Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  But what was doing in New York?

  Whether or not, with the insulting barside queries of that nosy Spence in memory mushrooming like an inspiration to recall everything else until Mayn became that southerner who near the moment of Lincoln’s election observed that if a Yankee pointed a pistol at him he would ask him how much he would take for it—"You mean your grandmother was pursued eastward to her very doorstep by that Indian what was his name?"—"You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat?"—he Mayn still felt that that history of his mother’s getaway—"I am going far to see the land," she had recited, plus other lines—or more anciently his grandmother-to-be staring up at flowers growing down out of a haunted ceiling above her bed in an 1893 Omaha boarding house and her father’s contradictory instructions to "Go west as the man said" (the man who ran that paper in the city?—Greeley?! No the crackpot who stood behind her in 1885 at the historic pre-ruin of the uncrated Statue arrived prepaid on Bedloe’s Island), yet her father (who hoped she would carry on the paper someday because as he said to her beau, Alexander, she was a reformer even more than a writer) said at the same time, "You’re to be with your Cousin Florence the entire time you are in Chicago and that includes when you are back in your hotel writing copy"—all that stuff, although he kept circling back to it only to find it wasn’t quite there any more, made no less sense than the twenty-five-year span promised (like interest) for regrowing the vegetation shield stripped by the geniuses who’d rented the mine from the Indians (and called it on their signs the "Indian" mine for Interest does not lie) to feed the coal-into-"natural"-gas-"if "ication project by the Lurgi method which Mayn learned in five minutes and consigned to one plain young sentence declining to contemplate the perfectly good principle that what’s true of (yea, good for) the part may not be true of the whole— until with a start that was not all him, Mayn felt the ache of wings in his back (a shade more credibly than any conclusions he and his distant loved son had reached at breakfast time as to why dreamers thought their dreams conveyed the future), Mayn we say felt a long, halyard-vector (call it) slung from far off bugging him with its maybe hundreds of thousands of miles of calm meaninglessness so that he understood again not only that his position in the future could be real but that he had been assuming without evidence but not with faith that nothing dreadful would happen to Larry, this troubled young (be O.K., though) fellow Larry: but then as if he were responsible yet could not be responsible for the boy, there came to Jim a fresh free dose of void— though without any of those gross little margins of witticism history’s humor—a prevision that Larry was doomed, and soon.

  Naturally, it passed through Mayn’s mind that his mother might have passed into another life, not died at all—a second, a third, or yet another life. He did not discuss this with Margaret, who, in so many words, had said that she just could not accept it, the fact, the fact of Sarah’s doing this. Meanwhile the boy lay awake with the shape or symptom of the repeated fantasy lost within him saying to himself, "She said to go away, but she went. So her advice now means, ‘Go away from home like me’—more than it means ‘Go away from me.’ "

  Jim was not deranged and so he was able to be amused even at fifteen at the thought that he had made her go away. It wasn’t a true thought, and he would have it from time to time. That is, he was aware enough of life to know he would have it from time to time.

  the message for what it was worth

  Meanwhile you have to come up with something, said the older gentleman with whom I exchanged views from time to time. Economical of words, he would have gone far giving business advice. Maybe come up with something now, I said; but the last thing you decide is what to put first. True enough, said this older acquaintance of mine, but who knows what condition you’ll be in on your deathbed?

  He would listen, and then he would speak. I had an odd way of seeing things, he said.

  Well, what did that mean?

  Oh, he said, smart, but a bit turned around. Cart before the horse? I said. That’s the idea, he said; first things first. But the last thing you decide, I said, is what to put first; that’s what the French mathematician said.

  Are you a French mathematician? my elderly acquaintance asked. And one day I asked myself that question verbatim. But I have heard that one should stop talking to oneself; or so advises one of the religions, I think. Does that mean talk to others instead? Well, I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go. Have you told her, my elderly acquaintance would say. Have you told him? my wife would say, of whomever. I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go.

  A hand gripped my arm and I turned to the young man detaining me. The train terminal all around me seemed freed of its morning rush hour, but the terminal wasn’t going anywhere, while I was. An old girlfriend of five or six years ago had come to mind with such perilous decency and sweetness that, if I kept moving across the marble floor uninterrupted, I might reach her voice; I was thinking of her, she was wearing bluejeans, then a plaid woolen skirt I had paid for. The hand gripping my arm was like the foreground sound I heard against a deep mass murmur in the station.

  "Sir, do you live here in New York?" the young man asked. He held a book to his chest, a holy book with a title I recognized. I wished him a merry Christmas. "Do you live in New York?" he asked, and I heard in his speech great spaces of our country that are not New York. His hand grew upon my arm, and I reminded him that I had wished him merry Christmas.

  "O.K., but I don’t think we’re getting through to each other," the young man said. I looked down at his pale hand on my arm and said that at least we were still talking. "That’s right," he grinned, and I said indeed I did live here in New York and at this moment was leaving it.

  He asked me where I was going. "It is the journey that counts, not the destination," I said, and withdrew my arm.

  "That’s right," said the young man and touched my arm again.

  But then I fell into a habit I have been ordered to break—a shorthand that somewhat privately brings together past and present: "I can’t come to your wedding," I said, "I’m busy every night this week."

  Whatever he thought of this—a private joke, sarcasm, madness—he smiled with an understanding I am all too familiar with. Another young fellow had accosted me Saturday on a cold, festive street as my wife and I peered at a menu through the fogged window of a restaurant. He had had three girls in tow and it was he who had asked me to his wedding. He was marrying— and of course I knew how to believe him—Jesus Christ at midnight. We smiled and nodded, my wife and I; all six of us, I think, smiled.

  But this morning I was alone. The young man with the holy book gripped my arm like a blood-pressure test. The Bhagavad-Gita was what he was holding. "Can I talk to you?" he said, as a son at a certain time of life might think of saying to a distant father.

  I threw up my elbow in his face and he let go.

  I approached my gate that had "11:40" in large white numerals below the name of the train. At the gate I turned and looked back. The young man was showing a blonde lady a passage in his book.

  I was early for my local, but I had an unbelievable number of other things to do, and today, whatever I had in common with the man I was visiting, I had little if anything to say to him. "And yet—and yet . . ."I already heard his words, this elder acquaintance of mine who in his slow humor betrayed only a very mild interest in his own affairs.

  If he could see me now. Here I was, moving away from the very gate I had approached, and moving toward where the young man and the middle-aged blonde stood discussing the Bhagavad-Gita. It is, I am sure, a religious book. But I have my own notion of gods. I am no god; I won’t go for that. Nor to my knowledge are any of those close to me gods. And yet, as the older man I have mentioned would say—and yet. My notion is that there are many gods. No problem.

  I passed near the young man and the blonde woman, and the woman looked up and smiled at me. I heard a
child crying, and I heard another child, on being prompted, say, "Hi." I heard a man say, "So sue her—sue her ass." I swept the great echoing station, picking up more than I knew, noticing at the end of one row of marble ticket windows that were now devoted to Off-Track Betting a notice that did not apply to me, for an organization that helps gamblers. The man I was going to see had known a gambler who came to him with strange pains in his fingers. My host did not tell jokes, but he told very particular stories. It seemed that this gambler had been strolling down a street in Anchorage, Alaska, with his recently widowed sister-in-law and had run into another card player, a recent settler there. He had introduced the lady he was with, but only by name, as she afterward pointed out to him. What she was not to know, however, was that behind her back a few evenings later at a crisis he risked her—bet her as his own wife—against the settler’s powerboat no less. An old story, no doubt. But she had never learned of her stake in the boat or in the proceeds of its sale, and the gambler came to love her and they married and were happy. This despite his habits (though he had a regular job now) and perhaps at the price of a ritual anguish in the nerves of his fingertips four or five times a year, one of those times the anniversary of that game in Anchorage.

  "Lucky at cards, lucky in love?" I had suggested.

  "If that’s how you see it," said my host.

  How then, did my host see it? He shrugged, but then he said, "Oh, smart at cards, smart in love."

  What had that gamble to do with love? I thought then and later. My host added that he and the gambler had concluded that telling the wife the truth about that game in Anchorage wasn’t what was called for and wasn’t even a good idea. The truth was that the gambler and his wife were having a little trouble at the moment and she was a bit bored with life.

  Once more at my gate, I thought of my wife in bed, answering, not answering. I was almost certain my elder daughter had read the Bhagavad-Gita. She talked of getting her own apartment. Our second daughter, much younger, had been my idea; her birth had proved unexpectedly easy. I wasn’t thinking straight, and yet to come out and think this thought could mean I was. I was going to get on my train.

  The dispassionate man I was going to see had a habit of prefacing a remark with "You’re not going to like what I’m about to say." But while he had his idiosyncrasies, this was not one of them. My wife was also in the habit of telling me I was not going to like what she was about to say. But unlike the man I was going to see today, she was almost always correct in her warning, her prediction. I say "almost" because, having warned me that I would not like what she was about to say, she would sometimes stop and not say whatever it was, on the ground that I stopped her from speaking her mind.

  Not half so much, though, as I stopped myself. For who has the time? I must speak for myself. Not a renouncing individual, I had renounced fighting with her. It was necessary to my renunciation that I had not told her.

  I sat in the NO SMOKING car of my train among newspapers left by commuters. I had a good empty feeling. I was hungry, but didn’t want whatever they were peddling in the cafe car. Christmas was going to be bearable. The somewhat elderly man I was visiting was not exactly a close friend; I was paying him this visit because I thought I ought to. I had nothing special to say to him today. As I’ve said, if he had taken himself seriously he could have gone far as a business consultant. I’m repeating myself.

  I had met him at the bar of a business-lunch restaurant downtown through a journalist friend whom I hadn’t seen for months and haven’t since. A bright, windy day a couple of blocks from the harbor—and the brass rail I put my foot on and the polished wood under my elbow and the golden rust flecking the great mirror behind the bar might have inspired even me to take the day off. I recall that they were discussing their grown children when I appeared, and the journalist said he didn’t see his as often as he’d like but he guessed it was partly up to him; his friend here was retired so he had less excuse. Semi-retired, my new acquaintance said. Well, you’re not packing a stethoscope any more, said my journalist friend. When he left the bar to sit down with, as I recall, two well-known economists, each with a full, reddish beard, who instantly began studying their menus, he shook hands and for a moment held in both of his the hand of my new acquaintance, this somewhat elderly doctor who had come into Manhattan to see his lawyer that morning.

  What happened was that the doctor and I had lunch, and the fish was watery. I told the waiter he had ignored us, he’d been taking something out on us, what was it?, and I told my companion that I had been using my squash racket on court lately like a shillelagh and I had no idea how many blood types were represented on its raw head, and what did he do by way of being semi-retired!

  The long and the short of it is that he was at present a therapist on an informal basis, with a few patients. That was the first and last meal we had together, a thought that came to me as I imagined what they were serving in the cafe car of my regular train. I had not asked what his qualifications were, though I had seen in his study a framed certificate from an institute of pastoral (I think it was) psychotherapy. My time was limited but we met quite often. What did I know of him? He had his share of sorrow. What more could one say? Well, that he was droll and, if not magical, self-contained. Mostly—for he declined to be an oracle—he said humdrum things like, You want to take some time for yourself. I sometimes thought I didn’t know what to say to him; but he was there, and I paid for the hour, though it was usually less. Well, it was supposed to be fifty minutes and it was usually at least that. I will say that I felt it was my time. There, that’s what I meant to say, banal as it comes out.

  I had had the time to talk with the young man in the terminal who would not go away, but I was here in my car instead. I knew that the Bhagavad-Gita was a Hindu poem, a sacred text I was almost certain. Come to think of it, I knew it was conversations between two persons, a god and, I believe, a warrior. I had not felt called upon to read the book. I knew pretty much what I would find. My personal view is that there are many gods, and when we organize and rank them we go too far, we ask too much of them.

  I saw my fellow passengers with such clarity that I might have suspected I could enter their bodies if I had not felt the opposite. A black woman in a red coat unwrapped a candy bar and watched a girl with a scout-green knapsack on a metal frame enter the car. Two mustachioed youths sat down, lighted cigarettes, and got up and left the car. An older couple—two older couples —sat in the far half of the car facing my way. A flaxen-haired woman who looked like my wife and had a slightly broken nose glanced across the aisle at me, held my glance, and gave me a smile. A man in a white helmet had wheeled his bicycle along the platform and was arguing with a conductor. Two men wearing glasses settled down with heavy-looking loose-leaf notebooks and, exchanging names of men they knew, talked for all our benefit as if the train were already rumbling along. A black woman entered the car, found the first black woman, and sat down with her. One had an old Macy’s shopping bag, the other a brown canvas bag like a blue one of mine in which I carry athletic gear.

  The doors closed, the train moved, and I felt I could see anything I wanted to see. The man in the helmet stood on the platform like a trooper, his bicycle pointed in the direction our train was moving. I heard what sounded like a cat’s angry squall at a distance and knew it was someone’s zipper close by. The train’s movement was like the tunnel we were moving through, and the loud voices of the two men with the notebooks talking guidelines receded.

  I hummed a chorus of an old tune, "It’s Just the Nearness of You"; those were very likely the only words of it I recalled. The flaxen-haired woman across the aisle smiled, and I asked her if it was going to be a good day, and we seemed to find that funny.

  I reported to her that a young man with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita had tried to convert me in the station, and the woman asked why I assumed he was trying to convert me. But then she raised a hand gently and said, "No, no, of course he was."

  "Wait a s
econd," I said. "You didn’t mean that."

  "Oh I guess I didn’t know why you were telling me," the woman said, and looked down at the cover of a magazine in her lap.

  "What are all these people doing traveling out to Westchester at half past eleven on a weekday morning?" I said.

  The woman opened the magazine as if we were old friends, in fact as casually as my wife would turn the page of a magazine if we were traveling together—indeed just as she had done on the one occasion when she had come with me to visit the man I was going to see today. I swung my shopping bag from the seat beside me to the floor. Well, I was not quite empty-handed journeying out to see this after all wise and interesting man, but perhaps he would have a laugh or two in store for me.

  The flaxen-haired woman looked at a page and barely glanced at me so that she seemed to be turning against the resistance of that small, abrupt angle where her nose had been broken.

  I had bought my wife a Christmas present on the way to the train, a last-minute inspiration. Standing in the crowded subway I had felt time warming me, exciting me to a point of common happiness—holiday time. On the subway platform as I had gotten off, a man was singing. But he might have been screaming, to judge from the pain in a woman’s face as she climbed the stairs. He had been singing well and singing for us all. I had wanted to speak to him, give him something; but that wasn’t his idea.