Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Are you implying I came to see Jim? You really do look for trouble, she said. A surviving observer was all, he returned. More than an observer, she said; where had he learned about Mayn’s family. Oh, Mayn and he went way back, said Spence, long before the daughter knew the difference between bedtime stories and fact, fertilizer and explosive, before she knew the real Indians out there from that Prince who came a cropper. Well Mr. Spence I don’t know your ins and outs but if you knew how he was murdered, you must have found out the same way Sarah’s father did, and he was amazed at what she knew.

All I said was he came a cropper, said Spence, who knew what they both did — that each wanted something from the other, and they were just missing.

I been slightly acquainted with him for years, said Spence.

The Masons and the global network (was it weather stations or Masonic societies?), and the weatherman’s German relative in Chile and—

Oh there are still Masons in Chile, said Spence, and one of them is under house arrest.

You couldn’t resist saying that, but I don’t know what it means, it’s unreal to me, but I have to talk to you face to face, Mr. Spence. I feel you’re dangerous, to yourself anyway. I feel you’re right in my mind right now; I didn’t know it till I said it.

Just waiting to see, he said.

You’re probably not as bad as I heard, she said.

Spence identified his corner she was to bring the cab to, and he gave her directions. She asked him, before she got off the phone, who Harflex was, and he said, hesitantly, that he didn’t know, so they both knew that he had it back there somewhere but not quite on tap.

Well, you phoned me, Spence said, I didn’t phone you. She replied that he had phoned her two times at her hotel when she had arrived in New York.

Once, said Spence. Twice, she said; the second to have breakfast the message said.

You sure that wasn’t a phone call you made to Mayn?

A Mr. Spence phoned twice, she said.

Sounds like you didn’t bring your family, he said.

What do you know about my family? she said, and hung up, though doubtless en route to a Manhattan cab. The phone rang and rang, stopped, then started up again.

Spence, on the pavement, and Senora Wing, decked in platinum opaque sunglasses as she emerged from the entrance to the warehouse-theater, seemed to catch each other simultaneously; they liked each other’s embodiments but not each other, which was suddenly now clear to each as he looked to his left only to find her as she pulled back the operating half of the old steel double-door and stepped forth into the bright, gray day. "You knew I was going to be here," she called; "I feel it." " I do now," he said. "You’ve been in here" (she tossed her head indicating the building she had come out of), "so you know." "Know what?" "I’m almost in the play," she said, "the opera. It’s destined." "What’s destined?" he asked, rotating his wrist to check his watch; he took a tooled-silver money clip from his jacket pocket and looked at his bills and returned it, and she touched a curl at her temple as if he should have understood something.

"Is the messenger still working for you?" "He was never working for me." "You make problems for yourself; anyway, he is not in the same place any more." "Oh is that where he is?" said Spence, and they both laughed. "You don’t know what you doing," Senora Wing said seriously, and she shook her head as if it were only her eyes and it was light she had to dislodge from between her and him. "I used to know," he said; "do you know the name of the old lady who comes around your place with that old guy?" "Does she have a name?" Senora Wing asked.

Spence followed some glint of her glasses and knew as he did so that the Chilean intelligence officer in, today, beneath his open overcoat, gray pinstripe, purple flower in the buttonhole (cum soft-looking black boots) was known to them both and that she knew this, too. He was crossing the street in their direction, and Spence stepped to Senora Wing’s side and asked, "Did the old guy ever call her Sarah?" "You would be amazed at what she knows," said Senora Wing, "for a nuts old lady."

The Chilean gentleman paused at the corner and deposited what looked like a sealed letter in an ashcan and then inspected the can’s contents. "You want me to ask you what you mean by that or forget it?" Spence asked. "Did you want to avoid me?" Senora Wing said, and they were both keeping an eye on the man at the corner. "I didn’t know you would be coming out of here," Spence said—"you always meet the ones you want to avoid, and it’s O.K." "Are you looking over my shoulder behind me?" she asked. "Yes, I was, there, for a second, I thought the door was opening again, it was in my head, an optical illusion." "Of course," said Senora Wing. "You make trouble for yourself," Spence said; "is your sister in there, too?" "You make trouble for jowrself." "That’s where we’re all coming from," Spence said, and Senora Wing, as he sidled around so his back was to the approaching Chilean, said, "You didn’t know you was going to say that, did you." "That’s right." "You going around in circles, Spence? What’s your business in here? you know these people doing the opera?" "You’re on the crest of something, Wing, you’re not just getting into the Off-Off-Midtown theater." They both felt the surprise coming before it came out of Senora Wing’s glitter-illuminated mouth: "That old lady told Goodie and Baddie she liked to see them fight because they didn’t hurt each other and she would always be their friend if she could come and watch, and they said they would remember. And she told them she knew of two brothers who carried messages from their mother and their father separately and stole them and never got caught. But they must never tell the people inside what she had said; and they didn’t until Goodie told Turnstein, who isn’t their real father, and Baddie told the old lady who told the old man right then and there, who got mad as hell and said that that was a long time ago in another state and Turnstein was sure the old lady knew about his freaks ripping off one of the clients and maybe she have second sight, who knows?"

The Chilean gentleman was upon them as a cab drew up on the northwest corner, the very curb where the wastebasket stood. There were two people in the cab, a man with a burnished face at the window glinting against the light from the day and the few drops of rain roaming in a light breeze. "She has a mole on her jaw," said Spence, and the Chilean bent abruptly past them as if to just turn in time, and inclined his handsome face so the whole curve of his behavior joined the two of them.

"I know the woman in that cab and so do you," said Senora Wing. "She came for a consultation and she asked if I knew where she could find you— it was wonderful how she knew I knew you."

The Chilean entered the warehouse and the door banged behind him. "Where were you headed?" Spence asked. "Where were you headed?" Wing returned. Spence nodded at the heavy metal door. Wing said, as up at the corner the taxi door opened, "The West woman asked if you had a brother and I said I did not know you but maybe I knew your brother."

Spence hauled on the door. "I don’t have a brother that I ever heard of." "The West woman said she didn’t believe in such powers but she asked if I thought you might be brothers though I didn’t know the two of you." "Who was the man?" Spence asked, and the City touched him in a way that drew him away from the words passing between him and this highly colored figure who was no fortuneteller he was sure, as he was sure also that he was carried along by a track or current he had tried to figure out so that now he was less himself but only like being a whole lot more than he had been for years and years of mere motion. The cab could be ten yards or a hundred yards away. "The man’s name is Mayn, and he is interested in that old couple, too, but it is the man he is interested in, I think." Spence started across the threshold, and Senora Wing said, "They’re not getting out after all." Spence left her without a word.