Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She had come here earlier than she’d planned, and she had recognized this woman and been invited to sit down. This was the unknown woman Sue had once seen across the street walking with the leader, star, and proprietor of a workshop Sue had attended. It lasted four weekends, it was called the Body-Self Workshop, it had been a bit of everything — terrifically tense getting out of the elevator, later a relief, a weird, quite happy relief. It had been really a mind-bending (literally naked) overload of rap, sympathy, information on food, eating, yoga, habit patterning, marital muteness, role constipation— just about everything and anything from speculums and sex-after-marriage to how the ancient mysteries celebrated the reunion of mother and daughter after the daughter has been raped during the harvest. So Sue and this woman had that in common — same workshop though not the same sessions.

But a moment later, when she learned Maya’s name, Sue couldn’t get over it. This was the author of a book she had bought and read, a book that had won an award. It was a small, wonderful book about the author’s weekend attempts at art and the spoor of strange signatures, monsters, and angels of patterns that weren’t there the first time you looked, the tangled clench, the struggle secretly recorded and perhaps actually dreamt by these amateurish oils and watercolors leading back, or was it forward, to the intrigue of the author’s own odd, half-free self which more and more looked like the true creation.

That was the book and here was the author, with a fresh tan from Trinidad, taking an afternoon coffee break at an Italian pastry place in the neighborhood. She had been meaning to come here.

She couldn’t get over it. This woman was the author of the book she had on the shelf in her living room. Maya’s book was a book to reread and see the author finding herself and sharing it.

"My boyfriend is named Dave," said Sue and stopped.

"It’s quite possible," said Maya, "and it’s quite possible he’s not a bastard."

"I don’t know how it’s happened, but he doesn’t appear to be," said Sue.

"You’re funny," said Maya.

"I mean," said Sue, "sometimes I think he’d just as soon not talk about it, but he’s been through quite a lot."

"My Dave hadn’t," said Maya. "He met me and made it up as he went along."

Sue opened her mouth. What came out was "I haven’t known him long. I mean, it’s been long enough. I really love him. We just bought a beautiful canoe."

Maya frowned. Sue nodded. Maya continued. Once upon a time, Maya was saying as if she were telling a story she’d told before, this Dave had had a mother, a mother and some brothers.

"Now that’s interesting," said Sue, who did not ask how many.

This mother had sent Dave out into the world trailing clouds of family pride. Maya told it from such a distance. This mother had told Dave to come back with first prize, otherwise forget it, she didn’t want to see him.

"Are mothers like that?" said Sue.

"I don’t follow you," said Maya.

The woman in the yellow T-shirt brought the man with the russet red mustache a small white cup of espresso and took away a cup. He opened his newspaper and refolded it.

This Dave had won first prize all right, Maya continued. Yes, indeed. He had done O.K. He had $300,000 in municipal bonds by the time he was twenty-nine. His mother was a beautiful person, he said; that was where he got his drive.

"Maybe he needed to explain it," said Sue. "I can understand that."

And so, of course, Dave had always needed women, and he had met Maya one afternoon when she was running up and down a train platform looking for her stolen suitcase, and later he wanted her to change her name from May to Maya after she had toyed with the idea. And he always sort of liked women, he listened, he asked questions about what they did and about their parents, and he touched them.

"Touched?" said Sue.

"He wasn’t very funny," said Maya, looking past Sue. A child yelled in the street. "But sometimes he had a jokey sweetness about him, and he did seem to listen."

"It’s nice," said Sue, who knew what she was talking about.

Maya frowned.

"I mean, it is," said Sue, but Maya’s frown, aimed at her cappuccino, might have nothing to do with anything but distance and with this story of Dave with its sense somewhere beyond even Maya — and a sadness that half-included Sue.

And always in that glass house he had built for her, there had been that mother. Well, he kept women on the far side of his mother; but this beautiful person, this ever-dark-haired, amber-eyed mother who never changed and when she was sixty-three her hair still looked like a painting, well, he actually didn’t see much of her, this great mother of his, even though—

"Did she live far away?" asked Sue.

— even though for a long time she lived close enough to drive to for a weekend (Maya had seen her the first time from a car window and didn’t know it). Later Dave’s mother sold the house and moved out West, right?

"What do you mean, ‘He kept women on the far side of his mother’?"

"What do you mean what do I mean?" said Maya, distracted.

"I guess I know," said Sue, and couldn’t look at anything but the metal cupholder in her hand. "I meant, what did he do when you saw this?"

A pale shadow went over Maya’s face as she looked past Sue over Sue’s shoulder, and the long window behind Sue seemed ready to expose Sue if she turned to look. It wasn’t that Sue was irritating Maya. The man facing them two tables away gulped some water.

"It wasn’t what he did, it was how he did it," said Maya.

"There you are," said Sue, "the how."

Maya frowned at her and looked past her out through the street window behind Sue.

"I only mean," said Sue, "it’s like I said. I mean, if you don’t want it to happen all over again the next time."

The pale shadow went over Maya’s face again. Her mouth was speaking. The story had a mystery missing from it, something left out, some act undone.

On a Saturday when Maya was at her table in the study, Dave would tiptoe down the hall like the dog moving over the floorboards, then stop at the verge, so her heart would start pounding, and she’d get mad — she admitted it. Then he would push the door open a crack and watch her, so she felt she was being checked up on and approved of; whereas, if he had knocked and come in asking if he was interrupting anything. . oh, it was all in how he did it. He made her feel like a well-endowed slave on display, when all she was doing—

"But no one can make you feel like that unless you’re willing to," interrupted Sue, recalling the workshop.

— when all Maya was doing was her own work although, mind you, it was stuff he pushed her to do. Like, there’s encouragement and there’s encouragement: "some encouragement is like alimony — deductible."

"But," said Sue, "when he came home for lunch when you weren’t expecting him, and he brought two splits of champagne—"

"A bottle, I said," said Maya, "didn’t I?"

"— it’s the gesture that counts," said Sue, "however he did it."

"But I wasn’t going to drink at one-thirty in the afternoon. I’m not his mother. I don’t even look like her. He even pointed that out to me."

"But champagne," said Sue, "an impulse."

"Maybe it would be different now," said Maya. "I really don’t know. His mother drank champagne; that’s all she drank. He sent her a case of French champagne at Easter and Thanksgiving, probably still does. He used to quote her—"

"His mother liked champagne?" said Sue. "So do I." She smiled impishly at Maya who frowned. "I mean," said Sue, "I’m not at all extravagant. I’m quite careful about money. When I wanted to buy a canoe, he was going to order a bark canoe although he would have had to go on a waiting list, but it cost thirteen hundred dollars, and for me the main thing was just that it wasn’t aluminum."