Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Away From Home All The Time: Mayn’s story as much as Joy’s, and it got handed down. But this sense of their shared account, this story about his jobs and their marriage, was not the same as the thing that now sometimes happened between them during these years since she had moved away with the children. (They could never have had an open marriage — bodies refracted in the light of absent feeling.) And then — though he’d kept the lease — he had moved away too, and the children had pretty well grown up, and Flick was tougher to talk to but now could be told anything, which Andrew could not. If he was even present. Once her father saw Flick kiss her brother goodbye softly, the fingers of her left hand upon the back of his neck.

Together Mayn and Joy recalled each other, month upon month separated, then divorced. They weren’t together in any but this way; they didn’t live together — and often weren’t geographically close; weren’t in touch, or not so you would notice unless you were tuned into the void or you had high-sensitivity gear that could assess vibrations between the village in western New Hampshire where Joy lived and the motion through which Mayn’s assignments took him.

He and she happened once to find it convenient to be in Boston on the same day and they had lunch with their son Andrew who just about cracked his father’s hand according to his father when they shook, and who wrote his sister Flick that he’d had lunch with them, the two of them together with him in a restaurant near the docks, near the new aquarium (with sharks and turtles in their own custom-made cylindrical bathysphere) — the three of them like a family with an only child drinking Bloody Marys in a window that looked out on a cold, slushy street. They had converged on Boston, the mother from the country, the father from Europe by way of New York and Washington and Philadelphia, and there they were in a restaurant eating tiny bay scallops and baked potatoes.

The son wrote his sister in that fancy style she wasn’t put off by that the parents had been "curiously good" together (so the void either smirks or it’s a long, smudged radar trace of low-pressure front) — good together — a lot of laughs was partly what Andrew meant — Joy remembering the woman down the road who had the choke pulled out to hang her handbag on until her car wouldn’t run anymore and a muscular mechanic found the trouble soon enough, the woman down the road one summer; and Dad remembering the subway years ago, losing Andrew — on the subway, that is — Dad just back now from the arms talks with another story entirely that would have been spiked if he’d still been with AP about the Viennese fearing their cathedral would sink into the ground if the new subway went through, which was at least as interesting as a tall, dark-suited delegate whom the night before one had seen with an excellent young whore in a tailored suit now the next afternoon raising his eyebrows but not his translated, rather resilient voice at the danger in Russia’s ceiling being America’s floor.

But no, the way Jim and Joy knew themselves to be together at instants of recollection was more like a growth, a surprise someplace in the body, more like feeling, and your own bared limbs, nerves, tendons are entangled for you then to see if you can move the one part someone points to, and you can’t, or it’s trial and error, and is it that you think maybe you got someone else’s body warped in here too? Feeling, did you say?

Feeling left over from a dream. Her words. She never believed him that he didn’t have any but day dreams.

A dream like an obligation you wouldn’t put your finger on whose stripe of tooth-and-nail action bled apart on waking and went away, and the residue was this sense. Not a feeling you could really see, like Joy staring when she was embarrassed or nibbling her lower lip if she thought she had an edge. And nothing so real as light reflected off the balls of his smudged fingertips when she read the Sunday paper over his shoulder.

A Sunday morning, a Manhattan apartment, Mozart with his five happy instruments on FM, coffee still in the air, a ham in the icebox, Joy in her long-sleeved nightgown, frills at the wrists, thinking (he knew) of going out for German potato salad; Flick practicing her flute behind a closed door, low and insistent; Andrew old enough to get out of the apartment by himself taking his football to meet Dick or Larry in Madison Park among the sheepdogs and dachshunds and poodles and profound dappled bassets, patrolled at the perimeters by one or two snakelike dobermans too thoroughly bred — while back in the apartment sun smeared your polluted windows high above Manhattan which is still Manhattan even high up there, and Jim and Joy looking out from where he sat and she stood behind him.

No, they recalled each other; and recalling each other they were together. Common enough, after all. Except how they did it. How it happened. How they thought it happened, or knew that it did.

For here was what it was (an analyst in Boston told Joy to get it out of her head, it was just intuition or leftover intimacy, let’s get back to how and why, but, quoting the analyst to himself, Joy says O.K. but maybe not every event has a cause, maybe not the silent anger during the last haircut! — but then what’s intuition? comes the question from the void) well, theirs was the recollection of the other person plus knowing that right then the other person had it also or had had very recently, maybe a minute before, or would have very soon after you did, three hundred, three thousand, or — in the song learned from him which he had learned from a girl in Geneva, Switzerland, that Flick their left-handed daughter one day stroked on her guitar — ten thousand miles away, Flick who accepted what she heard her mother say about this "knowing" of her parents’ though it wasn’t the sort of stuff she would really believe, right.

But being both of them strong people, they would doubt that what they felt happen actually did happen, some communication or other. But hold it a moment — for a little life-promoting, species-preserving exercise, try doubting that word strong used so easily.

Living with someone for a long time like twelve years doesn’t mean you can’t someday lose track of the person scattered like a passage of time all through you, a petition unvoiced. Refractions, Mayn said of his life or that of others. (His daughter remembered later.) Yet when he and Joy were in touch two or three times a year, they knew.

That is, they thought they knew about times in between. Yet why so awkward to talk of? Embarrassing, as if splitting had been a catastrophic mistake.

The hook-up between them? an unknown word between them, word was what you got before you wrote, write if you get word.

Communication between Joy and Mayn? Explain the odd message units passing between them any way you wanted.

The desire to drop the other a line came like a sudden information, came while one-handing a bottle of mountain claret in a mountain motel in Colorado or driving slowly past a colonial cowpond in spring twilight, and they each knew that the desire to drop the other a line couldn’t be hope that things would change between them. They could have gone to bed just like that, probably. If they’d been snowed in, or caught in some future emergency in a city. Or en route, needing a bed for the night. A friendly scalp rub. A friendly hand. A friend, maybe. Your arm under his head. Laughing about getting turned on right after coming. But get back together? They could not. The thought was laughable, so maybe so was bed. The thought of getting back together was as tritely elusive as failure tried to be. It was, then, real at least. And it was preposterous.

Together they recalled each other repeatedly. They communicated but rarely spoke on the phone or any other way. Joy told Flick like a joke.