Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "Tomorrow’s Election Day and you’re not going in to the office till late."

  They walked realistically hand in hand to get a newspaper. They made to cross the street again; Mayn let go her hand, he stepped off the curb looking at a hurtling, disintegrating cab coming at him carrying ancient authority, knowledge of this New York City, so that the driver thought here’s a guy, he doesn’t have to raise his hand. But, the brakes crying out prophetically, the high-slung real yellow chassis skiing in toward the curb, Mayn raised his palm (Peace or Stop), felt good, shook his head, but the driver, abandoning his brakes, now found the light changing to red and, against his normal practice of running the red, had to stop since he’s confused, or felt he had to.

  "Wait," she said; "I want you to know why I want to go to the movies even if you already want to know."

  "You’ll tell me even if I don’t."

  "Wrong!" she claimed, laughing anxiously. "I’m not necessarily going to."

  "Please tell me," he said, stepping back onto the curb and looking down into her angry eyes—were her eyes so young as she?, the colors had been put through much thought.

  They opened to the movie timetables. "I feel like I’m already there," he said, and, as if they had made a movie decision, he closed the paper and kissed her, their two soft, closed mouths moving a little upon each other and she opened her eyes so she knew—was that it?—that he wasn’t looking over her shoulder. She said she would like to take a shower, and he murmured that there was a movie near here where you could do that, and she murmured that he had been out of his marriage for too long. No sweat, he added. He felt, through her hands, his clothes on him by the material yard, yards of thickness.

  "Oh," she mildly disagrees—and reaches out again under the hot water from her own shower head in her own bathtub in an intimacy created by her own chosen shower curtain.

  Oh you believe in the two of you, here in an O.K. shower, you don’t have to pinch yourself, only her, and she pretty well thinks you are here, and you don’t believe in people who indulge themselves thinking they could be in two places, particularly since today, Election Day, you don’t have to be anyplace.

  "You voting?" she asks.

  "Nope." But all she knows is that you’re reclaiming a place in the City that friends are letting you reclaim because they don’t want it any more, they’ve sublet it from you while you waited to buy it, a family of friends, friends of the family, living there but now they’re leaving the city. Not out for a week yet. She knows this stuff and that you’re coming from Washington, from the West, from really not too many places, newsmen don’t travel incessantly, but you don’t speak of South America, it’s not too vivid.

  She doesn’t know your daughter’s phone, nor that it’s a new number and in Washington, or how old your daughter is; but there’s a thumping on the front door, isn’t it?, but this young lady hasn’t heard.

  You’ve made your living off information often from those too willing to give it, and reporting it like income, and for too long your aim has had to shift. You’re awake enough to feel the water altering you; it’s what it does so much better than cleaning you off; like the soap making us slippery.

  "Pair-shower time," she said; well, it’s the age she lives in like a place that keeps getting away from you, into you. It might be the age she is.

  "Lower."

  "There?"

  "Hold it—I mean, right there."

  "I know my place. Have we reached it?" she asks.

  "Did you hear someone at the door?" he might seem to change the subject.

  "Did I?"

  He would turn on the cold if with his eyes closed he knew which faucet. "I think we’ve ..."

  "Hey, oldtimer, you with me?"

  "I think we have broken through ..."

  A kiss from you seals two mouths from the shower’s bombardment, ties them with a soapy hand below, until you give that hand of hers a remote-control bump and she smiles you off. You’ve got a mile of rope in your lower back and a coat hanger in your shoulders and you must stretch.

  But you don’t get clear of the two places, the two at once, and you’re the window, and she’s looking at you from one side like she thinks you’re getting off somewhere else by soaping her own dear breast; but she says, "Are you in the thick of something? Why do I feel it’s so close?" and beyond New York or the dead lava of New Mexico’s earth you feel the shower head is spacewise transpondering you two, and when you audibly recall her words, "I just saw you all over again," and you thought this angel wasn’t particularly romantic you step away from the steaming shower that’s talking to you out of its silver disk-head, and, looking behind the shower curtain to the damp yellow tiles and a huge black towel cloaked on the door like a bathrobe and the toilet and the mirror now steamed that in another bathroom you briefly shared with her in Florida, once said, "Look me up" but here doesn’t know you—you hear now in the shower the woman’s voice as long ago as Joy your lost wife saying, "What’s the matter, did you hear something?" and you think you may not be here after all but through a bend of light seeing it awfully clearly.

  She rounds her palm on your hip to slide on around and soap-finger you at the point of your tail—for you are some earlier thing’s future.

  You cough and cough. She frowns and rubs your slippery back; she knows a good cheap hypnotist who’ll get you to stop smoking, she’s almost unhappy (she’s frowning so).

  The film she wanted to see had gone on already, fifteen minutes’ walk away: take a cab (you said), and it took fifteen minutes of sitting to get there, next to each other arm in arm—while you listened to her and told her she could be apologetic about bringing you into a movie half an hour late if she liked—so she, after thinking, said you meant you liked it and why didn’t you think why? But the point was, you were going into a film half an hour late and it was the film she wanted to see even if you didn’t mind, and this was the point—and not that she was apologetic.

  You had said her being apologetic was very sexy; your daughter said very like that. The cab had arrived and Jean wouldn’t let you pay, she was forward on the edge of the leather seat, the woman in the box office was talking on the phone, an old garden-variety clock your father would have on the bedside table beside the glass of water and the yellow-labeled bottle of aspirin and Wood’s Thoroughbred Racing Illustrated, and a clock here with green hands and a yellow face stood beside the opening at the base of the cubicle’s window, and after Jean said she had been in this situation before about paying, you won a compromise you didn’t care about: her movie, his cab fare: but, you explained, because in her paying all or part (well, dinner would have been going too far, and at the Pressbox at that, where she’d gritted her teeth and enjoyed her prime ribs hadn’t she?, dinner would have been letting women into the lockerroom, you said, though you understood there were coed saunas hither and yon nowadays, or at least a Tasmanian economist and his myopic lacrosse-star son reported same at the gym-pool complex of a prominent Middle Atlantic university), you found some sweetness of knowledge in her knowledge of you, and found this right through the paying at the box office where (like a nervous host figuring the tip while the waiter stands near) she wanted to take you up on Apologetic being Sexy but there was a static-fresh ten-dollar bill peeling away from the packet with the bank’s fifty-dollar paper band around it and four ones wrinkled and curling and skating with reverse wind back toward the hand that she said made her feel like this had happened before and pounced on them and slid them outward again as if not wanting them, and this girl you’re with (whose apartment you were already visualizing from under one of her bed pillows which was how you in an occasional crisis slept) was suddenly excited because the time given in the paper was in fact for a prize-winning Eastern European cartoon so they had missed less than twenty minutes of the feature, and as a boy tore the tickets right-handing the stubs to Mayn and the bright, dark photograph which was their screen was straight on regardless of the slope that took them down the narrow ho
use like a movie theater in an Italian movie he thought, quite crowded; and, putting her hand on his shoulder in the darkness of other people’s hands and laps and legs as they tried to see two seats, she whispered that she had always wanted to see this—forever—and he loved her then because she hadn’t remembered to ask him if he had seen the film.

  He looked at her and at the screen now darkened and there on the screen three people he knew were standing face to face alternately talking and silent, and she drew him in off the aisle, and as he came between the screen and three people whom they had to step on, one of the characters on screen broke silence and spoke and was speaking when Jim and Jean—Barbara-Jean her parents called her (long-distance)—sank into the audience and looking at each other’s perfect faces both began to whisper—He: "I love—" synchronized with but halted by her "I love black-and-white," but he heard himself substitute as silently as what she had halted, several adequate covers for the vinous, garlicky "you"—such as "coming in in the middle it’s like getting it twice"; "New York sometimes"; "these people"—onscreen, that is, for they were still there as they were one teenage afternoon at the Walter Reade Strand Theater in a town near the Jersey shore called, in the high-colored atlas of his secret pacts with his grandmother, Windrow, and he’d gone with a couple of his friends and had run into his kid brother and his brother’s shy little girlfriend—not that he hadn’t known they would be here, and his pale brother had looked past him as if he hadn’t been there, because Jim had not worked that morning for his father at the newspaper that was running itself toward liquidation run mainly by the father who had married into it—when despite his calm demeanor everyone especially Jim’s younger brother knew that Mayn Senior’s suffering over their mother’s being gone and dead was too great to bear alone. And on the screen that was finally revealed by two traveling curtains that parted for the cartoon and a newsreel and closed again in order to rattle open once again, these actors and a couple of actresses who had already appeared once talked frankly and dangerously to each other as if even when they were afraid of being caught—hurt—killed, they went ahead with their way of moving, looking away so that the screen losing their faces darkened, looking right at another person so you the onlooker might have been the trick mirror they looked through (though Jim didn’t know about such things at that age), these people who were getting ready to pull a job went ahead with their way of just sharp, abbreviated talking so the silences in between might have been all the admiration they were receiving from the unseen, unknown, silent while candy-crackling audience including Jim and his teenage friends—one of whom said out loud, Oh cripes I thought this was gonna be in Technicolor.

  Admiration that Jim wouldn’t have to announce personally to these apparently normal-size actors with names and with ways of talking and characters he knew no matter what action-packed mystery they appeared in, with cigarettes in their fingers and tough distrust of the world including the audience if they had included it and Jim, which without knowing it they didn’t, so that arriving outside at 4 P.M. in the wild, heavy-as-air daylight of East Main Street, three dusty pickup trucks parked across the street, this Jim who was suddenly again a part of the town which in his absence from it in the theater he’d still been part of but more grandly eavesdropping on the real life of the movie and without having to do anything, could feel satisfied that their good criminal world which he wished to enter and had, unknown to them, entered like a relaxed, off-duty ghost, was all set and completely to be seen without him, and lasted for at least fifteen minutes walking up toward and past the small newspaper office front where his father who’d been glumly p’d off for years it seemed before and irrespective of the Tragedy of Jim’s mother could be seen typing some letter or leaning over a table staring at ad proof or quickly grinning on the phone so he looked through you if he saw you but he would look through Jim anyhow as if Jim were not his son except he was better to other people’s kids. (Hold it, Jean said at dinner, how in the middle of his life, I know you’re being funny but are you sure he was pissed off for years?—she’s had two drinks and feels her charm; and his might need a little molybdenum, that’s what they strengthen steel with for cars, doll.)

  The young woman whose elbow you long ago conceded the glimmering armrest to, gently slipping your elbow off and raising your shoulder more against her, stretched at the end until her arm came up athwart that shoulder, the back of her hand finding your cheek, smiling as if, eyes half-open, she’d woken up happy, said, in the twilight between showings, "Well, I’m ready for this thing to start, how about you?" so you weren’t quite sure she had liked it.

  Was liking it; for the ominous, all-purpose real-life music that came at them more personal and closely closeting of whoever they were than the perfected world of the black-and-white drama now theirs, then it quieted down, and the silver-gray, menu-like ground with the plain-printed titles and credits was readying you for what was probably real life coming and she found your hand for this half of the show as the story began and squeezed your fingers when two Manhattanites in the squeaky seats behind you started suppressing laughter of recognition, doubling up it sounded like, and you ran your right hand along your roughening cheek concluding that inevitably you knew someone here. She was at once absorbed you could feel it in the unchanging grip of the humid palm.

  Then you didn’t want to be there but you did want to be with her, eyeing her in profile the way you used to catch your mother doing who didn’t go to movies but came with you and Brad and your grandmother when it was Errol Flynn or Fairbanks; so Jean tears herself away for a moment to gaze at you but she has work to do and presses your hand and lets go and is looking at the screen again, and so it goes—good film, soiled screen.

  A film that as it turns out has a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of because when the time comes for you and the girl to walk safely up the aisle get out of here, you and she all by yourselves—as incognito as the angels way inside you and way outside you that you of course wouldn’t know gimbal an essential window domestically unbudging amid the shuffle of your usual being—long before the show’s over—while, granted, nobody was exactly standing occupying a position ahead of you the way your stocky sidekick Sammy who played quarterback until high school who’d thought the picture was to be in Technicolor stood suddenly in front of your brother Brad coming out of the movie in 1945 and, though none of Sam’s business, said, "What’s the matter, Brad, ain’t you speaking to me and Jim?"—so Brad parted from his girl and tried to get around Sam who moved his unbudgeably occupied and waiting position with Brad—you saw last night like a fact leaving just ahead of you an older hippie type with a ponytail and some kind of jacket that in the lobby light proves to be rough-side brown leather fringed and braided and designed with deliberately rough-looking dark-orange and acid-gold cloth strips, a man you know, it might be him that little crook talking to you in one side of your routine (the girl you’re with will know which side, right left right left right—you had a good home but you left)—a man instantly known to you whom you wouldn’t want to know and you don’t know and never will know whether he got up out of his seat because you and the girl did, following you visibly from in front rather than an unseen shadow behind, you didn’t see which row behind you he came out of but you weren’t going to run up behind him, and you liked him less when he turned out to be a contact of the Chilean’s that night of the final moon launch (that you told the girl about, the time she was about asleep), and there’ve been other coincidences but ("Cripes," as Sam used to say) it’s natural in this job after all like running into your old Associated Press pal Red Harley (such a profession for plain brevity, get in get out) intoning his character by deep voice-print on the Metroliner, who called when Mayn passed him, "You gotta execute, fellow, execute," and Mayn, turning, had said, "Don’t stay too long in that hot shower, boy, saps ya strenth," which wasn’t what he meant to say though then on the way to Washington did say to a man he liked—not this bastard
in the complicated western jacket leaving the movie house by coincidence right ahead of him and Barbara-Jean, and alone, which wasn’t out of character really but ("Do you know him?") since he had always seemed to be turning a trick wherever you ran into him, and had no off-hours, what (again) was he doing here?—in that old backwards-half-and-half flick which you and Barbara-Jean ("Neat, eh?") (though you didn’t analyze it like the heavies behind you) had put together independently and side by side having come in in the middle, in which you found a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of, because on that Saturday afternoon soon after your mother was dead (which at dinner last night before the movie you found yourself interrupting a couple of other stories to mention to this young woman who’d said testily, "How do I know your father was pissed off for years before your mother died?"—then made a face to take the prickle out of what she’d said)—that Saturday afternoon of this movie of last night (plus a second feature in those days you can’t recall probably a third-string western with very very white ten-gallon hats and not much more), the gangster movie would not after all stand on its own apart from all the terrible time which Jim (aged sixteen) had cordoned off, that terrific movie of men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, also complete without him, which gave him that afternoon some escaped sense lasting at least fifteen minutes into (four-in-the-afternoon-daylight where you carried preciously the other light of the movie) re-entry, at which point, beyond his father’s newspaper-office storefront plate-glass, reflecting or transparent depending, and the Jersey Central tracks and the red-and-gold firehouse, he knew now under a friendly bathroom shower with a hand pounding his slippery-slapping back for he was coughing, that he would leave that town, and knew he would leave his family that, like what he’d been durably watching go on between his parents for so long (though nothing much to watch), was complete with him or without him who could not be complete himself except without it. She said he was quick in spite of himself and he said, looking at her, that he had to be; and there they were outside the theater stepping off the curb, and even an old stone with a hole in the middle of it yields a trace of mineral radiance irrespective of erosion factor in such company.