Women and Men (209 page)

"Are you going to unpack?" said Joy.

"Who screwed around first?" Flick asked him one evening in New York, no longer in a mood to reflect upon an amazing grandmother she’d never known—her grazr-grandmother.

Flick was eighteen and he was probably going to South America in a couple of weeks and she was in a brief period of not being in touch with her mother in New Hampshire, though both parents wrote her every week. The waiter would probably not have been curious, but the waiter had gone away, while the father was telling the daughter that old Bob Yard the electrical contractor who had wired Flick’s Uncle Brad’s house and the town’s streetlights all the way up to the cemetery but not including the traffic intersection near the race track had never relinquished his war story of the man who died twice in the Pacific and, coming to, after death number one, correctly predicted that six American ships would be sunk by Jap suicide pilots in the battle for Leyte Gulf and that we would stop the Kamikazes only with the granddaddy of all bombs—then died again for good with a magnetic halo shining golden over his belly.

Flick said anyone could have predicted the bomb: it was just bigger.

Mayn said he never knew if Bob Yard—Bad Bob Yard—believed the story, he wasn’t the type to believe it though Mayn’s mother might have believed it; Bob was a horny old wolf, but his wife thought he was a scream and they had an understanding, which meant that once she ripped a tuft out of his head (save it going gray), but the understanding must have included her and his, his and her, absences from home, and his words (shaking his head) that they were both getting on—at which she laughed looking to Jim he thought for agreement that her husband was droll—"getting on in
years,
I mean," said Bob, and they both had to laugh at that, and because crazy as it or they might be they did sort of get on together.

Flick said she would have shrimp kebabs.

Her father was trivial, then? But then he got the grip of her eyes like a memory and she smiled and said it would be nice down where he was going, it was summer, she seemed to remember. And he said come to think of it her mother and he had had an understanding that worked best at a distance— which got him a laugh that was a bit off—but then out of Mayn came the unforeseen notion that over the phone the diaphragm waves retained a remainder of message units that did not get translated back into words at the receiving end but just went on. He had some of that stuff surprisingly in his head, and it made her think of how her mother had sometimes called him "Mayn," and once in a letter he’d consoled Flick for her supposedly barren imagination by telling her that the void was not just a regular void and empty but was full of all that we did not expect of ourselves—which actually surprised him, that is to find himself saying things like that.

He told the waiter they would have the grape leaves and some roe, and the waiter said, "Taramasalata," translating it into sharp, frank approval.

The waiter went away.

"Who screwed around first?"

"It was officially mutual, I don’t see how that happened," the father said; "but on the other hand, it wasn’t much. From time to time we both felt our hearts weren’t in any of that stuff. A shrink—pardon me—"

"—very funny—"

"—asked her if she’d ever cheated on me and she walked out of his office. But she came back because she wasn’t sure if it was the word ‘cheated’ or the surprise, and she knew he was better than that, he was a good man even if he used stupid words—well, square. You know. And there
was
cheating."

"I know."

"We were cheating ourselves."

"Oh, great. Of what?"

"I don’t know. Frankness? Because we were more afraid than silly, can you understand that?"

Flick tipped up her glass and finished it and seemed to drop it back down to the table. She made him feel he was pausing and making her wait.

"Sometimes I was afraid I’d find you all dead when I came home."

"From where?"

"Anywhere."

"Like Washington or out West?"

"Or someone’s apartment."

"I remember you called from Washington and Mom cried when she hung up."

"You know something, I always got the grip of her eyes when I phoned, it went right through me like a memory you know, it felt like a passage of time," he was saying, thinking of when he’d once felt this but hadn’t said it.

"I guess you were very married. She told me you were shy, but I never saw it."

"One part of your mother and me was very conventional, O.K.?"

"But this screwing around went on. And I don’t even want to hear about it."

"You want a one-word description of it all?"

"Like Eisenhower," she remembered.

"Very good!"

"Maybe I can think of a two- ..."

"Funny, it was more an emotional screwing around, if you can understand."

"I don’t see what you mean."

"Long talks. With the other person. Agonized, inconclusive. Helpful."

"Sounds O.K. Sounds weird."

"It was close. While on the other side, we had a high resistance, went at it tooth and nail, on foot and by word of mouth—I mean the marriage went on."

"Why didn’t you end it?"

"We did," he said, and saw that she felt his stupid pain in her unsaid charge
Not soon enough
—she always acted like she knew what was what— and her pain was for having wanted him to think those words, go on thinking them, yet his and maybe Joy’s was to have covered up the signs over the years, the warning signs, so the children were more surprised than they needed to be when the time came. Andrew had said he had thought it had happened because his parents stayed up all night arguing. This was what he had said to Flick and Flick had started to cry when she told her mother.

Flick said, "We’re all going to have a good life, Dad."

"Whew!" she said with her breath.

Mayn’s cheek came up hard; did he look skeptical, smiling?

A Greek place up in the German neighborhood and they’d only had a glass each, but he relaxed his cheeks and managed to say, "See what the booze brings out," guessing she saw what was in his eyes, though then he suddenly thought of how good the crusty sliced loaf of bread looked in its napkin.

"It’s not booze," she said, "it’s wine, it’s golden wine."

He wondered if she liked the government agency job he’d gotten her in Washington? Or helped her get. She didn’t want to go on with college and she’d been gallivanting around the country in some kid’s car and they’d crossed the Mississippi four times on the way west, camping bright-eyed under a dark curve of continental sky. He didn’t bat an eyelash when she asked him who Mayga was because Joy had told her she was a woman in his life and her death had looked like murder. He said, "How did
she
ever hear of Mayga? She was just a colleague." But Flick thought he was wiped out.

Later he said, "Call your mother." He had hard, dry crumbs all over his place.

Flick didn’t answer for a moment. "One side of my head says O.K.; the other side says Oh shit why should I?"

She seemed not to know what was obviously in his head.

Andrew, Andrew.

Jim visited him occasionally totally unexpectedly, but more often he kind of worried about it and thought he must make a point of flying to Boston or having Andrew to New York or Washington, the maker of riddles. All but one of which riddles came out as clear and economical as a good lead: the one in question, however, sweaty and long-winded like the sweaty expensive late-night grass it came from, and assembled mostly from what the father over years had said to one or another about himself: Somewhere two people are turned into one; yet witness another One, lone species offspring from these preceding two; and as he, this One, looks back to them, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he can’t see quite where they went; and, deserted by that origin, this One feels thrust from that loss into the future, where he should be glad to be because, newsman as he becomes, it’s where tomorrow’s news is; but he
isn’t
glad, because bringing some bits of that aborted origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery far more intelligent than he which is partly the Shock of his unhappy mother once upon a time disappearing into the elements, he has on just one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost origin as if to find it in the future where he travels—

(whew! a lighter voice exhales returning or retelling the riddle to its subject on another late night).

Not the night here, though, toward the end of which, after a Greek dinner with his daughter, Jim called Joy when he was alone, feeling steady then, but not very solid.

Hello, he heard her say, softly so he felt no one had been thinking about him just before he’d called—which was kind of maudlin, which in turn might be the tariff on what was possibly just plain true. But her second hello wasn’t your enthusiastic Hello! but the same quiet, thought-like word, so he felt that she had been thinking about him, or she’d been thinking about her relation with Jack.

So here Joy was and was willing to talk but she made him feel it had to be
about
something. Then clearly she thought maybe he’d had more than enough. Her voice hit him and he got a still breath of the New Hampshire night from behind his eyes.

He thought he would (he said) drop in on her and Jack.

Has Andrew written you lately? she asked.

She didn’t quite say not to come, but she didn’t want him.

Which let him feel he didn’t know what she wanted. Which was, he knew, what she wanted—mutual debt minus time.

He expected to be in Montpelier and he could get a plane from there to Keene, he thought, and he wondered if she was looking at Jack while she talked. What the hell is it that happens anyway, he thought, you get a divorce from somebody you love because there’s too much between you, too much nerves, too many wrong pauses; and you go from there into a lesser relationship, isn’t that what happens?—and were these some words coming from his daughter’s private thoughts at dinner?—or somewhere else?—or from him alone? He didn’t mention dinner with their daughter Flick or the book that Joy and Jack had sent her for her birthday,
The Letters ofF. Scott Fitzgerald;
didn’t mention a disturbing and involved and unanswered letter from Andrew many weeks ago, but like a blank Mayn saw the dark back of Jack’s head bending toward the different-shaped stones framing a hearth that had seldom been used in summer. He said he didn’t know how much time he’d have after Montpelier, and Joy didn’t ask him what he’d be doing in Montpelier. He said it was about an insurance investment in South America, he had to ask a few questions without telegraphing his moves by making an advance appointment, though a lobbyist who was trying to get a rider onto a bill that was still in committee and who was pretty good himself at being in two or three places at once might have told the man in Montpelier that Mayn was quite capable of materializing.

No one was running for
cover
exactly, but—and he asked if she recalled—and she interrupted him with "the letter I wrote—why
wouldn’t
I recall it?" The "wouldn’t" stopped the flow, if there’d been any, but he was dazzled and his heart was on the move, he bet she heard it. But she was demanding that he not stop, he felt that. And so he told her O.K. if she came on like that O.K. then, he was answering the letter now ten years late in which she’d said "cover story."

"But it
was
answered," she said. "By phone, by letter, and"—he knew she’d dropped her eyes—"by nothing."

"But I wasn’t always away, and I wasn’t away that much, was I?"

Meanwhile she was saying under him and over him, We had all that out—Christ how he got into her mind and she couldn’t think straight, they were into each other for more than either could afford, or at least afford to think about. No, he said, she’d said his being away too much was their cover story. Corny, said Joy, but we all get that way. She was quite fond of the old apartment—aesthetic distance, she said (and he saw the night shadows of maple branches and couldn’t make out if the spruce and pine were pale with snow). Please, he said—and felt he was inciting her to hang up—and said then not what was in his mind but something truly trite, which went something like What world are we living in where it’s wrong to need the warmth and familiarity of another person, your spouse—bad word—your man, your woman—too possessive—let me finish—

Oh for God’s sake, she said (and didn’t say what he felt he distinctly picked up and without a "dear Jim") "You’re in your cups"—oh the unfairness of that!—he knew he’d phone and tell Flick, who would sound interrupted, whatever she was doing, except she’d pay close if tired attention and even get a little laugh out of it. He let his hair down more than ten years ago, he reported probably quite exactly what Joy had said: "What’s between us is what we were and you’re not going to fix that. Men and women often don’t get along. I hated it when you were away. I knew I would. I kept track of what time you arrived places, sometimes it made me feel more like an old person than a sailor’s wife. Then you came back. Then you went away to Bridgeport, Cape May, Boston, Florida. You came back. You went away, and a box of grapefruit arrived from the Coast Guard. You came back from Portland with four serrated spoons and ate some of the grapefruit. Suddenly you didn’t go away—it often felt like that—there you were, pinning up Flick’s hair while the tub ran and the faucets and pipes were groaning and you were still getting the last hairpin in and she was stepping into the tub and you thought she’d fall; I was thinking whether to pick Andrew up or let him yell and you got the pin to hold and your hand touched that little shoulder and I had to admit that, well, my husband touched me too like that, but damn it all (yet it’s a family, it’s a family!) yet I thought damn nice of him to borrow us—to^Hit in an appearance and put up that little girl’s hair for her bath with my hairpins, two years old, three years old, four years old, she didn’t get private about herself with you till way past what the book said but she did with a babysitter (that Irish girl from just the other side of Third who lived in the tenement brownstone they tore down to put up the apartment high-rise everyone kept saying wrongly for months was a Howard Johnson motor inn, who would tell you when you walked her home that the priest had been getting her alone a lot), with that Irish girl in the room Flick wouldn’t get undressed at the age of seven. But I was used to you being away. It affected my thinking. What thinking? I did a lot, I thought, but now I don’t think it even
was
thinking, it was like years of our both play-acting that we didn’t claim (you know) power over each other. So there you were. I thought I shouldn’t turn the TV on; you were home. I had suddenly to be contented. I was crazy. You didn’t talk about big events, and I thought I was glad you didn’t, and you think history’s a mess anyway. So I turned on the TV anyway. There it was,
Judgment at Nuremberg
you’d thought you’d missed. Playhouse 90. Good. You were glad it was on. You went away and it was like coming into range. But I must have had that range; listen, when I married you I thought I knew all about your being away and then home, and you would be—