Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Joy had called her husband a correspondent. He was. She told him he was crazy not to go for bureau chief. She told Flick.

He left AP. He came back.

He met an Argentine who owned not only one other South American country but four papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to boot, and as everyone saw it, that was what changed Mayn’s life. Later a clandestine backer of a women’s bank. A clean-shaven Argentine named Long who saw something in Mayn. Something beyond the mutual friend who brought them together, an American specialist in languages of the Uruguayan pampas, and beyond the amusing tales Mayn told Long about a friend of his father’s covering the Hauptmann trial and the explosion of the Hindenburg. Long sent Mayn where he discovered he wanted to go, and once let him get mad and resign; and then a month later after dinner with an AP traffic chief in Texas who’d known Mayn for several years, Long rehired Mayn. Joy wasn’t clear how it had come about, and in those days she seemed to act like she knew more about his work, his subject matter, what took him away, than he did, she made it her business to know, but about the rehiring she didn’t know and she saw through Jim’s shrug that he didn’t know either (except for one reason tossed out, namely that Long felt Mayn cared about the work but not a damn about the job). Well, he knew she thought she was proud of him, but then he thought she made too much of his work. (Say that again.)

Yet he did care about the job. They each had a streak of the secretive and indecisive, Flick once said, but the proportions were a mystery. Even when Joy had told him he should be a bureau chief with AP she would say also that if ever she got out of New York she could really get into the country. As for him, he spent so much time away from home he was impossible to live with. And while they were married the phone made things worse.

Too much time away: this story of theirs had run for several years before that word correspondent became a bad gag in the mouth of someone who liked her, who called her (Mayn had heard it) "chere" and said, "Quite," when he agreed. A young divorce lawyer with connections at the UN — well, yes, young — and "divorce"? maybe that was a trifle harsh — who said that in this case maybe there was no corespondent. There was more to him. But how could a guy say a thing like that? For Joy had quoted it to Mayn as if she wanted him to say to her How could a guy say a thing like that? ‘Tedious," their daughter Flick would have called it if it had been three, four years later, "incongruous" was another word, "illusory." She went through a period when she made puns. Some boys got into that, but not girls. But "Who did Mom inherit that job from?" Flick asked one day when she came home from school and didn’t get it — the hair in "inherit" — when her father turned his head to laugh and nearly shed his blood upon the wifely scissors working on his neck.

Well, Mayn had gray hair when he married Joy, but gray hairs or not, the two of them had been through the wars together. That was what Mayn said. Said about her, she felt, as if she had often been one to start whatever they had then been through together. But didn’t Joy say it too? Said it to her friend Lucille. Been through the wars. So? Yet sometimes it had seemed like nothing, like the gap between JFK at 9 p.m. and San Francisco at — actually — midnight Pacific Time, and one year it was one. Blanched shadows receding off to the left along the Rockies visible under the plane’s own moon. Not wars at all. An evening out, days at home — in tune — nights away from home subtracted like bad behavior as if they didn’t count. Not wars. More like falling away from time, falling through your own vaunted resilience, through nothing — but falling. Falling upward, even. And at home as well as in a hotel. Falling out of bed at dawn so your fall was broken by the ceiling. Jim. For Joy didn’t do that sort of thing, her daughter pointed out to her, product as she was of them both.

The void lets out a smile, which he and she might feel as a breath of relief somewhere that what had happened to them could be said so.

Been through the wars. A common breath let out like deep thought that was the two of them or nothing, and much heavier stuff and finer and more subtly worked out than either of them could have thought, such intellects as they were.

Been through the wars. A real-estate hot shot (though nice guy) named Sid living with a girlfriend now, and one day on the tennis court got a phone call from his doctor asking him to come in, and they decided he had two types of cancer, one possibly they couldn’t do anything about, the other his lung, and because his former wife, who was a lab psychologist working with animals, had smoked (at him) for years, he went looking for her and found her at dinner at the Mayns and told her, no less: but no one did anything, including him. The children were in bed.

The void will calm things down. Speaks through you like a whole thing of force and membrane neither yet full-grown. But in the person of those whom that void after all keeps moving, the void disperses time and the particles by which it is told until the equality of all things can become too much and a drag. And the nick in the back of the head that shows barely through the hair is not only a blood type but a section exacted from a singular person who might need to be saved at the expense of someone else.

How he knows ahead of time when she enters a room — is it some throat clearing he has lent her as if she like him were dialing a phone number and getting ready to speak? or is it some warning she has lent him in a private smile he knows (and pays for knowing) is there around the corner of the hall doorway before she comes in sight? — and if he knows exactly tonight how their host will enter behind her, as if for the moment they two weren’t intimate kitchen-sympathetic. Has life with Joy made Mayn this way?

This knowing is like some out-of-character eccentricity; he’s an ordinary guy, for God’s sake (and God would rather he’d stop thinking that) — not much of a believer — and when they arrived a while ago and the host kissed Joy and shook hands, Mayn felt the presence of another woman who wasn’t there, a wife or woman paired with the host. He did have an ex-wife somewhere— though not somewhere in the living room — but the point about the host’s kissing Joy was that his absent woman was imagined by Mayn as sticking out her hand to Mayn, kiss balanced by handshake, well a pair of couples needn’t be symmetrical, need they? yet the messages don’t quit coming; and in a Windsor chair near the fire (the andirons too far apart, the chemical log sagging and collapsing to bridge its break with a blue-green flush) he gazes at the young detective in a blue-and-red ski sweater who’s cutting his law class tonight, who’s on the floor between Mayn and the fire talking equally to Mayn and Lucille Silver who calls him Rick and questions him and he’s responding so Mayn is getting a garbled message part of which is that (which he knew already) he brought the detective here tonight and brought him like a message unknown to the bearer — well, Rick is in an A.A. group with a free-lance frogman Mayn knows, and Rick is cool for his age, his cheek crackles with shadow and color, so (Rick’s saying) he’s got nothing but respect for that guy’s homicidal instincts — so — so — so Rick (he’s saying) is about to get hit over the head, right? so he’s standing in the street telling the kid in the big white T-bird to put that thing down, but there’s someone behind Rick — Lucille crosses her legs in the corner of Mayn’s left eye and a flow of fleshly concern — flesh turned to fluid — gets to Mayn as Joy, having come in, falls cozily into her chair to his left across the white room, knees together sliding together off away from him as if she would tuck her feet up under her in his direction; Joy grasps Rick and Lucille in a look that opens like her lips which part — Rick and Lucille, who’s half again Rick’s age and twice as present to Mayn as Rick is to Joy (Mayn’s sure). . and when Mayn (who doesn’t seem watchful) swings his head a little toward Joy she seems to open her eyes in a glance that bears so much condensed attention out of the past so completely and painfully but, for a flash, so entertainingly to him: for example, Lucille likes more danger than the young cop knows (for, according to Joy, Lucille has twice disarmed her son — yes, literally — his father taught him to shoot a big.38 and ordered him never to carry a pistol), but Lucille doesn’t like risk quite so much as she is thought to by Jim, who likes her O.K. and distrusts her more than she knows because he confides in her once in a while. Joy’s teeth show but her tongue crosses her lip and time halts in her face as when one of her children takes a long look at her, a radiant thought that wished its way there from elsewhere in her body because a blankness at once slipped over Mayn’s eyes large enough to include the extra wine glass she has carried in here and has set down on the table beside her first glass — doubling that prior silence out in the kitchen beyond the living room that Mayn has received like rays passing through these minutes of the young policeman’s choice tale. Until a hatch falls in and all the objects in the room course into the foreground, into his eyes but not Joy’s, and there are for him no people, just objects and the space to go with them. But Joy’s tongue tip and a glint there on the lower lash of one eye give Mayn the fine word from her that please believe her whatever he thinks is going on it’s not public, what’s going on between her and the host — Mayn’s nameless witness won’t name him; Mayn is the witness — the host, the glowing, controlled man, has followed her not quite soon enough into the room and at once turns her from the cop’s rendition to tell her her father was smart to give her Texas Instruments in ‘57 even if she didn’t get along with him — but is this a tribe sitting here in this room? is this what it is? Mayn has the words ready to ask — and is he one member of the tribe and Joy another member (whose father if you want to get technical once in his cups threatened not to give her away) and Lucille and the policeman? And the man? The man’s name is Wagner and his place of work is some huge association where he keeps an eye on the pension portfolio. An "inside dope-ster" Joy called him to Mayn, and Mayn had heard it before, from someone else. Or in advance from Joy’s mind. Mayn wondered how much of Joy’s and his own story she’s put into words for this Wagner, and while Lucille, a friend in need, is asking Rick’s hours, saying married people see too much of each other, that’s Jim and Joy’s secret, Mayn drifts toward Lucille like his smell but his smell become conscious reaching her thoughts, and he says— out it comes—"Aren’t you a bitch." Yet Lucille seemed sincere in what she just said; and later when Joy bawls him out because Lucille is one of their close friends, he knows she’s instinctively getting away with it because, though it was true if not visible, he’s had that and can pay for it, and for a moment he and Joy are crazy together, though in a Connecticut motel next week he wakes to a Kansas City motel near the river, near the market too full of very raw animal-carcassed buffalo fish, and will never see Lucille Silver again because he’s kissing her goodbye, having told her in this dawn dream, for he claims not to night-dream, that for an offspring (like. . what’s her name?. . Flick) to have your courage shot into orbit by the dual thrust of united parents inc. is a great thing indeed unless the launch pad is unfinished or otherwise incomplete, and then for gawd’s sake don’t look back.