Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Sure the hope had been for herself quite apart from his famous parents. But she for her part had given him what, it turned out, he wanted, not to mention a lot of love. (Served him right.) So she was able to give up that job, high on her list of things to give up; and so she thought for years that he had saved her.

  For what? A couple of growing children? A foggy day on a friend’s tennis court, a sunny day? Throw in a raspberry mountain in green Carinthia where the woodcutter’s—we’d say lumberman’s—wife and her children pick gallons of berries in order to crush them with liters of sugar so that thick raspberry syrup may soothe the toothless winter. For Dobbie and wife, a raspberry mountain in Carinthia and at its foot a midnight bed-and-comforter.

  In which bed, lying on their sides, he before, she behind, single-file, each with the right ear to the pillow, headed both in the same direction, she pressed his welt and as it moved under her fingertip she saw that he had not looked at her because a voice in him had warned him not to for else he’d see for once who it was who had consented to be saved by him; and what then?

  This wasn’t easy. She smelt smoke coming out of his scalp, someone else’s smoke, and with it faint vanilla, used vanilla, off the skin of his scalp moistly glistening in the light of a cowless cowbell—and beer—beer because tonight she had had wine because the white wine was cheap, not because it was local and good, well fairly local. But at this moment in history she wished to talk, not smell—and not the words she had just talked a moment ago like a wife setting up a doctor’s appointment because it was her duty to keep her man alive, to save him, say, from losing ten years of life expectancy with her.

  And her head now curiously reached around the obstacle of him and bent round not so much to feel him where he was soft or tight as to see what he was facing in the direction of.

  And at this moment hearing hooves briefly canter upon the sod out on the mountain along with the clink which she now knew was more than a memory of an afternoon cow that had gone down the mountain to those farmgirls at milking time leaving behind it only the ring and with a large upheaval of the one heavy, clean-enveloped comforter that covered them her husband rolled one complete half-turn, hand on hip, his hand, her hip, except the hip had sensed change and all by itself had rolled with the crunch, as he observed the very next morning ten seconds before they were suddenly joined for breakfast by the Philadelphia couple—that is, the hip had rolled with his roll so that the hip he reached for turned out to be not her left hip, for she had also turned and was no more facing him than she had been before, but her right hip, and now he was behind her single file and had said, "Hey," to which again, with a magic not all her own, she did not say what she had wished to say but said, "It’s not that you didn’t look at me, it’s—"

  "—that" (came his voice) "you didn’t really care."

  "I’m going to sleep," she said, securely wiped out by having inspired him to say what she did not mean.

  Black telepathy call it, if he would only hear.

  If he only heard himself think, he’d think before he spoke, though singing if you could call it that was what he did sometimes outdoors instead of speaking, but singing in place of knowing what he was thinking, and so to fill the silence which anyone knew wasn’t at all empty but full of interesting junk, Dobbie could sometimes speak too quickly with the edge of someone by turns sharply shy, actively charming, though she had never gotten around to telling him.

  Though he did not sing on the tennis court.

  Or at breakfast. That is, until, ten seconds after the Philadelphia couple had announced themselves and arrived to find that at the table of their new New York friends from last night two additional place settings had materialized which inspired the woman as if nothing had happened between dinner and breakfast to ask if Dobbie’s parents had had any other issue besides Dobbie, Dobbie’s wife now said the cream in her impeccable Austrian coffee was sour and disintegrating, whereupon Dobbie pushed his chair back, got up, and, beginning to sing softly, made for the kitchen holding the earthenware jug only to meet, pushing from the kitchen side, the girl with the coffee pot temporarily on a tray.

  Hold it.

  Cut. He was so good, so smart, at putting things, their life, together, remembering how it had been, summing up, cutting, dissolving the little scenes they had: come on, I know how you’re feeling, I know why you’re doing this: while she stared like a stone, and when he said how sad it made him when they had their differences she had to laugh at him, he wasn’t exactly funny, or quite charming, but suddenly he had her—recalling, that is, what they had done together once upon a mountaintop or were going to do tomorrow, visit the free-lance diver in his Manhattan apartment, fish-out-of-water footage. Cut.

  To the kitchen of rich friends, a kitchen with familiar appliances, great farmhouse table in spring light with a green-stained chopping board and a slab of marble with flour on it, windows above the sink, the green boughs of trees out there, and among them, but hard to see, white shorts, white short-sleeved shirts of players rushing, back-pedaling, while the green leaves show of the tennis what they will and make the red earth and white-taped lines both far away and close, which she knows is what she has to want, but only flickers of the outside, a glitter of rackets, a flex of legs clearing the stretch of net she can see from here in someone else’s kitchen, why is she here inside in her bare thighs and tennis dress, sneakers on cool linoleum, feeling too good to put up with her own homicidal pique, in someone else’s kitchen that is better than her own because it asks nothing of her, why is she here staring into a huge refrigerator lit up like an enchanted robot proud of its sinister insides, and on top of the refrigerator stood the broad silver cylinder of a power juicer that will get juice out of a pit, butter out of nuts.

  While out beyond the windows, out amongst the leaves and boughs, flicker blue and white sneakers, and suddenly the same legs as before hurdle the net now in the other direction—hairy, she knows from memory she’s almost sure but couldn’t care if she wanted to and doesn’t want to, and doesn’t want to be back there fifteen minutes ago looking into the sun double-faulting three times in a row—thrice—while Dobbie, at the net, his back to her, bends over his shoulder, waits at the net to put one away that never comes back at him because at this moment of history she can’t get it over and she doesn’t blame it on the sun. But then amid his silence she does get one in, an ace so modest it’s hardly seen, like a practice serve, a slicing ace, not fast but a fair ping off her easy unbent overhead swing but they’ll never know that at the instant of tossing the yellow ball up she opened infinitesimally her whole left side, her leg, shoulder, behind, to give the angle of instinct that would hit Dobbie in the head with the serve even before her follow-through was finished. Ah so—and yet the ball missed his ear by a whisker, just missed, and found the sideline tape for an ace, and he knew this, though did not know he knew; and he put his hand to his ear to feel the fuzz of her intent, so the friends across the net jeered.

  "Sorry," she had called before she knew it, and the word looked back into her: "Sorry I missed," it said to her, sounding like she meant also—for she did—"Sorry I don’t know what I’m doing, acing, double-faulting ..." And before she could bounce up on the baseline tape at her left toe the one ball she had and serve at fifteen-forty, Dobbie had said, "What do you mean, ‘sorry’?"—fired it over his shoulders as if it wouldn’t affect her upcoming serve.

  So she walked off the court. The friends called to her, "Freya? Freya?" Dobbie called out, "Hey!" So she called over her shoulder, "I’ve got a cramp, I’ll be back."

  But she did not look back, which was difficult, until she had passed around the house and into the kitchen and then looked forth secretly through the green-leaved windows above the sink, one of them open, to see what little through their friends’ trees she could see of the bright sport on the tennis court, but then she became absorbed in the empty kitchen.

  Until she didn’t hear Dobbie in his sneakers, for here he was behind her, s
he knew a split second before his voice carried as well the decision that she was not sick as the words "What was that all about?"

  Without an answer that could be fair to herself, she said, "Oh, not turning around."

  "So I could catch one in the face?" he said. "You don’t want to be watched while you serve," he added, "you don’t want to think about it too much," he was saying over her shoulder; but he often didn’t turn around, and she would not remind him but it was not even years we’re talking about, it was Saturday now that she was working, now that she had a job Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday that had been so high on her list of necessities she couldn’t see anything else on the list and now looked forward to Saturday as a day off from her own job not his, freedom to do what she had not been free to do during the work week when she had also been free, words did not explain all this freedom (her job was finding words!)—and this Saturday coming here was not what she wanted to do, yet she had gone ahead with it anyway. Dobbie arriving in the driveway of this large half-timbered house with an all-weather tennis court off through the trees, though it looked like ordinary clay, and a fairly clean pool beyond it, Dobbie getting out of the car, walking toward the house, calling for some reason, "Coffee’s on" and stopping when he realized she was still in the car, but not looking around (catch her moving!), calling back over his shoulder, "Let’s go," while she sat staring through the tinted windshield, able to not move, gripping her new forty-nine-dollar racket like one-potato-two-potato by the handle sticking up through her legs, the head on the floor of the car between her feet, her sunglasses propped against the windshield on top of the padded dash, where they still are, no doubt, the top half catching the green hood of their leased car, the lower half the warm black imitation leather. She had felt compelled to open the door of the car, as if he’d never again hear her from inside the windshield, she felt her right sneaker sole on the gravel shift the little stones first slightly forward and slightly back, she was standing, she had been standing, the open door between her and Dobbie, who now walked on, rising on the toes of his strong legs, only to hear her say, "I don’t know what I’m doing here," when he stopped again, looking still forward, tilting his head back slightly to look at a bedroom window, using time always.

  "You don’t want to think about it too much," he said over his shoulder, and a familiar face had appeared at an upstairs window and she smelled roasted coffee.

  So that—her hand upon the Acme juicer two sets and a few games later—she knew he would open the fridge door now in order to be doing something in addition to whatever they were also doing, which for a second must have been, unless he was deaf, hearing the pock and answering pock, which was what distance did to a close-up ping, of a long singles rally going on behind the trees.

  "You don’t want to think about it," she said over her shoulder and fought hard against thinking of herself having a romantic misunderstanding two-thirds through a mellow old film, her proud, lovely back turned toward the male lead—her proud, lovely, vulnerable back, for everyone including their older child (child!) was saying "vulnerable" up to last year (wasn’t it?) but no one was saying it any more.

  So she succeeded here in fighting off romance, and felt only that Dobbie had come unnecessarily into a kitchen where she was. He asked if she was going to do some juicing.

  Why did he have to be here, why didn’t he go away into the shade of the trees, the blue-green of the swimming pool, the comfort of the car. She heard him saying, If you can sit, why stand?

  She wasn’t sorry she’d walked off the court, she said, said it awkwardly, stonily, heavily, much more significantly than she wanted; but, seeing this, she saw that it wasn’t homicidal pique as she had been thinking.

  Oh, he was saying, they were easy to beat after you left—with the fridge door, she was certain, still open—one against two, he said, why he’d been masterful, they were so out of position they were hitting each other with their rackets by mistake.

  She all but laughed, but she didn’t, he couldn’t get to her. They both knew he was trying.

  It was not homicidal pique. She wasn’t out to kill him. All she wanted was to rearrange him. Put the parts in the Acme juicer pushing the red oblong plastic pusher-plunger steadily down till it was all the way into its slot and for a moment longer juice streamed out the little chute into your glass, sweet pale celery, blue cabbage, dynamite beets, sweet carrot, apple, grapes, coconut, pear, if mixing veg and fruit didn’t screw up the enzymes and give you gas.

  Until looking out the kitchen-sink windows she saw their friends saunter toward the house, leaning toward each other, giving each other a push, a jab, and knew she’d forgotten everything for a moment except looking for her husband out the window when he was behind her.

  And, hearing him hum, she did not know what she’d turn into but knew he would not save her from it; and turning gracefully round, she could predict that he would look as he did yesterday standing on the city pier with his production crew and a helicopter making a racket rising behind him and three cops watching and an unidentified beauty and the free-lance salvage diver he was making a documentary of in a wet suit behind him standing on one leg to stretch off a flipper.

  She was late, and Dobbie looked her in the eye while the sound man talked to him, and Dobbie had nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying loudly to her, "You knew when we were shooting," and she was glad to smile and shake her head at him like any other person—he knew it was her lunch hour, now she was working—and she had been just in time to see the diver surface and climb the ladder. The same man she’d seen on a Saturday morning in his apartment telling the camera of his need to be free, stepping back from his stereo and turning to the camera as the record dropped, Delius, Handel (don’t smile), Bach, yes a long way from the work he did for the police, yes, what he had to come back home to, while Dobbie—who kept to the man’s work and did not ask questions about what he would eventually let viewers of the film see for themselves—Dobbie she knew would splice in and play against the man’s quiet, hard, flat voice footage of an apartment where no matter how hard you searched you would find no children, although the unidentified beauty on the pier was so young, why who knew who she was with?

  Dobbie did not let go of this little scene of theirs in the middle of his documentary: Where had she been?—he knew he was being dumb—where had she been, for God’s sake?

  "It’s my lunch hour."

  "Right, right."

  "And I’ve been having lunch."

  A woman friend with an impulsive voice and a hearty manner had helped her by listening to her. She was probably two or three years ahead of her and she encouraged Freya not to hide her light under a bushel. She told Freya, "Empathy, that’s what they don’t have. In the old days, I’m panicking or I’m taking something too personally, and my ex says he knows exactly what I mean, he’s getting a promotion from his territory back to the front office and all he can think of is his mother praising him to other people as if he weren’t there in the room or his father interrupting him sometimes in the middle of an idea and saying, "That’s what I’ve always thought!" So Freya wanted to get out and start using all this information that was being shared. The woman had said to her, "You thought that panic was yours and now it’s his. That ray of light at the end of the tunnel was your life, you thought, but—nope— it’s his, too."

  She walked over to the sound man she’d known for years, stepped over his cable. Dobbie followed, she heard him talking and did not answer when he changed his tack and she heard him say behind her, "Is everything okay?"

  She stood beside a piling above brown water, the city around her. She was between the sound man who was small with an Abe Lincoln beard and a cop in a bright blue shirt, a cop with a big mustache. And she felt behind her her husband under the waterside sun so close to her, to her shoulder blades, her neck, her ankles, that she could have fallen or been pushed in.

  "Oh Bill," she heard herself say to her old friend the sound man, "you
always were a sexist flatterer."

  Behind her, Dobbie as if there were no crew no set no documentary-of-a-free-lance-diver said, "Is everything okay, Freya?" as if he knew her so well, as if he knew her so well.

  So at last she turned to him, saying, "Still there?" only to see in his face—so she at once looked past him over his shoulder at the girl talking to the diver who had his glass face-mask high on his forehead where the black rubber helmet came down and who was looking at Freya, who he could not know had just caught fixed upon her husband the director-producer’s face— a stony mask of grief, of loss, not to be charmed away by the whistle of a tug or the sharp wash of its wake against the pier pilings, or the line "I don’t know you any more," from a romantic movie.

  But he recovered himself sufficiently so that next day, in someone’s dream kitchen adjacent to a private tennis court, he was able when she turned abruptly to him where he stood by their friends’ closed refrigerator, to show the same deadly face—so that, many women though she now knew herself to be, she did not sing.

  Gordon’s Story: The Year He Skipped

  Gordon met Mayn as they came out of the wind and rain into the lobby. The new man was on, although you wouldn’t know it; he hadn’t come out to open the taxi door for Mayn nor had he pulled open the lobby door but stood safely behind the glass panel on the other side and nodded and grinned as Gordon and Mayn came through and Gordon, who didn’t really know Mayn, held the door for him and Mayn had a word with the new doorman in Spanish. Gordon recognized tiempo, "weather," but not, he thought, the rest, though he heard mas temprano and knew he ought to know what Mayn was saying.