She’d been carrying the thought then of being not dependent.
Or most of it, for she’d woken up with it in her fingertips while the rest of her was aching, and she should have said it to the gray-haired broad-shouldered man who had come into the elevator out of nowhere, she saw now that she had wanted to, she just liked him, he had on a blue-striped shirt, the lines from his nostrils down past his mouth were grooves soft as leather, and she had never seen such eyelashes on a man—who then she thought might live in the building after all because he had aftershave on. And she didn’t speak her thought to him, that she was not dependent, it was so simple God knows what he would have thought. He had added to her his acceptance of the future like prediction, and from him she added to her thought that came to her the thought that what came to her came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future. She was probably dumb.
Almost hard to say, impossible to say to Gordon, who would think her a dumbbell. Which Gordon might claim he did not think—he who knew wine, and the law, and sports; who knew Complete Works—of Tolstoy, Gibbon, Auchincloss, and Waugh, Beethoven (almost), Leonardo (almost)—and for whom if she was buying a special bottle of wine what was she doing crying in a glass booth trying by plastic pushbutton to reach a law firm with half a dozen names. She longed for music, there should be a music number you could tap out on these buttons, the buttons made high, final beeps like a hearing test. She hung up, there was the dense waiting presence outside seeming to tilt and turn the fragile phone booth so she would have to look instead of listen, she didn’t want to get away from him, and couldn’t. She was smiling automatically with her teeth on her lower lip, the gray-haired man this morning had seemed to look at her mouth, but this man now she couldn’t turn to directly. She called home, and let it ring twice, and hung up, and then she used the dime a third time pushing the numbers of Gordon’s office only to be told that he’d left early. So he hadn’t stayed home today. And probably hadn’t done what he said in the dark he would do.
She wasn’t having anything to drink tonight before going upstairs to the first session of the workshop which was fairly hard to get into. With all those women sitting around on the rug. Letting it hang out. And Norma with them. Naked as they. Rapping. Sharing information, said Grace Kimball. Find out you’re like other women, said Grace. (Not unique, then?) Learn to breathe, said Grace, learn to use a plastic speculum (easy enough) and a standing mirror. Go public. (Norma had heard the words before, but where?) Here they were Grace’s words. But not Grace herself not Grace. Grace understood how impossible Norma felt. Grace had no furniture to speak of. She had phones; books of photographs; carpet, music, worklamps and workspace; but no furniture—she’d cleared it all out, she listened to what Norma could not say along with what Norma did say—so that Norma joined Grace in listening to Norma, who wanted to sign up for Grace’s workshop but almost had not asked, in the midst of the overpowering wind of garlic that Grace "cleansed" with and had just received a shipment of from a farmer near Taos, New Mexico.
Norma felt exposed.
It will come to you, said Gordon, when Norma said she didn’t understand something, and he wasn’t kidding.
"After what?" she asked, and heard, "What?" in the phone receiver, for Gordon was home and she didn’t have to ask about wine after all but if she didn’t she would have nothing to put in place of the question except what was happening. She was half giggling half gasping, and the man outside the booth rapped twice. She got a hot stoniness from the quick oversalted cheeseburger she now didn’t recall chewing, Grace was into chewing—Norma did not usually say "into."
"When are you coming home?" she asked, knowing he was home.
"For Christ’s sake, Norma, you—"
But she was crying anyway while the late light enlarged her and the space between question (Had she taken the checkbook?) and answer (Yes, she had) filled up the booth so she would not be able to open the door, and the man waiting to make a call would give up.
He is a black man in a gray pinstripe suit and for a moment he looks at her, wrinkling his forehead, looks away but in a friendly way that says he feels time spent in eye contact is time taken away from Norma’s phone business which she must conclude before he can occupy the position she now occupies. Is everything stopping?
People passed. A guy in jeans tapped the glass with his knuckles as he went past, she felt a breeze across her front. She was breathless, but she saw she wouldn’t stop, she had to cry through, spill through, and even if the name of her body was not known.
So the light changed and the policeman’s horse moved ahead, rocking the rather gigantic police rider so he looked handsomely like that was his job—to rock well. She turned past all the moving faces outside and looked in a direction opposite where Gordon was and saw sun glare in windows across Park.
Gordon said, "Who is with you?"
Her breathing rushed, and she wanted to say the building is a eater-cornered mistake and the Neighborhood Council woman Kate said the building is going to get a prize which didn’t make any sense.
"Is anyone bothering you?" said Gordon.
"I’m wasting this dime," she said. "The Council got some money, Gordon."
"You’re not still at work."
"I don’t think I even have a quarter," she said.
A sound came to her from the receiver and it said through her sinuses that it was a sound neither at her end of the line, where she couldn’t get her breath to ask if he needed anything because he was doing his usual tonight, nor at Gordon’s, where eggs would be hatching into omelets soon—but rather that it was between them.
It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future.
And Gordon said in that sure way sweeping away all difficulties (certainly those stirred up by her), being himself able to do so, "What’s the number there, I’ll call you back. Annie’s out for dinner. I’ve got something to tell you but I can’t until you get home—it’s what I mentioned when we went to bed last night." This was slow, slower than the sunset. But her life eluded her faster than the slowness was slow.
So she started with the area code, thinking the black man outside the booth was kind—he had a kind mouth she wanted to say to Gordon; the black man had—she was saying, "Two . . . one . . ." saying she was sorry she was slow, she couldn’t get her breath, her voice was—"two."
Then when he said, "That’s the area code," she said, "I’m sorry, that’s the area code, I can’t speak now, I can’t think," and Gordon said, "O.K., Norma, only the numbers after two one two."
She gave them, and then she was cut off before she could hang up. As if she had been looking at him again, giving him one of her looks according to him. She waited for him to touch her, her feelings, and instead she was in touch with what he was thinking, never he with her except to screw the top on.
The spasms did their own gasping, she had no make-up on, she had cheeseburger grease at the root of her tongue, Gordon would phone back now and sympathize, and maybe she would introduce him to the black man who was waiting. The black man had a mouth he pursed as he looked again at his newspaper folded in one hand—his other held an attache case. She smiled and he looked at her. The phone booth was his if he took her with it, and her joke fixed his smile suddenly and he looked at the phone box register and shook his head, and the phone rang as she pulled the folding door and stepped free, saying, "You take it."
It rang again, she thought she had some sugarless gum in her bag, she reached back into the booth to lift the receiver an inch and hang up but she only put her hand on it. She gracefully dipped out of the booth, the man saying, "Are you sure?" and she walked away into a green light. She found a Kleenex in her bag and pinched it to her eyes without breaking stride, while he called, "It’s for you." She didn’t turn back, though she was crossing to the north side of the street needlessly, but wondered if the black man’s voice would come across the phone to Gordon. Gordon could be kind, but the black man had looked too kind to discuss her with Gord
on, while Gordon was not so kind he wouldn’t tell her bluntly to think why she felt the way she did.
O.K., think back to Rhoda’s saying, "It’s different for you, you don’t have to work." Think back and see where your feeling is coming from but maybe what was there first.
While you look ahead and don’t have time to think. Certainly not that you wanted a son who would wear little red sneakers and talk to himself. And you would probably treat him like a prince.
The tall girls were out in their hot pants for the rush hour, and a big blue car with a cream-colored Jersey plate stopped near a restaurant doorway. Norma looked at a girl’s stilt-high, head-small behind, a girl who also had a large mouth, when she looked over her shoulder, a large mouth with pale lipstick almost white. What were they doing here? This wasn’t where they normally were supposed to be.
Three men wearing On-Strike placards stood across the width of the sidewalk. She would have to read the newspaper now because she had to be well-informed. Gordon had given up on her, she liked to think. Gordon, when they’d all been walking home from dinner, the men in front, Norma and Gordon’s friend’s wife behind the men, had been hailed by a girl, "Going out tonight?" and she and the other wife caught up and she told Gordon he ought to price them, they were neighborhood people, but he said, "They’re just interested in giving blow jobs," which Norma had an answer to but it would not be funny, he was always there ahead of her. But maybe there was more room on that point than just for him, and she’d said, "Maybe they like it," which she didn’t mean, and she wondered if he had heard. Or could hear. The Council’s new money, for instance. It dried her eyes right now. No one looked. No one looked away. She would not tell him she was on salary. He could ask about the Council’s new money. Let him.
"It will come to you," she thought, and the tall black pimp who stepped out not quite into her path in black, high-heeled boots and a high-crowned, insanely wide-brimmed hat that looked made of muskrat from one of the windows way over on West Thirtieth bent and tilted his head affably and said, "What?"
You will pass the Jewish restaurant, the Chinese, the Indian, the hotel, the church, the stationery store with the cleaner across the street. The girls and boys stand on the steps across the street, the steps of the acting school, waiting to go back in. Norma, you will come home from work by a route so invariable that the apartment house will come to you. The city thinks for you.
Gordon was inside her; but no, she had not wished the gap between the aches in her head and lower back to go on without her, so she hadn’t turned west on Thirty-fourth, but had gone down a block—then over to Park, then down then over a block but the gap was not just waiting for her as if it were last night in bed; it was with her now with the two pains that it was between. It was to be thought. She had to believe she had achieved a thing or two, this thinking that she kept with.
Her stuff was where she’d left it last night if Gordon had not put it away. He used to joke about putting it on his toothbrush. She felt in her speaking mouth that she had to think now on account of what had come to her—what he had communicated to her last night when all she could do was receive it, the thought, and hold it, but minus the future which had come this morning —but she had taken the white-and-blue tube of Ortho-Gynol out of the medicine cabinet but had put it back down on the sink remembering a night when she’d left the top off (next to the toothbrush) and she and Gordon had laughed about it in the morning.
The cycle of the household was where she’d left it this morning. Automatic morning that was once blind, blurred comfort. But automatic, too fixed to have room for a something it was waiting for, and Gordon didn’t hear her this morning when she took her pain from last night and with it the sound of his bath running and closed the front door behind her.
And so, ahead, she saw the apartment house, the restaurants (not the Jewish, which was in the block she’d skipped today), and the hotels, the church, stationery store, appliance store across the street, and the cleaner whose late Genoese father had been an actual tailor across the street on her side long before Norma had thought of New York. Once into the elevator she would be at the door of the apartment faster than she could think.
This morning the two pains, headache and lower back, received the two women coming at her from either end of the desk and room, Rhoda back from Washington—"We’ve got money for you, I didn’t want to tell you until we knew, and it’s a private source right here in New York, not federal money which is hard enough to predict but this is even crazier, apparently it’s right here in New York—we’re not asking any questions; do you understand what I’m saying? we’ve got money for you, two hundred a week"—and Kate, with a letter—"Hey girls, that building’s probably getting a prize, what do you think of that?"—she knew what Norma thought.
Norma couldn’t eat the cheese Danish that Kate put down on the desk with its paper unfolding. She had a job, though she’d been doing it for months anyway. So she ate the Danish but not lunch, and didn’t call Gordon. But at 2:30 had a cheeseburger with meat grease and juice rising through her cheeks yet did not find the gap, which she left to get bigger, until at 5:15, when she remembered she hadn’t gone to the bank at lunchtime, the shape of a pretzel sent her beyond the pretzel man past the prize building that pressed down on the old, vanished armory, and past an orange picked up by a man whose much younger girlfriend with longish, squeaky-fresh-looking hair didn’t know about the orange she’d lost. And so Norma through freedom of thought passed toward a thin, hurrying woman of indeterminate age (though Norma knew) applying lipstick to her stretched mouth as she walked along—and toward home, in all those directions that went on without her, toward Grace Kimball’s workshop where she knew she was to hear how hair is vanity so why not cut it all off and get in touch with your head, which is like your body and has something to tell you that men in 1976-1977 can’t, like Gordon now and last night, who said he didn’t care one way or the other if she went to the workshop, were all these naked gals in the workshop workshopping, he asked, were they throwing vases on a pottery wheel?, and she asked if he was thinking of the old women who in his old joke were up in the Bronx sticking the city’s pretzels together with their spit; no, wait, he said, the workshop’s your business, you know what I mean—he laughed and in his awkwardness a touch of color like fondness sharpened his eyes. Yet she had to think before she met him, for he was the source of the thought, and she had to stop being incongruous, not fitting, she’d lost two pounds up to last night and before today’s Danish and cheeseburger, so her breasts might be a shade firmer though they’d never been any trouble, they were smallish she had once thought but now she didn’t know—Gordon had once said he liked them, but he didn’t hear those voices any more or maybe didn’t know what to do with them any more, her breasts, and she’d read that prostitutes didn’t take off their bras; and therefore she should speak, for she couldn’t think unless she spoke, but whichever way she turned in the one operating phone booth she could not speak properly to Gordon, though she had saved that quarter she knew was in her purse somewhere. The unit call from Gordon at home cost less than a dime, and what with her magic new salary which she would be telling Gordon about in a few minutes after a day of unfaithful thoughts, yes, she remembered them like a series flashed through the city’s blocks but who could know what she was thinking? she couldn’t help thinking of what was in Gordon’s mind when he turned away from the eleven-o’clock news with its report on surveillance of foundations to look at her, his eyes blank, his tongue poking down in his cheek for a second as she then looked away and so did he, into the screen where CIA or FBI was being spoken of, but the message was in him more than the screen, like the shadow of the armory cast upward from deep below the ground where Gordon had told her to speak French to the woman whose husband needed razor blades, well only one blade would do, and then walking past the girls and pimps along Park she had tried to tell Gordon why English would have been better, that the French were not so patient as the Italians with foreign
ers speaking their language, but Gordon could always argue her down, and when he’d said, ‘They’re the foreigners, not us," she’d looked away at the long-legged black girls moving their feet around recklessly and laughing to each other, but she was going to be really naked tonight in the lights of Grace Kimball’s furnitureless apartment with jars and dishes of nuts and raisins and dried apricots on the window sills and candles celebrating the separation of the men from the girls who became women not girls.
What if a man came to the door? A messenger. A retarded messenger.
Norma had no further to go.
Only a ride up.
Manuel gone home, no one on the door. Any stranger could walk in, like the broad-shouldered man in the lobby waiting for the elevator. The man from this morning. Did women imagine and men think?
She was so glad to see him that she found herself shaking her head and saying, "Anyone could just walk in here." Her shoulders rounded toward him gently. Her day had curved back to him with nothing in between their meetings. His clothes smelled. Of amiable smoke. And he’d had a drink; he had thick hair, all gray but not dull. He asked what floor, but his hand was passing over the buttons as if it didn’t matter. "As you were saying," he said—and smiled.
Women and Men Page 77