She talked of a house they would build, near water she imagined you’d see through the trees. An open-plan house built around a huge tree—he had to laugh—no, she’d seen it from a car years ago, the tree, a hundred feet tall, six feet thick at least, not a branch on it, all gray like a rock, but alive (she thought it had been alive)—he had to laugh—and her loving uncle had looked away from the road before she had a chance to speak and had said it was a white oak. It was far from here but you could find oaks like that in New England too, and it was what she wanted, like two children, a girl and then a boy, Flick and Andrew, who Flick felt was so much smarter than she was and who when he went to college years later was a maker of riddles.
Joy’s father had been a chemist with the paper company in Chicago— Donnelly. The chemistry of paper, not that you need to talk about your work. Her sister got on better with him.
In the beginning Joy talked of a future she seemed already to have shared with this fellow Jim Mayn her husband, as if it had come first, so clear was she about it, and quick to catch him thinking her own thoughts about fair-to-poor rural schools when he’d hardly known he was thinking about schools though when she told him schools didn’t matter as much as she’d once thought, he had a spasm of caring still more for her, caring twice as much as he did about the two kids whom he was very content to love—while he did feel in his bones that if she was better balanced than he, she still didn’t admit to herself what it felt like to be preferred to her children, preferred in his sharp, erratic way.
Where were the children? Flick, the sharp-spoken girl, and Andrew, the potential roughneck (he’d suddenly start yelling to himself; it was funny, it was like he’d suddenly started digging down through the Earth—maybe he was hearing things, hearing even then those riddles he used to make up when he went to college). Where were Flick and Andrew in the marriage, in all this?
Everywhere and nowhere. (Her father said she really listened, but her mother shrugged.)
Or everywhere, both parents could sometimes feel, though Jim and Joy saw themselves as wise enough to let their children be free of them.
He listened to her build the house she had in mind and fill it; and he had to speak; but then he said only that . . . well, here he was.
Was he her old-fashioned future? As her sister’s minister back in Aurora, Illinois, had said, commitment in terms of marital union is like living already in the future.
He didn’t know if he could keep up with that future (whether or not he ever got to go to China).
Except that when he could admit abrupt rage in himself upon returning to the apartment and then, as he came in, see Joy watching him from where she was (like a neighbor’s ocelot—more like a friend’s shepherd watching a man and woman she knew leave in the morning—though more like a wife who was prepared for him) and just as this irritation of his toward someone he loved rose and then finished toward her in a rush, and he stood roughly and said something and went toward her, he felt that coming home was coming back: and when she said, "Do you like being here?" (so the words came together though they were divided by time and by sense and between said and not-said), "it’s nice here, isn’t it?" (she’d built a record cabinet, she’d fixed the wall telephone’s loose box)—"when I heard the elevator door, I knew it was you and when I heard the lock I knew you hadn’t shaved before you left the hotel—I know what you’re thinking, don’t say it—the children aren’t home yet—the last thing you want is to eat out tonight, tell me the truth"— he felt that what he’d come back from was some future, and what he’d come back to was an abundance threatening to waste itself on him. With his assignments, you see, he made sense of each individual one.
She told him what had happened while he was gone. Not a whole lot. She could stand with her arms akimbo as if she needed to take up a bit of space.
Sometimes she would know how not to come to him at the door, she would stand in the middle of the living-room rug instead and he could put down his case without taking his eye off her. Once she’d been sitting cross-legged on the sun-covered ochre rug, the ochre sun-struck into a growth loose through the spread of dark, interleaved pairs of bloomed coils, once upon a time beaks, each the beak of the rainbird if you please, standing each upside down to the other, and she was part of the rug so that he looked at both and didn’t know which came first, and this was more crazy than being irritated at feeling grateful; she wasn’t asking for gratitude any more than the eyes of his long-withdrawn mother (inherited by his happier grandmother?) really gave him gratitude for marrying for love.
What happens is never what came first, it seems to Jim Mayn, and Joy doesn’t see what he means for he says it even less clearly than that, and then shakes his head at himself and grins grimly as if he has to go off now and talk to someone he despises and once in the middle of an alarm clock going off he smashed the bathroom mirror without a drop of blood and his small daughter came and asked him why he had done it; what happens is never what comes first, it seems, but how about when what comes first has not yet appeared? It is waited for, as if it might be seen approaching through emptiness. It is thinking him! With ways of thought that aren’t his any more than they are Joy’s or his daughter’s, but these broken statements like he was a cracked philosopher in another life, or a traveling charlatan, another system, come into him, out of him.
Flick and Andrew had a lot to say to each other later on about their parents. Andrew was confused but brilliant about it. His father tried to tell him how to write with few words for his seventh-grade English. Did Jim ever tell anything like that to Flick? She and her brother thought not.
Jim was away too much, they later said. But newly returned was what Joy said she made him feel.
But returned from the future where, say, two people had been turned into one, which economizes on feeling: his daughter heard this at the end of a story one night, she was quite sure.
Yet also another kind of One, offspring from those dubious Two, is different from them, and alone; and as he looks back to the former Two, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he cannot see where they went; and deserted by that origin, this One (namely, Jim) feels thrust untimely from that lost Two into the future, where he should be glad to be because it’s where tomorrow’s news is, but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery smarter than he which is that of his unhappy mother disappearing into the elements, he has on one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost river to then find it in the future where he travels (whew!), or, to put it better, his wife didn’t always know where he was coming from, and, believing him not unfaithful, told him nonetheless that he wasn’t all there. But as her never-at-a-loss friend Lucille Silver put it, What man is entirely committed to his marriage? Which for Joy did not cover the thing that was happening to her.
Somewhere in the future Andrew and his older sister Flick who thinks he’s so much brighter have a lot to say to each other but seldom meet.
Meanwhile, hear yourself slog through the noise pollution of a street, what Mayn calls "bedlam," and his daughter years later learns from an older woman friend what Bedlam literally was.
"Grampa said he was tickled pink to see me."
"That’s right."
The little girl giggles, even without her little brother for an audience. "Tickled pink!" It’s funny.
On Second Avenue, that so powerfully carries from north to south the hills and bridges and tunnels of Manhattan’s east coast—well, one tunnel that he knows of—the morning sun low in the sky turns blinding against the snow and slick of the glittering pavement. Anything is here in this city, including all that’s outside, and the winter sun that has been fired silently off into the void above Queens and Brooklyn, the sun that has been launched into its old moment of fixity, stays there above the city, and there is nowhere else for a moment, since the sky east and west and up forgets New Mexico, Chile, Connecticut, the cobbles of Brussels, l
ife that lasts from a Russian subway platform to a peak in Tanzania. The morning traffic blasts cycles of current past people standing on curbs as if the avenue were being excavated. Glaring noise that would be a gaping hole if you could just manage to get the joke, which is someone else’s. Hitler’s loudspeaker has been pulverized and each deaf pore of the future soaks it up and naturalizes it. A child among other children gets up the two steps of a yellow Varsity bus, and the father, his shoulders hunched and his bare hand in his pocket discovering the warm tangerine it’s been holding for several blocks, sees her then through the bus windows shadowed by the outside light, knapsack strap slipping off one shoulder; sees her make her way back to a seat on the aisle and ease around leaning forward away from the back of the seat giving her knapsack room.
The light is in his eyes, the little girl looks straight ahead. The day has begun. The young driver in a sweatshirt with the hood back has drawn the door to, and watches what’s coming over his shoulder, revving the motor. The girl glances at her father, starts a smile—just a glance, that’s all—that’s it—the day’s begun. She sees him with her faintly smiling glance, and that’s it, she doesn’t see him find in his pocket and hold up the tangerine she was going to have on the bus. He has the tangerine but not his gloves, and will save it for her.
The kid on the seat in front turns to speak to her over his shoulder—but the father can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl in the knitted cap under the hood of a quilted parka. They have forgotten home and parents, thank God. His daughter and the other children are in a thing that’s about to move, it’s almost not here, the eye reviews the faces on their way to school.
Sun, like a power now being used, strikes through the bus broadside and the bus eases out into traffic in front of a honking cab and behind a truck. The truck is silver like bare metal and when it is gone he is looking at the same old rainbow-shaped red-white-and-blue Grand Opening banner above the plate glass of the supermarket Joy doesn’t go to any more because they lost her delivery once; and the father is even more still before he turns to go. He feels good. His child’s cheeks were pink, rosy. She’s thinking about what’s ahead, not about her father.
Turning, he is struck—struck on the elbow. The man, the Italian fruit-and-vegetable man—"ey!" knows him and greets him in his arms as if by name hustling across the sidewalk with a carton of half-green bananas in his arms that he’s slid off the back of the Hunts Point truck. The white double-door of the funeral home is like a seafood restaurant and out of one small leaded window, her center-parted dyed-dark hair tight-combed, a woman’s round face is looking, and he knows she has an apron on, he knows her though not to speak to and she holds his gaze with a morning attention his brother Brad back home in New Jersey would think unfriendly—she’s Italian and she looks at you, but then this is New York and she looks away and back. His knee hurts.
His knee is sick, and the fancy deli’s sidewalk is city-full, the baskets of shallots, of beans, of dried stockfish on end with their long gray whiskery jaws like flat fossils for being open, and he wonders if the fava beans in the plastic bags can be the same he saw last month, pale and tough for a long day’s minestrone, flat like limas. No doctor’s going to touch the cartilage in his knee, it’s floating, that’s what it’s doing—it’s not really knifing him nerve by nerve, it’s acting up because he walked four miles back to a motel—two miles in green quiet, two along a highway—and yesterday afternoon Joy saw the swelling while unpacking his bag which she still feels called upon to do. But back in New York today if he can’t get in some basketball he’ll swim laps. Joy’s given up telling him to see a doctor.
He takes another way home, roundabout. He picks a plane out of the air, the noise. His hands are cold. The air seems less acid, more fresh, but isn’t. He’s going home. Not going home "first" before he goes out to work, because today he’s at home. Not working at all until he has to see his old bureau chief for lunch which is soon enough.
Out of the cold sidewalk comes the awful question since no one like them was supposed to get divorced: So who will leave first, he or Joy? Is it what’s coming to them? Stuff comes to him he can’t prove, like that each waits to be prompted by the other. Certain words waiting for them may do it. By the time he gets back she will have put Andrew on the private-school bus—it’s apricot-colored, caramel-pudding-colored, but you know what paint smells like, and like a lot of individual school buses this one suggests police, the administration of the city, not the microbus of the same size but many colors; an airport hotel gives courtesy transportation in this type of bus, and Andrew’s costs six hundred dollars a school year. Will she be home? If home, in the bathroom? Does she want to go back to work? He sees the children arriving home and pressing and pressing the buzzer.
A clear puzzle anyway. More clear than this noise. Who will leave first? Not her.
Joy will say—he knows she will—that if in the midst of this clear puzzle she should leave, he her husband has already left. The house, that is. They don’t think of it as only rented, they think it’s theirs, though they hate rent. The "house," the apartment.
We’ve jumped a few events. A good apartment is hard to find. A good woman is not hard to find; they’re all so damned good. At not quite complaining. Until you’re at last not ready. Picking a time when you were about to think. About to go. It’s painful for him, isn’t it? this traveling—painful quite apart from her.
He’s away often, so he knows the City even better, he’s always returning and what would he know if he had stayed home in New Jersey to revive the family weekly newspaper when it couldn’t be done anyhow, and he knows this part of Manhattan as well as he knows Yorkville, the West Village, Wall Street, Maiden Lane, the Battery, or knows the sound of three familiar dogs repeatedly greeting each other down in the street very late at night or early in the morning long before Joy’s alarm goes off, sometimes he doesn’t want to explain himself, say he’s way uptown crossing East Eighty-sixth Street in the middle of the block at two or three in the morning having found a Puerto Rican former super he wanted to question and thinking now he’ll catch a German bar before it closes but is met in midstream by a drunk sailor with a pale, wiry mongrel on a leash and the sailor grabs him by the arm and asks him to take the dog back there into the Finnish restaurant that Mayn then recalls noticing the sailor coming out of, with the awning—"Where am I?" the sailor mumbles as a few late (or early) cars and trucks rub them both ways—"Eighty-sixth Street, Yorkville"—"Take the dog for Chrissake"— the sailor didn’t want to explain himself either, and Mayn understood.
Mayn’s not with the regional task force any more, though the bureau would have him back; but, with the task force that took him out of New York all the time, he was based in New York—whereas now he’s not—but lives on here—though he’s away even more. Got it?
"So it’s been in your family," a man at a bar once said respectfully, "now that’s what I kind of always wanted—my own small-town paper, I got the clothes for it."
Name of Ray Spence. That operator Ray Spence, impersonal, funky (too early for that word), unkillable (forget the rat poison—he wouldn’t have to vomit). Came back at Mayn once in a Washington bar, "So what happened? Family lost their grip? Those small-town papers ..." But Spence with his clear eye for some rich man’s secret that could be forgotten even after it wasn’t a secret any more, whether money changed hands or not, Spence can’t know so much without a staff but came on as a plain old photographer and had a gift for the instant, and tipped the bartender heavily, and hardly touched his drink, or was it his second or third?
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