Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"So it’s been in your family," a man at a bar once said respectfully, "now that’s what I kind of always wanted — my own small-town paper, I got the clothes for it."

Name of Ray Spence. That operator Ray Spence, impersonal, funky (too early for that word), unkillable (forget the rat poison — he wouldn’t have to vomit). Came back at Mayn once in a Washington bar, "So what happened? Family lost their grip? Those small-town papers…" But Spence with his clear eye for some rich man’s secret that could be forgotten even after it wasn’t a secret any more, whether money changed hands or not, Spence can’t know so much without a staff but came on as a plain old photographer and had a gift for the instant, and tipped the bartender heavily, and hardly touched his drink, or was it his second or third?

"It’s guys like you made me want to go into newspaper work," said Mayn looking around for another familiar face, finding it.

His child is halfway to school, he likes talking to her; she listens, then turns her attention to something more urgent; he has passed the renovated brownstones — some pink or white — they look childless here between Second and Third, opposite the massive brick blank of the phone company’s operations building, its windows steel-meshed against the morning’s prison of noise outside; it’s his neighborhood — call it Murray Hill, give it a name to remember (sounds like it was changed). Now he passes going the other way. The three heavy guys in windbreakers stand around smoking, there’s a king-size cylinder of beer on the curb and a Danger sign propped in the middle of the sidewalk — a crane as high as the six-story building makes people going to work raise their eyes but they mostly don’t look all the way up at it, it’s parked there and a man in a gray felt hat sits in the cab talking down to the men on the sidewalk, his hand appears along the cab window, he could use a shave, he’s got a plaid wool shirt under his windbreaker and he’s wearing gray kid gloves, Mayn feels the soft, tight give of the leather in his own fingers, it’s in his inside pocket, his small notebook. A gigantic switch console once slow and scaleless lowering against the sky stands in the crane’s truck bed and two men are looking down out of high windows in this building. Far up on company time. They’ll live in east Brooklyn, they’ll live in Queens, their kids nearly grown, wives are maybe at work, maybe sitting in the kitchen, settled in a chair on the phone to a daughter who’s discussing he doesn’t know what— last night. Not nudity you can be sure.

He has passed the renovated brownstones. He has passed the unfinished-furniture store drawing him like a restaurant with its warm sweet pine dust, a chest of drawers in the window, a pigeonhole desk, a rocker if you like rockers if you like the curves.

Meanwhile the Irish free-lunch bar pays the rent just; the shapes in there at this hour, the shoulders, the bill of a cap, an elbow, an anchored hand, are so dim to him through the damp glass, the place so dark, darkness some grime paid on profits of last night, that he might just get a whiff of last night’s slops, but from the sidewalk he sees himself in the long mirror passing behind the bottles.

Along the wide avenue he’s window-shopped the imported shoe store en route to the TV repair. And here’s the small sidewalk office of the plumbing contractor where he tried to buy a steel access door the super couldn’t find for Joy for a ceiling with an old leaky pipe up inside it — the fat woman under a bare bulb will always be on the phone at this hour staring through the plate glass on the lower right of which is jobbing promptly attended to. He’s passed the kraut deli with a steel tureen of grass-sweet, mealy pea soup to take out. And everywhere the new restaurants appear and fade — one an antique shop that kept some of the stock when they converted to spinach salad and quiche; he’s passed the A&P where women on food stamps buy hamburger rolls and giant Pepsis and you can get the cheapest good unground coffee anywhere but how old are the beans? — a coffee broker once bought him a drink beside the most beautiful lake in the world and attempted to find out what he knew about the tobacco lobby in Congress so he was hypnotized by the man’s multilingual indirectness but kept waking up wondering who this "we" was he spoke for; Mayn knows about weak coffee out of town that you can see down through, and Bridgeport’s ravaged waitresses, and midwestern high-school kids in aprons, and western cowgirl hostesses, they come by again with more steaming globes of it black, but transparent at the edge of the cup. He can reach Manhattan more or less — he’s passed the bakery with its layers and stacks, brown, sugar-dusted, glazed — where crisp butterflies and brown-and-white pignoli-nut cookies touch the tongue hinges as the immigrant eye is touched by the glue-slick apricot, peach, strawberry tarts glittering so toylike they could be a month old. He’s passed the Moravian church with the black-and-gold historical plaque and spiked iron railing where they bend No Electioneering signs around the spikes, on Election Day, and where a friend of Joy’s goes to O.A. — Overeaters Anonymous — where the A.A. "meeting" also meets, and a Senior Citizens coffee group rounded against the backs of the chairs, and a trash-recycling headquarters Joy calls Jesus Saves, and he’s passed out quarters to the bums against the railing who until he gets near them are nodding in serious conversation like personnel waiting to go on duty, and getting away from them he finds himself stopped looking into the New York sky which is cold and possible, pressing down upon you some chance of neighborhood, his and hers, between them shared though more by Joy who’s here more than by Jim, who can’t save a marriage.

Indians and Pakistanis move in, and one shop might hold spices, T-shirts, plastic luggage, and rock records — in suspension — or like in a big old suitcase; the neighborhood will absorb these shiny-haired brown men — he sees their future here — who walk with their feet out and maybe a step ahead of their females and under their overcoats wear white shirts without neckties (like orthodox Jews, but unlike Jews unbuttoned at the neck). The neighborhood will absorb them and their soft women, while they don’t seem to live here, and maybe they don’t — while carloads of them will career out of Park Avenue South and run large old cars into spaces between a dark restaurant and a brightly colored sari emporium, and maybe you see a whole costumed group standing beside a car with its trunk open or its hood up, always one or the other. Strong marriages.

The newsstand has gone out of business on Thirtieth Street, he sees; and so he’ll buy his paper in the women’s hotel off Madison, the occupied lobby at this hour he doesn’t want to think about or look at, Joy said it refutes the syndicated astronomer who says We are not alone — well that’s not "Mother" at her funniest — she gets herself a magazine here or maybe late at night a pack of cigarettes out of the machine, she’s not the type to smoke, why does she? it’s incongruous—"it’s not your sort of hotel," she said, but she knows him for an old cocky blood who’s got all this extra amiability he can give them, they’re women, women in housedresses sitting smoking; and Joy almost understands this in him, rouged women on canes, women in slippers staring ahead, watching the Middle Eastern desk clerk waiting maybe for something to do, or in easy chairs they’re turned toward small side tables with a lamp lighting a tabloid newspaper that spreads open down off the table. An odor of scent passes through him like the music tuned from the front desk, and he smells as if down the elevator shafts or out of the dark phone booths (doors folded half open) last night’s canned beef stew, women neither alone and independent nor not alone, and the vacuum cleaner starts up right behind him and he sees he’s stepping over the hose, while a woman as old as a grandmother watches him approach and holds on to a walker (wading in rapids, shivering in Chicago, slowing as if to thicken against the wind) and when he nods, she says at her own tempo, "Five and a half percent, six percent, six and a half percent, seven" so that if Mayn observes every possible detail of this world, he might never get home — but the man at the newsstand counter, his hand clamping his pack of cigarettes down on the counter next to his paper, says he’s glad to see him.