Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"I hate all those words," said Maya, turning toward the door.

"What were you doing in Albuquerque?" said the fat man. "You saw the lady’s book in Albuquerque."

"It was still sitting on a bookseller’s shelf after two years. I was on my way to visit my fiancé’s mother in Santa Fe." She stood up wearily.

"What were you doing in Burlington?" said the man.

"Dave has a cottage outside of Burlington. Why are we talking to you?" said Sue.

"And when your child is born," said Maya, "you will have a use for the inevitable extra bedroom."

"I have heard unconfirmed reports," said the man, "that marriage and love make doubtful bedfellows."

"But what else is there?" said Sue.

The man looked at the three women. "Maybe what I’ve been hearing about is first love and first marriage."

"You can’t tell by her," said Sue. "She was a victim of subjugation."

"You’re right, you can’t tell by me," said Maya; "Dave and I were never married."

"I thought so," said Sue.

"Ah," said the man, "the sore point."

"So maybe he’s still interested," said Maya.

"There are different kinds of love," said Sue. Then the fat man said, "You’ve seen him recently?"

Maya said, "What — fifteen, twenty minutes ago."

"You were here" said Sue.

"I was here," said Maya, "and he passed by and looked in the window. It happens."

"Dave," said Sue.

"He was right behind you," said Maya. "I’m sure he couldn’t handle it."

"Handle what?" said Sue, because it was the next thing to say. But this wasn’t the workshop. She hadn’t bugged anybody at the workshop, she hadn’t learned how. You could speak, and what came out was in you and you didn’t always know it except that it would be terribly obvious when it did come out. "But these two men named Dave we’re talking about—" she turned to the man at the other table— "why couldn’t they be the same man? There’s a lot to people."

The man was contemplating Maya. There were tears under her eyes. Her hand held the doorknob.

Elsa shrugged. "I don’t see your husband for a long time," she said.

"He hasn’t been here," said Maya, who held out her hand to Elsa as Elsa moved away from this no-man’s-land without having realized that that was what it was.

"Call it coincidence," said Maya to Sue, with a lot of eye contact.

"That he passed by when you were here?" said Sue.

"You too," said Maya — almost the very thing the Puerto Rican at the deli said when Sue told him to have a good day.

Maya pulled open the heavy glass door, and Sue was waiting for her to step out onto the sidewalk. "Maya, you said Dave had changed his looks with the times."

Maya thought a moment. "Yes, I see he wears a gold stud in at least one earlobe; I can’t blame you for that." The door swung slowly shut. Outside, she turned the other way; she didn’t pass the window. Sue thought they would never meet again. Then she thought, how could they help knowing each other?

"Dave seems to have recovered," said the man with the red mustache. "A man with a gold stud in his ear."

"Actually," said Sue, "it’s a tiny fourteen-karat mushroom."

"Conspicuous but discreet," said the man.

"It’s my Dave. You know that."

"There seems to be a lot of him to go around," said the man. When Sue did not respond, he added, "I mean there’s a lot to him, obviously."

"Do you think he’ll come back?" she asked.

"Oh, he’ll come back," said the man. "But maybe not today. Glad we got the mystery settled. Put two and two together, some days you get three. For a while there, I thought maybe he’d killed himself."

Elsa said, "You want your lemon ice?"

"Trying to get rid of me?" the man said.

"How did you guess?"

"The lemon ice is a work of art," said the man.

"I’ve got to get home," said Sue.

"You mean you want to get home," said the man.

She had been standing, and she almost sat down again. She lifted the glass of water to her lips.

The man said, "I feel I got quite a lot for my money today. But even if we now know that the two Daves are the same man, there’s still plenty to talk about."

At the door, Sue turned to him. "Other people have been through so much," she said. He nodded and smiled.

She was waiting for him to say something good.

"Tell me one thing," he said. "Why was it ‘amazing’ that Dave walked around the house in the morning with his mouth full of toothpaste talking? Maya mentioned it and you said it was amazing."

She was feeling queasy at the thought of that second cappuccino she’d had one sip of. "Now that I think about it," she said, "I was right. He doesn’t do it any more. At least I haven’t seen him."

The man raised his espresso cup. "Good luck," he said.

It’s a shower and it’s morning you can report and it’s not just any shower you’d write home about. It’s a shower slow as weight, deep as you both are tall; fast vanishing, steady as the fastest light. A warm-hearted thing, this shower! Shower-power — who cares how it happens dreamt up out of our future into the present? She just reached in behind the shower curtain and turned it on like going to bed, your two hands as near to her as if they were giving a supportive touch to the small of her strong back, this lovable Independent you choose lightly with an unsaid word "Angel" and, taking a shower with her, size her up and she is missing nothing or is anyhow like a question you put off as you take on this glassy fiber, two-for-one insulation against cold, against dryness, this. A show of New York’s famed drinking water on Election Day being economically purified by flowing down over two lovers before draining into all the stone-based drinking fountains of our coastal city’s parks and all the ceramic ones indoors in our hospitals and schools, bless ‘em. Plus through the shower head is coming hot-poured something, you don’t get a handle on it, does she? does Jean (or Barbara-Jean as she doesn’t prefer to be called). She knows her Hot, her Cold; adjusts her valves with the whole day in mind, voting or not; and no more could you get into words (at least before brunch) what in old New Jersey your once-upon-a-time quirks-and-music but then bottom-line/suicide-magic mother said (according to your grandmother, who survived her): that angels on the margins turn into us and out of us along their spiritual curve while voicing what they seem to need us for— and voicing also what you hardly know is in you at rest.

You left your name out there beyond the bathroom let alone the shower. Brought your light in here. Oh well, here comes the old water down onto the both of you. Your lighted skins grin. Water’s a new element always that does us all a bit of good and she seems less of an age under it, this youngster Jean (or Barbara-Jean). A woman, maybe she know what you not know, she like the water ultra-hot and maybe your bones need marrowing. She’s a near scientist, a science journalist unquestionably contractually, a cook of record, and with some less used ("-car") savvy of remembrance you get in your adopted New Yorker.

Hinterlandsperson come to sound the coast, she felt you were shadowed at the movie house last night by the nameless ponytailed Spence: hanging around there? or a one-night-stand Manhattan moviegoer? Maybe on the job armed, like some hobbyist, to the teeth, though you don’t tell that to Jean— and still haunting the Chilean exile-economist with (you understand) a deal for material on Middle Atlantic banking involvement in Dr. Allende’s brave downfall through level after level of intrigue like burning warehouse or as through stairwell down past deck after deck of ignorant oceanliner — yet Spence knows always about you some trace of you you don’t guess you bear, though you go on pondering the Chilean.