Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"We’ve hardly met," you say in some other body which she would refer to as He.

"You’re not married, isn’t that so?"

"Not right now."

She turns her shoulder away and seems to be thinking of all that lies between you/him and the prospect of turning off her shower; it is hers.

She scrubs her face under the water without the soap running off: how does she do that? If you can talk to her you can stop being in two places at once (which is O.K. to be if you’re one of a growing number of gurus with multiple commitments and not enough time). She’s walking a beach in Florida with you; then last night on concrete here in New York months and months later and on that heavenly ceiling.

"After dinner you gave me hell not too sweetly."

"You thought I did."

She was coming to you closer and closer without moving in the shower, so you did not have to make her up looking back from the future, which was your combat status and is a capability lunatic to mention. Being in the future and being able to live back here in the present only by making it up. Jim Mayn and Jean stepped off a curb, the back of last night’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel gently crowding them down into the alley of old Lexington Avenue, a men’s shoe store all lighted up behind them, this little range of the city no harder to make up than grandmother Margaret moving up Park Avenue in a carriage at the turn of the century, for you — he — look past the corner up the crosstown street to the hedges of Park Avenue.

"I know we hardly know each other but do you mind if we go to a movie?" she had said.

"Sitting in the movie will be like lying in bed."

"Thanks, Jim."

"We’ll get us a paper."

"No wait—" as if he was about to leave her to go locate a newspaper —"I want you to know why I want to go to the movies."

"I want to know."

"There was Cape Kennedy and that pool table and the motel and the canceled launch; and there was once in Washington; and we had some phone calls which I really liked; but I feel like the Other Woman — weird, I almost don’t give a damn about you, and I don’t talk like this, you know? — and I feel as devoted as the Other Woman is: as if we had been seeing each otheron the sly all these years a couple times a week and there’s just time to have a drink, dinner, and go to bed."

"Tomorrow’s Election Day and you’re not going in to the office till late."

They walked realistically hand in hand to get a newspaper. They made to cross the street again; Mayn let go her hand, he stepped off the curb looking at a hurtling, disintegrating cab coming at him carrying ancient authority, knowledge of this New York City, so that the driver thought here’s a guy, he doesn’t have to raise his hand. But, the brakes crying out prophetically, the high-slung real yellow chassis skiing in toward the curb, Mayn raised his palm (Peace or Stop), felt good, shook his head, but the driver, abandoning his brakes, now found the light changing to red and, against his normal practice of running the red, had to stop since he’s confused, or felt he had to.

"Wait," she said; "I want you to know why I want to go to the movies even if you already want to know."

"You’ll tell me even if I don’t."

"Wrong!" she claimed, laughing anxiously. "I’m not necessarily going to."

"Please tell me," he said, stepping back onto the curb and looking down into her angry eyes — were her eyes so young as she? the colors had been put through much thought.

They opened to the movie timetables. "I feel like I’m already there," he said, and, as if they had made a movie decision, he closed the paper and kissed her, their two soft, closed mouths moving a little upon each other and she opened her eyes so she knew — was that it? — that he wasn’t looking over her shoulder. She said she would like to take a shower, and he murmured that there was a movie near here where you could do that, and she murmured that he had been out of his marriage for too long. No sweat, he added. He felt, through her hands, his clothes on him by the material yard, yards of thickness.

"Oh," she mildly disagrees — and reaches out again under the hot water from her own shower head in her own bathtub in an intimacy created by her own chosen shower curtain.

Oh you believe in the two of you, here in an O.K. shower, you don’t have to pinch yourself, only her, and she pretty well thinks you are here, and you don’t believe in people who indulge themselves thinking they could be in two places, particularly since today, Election Day, you don’t have to be anyplace.

"You voting?" she asks.

"Nope." But all she knows is that you’re reclaiming a place in the City that friends are letting you reclaim because they don’t want it any more, they’ve sublet it from you while you waited to buy it, a family of friends, friends of the family, living there but now they’re leaving the city. Not out for a week yet. She knows this stuff and that you’re coming from Washington, from the West, from really not too many places, newsmen don’t travel incessantly, but you don’t speak of South America, it’s not too vivid.

She doesn’t know your daughter’s phone, nor that it’s a new number and in Washington, or how old your daughter is; but there’s a thumping on the front door, isn’t it? but this young lady hasn’t heard.

You’ve made your living off information often from those too willing to give it, and reporting it like income, and for too long your aim has had to shift. You’re awake enough to feel the water altering you; it’s what it does so much better than cleaning you off; like the soap making us slippery.

"Pair-shower time," she said; well, it’s the age she lives in like a place that keeps getting away from you, into you. It might be the age she is.

"Lower."

"There?"

"Hold it — I mean, right there."

"I know my place. Have we reached it?" she asks.

"Did you hear someone at the door?" he might seem to change the subject.

"Did I?"

He would turn on the cold if with his eyes closed he knew which faucet. "I think we’ve…"

"Hey, oldtimer, you with me?"

"I think we have broken through…"

A kiss from you seals two mouths from the shower’s bombardment, ties them with a soapy hand below, until you give that hand of hers a remote-control bump and she smiles you off. You’ve got a mile of rope in your lower back and a coat hanger in your shoulders and you must stretch.

But you don’t get clear of the two places, the two at once, and you’re the window, and she’s looking at you from one side like she thinks you’re getting off somewhere else by soaping her own dear breast; but she says, "Are you in the thick of something? Why do I feel it’s so close?" and beyond New York or the dead lava of New Mexico’s earth you feel the shower head is spacewise transpondering you two, and when you audibly recall her words, "I just saw you all over again," and you thought this angel wasn’t particularly romantic you step away from the steaming shower that’s talking to you out of its silver disk-head, and, looking behind the shower curtain to the damp yellow tiles and a huge black towel cloaked on the door like a bathrobe and the toilet and the mirror now steamed that in another bathroom you briefly shared with her in Florida, once said, "Look me up" but here doesn’t know you — you hear now in the shower the woman’s voice as long ago as Joy your lost wife saying, "What’s the matter, did you hear something?" and you think you may not be here after all but through a bend of light seeing it awfully clearly.

She rounds her palm on your hip to slide on around and soap-finger you at the point of your tail — for you are some earlier thing’s future.

You cough and cough. She frowns and rubs your slippery back; she knows a good cheap hypnotist who’ll get you to stop smoking, she’s almost unhappy (she’s frowning so).