Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "But I understand," said Sue, who had the slightest physical discomfort and was afraid the conversation had to get somewhere but might not. "You’re forgiven," she said to the other woman.

  "You’re funny," said Maya.

  "It’s behind you," said Sue.

  "But money isn’t only money," said Maya suddenly. "It’s how hard you have to hack for it."

  "Where in New England do you paint?" asked Sue. "I don’t think the book said."

  "I don’t paint," said Maya. "I never had the slightest gift. It was Connecticut at first, Vermont later on. There was a problem about my getting a driver’s license."

  "What was the problem?"

  "I didn’t get one."

  "How come?"

  "I happen to think driving is insane," said Maya.

  "What about being driven?" Sue asked. They observed the man with the red mustache licking his fingers.

  Well, Maya was of the opinion that it depended on who was doing the driving, and Dave was perfectly adequate, so why pressure her?

  "Really/’ said Sue, supportiveiy. But there she was, agreeing; and she added, "It’s hard to understand women who don’t drive; I think someone said that. But I couldn’t imagine not having my license." Again this was not quite what Sue had meant to say.

  She felt she was overhearing Maya, who went on musingly, seeing from far off by private surveillance some poignant map of motions; see the women pulling into the train station parking lot at sunset in the springtime; see them busing the children to school; see them unlocking the back of the station wagon for the cute supermarket boy to unload the cart he’s wheeled out for you—a silver basket with a jammed wheel. Subjugation came step by step, not all at once, and suddenly there you were, you were in the picture, drawn in by some drug of living with others.

  "That’s eternal," said Sue. Which came out flattering. "But don’t forget the women cab drivers up there in the front seat."

  "Will you say what you mean," said Maya. She looked back across the room and smiled at the woman in the yellow T-shirt and pointed to her cup. The man with the bright, bushy eyebrows and the mustache to end all mustaches blew two smoke rings and would have managed a third but proceeded to cough violently, shaking his head and grinning as the women watched his paroxysms.

  "Subjugation," said Sue. "Was it really subjugation?"

  "No, for God’s sake," said Maya, "it wasn’t really subjugation. It was only in my head. Got any other questions? It sounds like you haven’t had your turn yet."

  "I hope I don’t," said Sue.

  "He sounds O.K.," said Maya gently.

  Sue thought a moment. "I don’t know him too well yet," she said. "At least I can say what I mean to him."

  "What you mean to him?" said Maya.

  Sue shook her head and smiled tolerantly. "We’re more easygoing," she said. "I don’t ask him a lot of questions."

  "About old loves."

  "Right."

  "Do you want to know?"

  "Oh, once he had two girl friends going at the same time, and he was living with one. It didn’t make him exactly happy."

  "Poor thing," said Maya.

  "He did have," said Sue, "what he called a long misunderstanding with one person he really loved. I believe she was beautiful—I mean, I’m sure she was and," Sue shrugged, "he got really terribly confused, I gather. I didn’t much care to hear about her; I didn’t make a point of it, but he understood."

  "I would have gotten every last detail," said Maya.

  "Would you?"

  "No. Yes."

  "He said he was afraid she was suicidal, and once when they’d had a fight to end all fights, he felt suicidal himself—whatever that means."

  "Which ain’t much," said Maya.

  "But he said they could never have agreed on a suicide pact; he wishes he had made the point. They might have had a good laugh about it and parted more like friends."

  "So he had a good laugh with you instead, right?"

  "Right."

  "Have you ever hated him?" asked Maya abruptly.

  "I can’t say I have," said Sue.

  "It’ll give you a rush," said Maya.

  "I don’t follow you," said Sue. Maya had said the same thing to her.

  "It’s liberating," said Maya.

  "Well, I got a lot out of the workshop," said Sue.

  "My dear," said Maya. "I think you haven’t smelled rock bottom yet."

  "That’s true," said Sue bravely. "I haven’t been that desperate."

  "It isn’t like any workshop," said Maya. "No one can tell you."

  "I’ve listened to everything you’ve said," said Sue. "I’m hopeful. I’m getting married to my lover. We’re buying an apartment in my building. I’m pregnant; I didn’t say that. He’s glad. He’s quite a bit older, but he’s never taken the plunge. He’s wonderful. He’s amazing."

  Sue had said too much. So she added, "I guess I didn’t mention I’m pregnant. It happened during the workshop."

  Sue and Maya had to laugh, relieved of a burden apparently not there until it wasn’t there.

  "You’re pretty," said Maya.

  "Thank you."

  "I get sick of being blonde with blue eyes," said Maya.

  Sue smiled—rather sweetly, she knew. She turned to look out through the street window behind her.

  "But to be blonde with eyes like yours," said Maya, "or to have my eyes and your hair—Celtic—that would be the thing. But what are your eyes?"

  "Sort of brown," said Sue.

  "Better than that," said Maya.

  The man at the other table had a fit of coughing that wouldn’t go away until the instant before the woman in the yellow T-shirt paused to clap him on the back, coming with Maya’s cappuccino.

  "That’s better," said Maya.

  "But subjugation," said Sue seriously.

  "You’re really asking for it," said Maya. "Remember, I can be held responsible for what I say."

  One could use other words than "subjugation," according to Maya, if one wanted to split hairs. Anyway, this was how it had happened—in a nutshell.

  Maya told it so Sue could practically see the man—she knew she could—through the words of this woman she’d run into in a cafe that her own Dave had given her the address of, that she had been meaning to come to all by herself until he had suggested today. For a while her time was going to be her own. Maya’s experience was not her experience, and she didn’t especially need to tell about herself. Actually, she was ready for Maya to go.

  Maya’s words felt more directed to Sue than before, and Sue signaled to the woman at the Gaggia machine. There was a harshness that had been in Maya’s words that Sue recognized as now missing. The words were uncomfortable.

  "He phoned from his office and asked me to meet him at the movies," said Maya. "Dinner was all out on the chopping board. I put it on hold. Take a break from cooking, he was always saying. Or he phoned from Chicago— Chicago! when I thought he was twenty blocks away!—he hadn’t known he was going until the last second, and he hadn’t been able to reach me before he left. But I’d been home reading, right? Pack a bag for both of us, he said, we’d have a long weekend with his friends in Montana. I said, ‘Montana?’

  Sue felt the word "Montana." That is, sung from a familiar guitar by an easygoing voice, an already beloved voice that had recently taken up the guitar. Vm goin’ to Montana for to throw the hoolihan. She didn’t know what the hoolihan was. It was a type of cow or horse cowboys used to ride, she thought.

  Sue said, "I would have gone to Montana."

  "That was a weekend," said Maya. "I forgot my diaphragm, and Dave got paralyzed on top of our host’s roof just when a windstorm came up."

  "Did you travel a lot?" asked Sue.

  "Of course not. I was thinking about a job. And how would I travel with a job? And anyway, weekends aren’t traveling."

  "So what did you do in between?"

  "A lot of reading," said Maya. "I was reading science; yes, sc
ience. I sat reading from first thing in the morning till the middle of the afternoon. I used to get a phone call twice a day for a while. A variety of dirty phone calls I called a Sadness Call or a Tragedy Call: I’d pick up, and all I’d hear was someone weeping. I didn’t ask, ‘Who is this?’ They would hang up and the line would start buzzing. It sounded as if maybe not the weeping person herself had hung up. I told Dave and at first he didn’t believe me, but it was true. He paced the living room in front of the couch where I was lying with a drink in my hand, waiting for the timer to ring in the kitchen. He said my reading gave me fantasies. He got so he wouldn’t sit down."

  "You were thinking about a job," said Sue. She was ready for Maya to go.

  "I was reading geometry. Yup. Then I was reading economics; I was sick of hearing people talk about it."

  "I know what you mean," said Sue, "but no one really understands it."

  " ‘Why do you read that stuff?’ Dave said. He wanted to know what I thought of Delius’s ‘Florida Suite’; what did I think of a Dylan song, where had Dylan gotten it from? But then Dave would talk about economics after all, and he wasn’t over my head. The only advantage of public-venture-capital companies over private is liquidity, as I recall. It’s like those phone calls. I almost dream them. ‘Are you still getting those phone calls?’ he’d ask, as if he wanted me to bring up my insane fantasies. One night he said, ‘What are we going to do about you?’ "

  Sue imagined him standing doing something—she wasn’t sure what— but straining his muscles putting out effort, a tall man.

  "He demanded to know why I didn’t take my painting seriously," continued Maya. "I told him I enjoyed it, fooling around in a field, getting everything in that field except the horse, which I always left out because I can’t draw horses. Or sitting on a stump trying to get the color of a pond at five o’clock. He said that I should do something with the painting. He used to frown seriously as if he was really thinking about it.

  ‘You, you’re just waiting for something to happen,’ he said. I said things were happening. I was getting those phone calls. ‘That’s what I mean,’ he said; ‘you’re at loose ends, you don’t think enough of yourself.’

  "One Sunday night in Vermont I was packing a bag. I mean, that’s what I’d do Sunday at that hour, like clockwork."

  "You said that," said Sue. "You said you met here like clockwork."

  "I meant on one particular day of the week. Guess which one. Well, that Sunday in Vermont, a picture of mine was lying on the bed. Suddenly I hadn’t painted it. I could see it. I don’t know how long this went on before I was aware of Dave standing in the doorway with his new safari bow."

  It was so vivid Sue looked away. She saw the man wedge one end of the hunting bow against his foot and decisively bend the top end down to hook the loop into the groove. She saw him occupied. She saw pale stubble along his jaw. She saw rimless glasses that she wanted to change for Polo horn-rims but she couldn’t make out his eyes, which were aimed past her over her shoulder.

  "He knew I was aware of him. Then he said, ‘Do you want me to pack?’ I didn’t answer because I knew what he meant, but, you see, I didn’t answer because I was in that picture of mine. I resolved to be nice and to the point: I said, ‘I’ve done something here.’

  "Well, it released him from the doorway. I can visualize to one side of that door a photograph. I wouldn’t hang some dribble of mine, not even in a cottage in Vermont. He stood beside me. ‘You’re going to have a show,’ he said, T don’t care what you say. Compare this stuff to the stuff they sold at the outdoor show in August.’ "

  "What was the photograph of?" said Sue, wishing to be alone.

  "I never got to tell him what I’d started to say," said Maya. "I said I was going to settle for what I’d already completed. I let him misunderstand. I said all I wanted to do was look again because I had found some buried treasure in those pictures, if you could call them pictures. ‘There you go again,’ he said; ‘of course they’re pictures.’ Anger—I’ll never forget it. I was smelling him differently. Do you know he turned that bow into a sort of person who was with him."

  "That first picture," said Sue, "in the field you found hands going at each other."

  "Four handfuls of fingers, that’s right—"

  "That’s how you got it."

  "And nose-like things inside the still grasses, point to point. The eyes came later, but not real eyes—the land looking back. I found a pretty good horse standing inside the pond with lily pads for a saddle."

  "I remember," said Sue, "you didn’t leave it out." She was feeling the weight of her legs so much she needed to stand on them. She remembered actual words.

  "I told Dave it was a relief finding myself in those third-rate, little weekend smudges."

  ‘They weren’t third-rate," said Sue.

  "That’s what he said—and how would you know?"

  "I mean, not after you’ve read the book."

  A distinct snicker came from the man at the other table.

  There was another cappuccino in front of Sue. "I don’t know why I ordered this," she said. "I don’t think the first one agreed with me."

  "Isn’t that quite normal?" said Maya. "You look a bit pale."

  Sue wanted to ask Maya what her ex-husband had looked like. That had a mysterious way of showing you how to take other things.

  "I felt the change," Maya said, "but I didn’t take advantage of it. ‘What do you mean "therapy"?’ he said. This is art and there’s someone out there who’ll pay for it—you said yourself that money makes work real; I didn’t say it,’ he said, ‘you said it.’

  "So instead of peddling the pictures, I told on them. I loathe writing. It’s my frustration threshold."

  "I always forget," said Sue, "does that mean the threshold is low or high?"

  "It doesn’t matter," said Maya; "experience, I have learned, is frustration."

  "It isn’t that bad," said Sue, "you should try other people’s."

  "Because," Maya went on as if she hadn’t heard, "without it there isn’t any. I mean, I’ll say this for frustration, it’s always reminiscent of the next thing."

  "Didn’t you write that?" said Sue.

  "I wrote about this poor freak who was trying to reach out but was getting clobbered every step of the way. And that I did not write," said Maya. "I got so I could hardly see the original blob of my pond, my tree, my field; it was like taking your glasses off; you had to wait for that old scenery junk to come back, and even then it was a strain."

  Sue sipped her coffee. "You said in the book that he encouraged you to doit."

  "He found some pages I’d written in pencil. He said it was like a mystery. So I kept going."

  "You had to," said Sue. She felt pale again.

  "Steps came to the door of the study at midnight and went away."

  "You were usefully employed," said Sue.

  "Right. He asked if I would read it to him some evening."

  "Maybe he had a hard time with your handwriting," said Sue, tilting her head to one side.

  "So one day, the first thirty pages were missing. I had a daydream of being relieved. By sunset the pages had reappeared. I was so mad I couldn’t speak. I mean, I couldn’t think. One night he came home all excited. Someone else had been reading me."

  "He’d Xeroxed them?" asked Sue.

  "Susan, how did you guess?" said Maya. "He had them typed first. My confession. My salvage operation a piece of myself, as they say, in the hands of, as it turned out, if I do say so, a very smart woman. She wanted to see the illustrations. Everyone checking on me, right?"

  "It sounds like help," said Sue.

  "You understand how good I’d been," said Maya. "Keeping up the family tradition as if it was mine to keep up."

  "You mean, come home with first prize or don’t come home."

  "That’s it," said Maya. "You’ve picked that up. Oh, Dave joked about them, his family, but there they were."

  Sue had only to wait f
or what she knew was coming; it came from that distance that had seemed to be Maya’s, but it was other people’s experience that had to be Sue’s—it was time.

  "There they were," said Maya. "Dave’s father a legendary metallurgist, his grandfather a judge, great-grandfather an infamous, wall-eyed general."

  The words were grotesque. She couldn’t stand them.

  "But they’re Dave’s family; they’re not you," she said.

  "As for me," said Maya, "Dave couldn’t talk about anything except my project."

  "He got it published for you, for God’s sake," said Sue.

  "What do you mean? What do you mean?" said Maya. "What’s the matter with you?"

  "Did he ever brag about doing that for you?" said Sue. Sue put her hand on Maya’s wrist; Maya’s wrist felt warm; she withdrew it.

  "Just the opposite," she said. "He didn’t have to talk about what he’d done for me; he knew I would."

  "I’m sorry," said Sue. "I’m sorry for you both."

  "I’m not," said Maya, "and neither are you."

  "Let me cast the deciding vote," said the man with the bushy red eyebrows and mustache.

  "This," said Sue, "is the sort of thing my fiancé would go out of his way to do for me if I wanted him to."

  "Your fiancé " said Maya, as if that did it.

  "And if I had your ability," Sue finished.

  "In my opinion," said the man at the other table, "these are two entirely different men, a second-generation chauvinist pig (although ‘chauvinist’ was never the right word) and a somewhat battered third-generation."

  Maya stood up and found a five-dollar bill in her bag; she dropped it in the middle of the table. "Who does get your vote?" she asked the man, "since you’ve turned out to be a male suffragette?"

  "Oh heavens," said the man, and contemplated the flame of his lighter for a second before he lit another cigarette. "I’d like to vote for all of you."

  "Why was it subjugation?" said Sue, having been paid for and feeling distinctly sick. "I really want to find out."