Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

When the phone comes up in his hand, he has thought out this death of his ahead of time all by himself. For a second, it’s like huge, empty-headed stagefright, and no lights dim but the day pursues him with all the light of all the people he can’t become. But it has been given to him, this, and it is an awful thrill. "Thank you," he remembers saying just now to the man who was phoning as they had agreed, and he meant it. The human voice at the end of the phone line has done the best it could, authoritative and professional, a man, a friend with whom he might still try a set or two of tennis in the early evening under a pillow-like bubble on a city pier. Isn’t the news positive? The news has a future so pressing that his first thought was that he didn’t need to do anything. That is what he doesn’t need. He doesn’t need to do anything. But he doesn’t have time in which not to do anything. His thought has a funny side to it, and he weeps.

He is weeping for the first time in he doesn’t know when, standing alone in his home, his apartment, knowing his front-door buzzer will go any minute. Not having enough time in which not to do anything. That was why he started crying: he has interested himself and knows it. Amused himself, as a parent tells a child. He has wept suddenly but, despite the news, not tragically. He has interested himself and he smiles. It comes upon him, the widening of that smile in the life of his face. He’s going to keep the news to himself instead of giving away his life, damn it. He snorts the snuffle in his nose, feels his socks inside his shoes.

He dials his first wife, listens to the regular sounds and when another woman’s voice answers he remembers she is away and he hangs up. What if he were to tell the strange woman the news? Just a moment now; hold still. He smiles as if he is his own oldest friend behaving familiarly. He is bewildered, but he knows it. Some other being is here with him and it comes to him that it is not the angel of death because he doesn’t believe in angels. He has to wait here in the apartment, he can’t go out yet; but if he doesn’t, he is finished. But outside he is going to be embarrassed by the plain weight of what he now is. He will be thinking about every step he takes. Learning to walk again! That’s pretty good. He weeps. Destination unknown.

He dials his second wife and sees that a child of his might answer and today he hangs up. He feels good. He doesn’t need to do anything. He has to do everything. He doesn’t need to do everything. He doesn’t have time to do nothing. Has he ever done nothing? The buzzer is going to go in a minute, and there is someone or something else not unfriendly but interesting here in the apartment. His girlfriend is going to phone, and he is looking forward to that. He has arranged for her not to know, but though he doesn’t think she knows, he has always loved her for knowing things even before she knows she does, and so today when she asks him how he is, she may not mean merely his whole beautiful and beloved being and self. She will tell him what time to meet her.

"Could I have that in writing?" he joked with his friend, who then trusted him enough to say, "Going to hit me with a malpractice if I’m wrong?" "I hope it won’t come to that." "I hope we’ll talk."

The buzzer bursts and the thought comes to him that his doctor could have less time than he. And with this thought comes the thought that when life comes down on top of you you might imagine, just imagine, dying to get out from under. He has interested himself again, he has done just that; and as he opens the door to the superintendent’s daughter, he sees that he has been interesting himself for a long time.

She has her father’s heavy toolbox and she stands with her shoulders back, confident as a licensed electrician. "It’s in the kitchen, Carrie." "I know," she says. He has seen her so regularly over the years that her pale brown face looks much the same as when she was six looking up at him in the elevator, vivid with her kinky black braids and large skeptical eyes. In those days the mail got delivered by the super’s wife, who was Austrian.

"Can’t sit around and wait for you to burn the house down," Carrie says over her shoulder. "How come you’re not in school?" he says. "Had one class this morning. I go to the Community College." The phone rings and he takes it in the kitchen. He points to the double-socket fixture where the refrigerator normally plugs in, and takes the wall phone off the hook.

"How are you?" his girlfriend asks as if it is fifty mornings since she set eyes on him.

"What time will you be finished?" he says, and his girlfriend pauses familiarly: "You O.K.?"

He stops, because sadness hits his throat and is about to embarrass his voice. "No, as a matter of fact."

"So what’s going on? You mad or something?"

He isn’t going to tell his news to someone else in front of Carrie. She finds the circuit-breaker box. She has on pale blue overalls and a small black-and-white disarmament button pinned to one shoulder strap. She returns to the shorted socket, looking him in the eye as she selects a yellow-handled screwdriver. He says into the phone, "Actually, I’m raring to go"; and, getting out the words, he then does feel mad. Carrie smiles slightly, unscrewing the socket frame. He holds the phone out to her but she pays no attention. "Hang on, I’ll take it in the living room." He lets the phone dangle to the floor and feels curiously accompanied into the other room. "I’m on again," he breathes.

"What do you mean, ‘raring to go’?" says his girlfriend. Some small object falls in the kitchen and Carrie mutters something. His girlfriend wants to know who’s there with him, and, feeling in two places at once, he tells her. She asks how long Carrie will be. "Didn’t her mother die?" That’s right; a few years ago.

"I want you to know something," he says. He hears Carrie in the kitchen, tall and proud; he feels a presence near that other kitchen phone, maybe the enlarged reception, nothing more. "I am mad," he says very quietly.

"What about?" his girlfriend asks.

"I’ll tell you when I see you."

"Oh, great," she says ironically.

"I love you," he says.

"I’m very glad to hear it."

"I miss you," he says, and can’t go on.

"I think about you all the time, even when I’m with you," she says.

He feels, curling into his ear, the possibility that the kitchen phone is being listened to, like a speaker. He is going to die and he doesn’t give a damn how it comes out when he says it to her and to other people he loves, but he is not going to say it at the moment. It is here with him but he almost doesn’t know where.

His girlfriend gives him a place and a time; they say goodbye; something drops in the kitchen. He sits down in an armchair and is unable to weep. "I’ve got to get out of here," he calls to Carrie. "I won’t be long," she says, preoccupied. He thinks about his children, he gives it up for the moment; he knows he wants to see them every day as it is, to feel them come and go near him; he knows they are not overwhelmingly disappointed in him. He thinks of his two former wives, neither of whom regarded him as especially thoughtful. He sees them but has consigned their names to another room and is interested in this brutal feat. The brunette will remember him as an entertaining splitter of hairs; the blonde will think of him as the absent father of her children. He will not be around to miss them but he knows they do not expect him to die like this. When he phones them, he often hears a precise degree of impatience coupled with mild fascination, perhaps at what moved him to call.

What do you owe someone else when you are going to die shortly? A phone call, comes the answer, and he smiles but does not weep.