Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Was liking it; for the ominous, all-purpose real-life music that came at them more personal and closely closeting of whoever they were than the perfected world of the black-and-white drama now theirs, then it quieted down, and the silver-gray, menu-like ground with the plain-printed titles and credits was readying you for what was probably real life coming and she found your hand for this half of the show as the story began and squeezed your fingers when two Manhattanites in the squeaky seats behind you started suppressing laughter of recognition, doubling up it sounded like, and you ran your right hand along your roughening cheek concluding that inevitably you knew someone here. She was at once absorbed you could feel it in the unchanging grip of the humid palm.

Then you didn’t want to be there but you did want to be with her, eyeing her in profile the way you used to catch your mother doing who didn’t go to movies but came with you and Brad and your grandmother when it was Errol Flynn or Fairbanks; so Jean tears herself away for a moment to gaze at you but she has work to do and presses your hand and lets go and is looking at the screen again, and so it goes — good film, soiled screen.

A film that as it turns out has a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of because when the time comes for you and the girl to walk safely up the aisle get out of here, you and she all by yourselves — as incognito as the angels way inside you and way outside you that you of course wouldn’t know gimbal an essential window domestically unbudging amid the shuffle of your usual being — long before the show’s over — while, granted, nobody was exactly standing occupying a position ahead of you the way your stocky sidekick Sammy who played quarterback until high school who’d thought the picture was to be in Technicolor stood suddenly in front of your brother Brad coming out of the movie in 1945 and, though none of Sam’s business, said, "What’s the matter, Brad, ain’t you speaking to me and Jim?" — so Brad parted from his girl and tried to get around Sam who moved his unbudgeably occupied and waiting position with Brad — you saw last night like a fact leaving just ahead of you an older hippie type with a ponytail and some kind of jacket that in the lobby light proves to be rough-side brown leather fringed and braided and designed with deliberately rough-looking dark-orange and acid-gold cloth strips, a man you know, it might be him that little crook talking to you in one side of your routine (the girl you’re with will know which side, right left right left right — you had a good home but you left) — a man instantly known to you whom you wouldn’t want to know and you don’t know and never will know whether he got up out of his seat because you and the girl did, following you visibly from in front rather than an unseen shadow behind, you didn’t see which row behind you he came out of but you weren’t going to run up behind him, and you liked him less when he turned out to be a contact of the Chilean’s that night of the final moon launch (that you told the girl about, the time she was about asleep), and there’ve been other coincidences but ("Cripes," as Sam used to say) it’s natural in this job after all like running into your old Associated Press pal Red Harley (such a profession for plain brevity, get in get out) intoning his character by deep voice-print on the Metroliner, who called when Mayn passed him, "You gotta execute, fellow, execute," and Mayn, turning, had said, "Don’t stay too long in that hot shower, boy, saps ya strenth," which wasn’t what he meant to say though then on the way to Washington did say to a man he liked — not this bastard in the complicated western jacket leaving the movie house by coincidence right ahead of him and Barbara-Jean, and alone, which wasn’t out of character really but ("Do you know him?") since he had always seemed to be turning a trick wherever you ran into him, and had no off-hours, what (again) was he doing here? — in that old backwards-half-and-half flick which you and Barbara-Jean ("Neat, eh?") (though you didn’t analyze it like the heavies behind you) had put together independently and side by side having come in in the middle, in which you found a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of, because on that Saturday afternoon soon after your mother was dead (which at dinner last night before the movie you found yourself interrupting a couple of other stories to mention to this young woman who’d said testily, "How do I know your father was pissed off for years before your mother died?" — then made a face to take the prickle out of what she’d said) — that Saturday afternoon of this movie of last night (plus a second feature in those days you can’t recall probably a third-string western with very very white ten-gallon hats and not much more), the gangster movie would not after all stand on its own apart from all the terrible time which Jim (aged sixteen) had cordoned off, that terrific movie of men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, also complete without him, which gave him that afternoon some escaped sense lasting at least fifteen minutes into (four-in-the-afternoon-daylight where you carried preciously the other light of the movie) re-entry, at which point, beyond his father’s newspaper-office storefront plate-glass, reflecting or transparent depending, and the Jersey Central tracks and the red-and-gold firehouse, he knew now under a friendly bathroom shower with a hand pounding his slippery-slapping back for he was coughing, that he would leave that town, and knew he would leave his family that, like what he’d been durably watching go on between his parents for so long (though nothing much to watch), was complete with him or without him who could not be complete himself except without it. She said he was quick in spite of himself and he said, looking at her, that he had to be; and there they were outside the theater stepping off the curb, and even an old stone with a hole in the middle of it yields a trace of mineral radiance irrespective of erosion factor in such company.

You could feel her rubbing your back already, and you were hours away from a morning shower. Why was the guy coming out of the movie ahead of you like you were following him? Well, he had gone in and must come out: but it is Spence, who would make you feel drearily important, the way he is a retrieve-all of data so personal it is as unimportant as everyday life itself. You look up now on Election Day at the shower head of the hostess throwing its ray of weight upon you two together; and knowing like a good witness the dates when you were in New Mexico and when you were heading south through Bogota (where Spanish is as svelte as Florentine Italian) and in Caracas once heading north from the unconscionably disproportionate length of Chee-lay, and knowing just when you ran into the girl at Cape Kennedy, and just when the last time was that you were here in this city whose name should be Manhattan — though not knowing exactly when you decided to move back into an apartment you sublet unobtrusively for years — you figure that that jerk Spence knows such things on instinct, not because he is using you, much less following you — and, well, you can roll up that time belt, for the zone stripes run north-south the way the atlas always says, and you know the difference between Eastern Standard and Mountain, so just turn your face into this shower of Greenwich Village time and check out this smart kid whose keys you’ll leave where they are on the table, after brunch or whatever, and you see yourself doing it.

"Do you have a sister, Jim?"

"Brother. Married high school sweetheart. Took over her widowed mother’s haberdashery."