew but never told her) the memory of such grip thrown through his body like a passage of time. He was used to her at the same time that he didn’t know what to expect.

Her name was Joy, a name he wasn’t crazy about. But, though their love had its silly, dependent side, he was no good at thinking up those nicknames like Leafie or Needles, Nuzzle or Lark — or Sorry (his father’s for his mother Sarah) or Sam, his brother’s name for his wife — Sam — or, for a while, Joy’s name for him, Ghost, or Ghostie. It was from the song "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and it was he who had sung it to her in a whisper while the black pianist ("Negro," then) had played it in a pre-inflation French restaurant with buttery, average food (quote unquote, James) the second time they went out, though afterward they called it their third Chinese meal, and at the end of the song he said, "Let’s go."

Once when he visited his father in New Jersey he ran into old Bob Yard down at the Courthouse — Bob Yard, black-eyebrowed old part-dog, part-goat, part-horse, the electrical contractor, an Elk, like Mayn’s father, nothing else in common except that neither of them saw much of Jim from year to year. Bob liked to nag and jab with his penetrating voice like looking for inside info that he had himself all the time, and this time Bob asked if Jim had a picture of Joy; and Mayn happened to have a passport shot (in which Joy looked disturbed as if she were about to be transported somewhere). Old Bob — Bad Bob — held it up against the sun. His prominent front teeth and the eyes a little close together though not "bad" looking made him look stupidly like Mayn’s father but with a narrower face: "Your mother would have liked her," he said, "I can see it in the eyes. Your mother’s approval."

"In Joy’s eyes?"

"Your mother’d know how to say it. Your mother turns over in her grave hearing me speak for her. She had it coming — all the times she wouldn’t speak for herself."

The tongue came out and licked the lips. "Turns over with gratitude as if she was alive. The combat boys said it during the War: ‘Nobody dies.’ Though she might not say so."

Beyond the Jersey Central crossing, two men in dungarees came out of the firehouse and stood looking downstreet and one of them was Earl Haight with the red beak of a nose that had been red from the time he was a kid— Earl, from Mayn’s high school class, father a County Jail guard aiming to be nominated for Justice of the Peace. The other man outside the firehouse was Ira Lee, the Indian whose family had lived in the same narrow frame house for years at the power-company end of the black section. Mayn’s grandmother had taught Ira to garden. Crew cut former halfback. Mother a long-fingered halfbreed Creek from somewhere in the mid-South who had cleaned sometimes for Mayn’s grandmother. Father a Saconnet descended from the famed woman chief of that small, not originally nomadic Rhode Island tribe.

Bob Yard brought the photo down out of the sun. "Jimmy, you were smart not to stick around," he said. " ‘Course the paper, you wouldn’t have kept it going, no one could" — and Mayn heard the Jersey r roll through him like a hundred familiar greetings on the family porch three minutes’ walk from here, less than fifty miles from New York, "Get it steady," said Bob Yard, "cook for you, have some kids, get it steady. ‘Course you guys moving around, you get it steady anyhow. She cooking something for you?"

Mayn had to scowl like a smile or laugh. His father didn’t talk like that. Not that with old Bob you talked openly about everything. Mayn was way in the future staring back into the past wondering if his own father had been unfaithful to his wife’s memory even — words made you laugh and history fell apart into tales and isolated mysteries threatening to be trivial. But his father wouldn’t talk like Bob. Mayn didn’t care if his father was a prude or wasn’t.

Joy could be romantic, and she knew he was too, though she played to the other side of him, the part that wasn’t one with her. But the romantic in him was that he didn’t give a damn, though he didn’t say so. (Their daughter one day years later at a restaurant said, "You and Joy didn’t talk things out, I’m almost sure of that, I mean like me and my friends do.") He took Joy to Bermuda once on two hours’ notice, a pretty dashing but a rather funny thing to do to her, though to tell the truth she’d felt like it all day; and he made abrupt statements to her that made her go moist in the eyes (like he’d dreamed of someone like her when he was in high school, senior year, long before he knew her, he meant it) — she felt paid back too much, why was that? but she thought he meant day dreamt because he always claimed he didn’t have sleep dreams — (he liked, he said, the way she came into a room as if she were all by herself and going to be) and when he told her once that he was happy with her, it almost made her cry (she didn’t tell him) and later by herself it, or something, did make her cry. He didn’t give a damn about anniversaries or candlelight on mahogany, but he would buy her two dozen yellow roses, lay the soft greenly crackling cone of paper on the hall table as if it were not to be noticed even after they were finished hugging and kissing. He’d hardly ever written her a love letter, didn’t give a damn about old letters except ones he could quote from, couldn’t play house with his bride, though did tell about his family and his hometown, and Joy (he was asked to believe) recalled what he said sometimes better than he recalled it, though he’d tell (and remember) specially about his grandmother and her house down the street, his haven— for she had told him weird tales about the West and taught him to whistle.

But he didn’t give a damn about blanket chests — or a spinning wheel seen once through the fire-bright window of a New Hampshire inn; didn’t give a damn — or was not sentimental — about their first TV in 1959, an Admiral (and why did he think of it?); and he liked but could take or leave a cave painting they’d brought back from France (without the cave!) — a working honeymoon — yet he did care more than he showed about her favorite record in 1956: (shepherds calling across a valley; a child invisibly hearing a country lullaby; southern sun coursing through someone’s vibrant objection to a wife) Songs of the Auvergne. Sure he liked music. Listening to Dvorak when he’d come home from a trip, he said he knew she wanted to take flying lessons; and she was amazed he knew, and he said, Oh he thought she’d mentioned it (but he knew that it had come out of the blue — he put it out of his mind). She told him he liked the "coming" part of coming home, and he realized she was right. There wasn’t time to mail postcards from where he went, so he brought them home with him. He wasn’t sentimental about snapshot albums or possessions (his, hers, ours), or the soft green and cheesy chalupas at a restaurant on the corner that reminded her of a family place in the north end of Chicago, though a pan of oven-toasted and salted almonds their first Christmas brought back his mother’s furtive eyes with such a dryness of the mouth he forgot he had told Joy she used to make them and he didn’t recall till weeks later, so the mystery of the parallel stayed real. He wasn’t sentimental about Joy’s dough-bake Christmas-tree ornaments lying brightly colored in the cardboard box on the rug one December day he came in from La Guardia Airport to find no one home and in the middle of the living room this flash of green, red, turquoise, gold — a gold elephant, a blue dancer, a dark green shining-shellacked fir tree — but of more interest was a damp towel he sniffed hanging on the shower-curtain rail — flesh-rubbed — a message the skin of his hips took, that was lust in an absence he chose for a message — but more a presence than a real message; and she was so "there" — so "there" now —in how sometimes she watched for him to make the first move and then it didn’t seem only his, or his at all. He could run his hand down her back all night through the last button of bone into a spread softness doubling itself in curves back and forth larger than fingers or hand — and down her side and into the soft, sharp dip above her hipbone that sent his thumb inward in a small arc to touch tendrils only to find eyes glistening in the near dark, and her hands were better than his, you might say, even to when she’d lend him one of her hands to move from one place to another. And Bob Yard said Mayn’s mother would have been grateful for this marriage — marriage of love, he really meant, though those words of Bob Yard’s, not himself a sentimental man, brought back eyes that would have seen what the elder son saw in this person Joy, who he thought saw through other people clearly yet saw through them even to what was beyond them. (Say that again, slow.)