Women and Men (198 page)

How could the wife Joy react to his losing their son on the subway, when the son had been found at the next stop in conversation with a small elderly black man in an army jacket and a pith helmet and spurious ribbons? Joy reacted by walking around the living room as if it were tipping the way it was for her husband. As if she wanted to call the police now. And then she was crying at his side, but not in relief.

The landscape travels with him, throw in a Statue on a movable island, he doesn’t return the car tonight, he enters his building with the hitch-hiker’s phone number on his mind, cracked and peeling walls as if the charts on them get revealed as the walls disintegrate; the simultaneous reincarnation his young friend Larry will explain soon turns Mayn’s heart again to some ludicrously ancient threat which the statute of limitations exempts Mayn from, so the threat is inherited by Larry, and the doorman Manuel is standing in his way speaking Spanish, which Mayn returns.

It is a heavy nine-by-twelve envelope containing what Flick said was coming.

"Thanks. Thanks."

"I figure it’s important."

"You didn’t leave it lying around the mailroom. Thanks. When was it delivered?"

Manuel hesitates. "This evening. Two hours ago. I signed for it."

"Special delivery? Couldn’t be."

"Some guy. I signed for it."

"It was the post office."

"No. Just a piece of paper. I signed for you."

"Thank you."

The manila envelope has been sliced open and scotch-taped back. He needs a hot shower, and while he pictures Norma picking up his mail while he was away and visiting those plants, and he imagines where Flick is and what he is responsible for, he sees his own last name, no more, on the return address, upper left, and draws the sheaf of pages, forty or more, up out of the envelope and sees that his daughter has given herself back her given name, as (he recalls in a sweat his own words) "perpetrator of an amazing load of verbiage, Daddy."

It is about something called Effluent Pollution Reciprocal Involving Both Water and Air, and it is by Sarah Mayn, and he almost fails to get off at his floor, he’s electrified but because a wilderness of feeling hugs him like painless chest pains in the factual, explanatory lines. She could use a blue pencil, but he is frightened by the prospect of some form of truth, its real weight in his daughter’s grown life more than this other unpleasant business of how and why it was intercepted and then, this evening, returned. The envelope is coming into this old apartment of his for the second time, not the first. He finds on the last page gas chambers and gas ovens and wonders by what steps she got there; but he wants to get there himself the right way, he’s skimmed so many books, half-finished them. But sweat along the bridge of his nose swells in the corner of an eye and he is looking for his keys and thinking about his divorced wife Joy and feeling someone wants him to explain why it came apart, why it didn’t work out, if that’s a fair way to say it—and he can’t, he can’t explain, he can’t explain, entering the apartment—that is, he doesn’t know why he isn’t with her—he’s looking at his adored daughter’s typed lines, and he can see only
between
them for God’s sake, all that space between them:
for God’s sake
he hears some voice say in his brain,
for God’s sake
so sentimentally empty he could vomit.

He can’t explain why it fell apart. How’s that for maturity?’

IN FUTURE

She wanted him because she felt he would love her. He loved her because she was beautiful and funny and saw through other people even to what was beyond them. But she said, Sometimes I don’t think you want to be loved, sometimes I really think that.

He thought, Well, that’s O.K. You have to ask a lot of a woman.

Sometimes he didn’t think.

He told her he loved her and sometimes told her why. She made him feel newly returned. She understood this.

And he told her stories, some asked for again, some never the same, some that developed into others, some that she (though not their romantic, huntress daughter and hard-headed, retiring son) eventually found odd and threatening and became indifferent to: stories about a diplomat named Karl who carried a small Japanese pistol against his ribs because the secret of it being there at a conference thrilled him like telling on himself; stories about how Andrew Jackson rode a searing streak of lightning at an Algonquian rite of miscegenation and proved his courage but divided his brain permanently in two, or how once he loved a village attorney’s daughter from western New York who understood better than any the disappearance of the stone mason turned printer William Morgan who had threatened to publish a comic testament exposing Masonic secrets; stories also about the East Far Eastern Princess who paid a visit to the American Indians and flew in on her giant bird that was to become impossible because it missed its own food and took to eating Navajo ponies.

He told her a whole lot of stories while often claiming to know very little and be an authority on nothing, and some stories he didn’t understand and at least one was incomplete in his telling if not his soul, and his daughter came upon her own conclusion to it; in the beginning he told his wife about himself, fell silent, touched her arm, her waist—cracked a joke. The two of them amused each other. They got along like people who don’t need to talk too much, though they never took long car trips together. Never say never.

But they would blow up like other people: she when he said she was too damn good phoning his father twice a month; he when she accused him of just tolerating an unusually young navy captain who held down a desk job overlooking the Potomac and visited them when he was in New York.

He was content for her to be a housewife if she was content, but more than once said she shouldn’t permanently give up her job. But they knew that when she went back to it another job would be there. The next job. So they didn’t believe in forced unemployment.

When she married him he was a newspaperman based with a New York task force—that general area—and might not travel a lot. But she knew also that he might. And he was what she had been looking for; he had character and downplayed his knowledge and was physical and humorous to a fault and faintly tragic, but when you are in love you maybe don’t spell out all the details at least to the other person. But maybe this is untrue and you are so open you say anything at all.

Years passed and the two of them looked back, they didn’t always look ahead. But then it was often the other way around, and they lived in the future, which came often enough.

But what came first? What drew her to him or him to her? Easy. Not hard to think about.

They were about the same height, or almost. They weren’t at all incongruous, but their frames were different. She was slender, he was broad. She was tall, like her sister, and her legs were alive and noticeable through whatever she wore. Sometimes she stood with her arms sharply akimbo near a doorway.

Her eyes would hold him a moment too long, then drop with an invisible blink to his mouth. Her eyes were straight and explicit. She smelled sometimes of the lightest lavender rinsed through the cold skin of apples or diluted into, he felt, the spaces of some dry drawer holding a cardboard box of sachet (though he never looked); and it was just a hint of lavender taking him away from itself to remind him of what he could not place beyond a second of very green, almost sweet apples he recalled, which she also smelled of and which he did find—found like a less sweet berry in the smell and taste of her perspiration (as he once years later told to one other person in a rare moment of pinpoint intimacy).

She admired the dark hair on his wrists that went up under his striped shirt cuffs; but, strangely long afterward, she noticed a birthmark on his left wrist under his watch strap, a speckle of pinpricks like a cluster of freckles or tiny moles; he had hair on his wrists and some dumb recklessness in how he paid attention to her, her face, her reactions, and he had the lumbering walk of a man who might be smooth and rhythmic in sports but to her it meant shyness and a slight chip, though she would almost never point out this shyness, but he knew she knew him, as if he’d read her mind, yet found there her belief that he would not hurt anyone—she pretty much meant physically.

She had purposes, and she knew he felt these. He could be boisterous and stubborn, although an eavesdropper on the two of them alone would not have seen much of this in him.

What came first?

She gave him hell the first time they went out, but this did not come first. They had met in New York in a Russian place uptown where a friend of hers spent several nights a week because she was in love with a somewhat doomed, very middle-aged Russian family man who sang deeply to a guitar, sang like a deep-drawn bow across a bass viol—and wore a red, high-necked blouse with Cossack brocade on it so he might have scars on his neck. He had long lines down his face and it was from these lines that the lean face hung. Her friend’s love for the Russian was painful because he was nice to her. And he had shown a quiet deference to this young man Jim Mayn. Mayn was the name.

The first time they went out, it wasn’t at all uphill, but she gave him a hard time; she knew apparently so much more than he about the President’s lower intestine right down to his tan pyjamas and the semi-classical favorites he listened to, while downstairs in the hospital conference room the presidential news secretary was asked if there was still no one-word description of the President’s condition; and this heavy-set guy Jim Mayn smiling at her across a table at a Cantonese restaurant in New York had actually seen the President the preceding Thursday night laughing himself silly in a Washington hotel full of photographers at their annual dinner; and when she said the man must not run again and the whole thing was ludicrous, this heavy-set, strong-looking man she liked drank his beer that they had brought into the restaurant in a six-pack and he said Oh Eisenhower, Stevenson—and murmured in song "Pay me my money down"—it didn’t matter much as long as they could get two cars and a power mower into every garage, and a transistorized hearing aid into an eyeglass frame now. (No matter
what
you know how to do, you’re not going to phase out the strontium 90 from your milk.)

So she gave him hell—an insider, the cynical kind, do-nothing—and then she shook her head when he shut his eyes smiling like a blind man, and he shook his head, saying, Don’t be so damn hopeful about things. And they were both shaking their heads when he opened his eyes upon her amusement and said she reminded him of his grandmother in a 1900 photograph posed on a bicycle in straw hat, puffed sleeves, long skirt, dark bowtie, one discreet toe on the grass.

She asked if this was a compliment, knowing it was.

He said his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

I can imagine, she said, wishing she’d thought of something better to say, her eyes bright, seeing him for herself, her slow smile made witty, to him, by the pinch of her teeth in her lower lip and then her tongue. And at this point they were aware of time passing—he, of the excellent dark, rather coarse hair held up in back with a comb, and "her own eyes" (which their largeness and somewhat hard though momentary fixity made you identify them as) now turned upon her own hand lying along the table; she, of his large, sluggish or sleepy eyelids, and her hand, and the hazy blue and dark brown of his tweed jacket sleeve; and she suspected he had maybe two more or less under control girlfriends at present and was thinking something like How long till I make the grade, and will I have to ask her?—but then saw she was thinking the question from her side, and out of nowhere she said, Learning to whistle is like kissing, I mean learning to kiss—I mean if you learn from someone you love. It could have been dumb, her speaking so—but it wasn’t.

Then he didn’t call; then in vain she called him, and this was 1956. And then the next night—a Thursday—he called from Montauk and she couldn’t hear the sea so he held the receiver away from his ear for her to hear, but she did think that this independent man was not with anyone, and she was quite sure she smelt unsmoked cigar and garden mint over the phone and wished that she had put her hand out to feel his arm when they had had dinner. He said he would be back in New York the next day, and for a moment they both knew he had said it frankly. She ran her hand through her hair and he asked her what she was doing.

She said she was thinking how to put off a client tomorrow morning.

"Just tell him he has to wait," he said.

"She’s an architect," she said, "and
her
client’s getting impatient, that’s the thing, it’s this new light the Japanese copied from the Italians and it’s been ordered but it seems to have taken a long time, and now two real-estate guys in New Jersey are going to manufacture it a lot cheaper if we can wait. It’s the lighting business."

"What do you mean ‘seems’?" he said.

She felt some parts of them touching and she leaned toward him.

He said, "Is
her
client a woman too?"

She laughed, she knew she had tickled him.

He said, "You know me," and he said words he hadn’t known were coming but came from long memory as if he were off in the future, "I want a woman to get everything that’s coming to her."

She said, "O.K., I’m laughing, but you’ll earn that."

"Easy to get into, hard to get out," he at once regretted saying and knew he would remember. But "Hard to
stay
out," she answered, knowing (as she told him next day) that at that moment on the telephone he had got the grip of her eyes, or (as he knew but never told her) the memory of such grip thrown through his body like a passage of time. He was used to her at the same time that he didn’t know what to expect.

Her name was Joy, a name he wasn’t crazy about. But, though their love had its silly, dependent side, he was no good at thinking up those nicknames like Leafie or Needles, Nuzzle or Lark—or Sorry (his father’s for his mother Sarah) or Sam, his brother’s name for
his
wife—Sam—or, for a while, Joy’s name for him, Ghost, or Ghostie. It was from the song "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and it was he who had sung it to her in a whisper while the black pianist ("Negro," then) had played it in a pre-inflation French restaurant with buttery, average food (quote unquote, James) the second time they went out, though afterward they called it their third Chinese meal, and at the end of the song he said, "Let’s go."