Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Who shall I tell her said hello? I have a call on another line."

"Oh, my brother," said Spence, and laughed as if he were surprised. "God I must be in a rush. I mean Jim Mayn."

"Don’t I know your voice?" said the woman. "I don’t know him."

Spence hung up. Coming back across the street was the fine woman in the fur coat; she looked haggard as she caught Spence’s eye, a dark cut curved down her cheek like a shadowy parallel to her nose and nostril and so dark that the blood looked like it had never been bright. He went out toward her and found himself extending his arms in comfort and she did not shy away at first but stepped over so the wire trash basket was between them, yet smiled at him, but this might be because the phone started ringing somewhere at a compressed distance from the mass of traffic emerging then around them. She looked at him puzzled and leaned on the trash basket and vomited onto her hands.

Spence went and answered the phone and it was the low, resonant voice he had heard before with the definite, almost audible Mexican capability though the voice was not a Mexican’s: "Mayn, is that you?" And in his hesitation, Spence heard, "No! It’s Santee, hello, Santee. Dina West knows your twin brother named Spence (joke, eh?). So whatever happened to the technical specialist I was supposed to pick up in New Jersey that Mayn picked up, did you run across him again?"

Spence laughed and asked how Ray Vigil had found him here, though he knew.

"Or should I say Spence?" said Vigil. "Because it turns out I knew of you before we first met. So you are the Spence I heard about. Listen, I heard Santee knew where the child is."

"What are you doing there, Vigil?"

"Watching the cars go by standing in a pay booth with an empty can of grape soda on the floor and a non-reusable straw coming up out of it. Sounds pretty noisy at your end, too."

"I keep the windows open," said Spence. "Did you know this is an unlisted number?"

"The lady at the foundation gave it to me," said Vigil.

"I don’t know where the Cuban’s child is, and I don’t even know where the mother is," said Spence, and the sick woman watched him hang up the receiver.

It came to them together that they each were coming full circle, if that was ever possible, and she was in a new line of work and interested in life all over again almost, although he had never known her but he could see this was true. How had she known enough to find him? This hardly mattered. He had found her and she found him to be not the person — there on the street outside the foundation — that she had thought, from his intro, and then he told her he had heard of her through Mayn. Which was indirectly why she was in New York now from Minnesota. Hearing about her was, he said, like actually hearing one-time words of hers. What did he mean by "through Mayn"? they both wondered. Listening from the far end of a bar for years, he said. Which bar? More than one: D.C., Houston, Colorado Territory; and, right here, an Argentine joint near a saxophone store. And listening with much better ears than the guy Mayn would sometimes be talking to.

Heard so keenly that once Mayn had been heard to say he had not heard something — the last of a sentence — of hers — of Pearl Myles’s.

Which one?

Something said to Mayn’s father in a cemetery. How begun? Beginning, said Spence responding happily, that she had been "shocked to hear…"

When was that? she asked.

You were getting out of a pickup truck.

She laughed, then, as if at everything, at having thought him Brad Mayn because he mentioned learning of her presence at the far end of a phone call an hour ago and had known her instinctively when she came out of that old foundation and looked at the sky — a woman strong and inquiring, maybe five feet eleven or six feet, in a red tailored suit and a black cloth coat with collar that looked like a sexy cross between a marmalade angora cat and a fox that had outwitted all but the smartest team of Minnesota hunters (part Indian, part Anglo!), she was funny on the subject of clothes. She kept her coat on in the coffeeshop on the corner across from the mainland-Chinese clothing place— they had a window booth, she and Spence — and she told Spence what, he told her, he half-thought he had already envisioned, the camping trips she had taken near the greatest of inland seas though she had never felt the warmth of a trigger in the crease of her index finger’s second joint, while naturally she had her ups and downs though living more and more practically in the same house out there for thirty years.

Jim’s grandmother got mad as hops at her once, and Pearl felt reduced to a primal mass of jelly, the woman had this firm, Victorian charm and would sit you right down and bring out a tea tray with the biggest cozy in the world stitched with blue patterns and ask you what your pet hates were and whether your people had traveled. But in the middle of all this act of hers she had some painful trouble — maybe it was just all that character she possessed— and she would get short with you. Pearl had said once that she shared the lady’s sorrow for the death of her daughter Sarah, and she didn’t like Pearl’s saying that. Those people kept the lid on their feelings really by seeming to show them but so confidently so elegantly you know that the job didn’t get done. But the morning of that earlier day when they eventually went to the cemetery, Margaret looked like she would kiss Pearl, this relatively unknown teacher from the high school who had come uninvited to the house at a time of crisis and saw a strange light in that hall mirror coming from upstairs but from within the mirror too, and suddenly there was Margaret out of the kitchen, and Pearl Myles remembered grease on her fingers and a real leaning of the lady toward her as if to embrace her and kiss her without having met her. Pearl Myles in redecorating her home years later — in fact two years ago— had gotten so confused and fascinated by lighting that she likely had "redone" that entire time of her life, mirror and all (she laughed again). She was in Minneapolis when Margaret got sick and committed suicide some years later.

She knew the family, Spence said. Oh she remembered a low-pressure zone in her orange juice now that he mentioned it — ("it?" murmured Spence) — that day of the cemetery.

Not the funeral, said Spence.

No, it was when the younger boy had a fit of grief. And Pearl Myles heard from a local lady who had it from the father that the boys were having a crisis at home that morning and when she got there and stood by that mirror the grandmother Margaret came out with grease on her fingers and like to have kissed Pearl, the teacher, and then didn’t kiss her. Was Spence close to Jim? — but hadn’t he said he was his—? —no, she was fuddled by the city the last twenty-four hours but maybe by why she had come here, which could have been business but wasn’t, for she had not found what she needed for her home in New York or Minneapolis and so she had done the next best thing, which — she laughed — and so did Spence, funnily enough — which must sound like. .

She paused, and Spence, delightedly, said, Words, words, words!

Oh, you are a scholar, Pearl sighed ludicrously and then lifted her cup for the "Greek devil" in the white shirt and black pants to raise his eyebrows and nod to both of them.

As a matter of fact, no. Spence knew where his bread was buttered but was no scholar though if he had it to do over again he would — but did Pearl Myles know that New Jersey family well enough to know. .

Well, she had dreamt of that mirror and then put in a phone call to Mel Mayn the following morning, but. . "know" what?