Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

If there were other. . surviving children, Spence said.

She had to wait a second and look at him. . someone had been with Spence on that phone call, and that person knew her, she had thought: but he knew her, through Jim — but who knew that she had had an appointment? — or was she imagining that? What was it, in some fatigue she did not actually experience that was in her, that screened what she was picking up? Spence knew time, and it was wonderfully slow, here. Slow enough for him to stare in a friendly way at this quite young woman of about sixty and trace a day that began in a pay booth near Mayn’s home calling the Chilean economist at his, turned away to Turnstein & Wing’s where there was no Wing, sloped upward to the office rejected by Jimmy Banks where Dina West had tried to give a little hell over the phone, and wound up variously here, north of Mayn’s but suddenly closer to that New Jersey town with the code name than to the Chinese shop across the street. He told Pearl Myles that he understood time now, and she put the back of her hand on the cold glass of the window and said that now she understood what she had been feeling a moment or two before. And that he had changed jobs, too. He said he wouldn’t say that. But they watched each other and turned, as one, to see an Asiatic woman come out of the Chinese shop, change her mind, and go back in, and they had a quick, quiet laugh about that. Pearl Myles inquired how he knew the Chilean economist and Spence replied that they had a mutual interest in an American company’s actions in Chile.

But it was this family he was into.

Oh yes.

And as to surviving children, he knew of course, didn’t he, that the brother Brad was an illegitimate love-babe by another, but had grown up as Mel’s beloved son; they got along. Spence knew this. But she hadn’t thought about them for years, but something rubs off. Oh yes, said Spence, he himself had been insulted earlier today by a man who— another Chilean—

Oh yes, she had heard of him (as if there were only two in New York!).

— who Spence thought had called him an insect though the word might have been "insult" (Spence an "insult"), but we ask for these things, hit our head up against a stone wall in order to get somewhere and find that we thought we were only observing but were much more than that. Pearl knew what he meant and asked him if he had been to the Statue of Liberty but he hadn’t. He asked if she knew Spanish, and she said New York really was like this, with people running into each other and then talking without any actual reason to begin with. Spence thought there was real value in it, he had found a part-Sioux businessman in the Utah desert and they had discussed the commercial possibilities of a nondescript bush only to learn in the course of what turned into a whole night that they were brothers in knowledge if not in blood, that each knew of a woman named Manuel who had healed with the balm of this desert bush’s pod a Salt Lake City Mason who spoke Japanese so synergetically (Pearl smiled and smiled and nodded rapidly) that he had grown to sometimes look Japanese though very brief-spoken. And before the night was done, Spence had forgotten both the "bush" business and a legendary pistol that had been his original reason for meeting this part-Sioux-part-Mormon carpenter-businessman Santee. However, Santee then found that Spence knew both that the Japanese-speaking Mason had been killed for guessing in his own very medication and recuperation the link between that dry bush and the oil of whales, and that the famed botanist with rock-oriented corrugations on his bike wheels, who had been modestly mutilated by a father-son team of saguaro-cactus exploiters very likely responsible as well for the Jap Mason’s death, was loving colleague to an itinerant Chilean zoologist-woman who at the top end of a ladder once cast the famed double Moon, like a destiny, on a handgun that later could not stay in one place and that Santee-Sioux’s grandfather who somewhat earlier had almost certainly carried it across the Plains to the Rockies had always said there was a thing in that pistol strangely hard to find, so precious in value as to be, like what the South Africans call "future platinum" or the southern Indians of Argen-Chile "wise silver," the true unit of value.

Mena! exclaimed Pearl Myles and Santee-Sioux (in Spence’s voice) simultaneously, and Spence had added "from that musical family" a split-instant before Pearl Myles added that that Santee was cousin to an Ojibway who was why she thought she was in New York, certainly not to buy a giant thousand-dollar lamp designed by Alvar Aalto with tiers like a fir tree (wonderful in its way, too).

They waited, knowing that this was the Soon through which they would come to be silent in some other way. It sloped gently through both their minds — as if they didn’t need to worry about it because the slope was the thing and in charge — that they were drawing near to one another because something quite beyond them was the matter, and the matter even in a good way. Let the world’s interrogations go on outside this big pane of street glass, go on and on; and for a moment she told him how her husband had been very young when she married him and they were both affectionately (or something) repressed, or (you know) shy and were just right for each other, really cared for each other sexually, and when he hadn’t wanted to share her with a child she got nauseated with sex and felt guilty at denying him, well they really enjoyed it but she couldn’t help herself. Years later, neither of them was so repressed but it didn’t help. Spence said he thought she had skipped something in there but he wondered if something like all that had happened with his parents. She asked why. He didn’t know.

A fury came through him, she told him.

(On the way somewhere else, he thought.) He said, What?

Yes, through his shoulders — shoulders like magnets, did he know that? Sure, sure, he knew that. Well, she was going to leave him two phone numbers where she could be reached. Yes, through — through — through — all the many thongs of cowhide fringe ready to move, underneath that hair of his, she said.

They shook their heads laughing skeptically, while sunlight slid away and came back (via speeded-up dawn). On the way where? she said — now why did I say a fool thing like that? ( I know, he said.) (You’ve got my number, she said, a bit intimately.) Buffalo hide, please, he said, and, glancing at his watch, pressed the date button.

They talked some more, but she said he wanted to ask about something and he said it wasn’t what it would have been if he hadn’t run into her.

And how it happened didn’t matter, she added, and he nodded as if he had added it, which by running into her he partly had. How old was he? she asked, and he didn’t know and used to think it didn’t matter, and then uncomfortably asked, Which Ojibway was Santee-Sioux a cousin to? and she said only some faraway part of him cared, which was true (though he understood out of next to no experience at all that it sounded like a New York woman), and he tried to crack a joke, Are there any more surviving Ojibway cousins? but she said, Ojibvva; but why had he asked about surviving Mayn offspring? she had to know.

They looked away from one another, the long-time Minnesota woman in appearance as executive as her current physical position coat-on, boothed, and windowed, was more visitor, her companion as sandy-faced a buckskin-fringed itinerantly ageless trader as a hinterlandsman could imagine erroneously was no New Yorker, and they saw the Chinese woman leave the shop across the street listening to her companion eagerly talking. I think I know that woman she’s with, said Spence. She’s got a baseball cap on, said Pearl. Pirates, said Spence. You don’t make it sound like urgent news, said Pearl Myles. It probably is, said Spence, but I feel like I’ve never seen her in the flesh, and he leaned back in his booth, placing his fingers on the table, but finding not a keyboard but only Pearl in front of him.