Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She was asking for it but nonetheless said, Well, was this one of those rare moments in life or were they two doing business or about to? He said she had asked him how old he was and who were his people and he didn’t know, they might as well be Californians who introduced whales to the Great Salt Lake. She hadn’t asked him who his people were but thinking they were the whale people or they were a last-century private meteorologist of New York who dreamt of a new weather and then passed on his dream like the Good Advice a Bolivian-general client of Spence’s had had from his own assassin-to-be and swimming-pool contractor, namely "Pass it on," took Spence sort of out of himself like when this lady across the table from him had seen, she said, one day that she would make up her own lighting for her house, having found nothing that did the trick on either side of the Mississippi.

Presently, the Devil stood at their table frowning at them with deepest attention and with no other customer in sight — a large-straight line in their peripheral vision, an example, though of what? of recent Greek immigration?

Pearl said that when Spence’s client the Chilean economist and she had talked he had said Spence was a New Yorker from way back and he had praised Spence.

Too far back, said Spence — so far back his mother and father merged in the distance.

When Pearl and the Chilean economist had first talked—

On the phone?

Yes, long distance. He was friendly but it was tense for him.

Well, you know his situation, said Spence and then smiled at some awkwardness they both may have understood.

O.K., said Spence deeply enough to be noticed, why had she phoned him? And Pearl wondered out loud if he wanted to get into this and when he said, Sure, it gave them both pause, and like a couple of lovers she said he had been after something else she thought — further surviving offspring of the Mayn family. Why had she phoned the Chilean all the way from Minnesota? Spence asked, but— Oh, he had phoned her, she reported. This is some nightmare, he smiled as if unused to speak or think of nightmares, etcetera, plus the fact he had to be in two other places right now.

How did he have your number? Spence asked. Oh, such things could be explained, was the answer. As easy, he in turn asked, as turning away from where you were focusing and bending over backwards to be friendly only to find you were being pulled this way and that back into what for years you hadn’t known you didn’t want to be in any more? but—

You poor thing, she said, I heard you were the smartest. He just made her remember giving Mel’s father-in-law two phone numbers of hers the day of Margaret’s funeral.

But Spence didn’t know what he was doing here; he was supposed to be at least two other places by now, and Pearl Myles smiled and said he was not free to go, and the Greek pillar withdrew as if temporarily.

And if there were more Mayn offspring, where did they come from, and when?

Well, Spence had always said he was only an observer and now knew for sure he was being turned this way and that in the course of — but someone would throw you a curve if you asked for it, and the issue of further Mayn offspring was what Spence suddenly had come to think he had been sent to settle through some obstacle course of all these years, and now he really did have to go, if Pearl would only let him (they both smiled). For she, she said, had gotten drawn all over again into those strangely silly circles of—

— of news, Spence abruptly and sadly said, and they laughed again, discovering each other again as if this scene would pass the whole afternoon and turn it into evening.

Yes, of news — that doubtless he knew she had worked in and around for years, telling high schoolers about vigil sidebars (—what’s a vigil sidebar? asked Spence) and contributing items by the dozen here and there, and eventually her marriage busted up, she added for some reason. But she had known of the Ojibwa named Santee—

— she hadn’t said he was called Santee—

— because in other days she had been drawn far enough into the—

— isn’t it funny, interrupted Spence again (as the Greek proved again to be standing at their table), that in the midst of all this there are people who may get killed and it may be somebody’s doing. .

— she had to go, too, but let her just get this out: in other days she had been close enough to the Mayns to catch in passing the fact that the suicide-mother’s sister lived in Boston and was active in music as a sponsor not a performer, and feuded periodically with a very rich sponsor (Life Patron, was her category) over the matter of ticket pricing and allotment climaxed by a terrible skirmish over the matter of the Metropolitan Opera’s spring visit; so the scuttlebutt regarding the diva’s dramatic weight-loss brought to the long quiescent attention of Pearl Myles the fact that the Pride’s Crossing dowager’s son was the diva’s devoted Park Avenue G.P. lately most uncomfortably billed as a specialist in ulterior weight-loss regimes of such threatening grandeur that he was getting the wrong sort of name: but having long ago stepped out of it, Pearl had found herself back in it: in what? extended family junk or queer tragedy? endless local peacetime in a medium town or some plan that was receding out of hand but who from who? — back in it again, she recalled now going to the opera one mild night, driving in from New Jersey when the Met’s dark old barn stood southwest of the Public Library and she had a ticket from the math teacher’s sister two rows behind Sarah Mayn and her younger son, Brad, and Sarah whispered in his ear and at intermission put her arm around him, brown velvet short sleeves, and she kissed him and he stretched. And though Pearl had been out of that for so many years and lately engrossed in lighting design right down to nice clusters of hidden forty-watt bulbs, she found it all adding up again — or dividing and dividing — and one morning she found she knew that this Ojibwa healer had been enrolled at the diva’s doctor s expense in a state aeronautical program and since Minnesota is not normally a great state for New York City gossip a little goes a long way and before she knew it she—

— she was Pearl Myles High School Teacher all over again, Spence observed, who looked at his beeping wrist watch and said it hadn’t been a lost Chilean opera that night, had it? because he didn’t know anything about classical music, and suddenly he told her that he had had the wildest nightmares all his life and he didn’t know what they meant and every time he tried to escape them they got worse—

— How would you escape a nightmare? the woman in front of him asked.

And when he made an effort to see them as concoctions of the future and lies out of the past, he would lose them, some horses, hermits, Indians, all talking and as one, plus regular people he had never met and wouldn’t know if he saw them again unless he could get these awful dreams back but they went away when he went after them and he heard them but couldn’t see them.

Because they would vanish inside of you, said his extended coffeeshop companion.

. . when he and. . and they . . knew they were waking him up in the middle of the damn night whether in the mountains of the American desert or in an underground shelter whose "government" contractor he was quietly tracing by photo-investigation to a South American operator who owned newspapers here but had faked the plane-crash death of a brother in order to establish, for corporate purposes, the originally quite dubious existence of this brother complete with jojoba-bush investments and substantial gifts to the Presbyterian world mission.