Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

On Second Avenue, that so powerfully carries from north to south the hills and bridges and tunnels of Manhattan’s east coast — well, one tunnel that he knows of — the morning sun low in the sky turns blinding against the snow and slick of the glittering pavement. Anything is here in this city, including all that’s outside, and the winter sun that has been fired silently off into the void above Queens and Brooklyn, the sun that has been launched into its old moment of fixity, stays there above the city, and there is nowhere else for a moment, since the sky east and west and up forgets New Mexico, Chile, Connecticut, the cobbles of Brussels, life that lasts from a Russian subway platform to a peak in Tanzania. The morning traffic blasts cycles of current past people standing on curbs as if the avenue were being excavated. Glaring noise that would be a gaping hole if you could just manage to get the joke, which is someone else’s. Hitler’s loudspeaker has been pulverized and each deaf pore of the future soaks it up and naturalizes it. A child among other children gets up the two steps of a yellow Varsity bus, and the father, his shoulders hunched and his bare hand in his pocket discovering the warm tangerine it’s been holding for several blocks, sees her then through the bus windows shadowed by the outside light, knapsack strap slipping off one shoulder; sees her make her way back to a seat on the aisle and ease around leaning forward away from the back of the seat giving her knapsack room.

The light is in his eyes, the little girl looks straight ahead. The day has begun. The young driver in a sweatshirt with the hood back has drawn the door to, and watches what’s coming over his shoulder, revving the motor. The girl glances at her father, starts a smile — just a glance, that’s all — that’s it — the day’s begun. She sees him with her faintly smiling glance, and that’s it, she doesn’t see him find in his pocket and hold up the tangerine she was going to have on the bus. He has the tangerine but not his gloves, and will save it for her.

The kid on the seat in front turns to speak to her over his shoulder — but the father can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl in the knitted cap under the hood of a quilted parka. They have forgotten home and parents, thank God. His daughter and the other children are in a thing that’s about to move, it’s almost not here, the eye reviews the faces on their way to school.

Sun, like a power now being used, strikes through the bus broadside and the bus eases out into traffic in front of a honking cab and behind a truck. The truck is silver like bare metal and when it is gone he is looking at the same old rainbow-shaped red-white-and-blue Grand Opening banner above the plate glass of the supermarket Joy doesn’t go to any more because they lost her delivery once; and the father is even more still before he turns to go. He feels good. His child’s cheeks were pink, rosy. She’s thinking about what’s ahead, not about her father.

Turning, he is struck — struck on the elbow. The man, the Italian fruit-and-vegetable man—"ey!" knows him and greets him in his arms as if by name hustling across the sidewalk with a carton of half-green bananas in his arms that he’s slid off the back of the Hunts Point truck. The white double-door of the funeral home is like a seafood restaurant and out of one small leaded window, her center-parted dyed-dark hair tight-combed, a woman’s round face is looking, and he knows she has an apron on, he knows her though not to speak to and she holds his gaze with a morning attention his brother Brad back home in New Jersey would think unfriendly — she’s Italian and she looks at you, but then this is New York and she looks away and back. His knee hurts.

His knee is sick, and the fancy deli’s sidewalk is city-full, the baskets of shallots, of beans, of dried stockfish on end with their long gray whiskery jaws like flat fossils for being open, and he wonders if the fava beans in the plastic bags can be the same he saw last month, pale and tough for a long day’s minestrone, flat like limas. No doctor’s going to touch the cartilage in his knee, it’s floating, that’s what it’s doing — it’s not really knifing him nerve by nerve, it’s acting up because he walked four miles back to a motel — two miles in green quiet, two along a highway — and yesterday afternoon Joy saw the swelling while unpacking his bag which she still feels called upon to do. But back in New York today if he can’t get in some basketball he’ll swim laps. Joy’s given up telling him to see a doctor.

He takes another way home, roundabout. He picks a plane out of the air, the noise. His hands are cold. The air seems less acid, more fresh, but isn’t. He’s going home. Not going home "first" before he goes out to work, because today he’s at home. Not working at all until he has to see his old bureau chief for lunch which is soon enough.

Out of the cold sidewalk comes the awful question since no one like them was supposed to get divorced: So who will leave first, he or Joy? Is it what’s coming to them? Stuff comes to him he can’t prove, like that each waits to be prompted by the other. Certain words waiting for them may do it. By the time he gets back she will have put Andrew on the private-school bus — it’s apricot-colored, caramel-pudding-colored, but you know what paint smells like, and like a lot of individual school buses this one suggests police, the administration of the city, not the microbus of the same size but many colors; an airport hotel gives courtesy transportation in this type of bus, and Andrew’s costs six hundred dollars a school year. Will she be home? If home, in the bathroom? Does she want to go back to work? He sees the children arriving home and pressing and pressing the buzzer.

A clear puzzle anyway. More clear than this noise. Who will leave first? Not her.

Joy will say — he knows she will — that if in the midst of this clear puzzle she should leave, he her husband has already left. The house, that is. They don’t think of it as only rented, they think it’s theirs, though they hate rent. The "house," the apartment.

We’ve jumped a few events. A good apartment is hard to find. A good woman is not hard to find; they’re all so damned good. At not quite complaining. Until you’re at last not ready. Picking a time when you were about to think. About to go. It’s painful for him, isn’t it? this traveling — painful quite apart from her.

He’s away often, so he knows the City even better, he’s always returning and what would he know if he had stayed home in New Jersey to revive the family weekly newspaper when it couldn’t be done anyhow, and he knows this part of Manhattan as well as he knows Yorkville, the West Village, Wall Street, Maiden Lane, the Battery, or knows the sound of three familiar dogs repeatedly greeting each other down in the street very late at night or early in the morning long before Joy’s alarm goes off, sometimes he doesn’t want to explain himself, say he’s way uptown crossing East Eighty-sixth Street in the middle of the block at two or three in the morning having found a Puerto Rican former super he wanted to question and thinking now he’ll catch a German bar before it closes but is met in midstream by a drunk sailor with a pale, wiry mongrel on a leash and the sailor grabs him by the arm and asks him to take the dog back there into the Finnish restaurant that Mayn then recalls noticing the sailor coming out of, with the awning—"Where am I?" the sailor mumbles as a few late (or early) cars and trucks rub them both ways—"Eighty-sixth Street, Yorkville" — "Take the dog for Chrissake" — the sailor didn’t want to explain himself either, and Mayn understood.

Mayn’s not with the regional task force any more, though the bureau would have him back; but, with the task force that took him out of New York all the time, he was based in New York — whereas now he’s not — but lives on here — though he’s away even more. Got it?