Women and Men (101 page)

"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.

Mayn carried an old pale-leather valise which he did not set down as they waited for the elevator. It hung from Mayn’s hand and he might have been about to board a train. Gordon was a couple of inches taller than Mayn, a couple at most, but Mayn was broader than Gordon and stood with some final, strong balance that was power that came from patience.

The unusual dark shade of Mayn’s uniformly gray, thick hair didn’t look like a younger color mixed in, and his square, roughened face made you think he couldn’t be quite as old as he looked, which might be forty-five or fifty. The elevator floor indicator stayed at 5, and the new man came and pounded on the elevator door, put his nose against the diamond-shaped pane of reinforced glass, and tried to see up the shaftway. He shrugged and said that it was coming, and went away.

While waiting, Gordon and Mayn talked of security in the building, the boiler, and a general shift in weather patterns toward extreme warm and extreme cold winters in alternate years; also snow tires—in particular, radial snows. Gordon and Mayn re-introduced themselves. Gordon didn’t really know Mayn, but Gordon’s wife Norma, who had greeted Mayn once in Gordon’s presence, said Mayn was a nice man; he had lived in the building once upon a time, had left, had now come back to the same old apartment which he had somehow kept, and was often out of town. According to Norma, Mayn had bought an old white Cadillac for his young daughter who worked in Washington. She had not received it with quite the sense of humor her father had hoped for. Or so Norma had told Gordon.

Gordon at forty-four had taken a leave of absence from his law firm. He had to think, and think also how much this leave was costing. He kept thinking of himself as around forty. He had listened to Norma speaking of Jim Mayn.

She hardly knew him, but in his wife’s mentions of Mayn the rather lone new but old arrival, Gordon had found a tremor or shift that Norma might be unaware of.

What had Gordon missed? He had missed something—another life, no doubt—and that was why he was taking an expensive leave of absence which his firm did not understand. He had missed what? It was why he was where he was. He had almost forgotten how to think; or that was what it felt like in the morning and in the evening, and yet that wasn’t it. He noticed the year now when he read the
Times
in the morning, they were past the middle of the decade of the ‘70s.

The doorman came back and placed both palms on the elevator door, his nose against the diamond-shaped pane, trying to get into the shaft it looked like.

"She’s coming now," said Mayn. The doorman stepped back, giving the elevator door a single bang with his fist.

Gordon said he was glad his own daughters were too young to drive; he wouldn’t keep a car in the city. He listened to himself say that indoor parking cost as much a month as a room in an apartment, and what did the Motor Vehicle tax on a newly purchased car come to now? Mayn said that his daughter had a car in Washington. Gordon thought, A white Cadillac! Mayn said, The government takes so much, it’s almost too expensive to work. Still, thank God for withholding.

Gordon pointed out that they withheld too much, and he recalled that once he had prepared a speech on taxation.

Mayn asked who had delivered it, had Gordon been in politics?

No, it was for a contest at the rather traditional boys’ day school where Gordon attended grades nine through twelve. There were different categories and you could enter only one. Declamation was one category: you recited a poem. Public speaking was the other, but speech had two categories, prepared and extemporaneous. The extemporaneous speakers tended to be Jewish and kept up on their current events like sports fans; they were given topics fifteen minutes before they had to go on.

"That’s the way it ought to be," said Mayn.

Gordon had taken a load of information from an article in a magazine of his father’s, and when he went up to deliver his prepared speech from memory he looked left and right and didn’t know what in hell he was doing giving a speech on a subject like that. Where was the point of it for him?

Mayn wagged his head agreeably and said he couldn’t help him there.

In the elevator Gordon invited Mayn to come in for a drink. Mayn was saying, "Well ..." when they arrived at his floor and the door opened, and he asked Gordon to have that drink in
his
place.

There was no mat outside Mayn’s door and there was a point of light in the peephole. In his foyer was a rolled-up rug with a tag attached to it by wire. Gordon listened for a sound. The light had been left on in the foyer, and the peephole’s metal flap was stuck to one side in the open position. Mayn said there was a hanger in the closet, and Gordon said it was O.K. and dropped his raincoat on an old white metal lawn chair, and Mayn draped his coat over Gordon’s.

A mild, astringent scent of paint carried faintly into the living room, where a window was a few inches open. Mayn excused himself and disappeared into the kitchen. Gordon heard water spluttering out of a faucet—into a metal sink certainly; it droned and bounced like tinny rain. Mayn left the water running in the kitchen and appeared at the far end of the living room, disappeared for a minute, came back to the sound of a toilet flushing, passed out of sight, made some metal-on-metal and metal-on-wood noises, turned off the water and reappeared with a small pitcher and an ice bucket; he seemed to have evolved from a life that was far from here. You
can
go home again if you have several homes.

Mayn had one of the few three-bedroom apartments in the old building —said he had lived here with his family. Gordon could see the suitcase where Mayn had left it in the foyer.

Mayn poured for the two of them. Gordon urged Mayn to have a Medeco lock installed in his front door. They sat in the living room. Mayn hadn’t mentioned Gordon’s wife Norma, not that he should have. There was not much furniture in the living room, and Gordon liked the effect, although his frankly erratic feelings lately gave this living space for a moment a curious play in his mind. Either the furniture was being moved in or it was being moved out; but Mayn had recently moved back in and so the furniture, what there was of it, was certainly not being moved out, but Gordon had the feeling, as an unemployed observer, of a living space that contained a lot of different times. There were three large, detached, tree-like plants in tubs, but also there was a long, trailing, ivy-like growth that looked familiar, in a pot on a shelf above eye level. It was distinctly more present here in this room than the three big plants. Later, Gordon noticed another large plant, and maybe there were still more.

How had Mayn kept this place so long when the landlord didn’t give sublet clauses? No problem, said Mayn; Gordon didn’t follow it up. Gordon said, Come to think of it, he didn’t know anyone on this floor. Mayn said he had had two sets of friends in the apartment over the last few years, and he had come back, and left, and come back again.

Gordon inquired what it felt like, coming back, and Mayn knew what Gordon meant and thought a moment and then shook his head—he didn’t know how to answer and he said "Like remembering about my family when they lived here ..."

"What they didn’t know?"

"Or didn’t say."

Mayn lifted his glass as if to drink. Holding it before his mouth, he observed that he had never lived anything like this, never gone back. He had always done the opposite.

"You lived here with your family," said Gordon and the odd, slight cruelty he discovered in his remark seemed to contain what Norma knew about Mayn that Gordon didn’t know.

"There’s a man in this building who lived here for years with his parents," said Mayn; "and when he got married, he moved his parents out and moved his wife in; he moved his parents over to Brooklyn, as I remember, and now he lives here with his wife and daughter, she has a friend named Valerie and they’re always yelling at each other in the elevator"—"I know them," said Gordon— "and when his daughter gets married ..."

"Imagine the dreams you get in that apartment," said Gordon, but then he felt he was really talking about his host living here in this apartment, in this three-bedroom pad. "I mean the vibes."

"I don’t remember dreams," said Mayn. "Never have."

"Well, this is the old homestead, for sure," said Gordon.

"I do get end-of-the-world daydreams after I’ve had a few drinks," said Mayn—"a few too many."

"How
does
it end? Or do you have to protect your sources?" said Gordon, and thought he shouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

"I can’t remember," said Mayn. "Probably someone forgetting to tell someone something." He sipped his drink and looked away toward the lighted foyer where Gordon could see the valise standing. Mayn seemed to speak, then, from a distance. The good thing, he said, was that in the end-of-the-world he was beyond it; that is, in the dream he skipped his own death.

An uninvolved observer, Gordon said, and Mayn, having sipped his drink, looked at it and said that to tell the truth he thought it was when he
hadnt
had much to drink that the dream came.

Gordon didn’t want to just agree, and he said that schizophrenics have end-of-the-world fantasies.

"Listen, there are lunatics out there that the doctors never dreamed of," said Mayn with tired authority.

"You’ve seen them in your travels," said Gordon, who knew there was nothing between Mayn and Norma but guessed she was quite taken with him.

"I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn.

"Yes, I know. My wife told me," said Gordon. "Fast-breaking history."

"Pretty slow-moving in my case," said Mayn. "Strip-mining leases in the West, disarmament contracts in the East."

Gordon said he had had a dream the other night, if Mayn was interested, of climatologists joining forces with nuclear "fissionaries" to explode the cloud cover that makes Venus a greenhouse.

"Nuclear what?" Mayn laughed.

"But with your dreams of the future," said Gordon realizing to his surprise that he was persisting, "isn’t history breaking so fast that you have to anticipate it?"

"What gave you the idea I was on intimate terms with the future," said Mayn.

"I didn’t say you were," said Gordon.

"In fact, I doubt if I’ll be there when it happens," said Mayn. "I mean the end of the world or the chain reaction when they set the atmosphere on fire by mistake."

"But I’m serious, I read the headlines just like you," said Gordon. "What’s going on? Why are things falling out the way they are? Is it greed? Corporations? Generals? Is it everybody’s death wish? Is it that we can’t remember our dreams in the morning?" Gordon felt smart and foolish.

"Greed and death wish for sure," said Mayn. "I don’t know about the other thing you mentioned. I do seem to recall that U.S. Grant couldn’t stand to watch the man—what was his name?—risking his life crossing Niagara on a high wire."