Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Then before they know it, they decide to take a vacation in England go to the theater and to Scotland, and Buck’s going crazy not putting two and two together and asked me to dinner but it wasn’t possible but then we did have dinner at a Greek restaurant and I said I hadn’t seen Sally, and the upshot is that Buck draws up a paper one night which his girlfriend is probably too young to witness and invites Sally to cancel all alimony payments and he puts thirty thousand dollars into Sally’s bank account so everyone’s happy, but Jack Beebe doesn’t want Buck’s money because Jack wants Sally and they’re going to get married but Sally has given Jack an ultimatum, she won’t marry him without Buck’s money. And so they’re getting married but Sally says basically she’d like to just borrow a husband for twelve months. And that’s not the end of the story, kids.

(Mayn’s own true wife observed of his unfailingly courteous handling of women that when she saw a man rude to women she would at once think he didn’t like women, as if women — whom she sometimes heard her husband call "girls," even when not out with the "boys" — required her husband’s special treatment.) Fit this in.

And so, to return, Joy and Jim sat at the kitchen table one December night late facing each other, wondering who would go to bed first, their fingers near but fixed and heavy. She wondered if the apartment house would go coop, and he asked if she was interested. His hand was around his coffee mug, her hand lay on her purse, a leather purse with a brass snap.

He was going away for two days. Plenty of shopping days left.

He asked her what she wanted this year. He put it quizzically enough and with a plainness of feeling, he thought, but they both knew she liked surprises.

She thought a moment — or waited — and said, "It’s something practical but obvious."

He had to think — and he knew he wasn’t too good at presents. Her purse was worn but he wouldn’t get her a purse. Flick could, though Flick was almost twelve; she could, but she had big ideas. He wondered if Flick was asleep. She slept with such abandon, while her brother slept with huddled concentration.

"I’d like to buy you all a house in the country."

"Sleighbells and woodsmoke."

"I mean the house was always your idea, but I mean it."

"We will."

"It seems far off."

"We will."

"But you want something practical and obvious for Christmas. Is it something that you have and you want a new one?" He was just talking.

She got up and she heard Andrew snorting horribly.

They laughed at the noise, and the noise softened.

They were scared, and the fear passed between them, according to the void.

He couldn’t think in the midst of what must be her thoughts too. She’d made a fist around the purse. "Obvious, you said. Is it visible? Can I see it?" he said.

Joy sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten him. She looked at him like a zombie and she said mechanically, "If you were more observant, you’d know."

He wanted to be dead for a moment. She was offensive.

What drew him toward her? He’d lost time.

"If I were more observant—" he began but ran into such interference he didn’t catch up with the words he wanted, and in their absence he half rose and reaching out lifting onto the balls of his feet he struck at her with his open hand as she pulled back.

Off the top of his head he struck at her, and the kitchen bulb turned them into bilious kooks who might have drunk too much and woken to some such fact or other — but they’d drunk a third of a bottle between them and three hours ago.

Her look at him was still empty, but not void.

He heard himself say (getting up), "Why did I do that!" — getting up maybe to try again, this time not to miss, but he was so sure of something else that he hung there on his hands leaning at her, his eyes like mental cases all by themselves — she saw through them into his head but emptily, uncryingly clear through his head to a point beyond him — his eyes vomiting drops of dumbness, imbecility — he was sure that he had said, "Why did I do that!" — said out of his murderous belief that if he should ever hit her he would have to leave but said too because she, who had pulled back just an inch enough, had thought those very words he had said.

Had thought them first. Or at the same time.

They were both crazy, but no he was protecting himself thinking that.

"Give up," she said — had he heard it in the future and now could hear in the present? "Please give up."

That was all there was to it.

That was it.

But later, during weeks when she was getting ready to leave, she asked him questions about himself. She asked how his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

"Who knows?" he said. His brown leather grip stood in the hall where he’d left it hours and years ago — well, that was a cheap comparison, two to three hours was the time — if he was confused, the lease was one reason, for he’d been thinking about holding on to the lease of the apartment as an investment (though the landlord would let him out of it), holding on to it as if because he’d seen in the elevator that very night a woman (but it wasn’t that she was a woman) who’d recently moved in — into this building he’d spent so many years in — a friendly woman in the elevator, short fluffy hair, smiled right into him but no man-baiting bullshit, but with beside her the tallest Oriental he’d ever seen, and standing beside her as if hung from the elevator’s ceiling, a metal plate you would push out if you were moving something too high and then you could look right up the dark glimmering shaft as if you might fall down through its greasy hairy skylight — new to the building the woman was — was that it? it should have made him in his present state of mind want even more to go, get out, be forever away from the apartment house — but he was confused, too, because he was repeating and repeating the information he’d just received that Joy had gotten Flick a partial scholarship at a boarding school in Vermont not too far from their town in New Hampshire, an "academy" Andrew called it humorously because in the fall he was going to public school, which he said could be worse because he’d have in his class two of the town kids he’d played with every summer as long as he could remember, and one of them had a snowmobile. Andrew became more sweet; he was more than bright.

"I mean," said Joy, "how did she teach you to whistle? — did she tell you what to do with your mouth?"

"I don’t think she ever told me." He spoke deliberately, slowly.

"You just do it."

"Well, I do remember it was in bed early in the morning, I was four going on five."

"My father was cooking me breakfast by then," said Joy.

Mayn looked at her with a question she felt they couldn’t use, which was — and he picked it up — You sure we ought to be doing this? Isn’t this a bit too charming?

"And I would stay with her some weekends and I’d crawl into bed with her, my grandfather was in another room sawing wood with knots in it, and her gray hair was let down in plaits"; and he thought he smelt apple, but maybe it was hearing the doves outside in the morning air and the house floated upon the day; "I remember her soft skin."

Joy looked at him as if to say, You’re speaking differently.

And his grandmother and he had giggled over his attempts at whistling. He knew the true sound was there somewhere in the void and he went for it. Her pale lips puckered. Her eyes watched his lips until she couldn’t help laughing and then herself couldn’t have whistled if she’d wanted to.

Nor could he. Until one morning he could. He’d woken her up. Her back was to him. She turned over and right then she smelled of oatmeal and what he maybe didn’t know then was witch hazel, and she couldn’t get her eyes quite open or she could but didn’t see yet, and then when she did she woke up — right there with him — woke up with a smile at him puckering and trying so hard he saw his own nose — or was he five? — looking down below her face so as not to catch her eyes and he wet his lips again. And at the instant when she would have giggled, even with admiration, a couple of things happened: she didn’t laugh, number one, and number two he found, held between his lips and his tongue tip that moved up and down behind his teeth, a free space of air and sound that he could do what he wanted with, and he couldn’t now recall what tune he whistled — maybe "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" — but he was proud and smiled with his cheeks, and they giggled facing each other while he heard his grandfather, whom he loved to listen to the radio with, snoring in the other room, pillowed head shining as it did, even in the long dark, big nose up in the air. "You can whistle anything now," his grandmother said.