Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Into a next room. Of things said but too long unsaid. You tell me what I’m feeling.

A void of things ran through him he’d never said: You never tried to have power over me, you thought; and this was because when I made love to you you never had to ask for anything, not that a woman could ask.

A void of things he’d never said ran through him, fronts hitting him but a ground beyond him to be known if he wasn’t so damn lazy, known like some math he didn’t yet know for weather prediction, evolution of the atmosphere, ray on ray breaking him down into future — was he in the future? — redoing him more than a pretty fast stick of Acapulco Gold when an ounce had not caught up yet with the price of fifty minutes with Joy’s shrink (the man himself used that word) — wait, he meant not that, not that (and he didn’t smoke much) — he meant rays like when he had a fast stick alone having started smoking apparently full of relief at having phoned Joy in New Hampshire (therefore summertime? not necessarily) after he’d had dinner with their eighteen-year-old daughter Flick (eighteen? but she’s only ten in ‘66—Flick? Flick? from flicks, flickers, movies) who wasn’t getting along too well with her mother and didn’t always listen to her father’s jokes and stories but would break in sharply — Who was this Spence Mom said was snooping around New Jersey? But relief wasn’t what he was full of after all as he took his second pull on some good ballooning Hollywood and held it, thinking (or letting himself be grown into a thought), but instead losing breath, his heart running around him, and for being wrong about his own state (for it wasn’t relief he was full of but fear and absence) he paid the price of dying and dying and dying — his heart turned pot black, then no-color — until, afraid to call room service for what he wanted, he wobbled, sallied forth like rolls of a wave yet down the elevator shaft (and as if up) and then out into a midtown wind and to a newsstand he created as he walked toward it over the pavement in brand-new size 11!/2 wing-tips springy and slippery, a newsstand where all the tough guy standing outside his stand had was two big stacks of the Daily News and Mayn asked — he didn’t know how slowly — for an orange—"Have you got an orange?" — and the man (broader even than Mayn) looked at him like a leper disliking another leper and scowled like a competitor in a card game who’s been successfully asked by his neighbor for what he happens to have — and then — because Mayn (along some multiple web-route of New York veins and cracks) knew the man would — the man reached inside the counter-window of his stand and produced one, a large, thick-skinned eating orange, and watched Mayn as Mayn bit it skin and all, while families of tourists three or four abreast — one grandma whose feet hurt — sauntered like incognito posses uncertainly home to hotels, seeing him, he was sure, and maybe not telling him that while he thought his one-time wife Joy was in New Hampshire, she it was who was the gap standing beside him smiling into the orange, though not knowing that whereas he suddenly wanted, like a pastrami sandwich and another where that went, a News, he would not give the man the business as if in return for the life-saving orange Mayn had foreseen, but would give the man something in future even if he had to through a substitute.

Some good news to sell? You’d want to give it away, good news. Like a good story, which they’d just created with the aid of a clairvoyance operating through a scope of Hawaiian at the far end of which he’d seen an orange. Like the world’s mercy. Given in a headline to Bruno Hauptmann, if only a recommendation for mercy.

The man with the tight shoes had told that one, Bob Yard’s niece’s friend by marriage who’d scooped everyone else the day the Hindenburg caught fire and blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Those weren’t the stories Andrew asked for, sitting on a park bench flipping and catching a baseball with one hand so it irritated his father who didn’t interrupt the story to tell Andrew to stop because he knew Andrew was showing interest in this way.

And so Joy and Jim, Jim and Joy, sat at the kitchen table without their girl and boy one December night. (Looks like Jim must have been home!) But wait: here’s Lucille, too. And it’s not night. But it’s the kitchen table— kitchen sink, white light, brilliant new brown-and-orange linoleum. And Lucille has trapped them in an entertainment that shows no sign of ending, it’s all ending, and so the situation is this: Sally, who could never tear herself away, you know, partly because her parents had bequeathed her the faith that you never get something for nothing, is getting five hundred a month from Buck for the next five years, right? (and after that a dollar a year, which is another story, which as it turns out we won’t be coming to), but Sally will lose the five hundred a month if she spends more than twenty-one days per year with any man, cohabiting or just company for dinner. And I (Lucille) called Buck one night and told him he was afraid to let go and he should take a look at his girlfriend, scarcely out of high school so he must hate women, right? Right! he said at once, he must hate women, that’s half the population, and he gets off the point telling about a Christmas birthday present this kid just gave him wrapped up in newspaper, you know, but an unusually beautiful newspaper collage was the way the wrapping turned out, and I said don’t get off the point, the point is Sally and this twenty-one-day arrangement. Buck gets huffy. She was the one who wanted out, he says.

But Buck, you should really let go of Sally.

Let go! he says, and for a moment he knows there’s nothing more he can find to say.

Yes, let go. You think you’re being a good daddy to her but you’ve tied her up for five years in this chastity prostitution and the only alternative is secret affairs as if she were married.

Two days a month, says Buck, is good for her health.

More like two nights if you divide twelve into twenty-one.

That’s the only time she does it, anyway, says Buck.

Things might have changed, Buck.

Things have, Lucille.

Why don’t you drop the alimony idea entirely? she says to Buck.

It’s Sally that wants it, says Buck to Lucille (which is me, and imagine me putting my hand gently on his arm over the phone).

It’s both of you that think you want it, I suggest to him, and I think he feels the hand on the arm, he’s on the attack but he’s got his cheek on his hand and lying on his stomach and he’s beginning to feel the massage.

Suppose, I say, I get in touch with Sally and tell her how you feel about the alimony.

Go to hell, he says. But they have the same lawyer; you know Jack Beebe, who takes notes on envelopes wherever he is, whoever’s talking, and since Sally thinks she’s setting up her own little catering company, she’s been having dinner with Jack at her place and one night Buck phones and Jack picks it up but Sally grabs it away from him and Buck wants to know what’s going on and Jack disappears, and Buck tells Sally he thinks alimony is beneath them and doesn’t she? And she asks him if he had her favorite charity in mind as a substitute and he wants to know who’s with her, and she says someone incredibly nice and she’s really busy, Buck, and in the silence filled by the music and, as it turns out, Jack Beebe’s breathing on the extension, Sally is heard to say, Buck I don’t want the money, if you want a witness if you want to draw it up I’ll put it in writing, and in the pause with three breaths on a two-way hook-up (two male lawyers and one lay woman) Buck is upset enough to say like a kid in a small voice, "OX., Sallums." And she hangs up and starts crying and is comforted by Jack at her end.