Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The film she wanted to see had gone on already, fifteen minutes’ walk away: take a cab (you said), and it took fifteen minutes of sitting to get there, next to each other arm in arm — while you listened to her and told her she could be apologetic about bringing you into a movie half an hour late if she liked — so she, after thinking, said you meant you liked it and why didn’t you think why? But the point was, you were going into a film half an hour late and it was the film she wanted to see even if you didn’t mind, and this was the point — and not that she was apologetic.

You had said her being apologetic was very sexy; your daughter said very like that. The cab had arrived and Jean wouldn’t let you pay, she was forward on the edge of the leather seat, the woman in the box office was talking on the phone, an old garden-variety clock your father would have on the bedside table beside the glass of water and the yellow-labeled bottle of aspirin and Wood’s Thoroughbred Racing Illustrated, and a clock here with green hands and a yellow face stood beside the opening at the base of the cubicle’s window, and after Jean said she had been in this situation before about paying, you won a compromise you didn’t care about: her movie, his cab fare: but, you explained, because in her paying all or part (well, dinner would have been going too far, and at the Pressbox at that, where she’d gritted her teeth and enjoyed her prime ribs hadn’t she? dinner would have been letting women into the lockerroom, you said, though you understood there were coed saunas hither and yon nowadays, or at least a Tasmanian economist and his myopic lacrosse-star son reported same at the gym-pool complex of a prominent Middle Atlantic university), you found some sweetness of knowledge in her knowledge of you, and found this right through the paying at the box office where (like a nervous host figuring the tip while the waiter stands near) she wanted to take you up on Apologetic being Sexy but there was a static-fresh ten-dollar bill peeling away from the packet with the bank’s fifty-dollar paper band around it and four ones wrinkled and curling and skating with reverse wind back toward the hand that she said made her feel like this had happened before and pounced on them and slid them outward again as if not wanting them, and this girl you’re with (whose apartment you were already visualizing from under one of her bed pillows which was how you in an occasional crisis slept) was suddenly excited because the time given in the paper was in fact for a prize-winning Eastern European cartoon so they had missed less than twenty minutes of the feature, and as a boy tore the tickets right-handing the stubs to Mayn and the bright, dark photograph which was their screen was straight on regardless of the slope that took them down the narrow house like a movie theater in an Italian movie he thought, quite crowded; and, putting her hand on his shoulder in the darkness of other people’s hands and laps and legs as they tried to see two seats, she whispered that she had always wanted to see this — forever — and he loved her then because she hadn’t remembered to ask him if he had seen the film.

He looked at her and at the screen now darkened and there on the screen three people he knew were standing face to face alternately talking and silent, and she drew him in off the aisle, and as he came between the screen and three people whom they had to step on, one of the characters on screen broke silence and spoke and was speaking when Jim and Jean — Barbara-Jean her parents called her (long-distance) — sank into the audience and looking at each other’s perfect faces both began to whisper — He: "I love—" synchronized with but halted by her "I love black-and-white," but he heard himself substitute as silently as what she had halted, several adequate covers for the vinous, garlicky "you" — such as "coming in in the middle it’s like getting it twice"; "New York sometimes"; "these people" — onscreen, that is, for they were still there as they were one teenage afternoon at the Walter Reade Strand Theater in a town near the Jersey shore called, in the high-colored atlas of his secret pacts with his grandmother, Windrow, and he’d gone with a couple of his friends and had run into his kid brother and his brother’s shy little girlfriend — not that he hadn’t known they would be here, and his pale brother had looked past him as if he hadn’t been there, because Jim had not worked that morning for his father at the newspaper that was running itself toward liquidation run mainly by the father who had married into it — when despite his calm demeanor everyone especially Jim’s younger brother knew that Mayn Senior’s suffering over their mother’s being gone and dead was too great to bear alone. And on the screen that was finally revealed by two traveling curtains that parted for the cartoon and a newsreel and closed again in order to rattle open once again, these actors and a couple of actresses who had already appeared once talked frankly and dangerously to each other as if even when they were afraid of being caught — hurt — killed, they went ahead with their way of moving, looking away so that the screen losing their faces darkened, looking right at another person so you the onlooker might have been the trick mirror they looked through (though Jim didn’t know about such things at that age), these people who were getting ready to pull a job went ahead with their way of just sharp, abbreviated talking so the silences in between might have been all the admiration they were receiving from the unseen, unknown, silent while candy-crackling audience including Jim and his teenage friends — one of whom said out loud, Oh cripes I thought this was gonna be in Technicolor.

Admiration that Jim wouldn’t have to announce personally to these apparently normal-size actors with names and with ways of talking and characters he knew no matter what action-packed mystery they appeared in, with cigarettes in their fingers and tough distrust of the world including the audience if they had included it and Jim, which without knowing it they didn’t, so that arriving outside at 4 p.m. in the wild, heavy-as-air daylight of East Main Street, three dusty pickup trucks parked across the street, this Jim who was suddenly again a part of the town which in his absence from it in the theater he’d still been part of but more grandly eavesdropping on the real life of the movie and without having to do anything, could feel satisfied that their good criminal world which he wished to enter and had, unknown to them, entered like a relaxed, off-duty ghost, was all set and completely to be seen without him, and lasted for at least fifteen minutes walking up toward and past the small newspaper office front where his father who’d been glumly p’d off for years it seemed before and irrespective of the Tragedy of Jim’s mother could be seen typing some letter or leaning over a table staring at ad proof or quickly grinning on the phone so he looked through you if he saw you but he would look through Jim anyhow as if Jim were not his son except he was better to other people’s kids. (Hold it, Jean said at dinner, how in the middle of his life, I know you’re being funny but are you sure he was pissed off for years? — she’s had two drinks and feels her charm; and his might need a little molybdenum, that’s what they strengthen steel with for cars, doll.)

The young woman whose elbow you long ago conceded the glimmering armrest to, gently slipping your elbow off and raising your shoulder more against her, stretched at the end until her arm came up athwart that shoulder, the back of her hand finding your cheek, smiling as if, eyes half-open, she’d woken up happy, said, in the twilight between showings, "Well, I’m ready for this thing to start, how about you?" so you weren’t quite sure she had liked it.