Women and Men (199 page)

Once when he visited his father in New Jersey he ran into old Bob Yard down at the Courthouse—Bob Yard, black-eyebrowed old part-dog, part-goat, part-horse, the electrical contractor, an Elk, like Mayn’s father, nothing else in common except that neither of them saw much of Jim from year to year. Bob liked to nag and jab with his penetrating voice like looking for inside info that he had himself all the time, and this time Bob asked if Jim had a picture of Joy; and Mayn happened to have a passport shot (in which Joy looked disturbed as if she were about to be transported somewhere). Old Bob—Bad Bob—held it up against the sun. His prominent front teeth and the eyes a little close together though not "bad" looking made him look stupidly like Mayn’s father but with a narrower face: "Your mother would have liked her," he said, "I can see it in the eyes. Your mother’s approval."

"In Joy’s eyes?"

"Your mother’d know how to say it. Your mother turns over in her grave hearing me speak for her. She had it coming—all the times she wouldn’t speak for herself."

The tongue came out and licked the lips. "Turns over with gratitude as if she was alive. The combat boys said it during the War: ‘Nobody dies.’ Though she might not say so."

Beyond the Jersey Central crossing, two men in dungarees came out of the firehouse and stood looking downstreet and one of them was Earl Haight with the red beak of a nose that had been red from the time he was a kid— Earl, from Mayn’s high school class, father a County Jail guard aiming to be nominated for Justice of the Peace. The other man outside the firehouse was Ira Lee, the Indian whose family had lived in the same narrow frame house for years at the power-company end of the black section. Mayn’s grandmother had taught Ira to garden. Crew cut former halfback. Mother a long-fingered halfbreed Creek from somewhere in the mid-South who had cleaned sometimes for Mayn’s grandmother. Father a Saconnet descended from the famed woman chief of that small, not originally nomadic Rhode Island tribe.

Bob Yard brought the photo down out of the sun. "Jimmy, you were smart not to stick around," he said. " ‘Course the paper, you wouldn’t have kept it going, no one could"—and Mayn heard the Jersey
r
roll through him like a hundred familiar greetings on the family porch three minutes’ walk from here, less than fifty miles from New York, "Get it steady," said Bob Yard, "cook for you, have some kids, get it steady. ‘Course you guys moving around, you get it steady anyhow. She cooking something for you?"

Mayn had to scowl like a smile or laugh. His father didn’t talk like that. Not that with old Bob you talked openly about everything. Mayn was way in the future staring back into the past wondering if his own father had been unfaithful to his wife’s memory even—words made you laugh and history fell apart into tales and isolated mysteries threatening to be trivial. But his father wouldn’t talk like Bob. Mayn didn’t care if his father was a prude or wasn’t.

Joy could be romantic, and she knew he was too, though she played to the other side of him, the part that wasn’t one with her. But the romantic in him was that he didn’t give a damn, though he didn’t say so. (Their daughter one day years later at a restaurant said, "You and Joy didn’t talk things out, I’m almost sure of that, I mean like me and my friends do.") He took Joy to Bermuda once on two hours’ notice, a pretty dashing but a rather funny thing to do to her, though to tell the truth she’d felt like it all day; and he made abrupt statements to her that made her go moist in the eyes (like he’d dreamed of someone like her when he was in high school, senior year, long before he knew her, he meant it)—she felt paid back too much, why was that? but she thought he meant
day
dreamt because he always claimed he didn’t
have
sleep dreams—(he liked, he said, the way she came into a room as if she were all by herself and going to be) and when he told her once that he was happy with her, it almost made her cry (she didn’t tell him) and later by herself it, or something, did make her cry. He didn’t give a damn about anniversaries or candlelight on mahogany, but he would buy her two dozen yellow roses, lay the soft greenly crackling cone of paper on the hall table as if it were not to be noticed even after they were finished hugging and kissing. He’d hardly ever written her a love letter, didn’t give a damn about old letters except ones he could quote from, couldn’t play house with his bride, though did tell about his family and his hometown, and Joy (he was asked to believe) recalled what he said sometimes better than he recalled it, though he’d tell (and remember) specially about his grandmother and her house down the street, his haven— for she had told him weird tales about the West and taught him to whistle.

But he didn’t give a damn about blanket chests—or a spinning wheel seen once through the fire-bright window of a New Hampshire inn; didn’t give a damn—or was not sentimental—about their first TV in 1959, an Admiral (and why did he think of it?); and he liked but could take or leave a cave painting they’d brought back from France (without the cave!)—a working honeymoon—yet he did care more than he showed about her favorite record in 1956: (shepherds calling across a valley; a child invisibly hearing a country lullaby; southern sun coursing through someone’s vibrant objection to a wife)
Songs of the Auvergne.
Sure he liked music. Listening to Dvorak when he’d come home from a trip, he said he knew she wanted to take flying lessons; and she was amazed he knew, and he said, Oh he thought she’d mentioned it (but he knew that it had come out of the blue—he put it out of his mind). She told him he liked the "coming" part of coming home, and he realized she was right. There wasn’t time to mail postcards from where he went, so he brought them home with him. He wasn’t sentimental about snapshot albums or possessions (his, hers, ours), or the soft green and cheesy chalupas at a restaurant on the corner that reminded her of a family place in the north end of Chicago, though a pan of oven-toasted and salted almonds their first Christmas brought back his mother’s furtive eyes with such a dryness of the mouth he forgot he had told Joy she used to make them and he didn’t recall till weeks later, so the mystery of the parallel stayed real. He wasn’t sentimental about Joy’s dough-bake Christmas-tree ornaments lying brightly colored in the cardboard box on the rug one December day he came in from La Guardia Airport to find no one home and in the middle of the living room this flash of green, red, turquoise, gold—a gold elephant, a blue dancer, a dark green shining-shellacked fir tree—but of more interest was a damp towel he sniffed hanging on the shower-curtain rail—flesh-rubbed—a message the skin of his hips took, that was lust in an absence he chose for a message—but more a presence than a real message; and she was so "there"—so "there"
now
—in how sometimes she watched for him to make the first move and then it didn’t seem only his, or his at all. He could run his hand down her back all night through the last button of bone into a spread softness doubling itself in curves back and forth larger than fingers or hand—and down her side and into the soft, sharp dip above her hipbone that sent his thumb inward in a small arc to touch tendrils only to find eyes glistening in the near dark, and her hands were better than his, you might say, even to when she’d lend him one of her hands to move from one place to another. And Bob Yard said Mayn’s mother would have been grateful for this marriage—marriage of love, he really meant, though those words of Bob Yard’s, not himself a sentimental man, brought back eyes that would have seen what the elder son saw in this person Joy, who he thought saw through other people clearly yet saw through them even to what was beyond them. (Say that again, slow.)

She talked of a house they would build, near water she imagined you’d see through the trees. An open-plan house built around a huge tree—he had to laugh—no, she’d seen it from a car years ago, the tree, a hundred feet tall, six feet thick at least, not a branch on it, all gray like a rock, but alive (she
thought
it had been alive)—he had to laugh—and her loving uncle had looked away from the road before she had a chance to speak and had said it was a white oak. It was far from here but you could find oaks like that in New England too, and it was what she wanted, like two children, a girl and then a boy, Flick and Andrew, who Flick felt was so much smarter than she was and who when he went to college years later was a maker of riddles.

Joy’s father had been a chemist with the paper company in Chicago— Donnelly. The chemistry of paper, not that you need to talk about your work. Her sister got on better with him.

In the beginning Joy talked of a future she seemed already to have shared with this fellow Jim Mayn her husband, as if it had come first, so clear was she about it, and quick to catch him thinking her own thoughts about fair-to-poor rural schools when he’d hardly known he was thinking about schools though when she told him schools didn’t matter as much as she’d once thought, he had a spasm of caring still more for her, caring twice as much as he did about the two kids whom he was very content to love—while he did feel in his bones that if she was better balanced than he, she still didn’t admit to herself what it felt like to be preferred to her children, preferred in his sharp, erratic way.

Where were the children? Flick, the sharp-spoken girl, and Andrew, the potential roughneck (he’d suddenly start yelling to himself; it was funny, it was like he’d suddenly started digging down through the Earth—maybe he was hearing things, hearing even then those riddles he used to make up when he went to college). Where were Flick and Andrew in the marriage, in all this?

Everywhere and nowhere. (Her father said she really listened, but her mother shrugged.)

Or everywhere, both parents could sometimes feel, though Jim and Joy saw themselves as wise enough to let their children be free of them.

He listened to her build the house she had in mind and fill it; and he had to speak; but then he said only that . . . well, here he was.

Was he her old-fashioned future? As her sister’s minister back in Aurora, Illinois, had said, commitment in terms of marital union is like living already in the future.

He didn’t know if he could keep up with that future (whether or not he ever got to go to China).

Except that when he could admit abrupt rage in himself upon returning to the apartment and then, as he came in, see Joy watching him from where she was (like a neighbor’s ocelot—more like a friend’s shepherd watching a man and woman she knew leave in the morning—though more like a wife who was prepared for him) and just as this irritation of his toward someone he loved rose and then finished toward her in a rush, and he stood roughly and said something and went toward her, he felt that coming home was coming back: and when she said, "Do you like being here?" (so the words came together though they were divided by time and by sense and between said and not-said), "it’s nice here, isn’t it?" (she’d built a record cabinet, she’d fixed the wall telephone’s loose box)—"when I heard the elevator door, I knew it was you and when I heard the lock I knew you hadn’t shaved before you left the hotel—I know what you’re thinking, don’t say it—the children aren’t home yet—the last thing you want is to eat out tonight, tell me the truth"— he felt that what he’d come back from was some future, and what he’d come back to was an abundance threatening to waste itself on him. With his assignments, you see, he made sense of each individual one.

She told him what had happened while he was gone. Not a whole lot. She could stand with her arms akimbo as if she needed to take up a bit of space.

Sometimes she would know how not to come to him at the door, she would stand in the middle of the living-room rug instead and he could put down his case without taking his eye off her. Once she’d been sitting cross-legged on the sun-covered ochre rug, the ochre sun-struck into a growth loose through the spread of dark, interleaved pairs of bloomed coils, once upon a time beaks, each the beak of the rainbird if you please, standing each upside down to the other, and she was part of the rug so that he looked at both and didn’t know which came first, and this was more crazy than being irritated at feeling grateful; she wasn’t asking for gratitude any more than the eyes of his long-withdrawn mother (inherited by his happier grandmother?) really gave
him
gratitude for marrying for love.

What happens is never what came first, it seems to Jim Mayn, and Joy doesn’t see what he means for he says it even less clearly than that, and then shakes his head at himself and grins grimly as if he has to go off now and talk to someone he despises and once in the middle of an alarm clock going off he smashed the bathroom mirror without a drop of blood and his small daughter came and asked him why he had done it; what happens is never what comes first, it seems, but how about when what comes first has not yet appeared? It is waited for, as if it might be seen approaching through emptiness.
It
is thinking
him!
With ways of thought that aren’t his any more than they are Joy’s or his daughter’s, but these broken statements like he was a cracked philosopher in another life, or a traveling charlatan, another system, come into him, out of him.

Flick and Andrew had a lot to say to each other later on about their parents. Andrew was confused but brilliant about it. His father tried to tell him how to write with few words for his seventh-grade English. Did Jim ever tell anything like that to Flick? She and her brother thought not.

Jim was away too much, they later said. But newly returned was what Joy said she made him feel.

But returned from the future where, say, two people had been turned into one, which economizes on feeling: his daughter heard this at the end of a story one night, she was quite sure.

Yet also another kind of One, offspring from those dubious Two, is different from them, and alone; and as he looks back to the former Two, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he cannot see where they went; and deserted by that origin, this One (namely, Jim) feels thrust untimely from that lost Two into the future, where he should be glad to be because it’s where tomorrow’s news is, but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery smarter than he which is that of his unhappy mother disappearing into the elements, he has on one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost river to then find it in the future where he travels (whew!), or, to put it better, his wife didn’t always know where he was coming from, and, believing him not unfaithful, told him nonetheless that he wasn’t all there. But as her never-at-a-loss friend Lucille Silver put it, What man
is
entirely committed to his marriage? Which for Joy did not cover the thing that was happening to her.