"I guess you were very married. She told me you were shy, but I never saw it."
"One part of your mother and me was very conventional, O.K.?"
"But this screwing around went on. And I don’t even want to hear about it."
"You want a one-word description of it all?"
"Like Eisenhower," she remembered.
"Very good!"
"Maybe I can think of a two- ..."
"Funny, it was more an emotional screwing around, if you can understand."
"I don’t see what you mean."
"Long talks. With the other person. Agonized, inconclusive. Helpful."
"Sounds O.K. Sounds weird."
"It was close. While on the other side, we had a high resistance, went at it tooth and nail, on foot and by word of mouth—I mean the marriage went on."
"Why didn’t you end it?"
"We did," he said, and saw that she felt his stupid pain in her unsaid charge Not soon enough—she always acted like she knew what was what— and her pain was for having wanted him to think those words, go on thinking them, yet his and maybe Joy’s was to have covered up the signs over the years, the warning signs, so the children were more surprised than they needed to be when the time came. Andrew had said he had thought it had happened because his parents stayed up all night arguing. This was what he had said to Flick and Flick had started to cry when she told her mother.
Flick said, "We’re all going to have a good life, Dad."
"Whew!" she said with her breath.
Mayn’s cheek came up hard; did he look skeptical, smiling?
A Greek place up in the German neighborhood and they’d only had a glass each, but he relaxed his cheeks and managed to say, "See what the booze brings out," guessing she saw what was in his eyes, though then he suddenly thought of how good the crusty sliced loaf of bread looked in its napkin.
"It’s not booze," she said, "it’s wine, it’s golden wine."
He wondered if she liked the government agency job he’d gotten her in Washington? Or helped her get. She didn’t want to go on with college and she’d been gallivanting around the country in some kid’s car and they’d crossed the Mississippi four times on the way west, camping bright-eyed under a dark curve of continental sky. He didn’t bat an eyelash when she asked him who Mayga was because Joy had told her she was a woman in his life and her death had looked like murder. He said, "How did she ever hear of Mayga? She was just a colleague." But Flick thought he was wiped out.
Later he said, "Call your mother." He had hard, dry crumbs all over his place.
Flick didn’t answer for a moment. "One side of my head says O.K.; the other side says Oh shit why should I?"
She seemed not to know what was obviously in his head.
Andrew, Andrew.
Jim visited him occasionally totally unexpectedly, but more often he kind of worried about it and thought he must make a point of flying to Boston or having Andrew to New York or Washington, the maker of riddles. All but one of which riddles came out as clear and economical as a good lead: the one in question, however, sweaty and long-winded like the sweaty expensive late-night grass it came from, and assembled mostly from what the father over years had said to one or another about himself: Somewhere two people are turned into one; yet witness another One, lone species offspring from these preceding two; and as he, this One, looks back to them, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he can’t see quite where they went; and, deserted by that origin, this One feels thrust from that loss into the future, where he should be glad to be because, newsman as he becomes, it’s where tomorrow’s news is; but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that aborted origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery far more intelligent than he which is partly the Shock of his unhappy mother once upon a time disappearing into the elements, he has on just one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost origin as if to find it in the future where he travels—
(whew! a lighter voice exhales returning or retelling the riddle to its subject on another late night).
Not the night here, though, toward the end of which, after a Greek dinner with his daughter, Jim called Joy when he was alone, feeling steady then, but not very solid.
Hello, he heard her say, softly so he felt no one had been thinking about him just before he’d called—which was kind of maudlin, which in turn might be the tariff on what was possibly just plain true. But her second hello wasn’t your enthusiastic Hello! but the same quiet, thought-like word, so he felt that she had been thinking about him, or she’d been thinking about her relation with Jack.
So here Joy was and was willing to talk but she made him feel it had to be about something. Then clearly she thought maybe he’d had more than enough. Her voice hit him and he got a still breath of the New Hampshire night from behind his eyes.
He thought he would (he said) drop in on her and Jack.
Has Andrew written you lately? she asked.
She didn’t quite say not to come, but she didn’t want him.
Which let him feel he didn’t know what she wanted. Which was, he knew, what she wanted—mutual debt minus time.
He expected to be in Montpelier and he could get a plane from there to Keene, he thought, and he wondered if she was looking at Jack while she talked. What the hell is it that happens anyway, he thought, you get a divorce from somebody you love because there’s too much between you, too much nerves, too many wrong pauses; and you go from there into a lesser relationship, isn’t that what happens?—and were these some words coming from his daughter’s private thoughts at dinner?—or somewhere else?—or from him alone? He didn’t mention dinner with their daughter Flick or the book that Joy and Jack had sent her for her birthday, The Letters ofF. Scott Fitzgerald; didn’t mention a disturbing and involved and unanswered letter from Andrew many weeks ago, but like a blank Mayn saw the dark back of Jack’s head bending toward the different-shaped stones framing a hearth that had seldom been used in summer. He said he didn’t know how much time he’d have after Montpelier, and Joy didn’t ask him what he’d be doing in Montpelier. He said it was about an insurance investment in South America, he had to ask a few questions without telegraphing his moves by making an advance appointment, though a lobbyist who was trying to get a rider onto a bill that was still in committee and who was pretty good himself at being in two or three places at once might have told the man in Montpelier that Mayn was quite capable of materializing.
No one was running for cover exactly, but—and he asked if she recalled—and she interrupted him with "the letter I wrote—why wouldn’t I recall it?" The "wouldn’t" stopped the flow, if there’d been any, but he was dazzled and his heart was on the move, he bet she heard it. But she was demanding that he not stop, he felt that. And so he told her O.K. if she came on like that O.K. then, he was answering the letter now ten years late in which she’d said "cover story."
"But it was answered," she said. "By phone, by letter, and"—he knew she’d dropped her eyes—"by nothing."
"But I wasn’t always away, and I wasn’t away that much, was I?"
Meanwhile she was saying under him and over him, We had all that out—Christ how he got into her mind and she couldn’t think straight, they were into each other for more than either could afford, or at least afford to think about. No, he said, she’d said his being away too much was their cover story. Corny, said Joy, but we all get that way. She was quite fond of the old apartment—aesthetic distance, she said (and he saw the night shadows of maple branches and couldn’t make out if the spruce and pine were pale with snow). Please, he said—and felt he was inciting her to hang up—and said then not what was in his mind but something truly trite, which went something like What world are we living in where it’s wrong to need the warmth and familiarity of another person, your spouse—bad word—your man, your woman—too possessive—let me finish—
Oh for God’s sake, she said (and didn’t say what he felt he d
istinctly picked up and without a "dear Jim") "You’re in your cups"—oh the unfairness of that!—he knew he’d phone and tell Flick, who would sound interrupted, whatever she was doing, except she’d pay close if tired attention and even get a little laugh out of it. He let his hair down more than ten years ago, he reported probably quite exactly what Joy had said: "What’s between us is what we were and you’re not going to fix that. Men and women often don’t get along. I hated it when you were away. I knew I would. I kept track of what time you arrived places, sometimes it made me feel more like an old person than a sailor’s wife. Then you came back. Then you went away to Bridgeport, Cape May, Boston, Florida. You came back. You went away, and a box of grapefruit arrived from the Coast Guard. You came back from Portland with four serrated spoons and ate some of the grapefruit. Suddenly you didn’t go away—it often felt like that—there you were, pinning up Flick’s hair while the tub ran and the faucets and pipes were groaning and you were still getting the last hairpin in and she was stepping into the tub and you thought she’d fall; I was thinking whether to pick Andrew up or let him yell and you got the pin to hold and your hand touched that little shoulder and I had to admit that, well, my husband touched me too like that, but damn it all (yet it’s a family, it’s a family!) yet I thought damn nice of him to borrow us—to^Hit in an appearance and put up that little girl’s hair for her bath with my hairpins, two years old, three years old, four years old, she didn’t get private about herself with you till way past what the book said but she did with a babysitter (that Irish girl from just the other side of Third who lived in the tenement brownstone they tore down to put up the apartment high-rise everyone kept saying wrongly for months was a Howard Johnson motor inn, who would tell you when you walked her home that the priest had been getting her alone a lot), with that Irish girl in the room Flick wouldn’t get undressed at the age of seven. But I was used to you being away. It affected my thinking. What thinking? I did a lot, I thought, but now I don’t think it even was thinking, it was like years of our both play-acting that we didn’t claim (you know) power over each other. So there you were. I thought I shouldn’t turn the TV on; you were home. I had suddenly to be contented. I was crazy. You didn’t talk about big events, and I thought I was glad you didn’t, and you think history’s a mess anyway. So I turned on the TV anyway. There it was, Judgment at Nuremberg you’d thought you’d missed. Playhouse 90. Good. You were glad it was on. You went away and it was like coming into range. But I must have had that range; listen, when I married you I thought I knew all about your being away and then home, and you would be—
Valued in his absence (yes he knew, he knew, he told Flick these phone conversations word for word as if she would change them), and remembered loving his grandmother because in her letters she didn’t nag him—the letters so different from the few "official" ones he’d come across from 1893 when she traveled west with her distant cousin Florence and sent back a regular column for the Democrat: Chicago (the World’s Fair was the excuse, the New Jersey exhibition which was a colonial house staffed with blacks, and a great horticultural exhibit with crystal rocks, and an African village with fifty huts and a witch doctor) but then Florence got ill and dropped away from what proved to be Margaret’s westward course, Colorado, Arizona, no kidding; New Mexico, pretty incredible for a Victorian girl—and come to think of it these letters were also rather different from stories she’d told from the time he was too little to remember—about Indians, stories less than The Last of the Mohicans which was the first grown-up book he’d read, though she’d read most of it to him and it made them both (somewhat secretly) cry at the end (and he’d been glad no one else, like his sissy brother, was there) but if less exciting, her own tales of the West and the Indians were more peculiar, more memorable (is that the word? you could build on them) word for word—more human—that was it, more human—so that even though they were made up out of who knew what weird hearsay and daydreams (twice removed) and were not true, you really felt she put herself into them; as indeed she did in her letters to Jim much later at the end of her life when she said she guessed she had it coming after all these years, a Victorian feminist who was hard on her own daughters and corresponded with Jack London, a fact which Mayn never perhaps had told his daughter, who was a socialist and had to find out her own way, which was just accident—her illness—and he heard the clear, familiar laugh in the words he read—not hoots of laughter like when he was a kid, but a—she once wrote him that his father had said to her daughter, Jim’s mother, when she, Margaret, was present with Brad, "We all get what’s coming to us—even you" (who never got "whipped" in her life)—and the grandmother’s letters which were strong and informative would never nag him about coming home to Windrow to visit, the way his father even knowing that his other son Brad was tied right into his girlfriend’s mother’s haberdashery store would make Brad feel guilty about the mere prospect of taking a temporary job in a department store in Trenton. (Andrew. Andrew. With the unconvincingly bone-crunching handshake all by himself studying zoology. Andrew. Andrew. Had lost his father, hadn’t he?) But Jim had had an experience of being valued in his absence—was that it, dear Joy? Crazy idea. Did he make Joy that way? Kind of nuts, but strong enough to leave him— to find words to leave him.
Valued in his absence. He was a bit drawn into that, but so were two or three other guys whose names he’d heard her mention. But he could think of two couples who weren’t having children and lived so close that—well, didn’t he envy them?—well, if they weren’t reading In Cold Blood together or Dickens, or doing their laundry together (well, he must have read one book by Dickens in high school but he couldn’t say honestly for sure if he’d read a second and never cared to open those diaries of the 1820s—30s—40s. Mayne who must have grandfathered the man who never knew an ancient healer’s weather secret until it was too late to keep it from spreading eastward), or holding hands at the supermarket checkout or (breathing tandem) swimming side by side (or—who knew?—single-file in one economical lane) in the pool on the top floor of their building or, month in, month out, playing tennis inside a giant sagging but taut half-dirigible laced down above a parking lot, cooking together, or (peeing possibly in unison) shitting together so to speak, which Jim Mayn had no hesitation about as Flick and Andrew might know and neither did Joy (most of the time apparently) though the issue didn’t seem to come up with her. Could you say she kept modesty a secret?
He thought he was better about secrets than she; he had no use for them, yet that meant he would also leave them where they were. The first time he and she had talked in the restaurant in 1956—and her friend’s Russian was getting ready to sing—Jim had told her what he said was the only real secret in his family, told it like an afterthought or like a "lady’s pistol" in the pocket of an attache named Karl at an arms-control conference in Scandinavia; but as soon as he said it was, he said he realized there were some others. But, O.K., the only one in his family not to know that Brad his younger brother was a love-child had been Brad himself (like he’d been adopted and never told)—"But why didn’t you tell Brad?"—and yet, of the two of them, Brad was the devoted son—at least to his supposed (and Jim’s real) father—while Jim actually had preferred Bob Yard—"preferred" that raunchy, explosive old bastard (though not "old" then), the byblow adulterer in question who had maintained a running (at least) conversation with Mayn Senior over the years while Mayn Senior, known as Mel, was supposed not to know about his wife and Bob, but did, while the New York grandchildren didn’t know till years later and the Windrow grandchildren never—as if they were adopted (which they were). Supposed, that is, by one who liked Mel Mayn (or warmed to him) least, the gifted grandmother who wrote action-packed, plain, not especially feminine letters and told wild stories to Jim and who couldn’t love Brad and his older brother Jim the same and at some point stopped trying to keep up with the unhappiness of their mother, her daughter, Mel’s musically gifted wife, Bob Yard’s one-time relatively secret lover.
But when this family secret got told and somewhat enlarged upon one night years and years later after Joy had been Joy Mayn for a dozen years, she said astoundingly, as if the world were not after all going to end, "So that’s the way it fell out. Must have been heavy, but I don’t pick it up."
"You’re saying ‘So what,’ I guess, and that’s what/ felt in the beginning, I thought, but I guess I felt like blowing my brains out."
Their voices blurred into their persons.
Funny, I was thinking of suggesting it, Joy said.
I need practice, he said.
She had never questioned whether she totally liked him, and knew he had picked this up now.
I could practice with blanks, he said.
That’s no good, she said, and they could have burst out laughing, the capability was there.
No, he said.
Go and see a psychiatrist, she said. They had a laugh on that note. That is, if that was what he wanted to do, but not because his mother committed suicide.
Mayn knew what she meant. And that she’d been shaken, and not because Flick and Andrew would know, like kids learning that one of their parents had been married before.
Now was too late to be helpless; she had known for ages that he had never been able to understand being married. Or, which might be worse, he knew this was her feeling, right or wrong, about him; and now, that family secret got tiresome to believe—which devastated them both as if the story could be a substitute for further secrets and was unreal and temporary.
But knowing what she meant, he couldn’t speak. The weight was not in him of those experiences—it was near, but not in—like a near limb that’s gone to sleep, yet not uncomfortable (but come on, was he kidding?).
And the subject returned as if by itself to her complaint about the TV. The same complaint she made now on the long-distance phone.
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