Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Did you ever see that movie? — I mean, you know, not coming in in the middle?" She’s here and sits down hard on his lap, tall and subtle enough to carry his love into the Great American Question Who was here first? and beyond.

He doesn’t want to get around her. "But is weight slow?"

"It’s steady," she guarantees. "It’s steady?" she asks the void.

"That’s what I was thinking in the shower."

"We had a great one. Slow as weight itself," she says. "Do you ever feel," she wonders, "that we fit into a large life that doesn’t much know us but — holds us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?"

"Well, let’s not tell it about us," he seems to agree, and she puts an arm on his shoulder and frowns.

"It is beyond understanding us," she pontificates softly.

"It’s still fun being here," he is going to say but instead out comes, "I think I have to go and ask it a few questions. It’s fun being here, Jean."

"It is," she agrees; and feeling her legs across his all over again, he finds that she doesn’t yet know what she wants of him, so he brings the question inside himself, switches the sexes to protect the innocent, and now sees he’s had the question in him all along. To be sure, it’s shared, but at the moment he was here first.

It was a distance from her place, but he often walked home. The hours were insane to be leaving her. What did he think he was doing? Along the glowing, blank streets, where the cab at 3 a.m. or some face, above a wind-breaker, of a man going on early shift at five had less than nothing to do with him, he imagined he was married and bound home to his wife. He could imagine this because he had been married. Yet when he had been married, he hadn’t been unfaithful in this way. Unfaithful? But he wasn’t married now.

Sometimes he stayed overnight, but sometimes he didn’t. But he liked staying overnight with her, so that when he didn’t stay, it lingered, like a bad time. It wasn’t a bad time, but you might call it a bit dumb. But it was his life.

She didn’t much question these departures in the middle of the night, except to complain a little and maybe make a joke. Like did he have a paper route? Was he moonlighting as a milkman? There are no milkmen any more, he told her. Did he have another girlfriend, a daytime girlfriend he went home for? You’re my daytime girlfriend, he said. But that’s the point, she said— you’re not spending the night tonight. Oh, but I do, he said. Oh well, she said. Because it wasn’t worth arguing about.

She might switch on the little globe-shaped light beside the bed and get up and pull on her bathrobe and hug it around her while he put on his clothes, which had been lying on the floor, or on a chair, or once — his socks — on the keys of the upright piano she kept in the bedroom. The bedroom was bigger than the living room; she thought she wanted to move. Sometimes she stayed in bed while he dressed, and told him sleepily that she’d had a good time with him. Then the darkness and slight strain of what he was doing, going home when they could have been sleeping, seemed to make her say less than she wanted to say, as if, in ‘he dark, she mustn’i. even ask his name or he would vanish; and so there were words in the air between them, and perhaps it wasn’t clear who was thinking t m. What on earth did he think he was up to? What was this? Who did he thinK he was, doing this to himself? Really to her was the equally unspoken reply; to her, if anyone. (Forget it, pal, she 11 survive was surely in both their minds.) One time she laughed and said, Well, did he have a wife he hadn’t told her about? No, not one he hadn’t told her about.

He said, "I only have two bodies. How’s that for fidelity? Mine and yours."

"Well, I should think so," she said quickly, without feeling. But generally she was easy on him when she was with him. She was smart; in fact, she was artistic. She had a happy influence on him.

When he got dressed in the dark, he might find himself back on the bed for a moment or two, the covers and his coat between them, his mouth on her cheek, her eyelid; her mouth, thank God, smiling in the shadows while he told her the same things he had told her before, but now he was dressed.

They went on like this all through the fall, and while he wondered, listening to her play the piano, he knew that eventually she would act if he did not. They were shadowed by a sense of humor which sometimes seemed a longer shadow of events.

She knew what he had done, or what he meant when he said it, which he did at length. She had heard all about it, and she listened with such attention that she might have been taking him literally. He said quite seriously — so she had to smile — that he had killed his wife. All right, not killed — merely destroyed. Yet not her but her life. Or their life. That is, by not leaving her. (She had left him.) He said all this as if he would recall, and recall in order to amend. But this long crime against womanhood, this murder, had it not required an accomplice? he was asked — asked more than once, and once in her dark, lovely bedroom.

An accomplice? She meant his wife, of course.

Well, nobody had caught him, nobody had put him in jail for it. So forget, forget, forget.

And, naturally, his girlfriend was right, but he shook his head, staring at the ceiling in the dark room. Her hand found his face and covered it firmly. "You see, they changed the law. We’re on the honor system now. You punish yourself."

"Don’t want to be on the honor system," he muttered, but she didn’t change the subject.

"John, you’re still half married."

He looked through her fingers into the darkness and made a satisfied sound; the hand upon his face was delicious. He kissed the hollow of her palm and turned to look her in the eye.

She asked if he minded her calling him half married. He touched her mouth and he remembered that she had said he hadn’t really thought about that old marriage of his. Think about it, forget it, think about it, forget it, she seemed to be saying. They listened to a neighbor’s stereo drumming deeply, distantly. She gave his forehead a long, soft kiss, which was like when she whispered in his ear, whispered until the finest-spun words became breath.

Once, on the way home, from streetlamp to streetlamp, past gentle, lurid light, past probes of flashing cabs winging downtown over potholes and heaves of the avenue, he thought that he had not really been married after all. Across the street, the blonde prostitute who was always zipped tight into the bright colors of her costume stood dark-eyed and pale at the entrance to an alley, so that she looked like she had the key to its high iron gate. His hands were cold, and he stopped for coffee in a place he had passed many times — a little hole-in-the-wall newsstand cafe. Why had he wanted to stop there? Nothing much — it was at the intersection where he turned.

He would come along in the middle of the night before dawn, following a coastline, and then, across the street, through the sidewalk service window, he would see a woman pouring coffee from a glass pot that seemed to hang from her knuckles. Three or four men leaned on their elbows at the cramped counter inside. A nurse in white stockings and a dark coat would come along — or, once, an off-duty cop with his satchel — and stop at the window and pick up a paper if the early papers were out, fold it, and hand the money through. The woman, who looked Puerto Rican, was framed in the service window and gave change or passed out a pack of cigarettes, and she might pause and look out across the avenue. At this intersection he would turn and walk the rest of the way home crosstown. But this one night he went in and took the remaining stool at the counter. There wasn’t much room inside. Someone must have been right behind him in the street, because the woman went to the window with a brown paper bag. She must have had it ready. She handed it out to a man who wore a knitted face mask. The man laughed at something she said, and she came back to the counter and poured John a cup of coffee, assuming with a smile that that was what he wanted.