Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He’s passed the sculpture-materials store, and the offset printer’s who’s leaving the business to his Bahamian assistant next year and retiring to Lake-hurst, New Jersey, where the Hindenburg blew up. Passed these places often — often slowly, walking with small children (they knew where your hand was without looking), as if those certain presences have been left in the daytime absence of stories he told at night — mostly tales of the East Far Eastern Princess, her giant carrier bird that took to eating Indian ponies on a visit, or the Inventor of New York who did pathmark work on wind stress for high buildings and never got credit, who went west and met the Navajo Prince when he was in love with the East Far Eastern Princess but just as the Four Worlds were materializing together the Inventor had to ride back to New York because in his absence it was disappearing even though he had invented it, maybe because he had invented it rather than discovered it.

A hand reaches for Mayn’s on one side and he for another hand on the other side. And now, after years, it’s because of the children that on the harder days these streets have seemed less a neighborhood than ways to elsewhere, so that he might despair and wrongly — and despair of giving his children something else even though all this is what they know they have and they are busy, and they haven’t the chance to forget all that he knows. But, since they are his memory’s guarantee, it’s also because of his kids that these blocks have made a neighborhood that sometimes when he opens his eyes can’t be residential, but then is. Just as he wonders if the children have anything to do with it all, when Joy stands at a window staring at the decorated beauty of high, turn-of-the-century office buildings and textile warehouses or cutting rooms, underwear, whatever’s inside, with round-arch windows and blue stripes and flowery pediments and scrolls and other decorations the names for which he doesn’t know staring up from the street ten or fifteen stories the way he used to think about New York fifty miles away when he was in high school, and above all that architectural decoration and the overhanging rims of the roofs a sky that on a day like this you’d never believe is better for astrology than astronomy, but it’s Joy at their own high window looking out and she says, "Those water towers, those sawed-off silos, you know something, I have no control over my life."

His wife this morning has said that Flick is nine and doesn’t have to be walked to the bus. He knew that, didn’t he? she said.

Flick objected and asked him to help her wedge her house-shaped lunch-box into her knapsack—"He does have to walk me." She remembers what’s what.

"He doesn’t," said the boy in a soft tone of discovery staring at the spoon gripped in his hand, a monogrammed spoon that belonged to his father’s grandma — staring at it and turning it, staring and turning his neck so slender his plaid shirt looks man-size, the dark mole clear and small below the hairline.

"I think he does," said the mother, seeing through the conversation, and on the spur of the moment tossed her husband, ten feet away in the hall, a yellow apple which for an instant he felt his teeth slowly, slowly, neatly bite into in mid-air but he has taken it without thinking, in his cupped fingers, and in a trice it stands on the hall table beside bill envelopes that need stamps.

"You don’t own him," said Flick. "Yes I do," said Joy. "Does she?" "She only rents me."

"Your hair’s gray," said his daughter reaching up to smooth it at the ear as he bends down to her hand.

"It always has been," says Joy, who sees him take up one of the envelopes.

Joy never liked mailing things. They laughed about it. He said in the presence of a friend that Joy turned it into his obligation, and the friend said it should be easy for Joy to figure out what was behind this feeling.

Andrew has turned abruptly to watch, grinning, and leaves his cereal, goes into the hall, grabs the apple, and flips it to his father, "Hey Dad, can we go to the library today?"

His father grabs him as if to get hold of the question and wrestles the small, ambushed shoulders into a hug. "If I’m back from lunch," he seems to have said before.

He’s passed the new library, second floor just for children. And now he’s walking over the crusts of snow, and a dog ahead has balked and is being dragged but won’t go further, it’s the salt on the pavement — the dog’s paws sting. Salt was tossed all over the pavement in front of this office building, tires slithering, a cab door sounding not quite shut, a black man’s breath into cold air, his breath like engine steam above his two-decker trolley of coffee and Danish halting for him to reach around to yank open a glass door, and in the brisk fantasy of this morning in this commercial residential point in Manhattan — residence used to be good business but no more, says the landlord — Mayn remembers that Joy has started having the paper delivered — recalls on another street a few minutes ago following a young woman— well, not following —but following her too closely, she was swinging her butt but she was moving right along yet was going too slow for him though he couldn’t get past her what with the garbage cans and the tree plots, and she turned her head to catch him in the corner of her eye like an animal — he smelled her powder, her morning perfume, whatever.

He’s almost home and loves his wife. She’s ahead. What’s the matter with them?

A new couple stayed till one, their girl-child is now in public school again and they’re rich enough to believe in it — and Joy said that she thought the man, who was very presentable and well-educated and was in the aluminum business and praised Women’s Lib (—bib, crib—), had wanted to be treated like an invalid. Their child at six had greeted the arriving soon-to-be-nude women of a workshop and had made the gossip column — first name (basis) only. Joy knew them from the library where she and they had reached for an opera album at the same instant.

The man’s feet — extremely big to say the least. And when he had put his drink down he had held on to it unless his wife was talking. His wife had talked about him, and there he was, temporarily, in the room. She shouldn’t have, both because the guy might just have been not there (Jim later said) and because she seemed to make him materialize there (Joy later said).

"Invalid maybe," said Mayn, "and he did have a helluva cold, but she’s sure talking about him instead of something else that she won’t put her finger on, and it isn’t anti-Semitism in Space."

"I like talking to you, Ghostie."

"I think I’m drunk. Well, she’s bored with him but she thinks it might be her. In the kitchen he asked me if he hurt your feelings asking if the rug was genuine and you’d said a genuine imitation, and he asked if there was anti-Semitism in my business and he asked if one thing didn’t come on top of another too fast in the newspaper racket (he’s humble and sensitive and insulting) and was there any continuity? and I was going to say Yes, but he suddenly said, like he was explaining something, that he had to change his life — before we knew it it would be the seventies — and then—"

"He laughed very loudly," said Joy. "I thought you’d told him a joke and he was the kind who doesn’t remember them well enough to tell them— we heard him laugh out in the living room, we thought you’d said something, and she said she hoped Tom wasn’t telling you about the models he makes, and then she said she’d bought him ten pairs of socks on the spur of the moment this afternoon, his mother bought him six pairs."

The light is now red — how’d that happen? — and Mayn won’t hurry— models of what? — no two of the four of them had gotten around to that — the cars seem to wait, he can’t fly, he considers limping — that is, across against the light. Last night he heard "Ghostie" for the first time in a long time. It’s been a short walk, he hasn’t gone far. She will bend her head to one side combing her hair at night — that’s what she does, the circles of coffee in his gut melt the path to her — he has stood over her holding her shoulder in his hand, as she bends her head resisting the clutch of the brush with that look of arranging something inside her head that she can’t always see. Seeming as if she has an idea what is wrong with the world around her which might be the people very close to her.