Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"That first picture," said Sue, "in the field you found hands going at each other."

"Four handfuls of fingers, that’s right—"

"That’s how you got it."

"And nose-like things inside the still grasses, point to point. The eyes came later, but not real eyes — the land looking back. I found a pretty good horse standing inside the pond with lily pads for a saddle."

"I remember," said Sue, "you didn’t leave it out." She was feeling the weight of her legs so much she needed to stand on them. She remembered actual words.

"I told Dave it was a relief finding myself in those third-rate, little weekend smudges."

‘They weren’t third-rate," said Sue.

"That’s what he said — and how would you know?"

"I mean, not after you’ve read the book."

A distinct snicker came from the man at the other table.

There was another cappuccino in front of Sue. "I don’t know why I ordered this," she said. "I don’t think the first one agreed with me."

"Isn’t that quite normal?" said Maya. "You look a bit pale."

Sue wanted to ask Maya what her ex-husband had looked like. That had a mysterious way of showing you how to take other things.

"I felt the change," Maya said, "but I didn’t take advantage of it. ‘What do you mean "therapy"?’ he said. This is art and there’s someone out there who’ll pay for it — you said yourself that money makes work real; I didn’t say it,’ he said, ‘you said it.’

"So instead of peddling the pictures, I told on them. I loathe writing. It’s my frustration threshold."

"I always forget," said Sue, "does that mean the threshold is low or high?"

"It doesn’t matter," said Maya; "experience, I have learned, is frustration."

"It isn’t that bad," said Sue, "you should try other people’s."

"Because," Maya went on as if she hadn’t heard, "without it there isn’t any. I mean, I’ll say this for frustration, it’s always reminiscent of the next thing."

"Didn’t you write that?" said Sue.

"I wrote about this poor freak who was trying to reach out but was getting clobbered every step of the way. And that I did not write," said Maya. "I got so I could hardly see the original blob of my pond, my tree, my field; it was like taking your glasses off; you had to wait for that old scenery junk to come back, and even then it was a strain."

Sue sipped her coffee. "You said in the book that he encouraged you to doit."

"He found some pages I’d written in pencil. He said it was like a mystery. So I kept going."

"You had to," said Sue. She felt pale again.

"Steps came to the door of the study at midnight and went away."

"You were usefully employed," said Sue.

"Right. He asked if I would read it to him some evening."

"Maybe he had a hard time with your handwriting," said Sue, tilting her head to one side.

"So one day, the first thirty pages were missing. I had a daydream of being relieved. By sunset the pages had reappeared. I was so mad I couldn’t speak. I mean, I couldn’t think. One night he came home all excited. Someone else had been reading me."

"He’d Xeroxed them?" asked Sue.

"Susan, how did you guess?" said Maya. "He had them typed first. My confession. My salvage operation a piece of myself, as they say, in the hands of, as it turned out, if I do say so, a very smart woman. She wanted to see the illustrations. Everyone checking on me, right?"

"It sounds like help," said Sue.

"You understand how good I’d been," said Maya. "Keeping up the family tradition as if it was mine to keep up."

"You mean, come home with first prize or don’t come home."

"That’s it," said Maya. "You’ve picked that up. Oh, Dave joked about them, his family, but there they were."

Sue had only to wait for what she knew was coming; it came from that distance that had seemed to be Maya’s, but it was other people’s experience that had to be Sue’s — it was time.

"There they were," said Maya. "Dave’s father a legendary metallurgist, his grandfather a judge, great-grandfather an infamous, wall-eyed general."

The words were grotesque. She couldn’t stand them.

"But they’re Dave’s family; they’re not you," she said.

"As for me," said Maya, "Dave couldn’t talk about anything except my project."

"He got it published for you, for God’s sake," said Sue.

"What do you mean? What do you mean?" said Maya. "What’s the matter with you?"

"Did he ever brag about doing that for you?" said Sue. Sue put her hand on Maya’s wrist; Maya’s wrist felt warm; she withdrew it.

"Just the opposite," she said. "He didn’t have to talk about what he’d done for me; he knew I would."

"I’m sorry," said Sue. "I’m sorry for you both."

"I’m not," said Maya, "and neither are you."

"Let me cast the deciding vote," said the man with the bushy red eyebrows and mustache.

"This," said Sue, "is the sort of thing my fiancé would go out of his way to do for me if I wanted him to."

"Your fiancé " said Maya, as if that did it.

"And if I had your ability," Sue finished.

"In my opinion," said the man at the other table, "these are two entirely different men, a second-generation chauvinist pig (although ‘chauvinist’ was never the right word) and a somewhat battered third-generation."

Maya stood up and found a five-dollar bill in her bag; she dropped it in the middle of the table. "Who does get your vote?" she asked the man, "since you’ve turned out to be a male suffragette?"

"Oh heavens," said the man, and contemplated the flame of his lighter for a second before he lit another cigarette. "I’d like to vote for all of you."

"Why was it subjugation?" said Sue, having been paid for and feeling distinctly sick. "I really want to find out."

"Listen, Susan—"

"Sue, if you don’t mind."

"Were you ever ‘Susan’?" said the man.

"I was christened Susan," said Sue, not taking her eyes off Maya.

"Only the names have been changed," said Maya, sitting down.

"You women are turning out books right and left," said the man.

Maya rolled her eyes upward but seemed to accept the man. "After the book, Dave said I had to follow it up because people knew my name. I said one book was it. Then I got this free-lance design job through a pal of his."

"I’d like to get hold of your book," said the man. "Do you happen to have an extra copy? How do you feel about it now?"

"It was a wonderful book," said Maya.

"Where was the subjugation?" Sue persisted. "I don’t see what it was."

"The book," said Maya. "That’s where it was. It was me by me, forced by him, maybe I should say pushed by him."

"It sounds bigger than both of you," said the man.

"Each thing I did," said Maya, "had to lead somewhere, right? But I was happy as I was, wasn’t I? Dave had to show me off, the gifted lady he lived with. Then that wasn’t enough. He had to give me the gifts."

"I don’t get that," said Sue.

"Neither do I," said Maya. The woman in the yellow T-shirt made change at the table and Maya left a dollar. "Thank you," said Sue.

The woman stood there; she thanked Maya for the dollar that lay on the table.

"But this began quite a while ago," said the man at the other table. "If Dave was a second-generation pig, wasn’t he ahead of his time?"

"He transcended it," said Maya.

"You’re Elsa?" said Sue to the woman. She nodded agreeably.

Sue then didn’t ask what she had been going to ask. She felt sick and asked for a glass of water.

"This is hopeless," said Maya, getting up. "You have to find out for yourself."

"Maybe I’m a second-generation feminist/’ said Sue. "If we have problems, we’ll talk about them."