Women and Men (106 page)

‘Fraid so.

Newspapermen had endless stories, Gordon said.

Oh all right he had a million, Mayn said, but it was a nine-to-five job.

Gordon said Mayn was kidding him—newsmen were like private eyes.

Yeah, and like sailors, right?

Gordon had had about Mayn a "good feeling"—Gordon heard Norma say she had a "good feeling" about herself, or about Clara the wife of the Chilean economist who took books to inmates in a New York State prison, or Lucille—she picked it up from her group. But also Gordon had to get out of here. Away from Mayn’s waiting, his patient humor.

"But my brother was the one who dreamed," said Mayn, for a moment talking; "walked in his sleep. Came wandering into my room in the middle of the night just before I almost ran away from home."

"This is . . . ?" asked Gordon.

"—Jersey," said Mayn, "Monmouth County? and soon’s I went to bed, well there he was in my room. What—ten, eleven. He’s telling me this stuff and I thought he was awake standing there sound asleep. I thought he was cracking up. But you know, he was asleep; said he had this feeling I was going away."

"Your brother still visits you in his sleep?"

"I’m not home then," said Mayn.

"O.K., who else visits you?" said Gordon, laughing, but he had pulled himself forward to the edge of his armchair.

Mayn was looking at Gordon with sharp puzzlement, and Gordon through his own impatient uncertainty heard Mayn saying that that was spoken like a lawyer.

Unemployed lawyer, Gordon thought, and thought he hadn’t mentioned what he was, had he?

Mayn said that while he still felt he didn’t have regular dreams sleeping at night, that sort of thing, he was starting to think somewhere in his head he did have a recurrent think-dream if you want to call it that—full of surplus equipment (can you beat that?), but he traded in some of the details for others, he said; it was anybody’s guess what it all meant, but one thing he knew, the memory that kept showing now and then if you could catch it, split-screen, obscure movie tricks, was paying a visit to one’s one-time torturer: there was your title for this dream, a daydream, O.K.?, and Mayn had it sometimes, he was pretty certain he didn’t dr^m-dream but he had those waking daydreams. It ought to be about vengeance, right?, and he knew this during the dream; but he didn’t avenge himself on the torturer: either his tongue had been removed during that previous bout of torture so he couldn’t speak, or his arms were nowhere to be found having also disappeared during torture, which meant he fitted cleanly into the doorway of the now-unemployed torturer’s furnished room. The fellow lay on a cot smoking his last cigarette, and Mayn knew, armless, that the torturer, or former torturer, would try to bum one when this cigarette was finished, for Mayn was about to be shot out of a surplus cannon to where he would be different.

"There’s the circus," said Gordon.

"That’s Barnum and Bailey in New York City," said Mayn, "the space man in the white aviator’s helmet. I got taken to see it; but our own local circus had the one tent set up on ten acres that the town electrician rented to the town on special occasions down behind the water tower between the Catholic cemetery and an applejack distillery; my grandmother took me there to see an Indian bareback rider."

"But
have
you ever been tortured?" asked Gordon.

Mayn seemed to look off into some corner of the large, sparsely furnished room. "No," he said. "Of course not."

"But you’ve known those who have been?"

"I knew a man who did it for a living."

"Went through it, or administered it?"

"I’ve known both," said Mayn humorously.

"Where?" said Gordon.

"What about the sixth-grade bulletin board?" said Mayn.

"The bulletin board?" asked Gordon.

"You had turned away from the European theater," said Mayn, "and were concentrating on the Pacific, am I right?"

Indeed.

And at that time—in the days of Caesar Augustus, Gordon wanted to say—for he heard that name uttered again and again in memory by a fifth grader with a watery cold, whose face was secretly lighted by the lectern, for the boy whoever he was was reading his allotment of the Bible story that narrated the Christmas pageant the morning of the last school day before vacation. The whole school was present, parents in the back benches and side benches of the old meeting house—Quaker meeting house, pews really, and aisles dark with small electric candles moving beneath faces—lines from one of the Gospels—"There went out a decree," that was it, "from Caesar Augustus."

"I went to a public high school," said Mayn.

"Well, this was Quaker," said Gordon, "and I went there up through eighth grade, although they had a high school too. My father went to a public high school but he did six hours of homework a night."

"I was lucky if I did six a week," said Mayn.

"I worked about a sixteen-hour-a-week night shift," said Gordon.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus," said Mayn.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus."

"Well, you had to keep some time to yourself. You were having those dreams."

"It was a lulu," said Gordon. "I don’t know if it was the next night after Metz was supposed to speak to the sixth grade. Sometime in there."

Mayn put his drink down on the floor, sat back and looked very straight at Gordon.

"I keep feeling I’ve missed something," said Gordon, and then had to laugh and shake his head.

"I can’t think what it would be," said Mayn.

If Gordon could finish this dream he could get out of here; the emptiness of Mayn’s living room had begun to weigh on him.
When
he’d had the dream didn’t matter.

It had a lot to do with newsprint. Mayn raised his dark eyebrows. Gordon was coming out of the Courthouse and being chased by a familiar janitor in galoshes yelling to him that he could not use the courthouse ground-floor corridor as a shortcut from Court to Livingston; the familiar face was pressing him at the same time that the galoshes should have held this person back, and in the dream Gordon emerged into Livingston Street with the old brick of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute up to his right and Boerum Place crossing Livingston down to his left—

"I don’t know this geography," said Mayn, "but I got chased by a patrol car in high school without a license and drove across a wood bridge and it fell to pieces behind me—"

—but it was dark, the streetlamps were still bright, and Gordon had gotten up much too early.

At the school gate there was Metz waiting. At the last second Metz stepped inside ahead of Gordon and leapt up the steps into a glare coming off the glass doors; it was the sun, and the time was the normal time. In no time, Gordon reached his classroom and Metz had already begun addressing the class in German, harsh and speechifying, and two girls were giggling like children. Gordon was at the bulletin board untacking clippings as they were needed to illustrate Metz’s talk and the board
flashed.
But in the dream
Metz
didn’t know that with each new piece of newsprint untacked the accompanying explosion on the bulletin board was in the Pacific Ocean, not western Europe.

He was telling his daily life that he’d had in Alsace; they used wooden plates there—

"Was that what he actually did talk about?" Mayn asked.

"Yes," said Gordon, but in the dream his French and German were so easy to understand (like a story you don’t listen to the actual words of) that Gordon recognized his own mother’s slick-haired Italian cobbler in his basement shop on the south side of Montague Street and red decorated Flexible Flyers almost out of control on the ice and snow racing down the harbor end of Montague Street that led to Furman Street and the docks, down Montague’s cobblestone hill covered and quieted with the wintry white gravity of the air itself—or elsewhere, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta accompanied by an alternately loud and nearly inaudible piano coming out of a brick house on Garden Place with a brass knocker helping the piano keep time to "What a very very nice young man"—

"Dreams," said Mayn.

—and red clay tennis courts at Henry Street between Remsen and Jor-alemon and Gordon’s dad out of breath going for a drop shot and Gordon’s parents standing elbow to elbow sharing a hymnal by the light of Presbyterian stained glass while for some reason the shallow, carved-wood offering plate was reaching into their pew to get their attention, and Metz’s French and German were so easy to understand and Metz told how many planes while Gordon was trying to tell them none of this was true.

"All I want to know," said Mayn, "is who took your place as the fifth-grade angel?"

Gordon had been only
one
of the fifth-grade angels. It was lost in history. But the kid who had been Joseph and got sick, got well and came back and ended up an angel, whether substituting or not Gordon didn’t recall.

"You’ve taken a leave of absence," said Mayn, "you said you were unemployed?"

"I thought I was not living as I ought to," said Gordon.

"Oh is that all," said Mayn.

Gordon hadn’t said leave of absence. So how did Mayn know? "What have I missed?" Gordon said, standing up and looking around the room, looking for mementoes of Mayn’s adventures. "It’s a rambling memory."

"The Metzes didn’t get out of Europe till ‘44?" asked Mayn.

Gordon actually didn’t know. Perhaps if the Metzes had made a dramatic escape the kids at school would have heard the story.

"Had they been in hiding?"

Gordon didn’t know. He and Metz were friends for a few months. The Metzes moved to Manhattan the next year, he thought. Yes, Metz took violin lessons in Greenwich Village, someone had said.

Gordon said he had to go. "One other thing," he said. "The Christmas pageant, right?"

"Right," said Mayn, "but did Metz take lessons when you knew him?"

"Not in Greenwich Village. That was after he moved away. He visited school the next year and stood in the corridor, he had his violin case with him. He was quite a tough fellow."

"But the pageant," said Mayn.

"Metz’s parents came. So did my mother. She knew Mrs. Metz from Civitas it comes back to me—a women’s club that had speakers. It was Metz’s father who created the scene."

"What happened?" said Mayn.

Gordon and Mayn both laughed. "Maurice hadn’t told his parents he was playing Joseph. His father was offended. I’m sure they weren’t especially observant Jews; maybe that was the
reason.
Anyway, carrying a candle was one thing; playing Joseph was something else. Miss Gore kept saying, ‘He was really very good,’ meaning how Maurice had looked in the tableau. I remember him after the pageant standing there with everybody and his father talking to him and then to the principal who was a tall, handsome man with a black mustache. Maurice was standing there at attention. His father was upset. Mrs. Hollander was there, too, and I remember she and my mother talked like friends, like two women; and when Mrs. Hollander came up, taking it all in, I remember my mother turned away from the Metzes and the principal and Miss Gore to pay her respects to Mrs. Hollander; and Mrs. Hollander had a smile on her round face with all the rouge; she had a sense of humor, you know; she was little; and instead of answering what I imagine my mother must have said, Mrs. Hollander said into the group, ‘I think you’re expecting quite a lot of your son.’ And something in how she said it shut Mr. Metz up and next thing the principal was introducing Mrs. Hollander to Mr. and Mrs. Metz, and my mother and I were so conscious of what had happened to Mrs. Hollander ..."

Gordon had finished. He had been standing, addressing Mayn who looked up at him from the couch but now swung his head around to look toward the front hall where the tentative sound of a key in a lock could be heard.

The door creaked, and Gordon heard the voice of his own wife Norma say, "Oh you’re home."

"So is someone else," said Mayn, hauling himself up, as Norma in the hall was heard to say, "Oh?"

"I got home earlier than I expected," said Mayn. Gordon wondered if Norma was to have been a welcoming committee.

She was in the doorway now, looking at Gordon, and she was wearing a pale brown cashmere sweater with a monogram, and she had that plain-boned prettiness and that strength of demeanor that Gordon knew he took for granted, and she was hanging on to the red rubber bulb of the plant sprayer.

Gordon remembered the trailing ivy-like plant he’d noticed. "Got yourself a job?" he said.

"What are you doing here?" said Norma, taking a few steps into the room and stopping.

"We’ve been talking," said Mayn.

"What about?" said Norma.

"Oh, what’s become of us," said Mayn.

"I’ll bet," said Norma, but with an irony of relief risen in her voice, yet Gordon still did not look from her to Mayn.

"Yeah, just reminiscing," said Mayn. "It’s that time of day . . ."

"—when," Gordon added, "the Chacma baboons of southern Rhodesia get melancholy supposedly."

‘They have each other," said Norma.

Mayn said, "He was going to tell me about the day they exploded the cloud cover that makes Venus into a greenhouse."

"Extemporaneously," said Gordon, sitting down again, and understanding now what Mayn had said to the new doorman, the remark that had
mas temprano
in it—he’d said he had come home a day early. "No," Gordon said, "I don’t think I can manage any more history right now."

"I’ve been watering Jim’s plants while he’s away," said Norma.

Gordon wanted to make a bad joke, but couldn’t think of one.

She went out of the room. Gordon heard water running. Mayn did
not
say, "Hey wait a minute, didn’t you
know?"

"So that was the year I skipped a grade," said Gordon.

"That year you skipped was pretty packed," said Mayn kindly.

"That was only three months of it," said Gordon.

The water stopped. For a few moments there wasn’t a sound from the kitchen.

"Thanks for the drink," said Gordon.

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