Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Whereas Mayn favored a barstool. That is, in a bar.

That is, if he was going to be talked to from the side or behind his back. Maybe she was right, maybe he had been massacred by bad barbers for years before he met his wife. Saved my life, he said one Sunday Lucille was there for breakfast. You owe her that? asked Lucille, looking down her nose and through a fresh bagel she was about to bite. You’ll leave her if you lose your hair. But that wasn’t it either (the bad barbers) — for he had felt massacred by good barbers, the alien size of the steel, sounding between the low, stationary voice and the traveling touch upon his soft head, each abrasion between the shears sealed by that higher-pitched tsit raced by the music breath of the blades opening, inching. Joy had thought of cutting his hair, or he had asked her to take over, they didn’t recall who started it. He lent her his head to practice on. She was pregnant with Flick, they both recalled that. He dreamed she was chipping the hair with a tool he couldn’t see and he woke up in sly self-defense when the pieces began coming down on top of him.

Nearly twelve years of his prematurely gray hair piled up around them so now he needed more than the eyes in the back of his head that she’d said once she knew he had because he had thought he needed them.

Oh sometimes he thought that was all he had, the eyes in back. She laughed; she couldn’t help it.

But come on, she said — while he receded again (or was that her expanding with some fit of contentment?), receded through the years of living together, it was several years now—"Come on be serious," how had he seen the two things behind him? — seen her lick her lips and the tear push out onto her lower lashes?

"Leave the eyebrows," he said, and wanting to lean his head, eyes and all, back into her — wherever those back eyes were (she having withdrawn her long scissors, he felt sure) — he must have made some move he did not feel, for she was laughing about those eyebrows in the back of his head, "Don’t lean back!" But he was sure he hadn’t moved.

"Aren’t you there?" he asked.

"I’m there," she said.

But come on, how had he seen Joy lick her lips, and how had he seen the tears weighing upon her eyelash?

He panicked. Why had he known these things? Were they some waste?

Panicked the way when he’d waited for a man he had hit to get up off the floor and the man didn’t, and the panic wasn’t that this was the man’s apartment or a man named Martin Wagner might find his nose had turned more than a corner and left him with a future headache he would not be able to feel in the morning (and it was already morning) — it was a wild space in him flown in by Joy and this guy made of nights spent here — probably panic not about that but the time through which had happened slowly what he hadn’t seen he couldn’t take until there it was. The ultimate push-up the man on the floor seemed attempting, or words out in the open he couldn’t take back; he’d been around, he wasn’t so shockable, yet there he was on the future end of a thick cube of time you saw through, looking back on how he’d awaited a love that was still there on her side too. And was this how, later, he panicked at seeing (when he could not see) the lick of the lips and a grand tear weighing on the eyelash?

Then he saw why.

It was that he’d known what she was thinking. So of course he could see what her face would do. Was he awaiting a terrible loss of her that would bring him some news? What a jerk!

He in front, she cutting his hair right behind him so that with the small of his back he could butt her tight belly as if its hardness were its largeness and he with his reverse face could come only into nosing tangency with it while it went on its way — on with its thought. Her thought. Which he did not presume to know. But couldn’t stay away from. That is, he was minding his own business and she was snipping — still learning — and they were discussing his father: of how, a full ten years after the family paper run by his father and his uncle had folded, his father had said this other son of his would never have kept it going if it had been still printing when he was old enough to think about taking it over, never in a million years, not with more county business, not with a connection in Jersey City or the State House.

"As if you’d been the one to let it fold," said Joy.

"Well, I would have — he was right."

"He couldn’t know."

"I’d delivered enough of his bread-and-butter job printing to know the future."

"That’s what I’m saying—"

"I know that’s what you’re saying."

"Wait, I haven’t said it," she objected.

"Make up your mind—"

"Not in so many words I didn’t say it, but it’s what I meant. He was making you responsible for what had already happened to him years before because carrying the paper obviously wasn’t in your future — not with the weekly competition — they tripled — and getting the farmers around the county, and the advertising."

"Your scissors are soothing."

"Experience is."

He could feel her almost drop the subject.

He said her name.

He leaned back but missed her. She was looking at the job she’d done. She was looking at him. Looking into the back of his head that he knew she would heedlessly nick someday, if only a paper-thin cut — as if the music in the next room were being played by her upon his scalp, and she could heed only some thought that, let’s say, she shared at that moment with him.

A record ended and they heard a fire engine getting louder, and a new record dropped softly.

‘‘There’s a lot to my father."

"Come on, I know that."

"Well, not that much."

She laughed.

He’d brought up the subject. Put an idea in somebody’s head, get it back with interest.

He heard her breathe, and she wasn’t thinking how to even out his hair, she was thinking he’d said this instead of what he felt about that man — as a father, a husband for his mother. Mayn had felt her sympathy but in the exhaled breath he felt the quantity of her knowledge of him, the sheer neutral amount. And he was about to say, well, he’d had his share of choices, his father had let him alone. ("Sorry this is taking so long," she said.) But Joy began to cut his hair again while they both knew that she might push at his weaknesses — until they went away! — and get at him, but not the way Mayn’s younger brother Brad did, who needled brother Jim with what the local electrical contractor Bob Yard had said in the barbershop, in the atmosphere of sleepy talcum cut with a dash of sweet hair tonic, and Bob had said Jim Mayn was too damn independent, a wise bastard to boot, too smart for his own hometown — until Jim let Brad have it, which was what Brad had wanted all along, to be told he was in a rut and had never known enough to know he seriously wanted anything, he was timid — while (wait) in his own business smarter and better than that old cable-throwing fuse-screwer Bob Yard any day of the week. Maybe their father wanted the same treatment but never got it.

"It’s too late to punish him for your mother," said Joy. "Stop dwelling on it. It’s a mistake. It’s tedious for you and me."

Surprised into almost laughing at her "tedious for you/’ those shrouded eyes in the back of his head had sensed the onset of Joy’s left hand, her comb hand. Not in order to comb but to finger. To say that she understood and that it was over now. And to say she was glad she was pregnant and knew he was, too.

They laughed at that — at his being pregnant, too.

The warmth of her feeling went all over the back of his neck, and it went on for years and she wasn’t pregnant now. Children give you something to talk about, but they didn’t need that, and yet when sometimes they couldn’t speak, the thoughts spun off and they had this idea that they were thinking the same thing, though when they were married they didn’t know if they were spending these identical thoughts on each other, which would be a strange economy, or only thinking without conveying the thought to the other. Conversations repeated themselves, but she stopped occasionally saying there was a thing he wasn’t telling her. About the past? No. It feels like the future. (And this was long before he tried to tell his daughter, who had been vouchsafed these gropings by her mother.)