Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Mayn recalled more than he told Ted his steady-eyed elder colleague, though the info-dealer-hunter Spence (who came to mind with some sheen of mold on his face) was not present and would not have heard; and besides, Jim liked Ted, yet before he got through telling what little he told, and remembering the larger thing of which the telling was a part while being told by a part of himself out ahead, not telling the larger matter affected the memory of it in a way quite different from a fact that he had withheld that night in 1969 just because the Spence character-sleazy-watchman-photo-journalist was present and he didn’t like the guy: to wit that in ‘33 a couple of researchers discovered that that desert seed oil bore amazing similarities to the legendary oil of the sperm whale whose sea-acres of flow could never have been thought expendable until now sperm whale oil twenty-five years afterward had been slapped with an import ban.

  Call it an uncaused event, he heard himself say into his old-fashioned-glass low-ball to deep-jawed Ted smoking quietly beside him who had praised surprisingly (for humdrum work) his series of three articles on the Delaware River engineering, and from there they had digressed to family pistol which Ted said could seem like more than one, the way Jim outlined its provenances—and digressed to the State of New Jersey and what could and couldn’t be done taxwise, and to whales that were still to be seen from the Jersey shore, which had gotten ugly since his own late childhood much less since his grandmother Margaret’s day when they had a cottage in Mantoloking long since sold which brought them to the beach where you let yourself go, with your fishing pier and the long breakwater all on the sea side and a bright hilly beach where took place the phenomenon that belongs maybe not to the history of junior pickup baseball but of sand or angular gravity; and, come to think, it was several figures in the bright day walking, running, standing literally (we think) rooted, and one lying eyes closed though not silently. And the non-causal event—

  —You mean "miracle"? the friend said, whose voice was sometimes in recall what Mayn got but not the face, with its deep jaw and its cigarette.

  Yes, like Cleopatra’s Nose—arose from the well-known primarily beach game called "Bases" where two basemen throw the ball back and forth trying to tag the base runner who runs back and forth keeping away from the ball —and in which Jim was engaged with his friend Sammy who’d come with them that day from Windrow—and another guy who wore a green sateen racing-type bathing suit—Sammy and Jim thirteen, Sammy a bit tiltingly taller with a longer reach which he wouldn’t use on Jim because Jim would outshove him but could sometimes kick Sammy in sideways preview of the import of eastern modes of violent aggression a generation later, which made our western combat almost overnight more meditated—while Jim saved for the wintertime when they had their parkas on a punishing hook to the ribs which he had thrown maybe three or four times—and the guy in the sateen jockstrap-type bathing suit was running back and forth low to the ground between the "bases" and Jim, who could run, and Sammy, who could take a throw and run, were trying to get the kid out but he would skip sideways between them, and the ball would wing past his head and Sammy get it right back to Jim who’d run up to within a few feet of the guy and toss it to Sammy before the guy was safe and the guy would slide under Sammy’s tag or jump and go the other way and be past Jim before Jim got the ball back in his hand—a tennis ball, an old one, long before the yellows, and so napless and smooth you couldn’t tell if it had been the Pennsylvania ball belonging to a girlfriend of Jim’s who played tennis, and you could curve it.

  But in the middle of all this, with Jim’s grandma Margaret walking down the beach and Jim’s half-pint brother over digging near their mother, who lay face up on a black towel with her arms exactly at her sides (ready to be launched elsewhere) and her very dark but sometimes very faintly (in memory) auburn hair still up and wearing a flowered but very dark bathing suit with a skirt—the guy in the middle stopped and walked away, didn’t seem to hear Sammy, who said, "You’re out, you went outside the baselines." And Brad, with the deep-socketed eyes as if he were digesting a great deal that he had recently learned, turned suddenly, small-shouldered, from what he had seriously been doing and yelled, ‘There are no baselines on the beach," and Jim said, "For Christ’s sake," as the guy in the green sateen suit walked obliviously up the beach—had someone summoned him?

  So they had to use Brad, who had been trickling sand over his mother’s instep and had been piling sand in earnest over her shins.

  What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice but for that moment not Sarah his mother’s, for she was as she had been, rigidly receiving the sun (if non-looks could kill) no doubt thinking her way through a sonata until a few notes of it came humming out of her, but how did you hear the sound with her mouth closed?—answer: through the nose (try humming, mouth closed, and just stop up your nostrils—then it’s out your ears or through your eyes)—

  What are you looking at? came a voice again but now like little brother Brad’s but Jim was looking now off a hundred yards downbeach at his grandmother Margaret in conversation with a sort of old geezer, not decrepit but an oldster, who had materialized in beachcomber’s khakis and a white shirt, dark, dark glasses, and a white sailor hat opened out like an inverted bowl; but a familiar bawling greeting came from nearer by and, beyond his mother, who was now leaning back on her elbows and staring at Jim, Jim saw the fully clothed figure of Bob Yard the electrical contractor—evidently having driven over to the shore from Windrow—and then Brad came running over to run the bases, and Jim and Sammy lobbed the ball back and forth high enough so Brad scampered all the way to the other base, sliding in, though he didn’t have to, Jim told him.

  What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice which we know Jim was correct to believe he heard as if down the road a future comment on Brad’s preliminary trans-mater excavation concepts were not being given grounds for utterance: ‘stead of digging down, youse cover the thing up; then level off and keep at it a few ages and my goodness you’ve d/seroded th’ Earth surface as much as several inches all around, which renews resources if anything.

  What are you staring at? distinctly came Jim’s voice the eve of the U-2 press conference. But the strong hand on his arm counseling him not to bother about the Spence character who’s as good as lost at the end of the bar silenced him—or his voice—while his long-time colleague-friend Ted’s actual voice went armlessly on quoting the famed pilot of the Yankees in response to his interrogator right here in Washington a couple of years back:

  ... I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days. In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D. Class C ball, Class A ball.

  How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?

  But, what are you staring at?, said an all-purpose voice, a few short years later when Mayn and Ted (agreeing they needed a vacation) found themselves in the same hotel bar moderately amused by their light, disintegrating discussion of what was technically known as "hardening" a land-based missile by sinking it into an underground silo: lo, a process which (who knew?) the next century might extend to what the well-tanked thinkers down the street called "soft" targets such as cities, if there were such by then (i.e., either distinct from a densification along the seaboard, or after a "greenhouse effect" due to pollution-rich atmosphere above, lidding the healthy glow of our Earth breath below, till our destined glacier melted down and the ocean went up and swamped Philadelphia and its boating clubs along the river there and Venice-ized New York)—for the now western-wear photographer and infor-mation-transacter Spence had answered (for him pretty point-blank) Mayn’s this-time light query What are you staring at?, with the same words with the you stressed, and Mayn shrugged it off this time
without the actually more irascible Ted’s help, Spence was so sleazy, well there was something about him that just wasn’t worth putting your finger on: but who cares if the Devil’s up-to-date barter-economics drew the line at making unrefusable offers here, because Spence was in another room downstairs making his own deals.

  Yet again, What are you staring at? was Mayn’s line and as warped as his retroactive view of his mother—not worth talking about but if it ever came up, her tragedy, ununderstandable as it was, he talked of it naturally but said out loud that he knew nothing really about it, about the awkward marriage and the annihilatingly downplayed disappearance as if the war ending was what mattered like being strong, and hardly heard Spence say, "I never had a family to speak of—or maybe you just remember yours—you certainly got me guessing—I mean, I never had much in the way of family, O.K.?"

  —You mean it was natural to talk of it, or he talked of it in a natural voice? we hear the multiple interrogator like a multiple child having to ask—

  —Well "What are you staring at?" was what, long ago, ball in hand, he came back at his mother with:

  ... for his mother, the Sarah of his remembered moment, had been staring in Jim’s direction as Bob Yard, somewhere behind her, hallooed high falsetto cum deep feckless baritone brashing his way across the beach toward her and her alone, Jim understood, while she was really staring at Jim yet at the horizon over his shoulder too: oh shit, Jim knew she liked him even if in Windrow he stayed clear of the house most of the time "from sun to sun," though he lied when he joked about her practicing and even wanted to hear the interruption no the interrupted phrases of her violining cross slowly, backtracking in order to go ahead, halting upon a gap, her whole self or life, or just music, get it right, go back, go back, go back again and get it right not at all like voices in the evening bursting now and again through the pillowed atmosphere of the roomy house in Throckmorton Street only to disappear like hallucinated messages into what might as well be Jim’s mere thought process, which was like his grandmother’s house.

  What are you staring at? said Bob Yard directly above her, a little bent over like in a cave. His charcoal eyebrows vanished under a straw hat as he looked down at the woman who laboriously sat up hunched and swung half round to look up at the noisy man in green chinos who was now not talking, unless he was humming words that Jim didn’t hear.

  Up the beach Margaret and the old man were approaching in heated conversation—the oldster maybe not so much older than Margaret—and Bob Yard squatted beside the harshly pale woman—Sarah’s shoulders helplessly conversing with the profound sun, her dark hair defying his arrival, glossy hair, straight hair, her face bending kind of stupidly away from Bob, and her body—her body!—hunched like she didn’t have headroom—

  —stupidly? or struck dumb?—

  —so Jim knew what his mother was like: she was not just beautiful— and at the very moment when she was warped by an indifference, her look aimed—aimed at him?—so that with Brad and Sammy (who grew younger) and the endlessly plunging breakers pushing Jim to throw the goddamn ball and get the game going, he found himself to be a man:

  a man twice told—(he wouldn’t voice that one to Ted no matter how close they were, in i960, 1963, 1972, or 1975, when Ted got sick)—but why Jim was this, he didn’t just know, but knew it was her looking both truly at him and yet around him, while Bob Yard raised his biting voice a notch, "He’s that crackpot Indian hustler-scientist from the old days or a relation maybe— isn’t he that old pal of Margie’s she talked about that helped her out when she was in that tight spot in the old days? He was sitting on the front steps like a veteran when I drove by"—which was why Bob Yard said he had driven down to the shore on impulse (nice day, here’s this old friend of Margaret’s—or is it a relative?—or the old friend, that is—looking for her because he took the train up from New York to Windrow, didn’t phone; said he doesnt)—while Sarah bestows on the man in chinos the intimacy of very cold indifference, but answers—but as if Bob wasn’t there: "Margaret’s romantic adventures are catching up with her"—Sarah’s plain words, but what did they mean? had the oldster appeared here to tell Margaret something? or maybe to ask her.

  No wind to scatter the controversy, we add, to convey the potential lightness of the picture, and at that moment Jim had to shy the ball at wonderfully wall-eyed Bob Yard (who seemed like a north pole to Jim’s mother’s south, though not in direction, in some bump of touching and unpleasant barrier), but Jim didn’t throw it after all. The voices of the bathing-suited mother and her chance visitor rose tightly, but in their duet had only a funny sound (like strange vocal cords, not human maybe); and Jim imagined them to his chagrin fondling each other, to make up after this raising of voices. How could he? Because he could see that though his mother had been right here in his sight and, earlier, in the car on the way here—the dark blue Buick with the breezy straw upholstery and the knob on the steering wheel that when Jim was Brad’s age he would sit in the driver’s seat and grab—she had been "here" all the time: yet some scene between her and the principal Windrow electrician, Bob Yard, had come before what Jim was witnessing.

  She turned away from Bob Yard who stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, and she looked past Jim, catching his eye so he knew he was part of that extent of sea that, when he turned to see what she was looking out at or looking off to, proved to have a slow freighter passing from right to left he could tell by the bow and stern (he had never seen a convoy, they must not come this close to shore); and facing what she was looking at, he let go a pure, healthy sigh, knowing that he hadn’t been breathing and he would breathe for both of them—live, play, eat; and the words of his grandmother and the old man in white sneakers she was with came to him like the target within the larger bull’s eye, and—

  And he heard—he hears his half-pint brother Brad like he’s getting out of hand with a parent (which he never did) insult him and later he doesn’t recall how—that is, the words of the insult—except that they made Jim feel cornered.

  Except no one can make you feel anything, says of all people the interrogator who has heard these words underwater in a health-club pool or during an intermission at an obscure tryout reading (pre-production) of a new opera, a private opera, pressed upon a major basso by his young beloved the composer where the interrogator had thought to find someone to interrogate after the show; or in a therapist’s anteroom, underwater or not—

  —made, though, Jim feel transfixed by both couples, his grandma in her bathing suit raising her voice at the geezer from New York, and Sarah lowering hers to Bob. So Brad, having uttered his insult to his big brother who felt the sunburned sand tightening and dyeing his strong, contented arms with its dust, danced away a few steps toward Sammy and came back so close to Jim that Jim drew his hand back across his body to his opposite shoulder. Obviously he is about to back-hand his half-pint brother, but Sarah’s voice rings out saying Jim’s name. Whereupon our Brad snatches the tennis ball from his brother’s other hand and darts away with Jim after him angered, relieved.

  No, Jim didn’t want to have a fight with Bob Yard, he liked him; no, he liked his mother taking care of herself, and the newspaper would fold one of these days, it wasn’t competitive with the Transcript’s advertising. No, he wasn’t just mad; he really didn’t like little Brad. So there they were, for a moment of four, five, or six steps—the baseman pursuing the ball and the base runner in the over-all picture of Mantoloking, New Jersey, the blistering landscape of beach, the horizon out where the water gave way to wind—and Jim, skidding into a little ridge of sand, snagged his brother by the waist of his trunks pulling them and him half-down but letting go just as his mother called his name again, and he knew—though he couldn’t tell Ted a generation later—that he at thirteen had missed some point before when he turned away from her to see what the heck she was looking at so he’d warped her and himself into a real fix he would never get out of, oh it was his future he’d have to go to and look ba
ck from, or be only a means of doing that—be used matter-of-factly by others who saw what he did not.

  And at the instant his brother lay stretched out in front of him, Jim leaned over him so the shadow or human window fitted Brad exact, with no overlap onto the sand. And before Sarah’s angry voice cut through a tissue of his feeling, Don’t touch him, came her shout—Jim had already in fact stuck right there in the sand, and Brad screamed.

  Jim said to his old professional friend Ted in the bar of a Washington hotel, "If you can beat that," knowing he’d rather be talking some second-hand factual matter to him about the Sprint missile (a favorite of his despite or on account of its mere twenty-five-mile range)—"ewioatmospheric" because it intercepted the enemy missile only after it reentered the atmosphere (last-minute stuff, twenty-five miles, highly personal!).

  "What do you mean ‘stuck’?" said his friend.

  "I mean I was at an angle sort of one-quarter leaning like the vertical of an L-shape over my little brother—

  —a drunken L-shape—

  —slanted, and I should have fallen but I didn’t, and my feet weren’t that deeply into the sand so nothing was holding me, I was operationally extra-gravitational."

  "What were you leaning on?"

  "My ankle, my shin, my stomach muscles, my own back."

  "Something was holding you up. Didn’t you ever fall?"