Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Maybe she won’t take angry action on what she knows.

She is ahead; he sees her out there. She can report of herself more than she is willing to know but of him knows more than he for one is able to report. She is funny and beautiful and she wants to let Jim know without words that she knows he thinks this of her. Andrew and Flick’s mother who is quite a character to them had a job before she had them. Before she had a job she had a home with a father in Chicago who, with his large, inky-black mustache, entered the house at a violent, silent run knowing his first wife was busy upstairs. She preferred upstairs and managed always to be there. He pounced on the piano, however, and plunked a few bars of "Meet Me in St. Louis" knowing she would not come downstairs but would be waiting for him when he crept wickedly to the top of the stairs until one day he found her dead, her hand held in Joy’s sister’s. Whereas for his second wife he would also play, but she could never be trained to stay put but could be seen plunging silently downstairs before he was safely out of the second bar of Albert Au Revoir’s "Banana Waltz." Kind of a depressive man, besides. (Had enough? Joy asked, and could eventually communicate this question without words by dropping open her mouth and glazing her eyes.)

She is funny and beautiful. She is not Jim, no matter what their marriage (he once observed) threatened them with.

Once on a morning like this he didn’t have his key and she opened the door in a big towel, her half-peeled banana in her hand, and she said smiling, 4’Oh it’s you."

He knows what’s happening. But not why. Does she want him to be away less? He doesn’t know, and the reason is that he asked; and she answered Oh yes she wished he were away less. But what he wanted to hear wasn’t to be heard in her answer. Ask for her touch; fine. Or ask her which of the people they saw socially she’d be content not to see again; ask her why she lets the phone ring at least twice even when she’s right there, ask her why she said hardly a word when he brought the salvage diver by for a drink — and she’ll say she shut up because, because, it was the absent presence in the diver man’s talk, the man’s very young girl friend, whom he discreetly bragged about in the shape of her record collection, O.K.? — or ask Joy if she originally expected to be happy having made a good match, or ever thought of getting off under the bathtub faucet no hands like Lucille and her workshop friend, or has ever run amok; ask her why she gave up smoking one week while she asks you — call it him —if you smoke after intercourse and answers her own question (I haven’t looked); or ask her to shut up — or be asked to shut up when he tells Joy she should go back to work; be asked once when silent, having been silent for a minute, having been already asked to be. As if some unspoken answer had matched what he’d wanted to hear in hers at other times. But for all these successful askings (no complaints, take care) you still can’t ask her to tell you not to travel so much, and expect to get the truth. You hide your heart in this apartment like a Christmas present not yet wrapped or — for she hides hers sometimes too (yet that prior you is also she) —like a plumper tummy in a Danskin leotard dusky like old-fashioned stockings, while he, the deployed emplaned husband hides between here and there like the shadow or chance of one end or the other, yet seems to be only at one end of the other.

He still had this sneaking idea that they’d always had a perfect understanding, but he wouldn’t claim so to his daughter when she was old enough to talk to — that is, about this — sometime around the time she had discovered a lot of words, including "tedious."

He and Joy — meeting of the minds is relative, you know; it doesn’t mean you agree, like seeing the delicate neck of your little boy looking over his shoulder at what he’s drawing and you run a finger up the neck into the hair and he doesn’t say anything.

Relationship was the word. Relation. Each was the other’s closest relative. Closer than blood, and clearer to boot — clear friction. Not just that he on his back with his knees V’d out licked her insteps’ wrinklable arches while from below her she divided and trained his soft-skinned old beanbag either side of her soft, stuck-open breather (take a breather, sweet) while he broke the V of his knees to run his own instep up and down her ribs, pigeon-toeing under onto a softer flesh to the returning touch of separateness, each soft spot of nipple marking his motion. Well, you can’t exactly tell it, speak of it, except some other way, say indirectly, with the door closed — but where are you? For example, let them watch TV in a room or hunt for change in a dark taxi, or one lie on a bed in a hotel room while the other moves into the bathroom or out. Soft points marking motion. Life’s in parts, and some go together and some don’t, and some incongruously don’t, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.

(She’s ahead. So’s he.) It isn’t an opening, that part of her, or not only an opening; it’s a coming out as much as an opening in — more so; an irregular bloom: he thinks rose, but no, he’s no good on flowers. But heading toward her on a loud morning in New York knowing they may leave each other but on some other hand (whose touch in him is each child’s and his wife Joy’s succeeding each other in dissolving substitution confusingly endless he hopes) she is ahead, and she is funny and beautiful.

He knows what is happening. He sees events fall. And fall back. Away from him. Another self, she might once have been his.

But did he see? Was he a witness? He has known so much, how can he know so little? He wouldn’t have thought he’d get so friendly with Avery ("Ave") of the big feet and the hand on the glass and the tall body that looked for air to lean on and, behind glasses, eyes that wanted like the hands to talk — Ave the metals engineer (well what are you going to do with a guy like that?) making his ungainly entrance on what was proving to be the last night Joy had ever said "Ghostie."

They see into the future, she through him, he through nothing. She is behind him, the two of them Indian file, and she behind him like a wind that’s past. He sees into a future, doesn’t he? The children are beyond them — grown.

And then he is there. He was there all along. A silent transfer from here to there. Truly from the future, she distinctly hears him say.

Certain years are done with. Force that drew them swung them past one another. The years? Or him and Joy?

Only in this way can the new mystery appear. Would he bet on it? Is it just pollution?

Looking back, no longer together, they might try to think what came first. Three, four years after their separation — on course to new decades.

Together they recalled each other. But they did not speak of it. Except once on the phone. That is, they did not speak of how it happened. For it was together, yet they were not together now in any but this way, he and she, nor had been for several years (though each sometimes forgets — he waking one morning out of a hundred, she dreaming and waking in the middle of the night in the country)—"and anyway I’m not alone."

But for one lapse, the time on the phone wasn’t referred to again; they were embarrassed or they were preserving it, that is preserving the oddity, the shade of this secret communication, illicit visiting rights. She told her son, who took a scientific interest.

But this new kind of communication was not the same thing as their story.

They had a story that seemed to get easier to tell. It was that he spent so much time away from home that he was impossible to live with. He moved around. He traveled. He wasn’t a traveling salesman, for he traveled in order to get hold of things, not unload them. Yet get and then unload. For at times he hardly altered the handouts he received on behalf, at first, of an organization he drily pointed out to his wife was non-profit. It didn’t sell stock, like United Press which became United Press International; but his organization was mutually owned. By its members — and don’t call them "subscribers" on pain of excommunication.