Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She talked of a house they would build, near water she imagined you’d see through the trees. An open-plan house built around a huge tree — he had to laugh — no, she’d seen it from a car years ago, the tree, a hundred feet tall, six feet thick at least, not a branch on it, all gray like a rock, but alive (she thought it had been alive) — he had to laugh — and her loving uncle had looked away from the road before she had a chance to speak and had said it was a white oak. It was far from here but you could find oaks like that in New England too, and it was what she wanted, like two children, a girl and then a boy, Flick and Andrew, who Flick felt was so much smarter than she was and who when he went to college years later was a maker of riddles.

Joy’s father had been a chemist with the paper company in Chicago— Donnelly. The chemistry of paper, not that you need to talk about your work. Her sister got on better with him.

In the beginning Joy talked of a future she seemed already to have shared with this fellow Jim Mayn her husband, as if it had come first, so clear was she about it, and quick to catch him thinking her own thoughts about fair-to-poor rural schools when he’d hardly known he was thinking about schools though when she told him schools didn’t matter as much as she’d once thought, he had a spasm of caring still more for her, caring twice as much as he did about the two kids whom he was very content to love — while he did feel in his bones that if she was better balanced than he, she still didn’t admit to herself what it felt like to be preferred to her children, preferred in his sharp, erratic way.

Where were the children? Flick, the sharp-spoken girl, and Andrew, the potential roughneck (he’d suddenly start yelling to himself; it was funny, it was like he’d suddenly started digging down through the Earth — maybe he was hearing things, hearing even then those riddles he used to make up when he went to college). Where were Flick and Andrew in the marriage, in all this?

Everywhere and nowhere. (Her father said she really listened, but her mother shrugged.)

Or everywhere, both parents could sometimes feel, though Jim and Joy saw themselves as wise enough to let their children be free of them.

He listened to her build the house she had in mind and fill it; and he had to speak; but then he said only that. . well, here he was.

Was he her old-fashioned future? As her sister’s minister back in Aurora, Illinois, had said, commitment in terms of marital union is like living already in the future.

He didn’t know if he could keep up with that future (whether or not he ever got to go to China).

Except that when he could admit abrupt rage in himself upon returning to the apartment and then, as he came in, see Joy watching him from where she was (like a neighbor’s ocelot — more like a friend’s shepherd watching a man and woman she knew leave in the morning — though more like a wife who was prepared for him) and just as this irritation of his toward someone he loved rose and then finished toward her in a rush, and he stood roughly and said something and went toward her, he felt that coming home was coming back: and when she said, "Do you like being here?" (so the words came together though they were divided by time and by sense and between said and not-said), "it’s nice here, isn’t it?" (she’d built a record cabinet, she’d fixed the wall telephone’s loose box)—"when I heard the elevator door, I knew it was you and when I heard the lock I knew you hadn’t shaved before you left the hotel — I know what you’re thinking, don’t say it — the children aren’t home yet — the last thing you want is to eat out tonight, tell me the truth" — he felt that what he’d come back from was some future, and what he’d come back to was an abundance threatening to waste itself on him. With his assignments, you see, he made sense of each individual one.

She told him what had happened while he was gone. Not a whole lot. She could stand with her arms akimbo as if she needed to take up a bit of space.

Sometimes she would know how not to come to him at the door, she would stand in the middle of the living-room rug instead and he could put down his case without taking his eye off her. Once she’d been sitting cross-legged on the sun-covered ochre rug, the ochre sun-struck into a growth loose through the spread of dark, interleaved pairs of bloomed coils, once upon a time beaks, each the beak of the rainbird if you please, standing each upside down to the other, and she was part of the rug so that he looked at both and didn’t know which came first, and this was more crazy than being irritated at feeling grateful; she wasn’t asking for gratitude any more than the eyes of his long-withdrawn mother (inherited by his happier grandmother?) really gave him gratitude for marrying for love.

What happens is never what came first, it seems to Jim Mayn, and Joy doesn’t see what he means for he says it even less clearly than that, and then shakes his head at himself and grins grimly as if he has to go off now and talk to someone he despises and once in the middle of an alarm clock going off he smashed the bathroom mirror without a drop of blood and his small daughter came and asked him why he had done it; what happens is never what comes first, it seems, but how about when what comes first has not yet appeared? It is waited for, as if it might be seen approaching through emptiness. It is thinking him! With ways of thought that aren’t his any more than they are Joy’s or his daughter’s, but these broken statements like he was a cracked philosopher in another life, or a traveling charlatan, another system, come into him, out of him.

Flick and Andrew had a lot to say to each other later on about their parents. Andrew was confused but brilliant about it. His father tried to tell him how to write with few words for his seventh-grade English. Did Jim ever tell anything like that to Flick? She and her brother thought not.

Jim was away too much, they later said. But newly returned was what Joy said she made him feel.

But returned from the future where, say, two people had been turned into one, which economizes on feeling: his daughter heard this at the end of a story one night, she was quite sure.

Yet also another kind of One, offspring from those dubious Two, is different from them, and alone; and as he looks back to the former Two, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he cannot see where they went; and deserted by that origin, this One (namely, Jim) feels thrust untimely from that lost Two into the future, where he should be glad to be because it’s where tomorrow’s news is, but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery smarter than he which is that of his unhappy mother disappearing into the elements, he has on one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost river to then find it in the future where he travels (whew!), or, to put it better, his wife didn’t always know where he was coming from, and, believing him not unfaithful, told him nonetheless that he wasn’t all there. But as her never-at-a-loss friend Lucille Silver put it, What man is entirely committed to his marriage? Which for Joy did not cover the thing that was happening to her.

Somewhere in the future Andrew and his older sister Flick who thinks he’s so much brighter have a lot to say to each other but seldom meet.

Meanwhile, hear yourself slog through the noise pollution of a street, what Mayn calls "bedlam," and his daughter years later learns from an older woman friend what Bedlam literally was.

"Grampa said he was tickled pink to see me."

"That’s right."

The little girl giggles, even without her little brother for an audience. "Tickled pink!" It’s funny.