Women and Men (102 page)

"Grant was better out in the field. He didn’t know what he was doing when he got to the White House," said Gordon, who knew what he was talking about.

"Grant was a vegetarian," said Mayn, shaking his head with friendly hopelessness at Gordon. "Wouldn’t eat a chicken, said he couldn’t eat anything that went on two legs, and he couldn’t stand rare meat, he’d seen so much blood when he visited his field hospitals and saw those kids—he had to have his beef done to a crisp."

"I thought he was a vegetarian," said Gordon. "That’s better as a story than as history."

"Oh, I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn. "I wouldn’t give you a dime for my view of history if I had one. History is words."

"That doesn’t sound like a newspaperman," said Gordon, who had again said more than he had meant to or than he’d known he would say.

"You’re welcome," said Mayn, as if Gordon had thanked him. But it had hit home, and Gordon, who could entertain himself, thought Mayn was sorry he’d asked him in, and he wondered how long Mayn had been away and if he left the light in the foyer burning. It was how Mayn uncrossed his legs and how his polished wingtip shoes, rich with wear like furniture wood, gripped the floor parallel and squarely. Also, there was the valise visible in the foyer. The man risked danger, Gordon felt.

Then Gordon saw Mayn stand up with a quick force that said that he was not going anywhere. What, asked Gordon, were the big things in the tubs, because Mayn didn’t seem like a plant man. Gordon thought someone strange might come in and threaten Mayn, but Gordon needed to talk.

Mayn took a look at the three great plants and pointed to another Gordon hadn’t noticed, a smaller one with dark, shiny, tight, strong leaves. "That one I happen to know is a jade tree, a young friend of mine named Barbara-Jean gave me that; said she thought I needed it to stand up to the three monsters. I don’t, to tell you the truth, know what their names are; my daughter and my son—well, really my daughter—had them sent here when I moved back in."

Gordon liked Mayn. It was too late to ask for wine, which hadn’t been offered. He said he wasn’t ready for a refill. Mayn came and sat down. He brought with him a long stretch of time, and Gordon felt less unemployed.

"If you’re away a lot," Gordon began but he didn’t go on, and with a shrug surveyed the room and the lighted foyer. Mayn looked at Gordon. Mayn’s hair was solidly but darkly gray and thick, the eyebrows not at all gray, face and chin very square; the eyes through largeness or the illusion of largeness, or through some lighter tint, were more a real color than Gordon had ever seen brown eyes. And he felt—yes—that the man would have felt downright alien had he paid any closer attention to what Gordon said. Or what Gordon was. For Gordon really wasn’t saying anything. He returned the wise or heavy look of his host. Gordon had ventured into this apartment for a casual drink.

Mayn didn’t know Gordon, and yet Gordon felt his life visited by Mayn like a whole way of looking at things, a friendly abstention, powerfully non-intrusive. It was the sensation of the drink and it was the sentiment of memory and it was another day away from work. Gordon had to like Mayn, and he now saw that his self-sought unemployment would end in a few weeks or months and he would go on living his life and it would change for the better. What had Mayn to do with it?

It came to Gordon—and came to him later as he then realized he’d known it
would
—that the one man, Gordon, knew he had taken the opposite view from how he usually saw his talk in all its intelligent volume, and so he thought he’d talked and said too much; and the other man, Mayn, who didn’t care what another thought of him, had known he was going to think he’d said too little, and had let this narrative go on from a man he didn’t know; which in turn wasn’t a matter of this fella Gordon subjecting him to something, much less mastering him—not at all, quite the reverse—but a drugged, sluggish (he had no right to be tired) feeling that he let his half-invited guest jumble his story, well lift one whole side of it from time to time so all Gordon said slid down toward one edge: a jumble Mayn let happen as if he were being a man to a man letting him talk—yet really offering an ear that was void. Oh Gordon was only guessing, but he felt sure of all this. Not that Norma really knew the man—she had only met him—but she had conveyed to Gordon some shadow that was now Gordon’s own intuition of this man in front of him.

"You
would
like another," said Mayn.

"Yes I would," said Gordon, and finished his bourbon.

"Knew it," said Mayn, taking Gordon’s glass, and the words stopped whatever spell had sent Mayn running through Gordon’s past a moment before to set out on Gordon’s future without Gordon having the chance to say goodbye.

Gordon spoke and did not stop for a long time. It might have been stupid. It was five-thirty when he began, and Mayn, this former tenant who had resumed residence in the building, asked a question or two and once got up to refill their drinks.

But Gordon talked straight through for what turned out to be an hour.

Why did he do that? Were they both wondering? Perhaps they both had the time. And when he stopped at last, he might in doing so have been anticipating the unexpected sound of a key in a lock that would have stopped him anyway if he had not already just come to the end.

It was more a school story, and after he was into it he would get uneasy telling it for the first time as if this was the hundredth (as it
also
was), but dismayed more because he’d thought it out so many times but now didn’t know how to end it. Gordon was taking an unpaid leave of absence from his law firm, but what he told Mayn was that he had taken a deep breath and had quit his job and was taking inventory; but Gordon didn’t need to hear himself tell anyone else, even a stranger, that if it was more than a vacation and less than real unemployment, he and Norma and their two children couldn’t live for too long without his working, and although his firm would take him back or he could always get a job—always, always—he also knew a college classmate who had lost his job as vice-president of an insurance company (or was it president) and seven months later shot himself.

Mayn asked a couple of questions that sounded like he was hearing things (or was it Gordon hearing things?). Gordon’s father? Gordon’s grandmother? Quakers? The height of a wall surrounding the roof of an apartment house in Brooklyn? Brooklyn Heights could seem a long way away from Manhattan on a cold, windy, rainy late afternoon.

This is what you do when you’re unemployed, said Gordon; you keep to yourself or you bend someone’s ear—someone who’s just come home from work. But when you begin you lose the beginning, as if maybe there never was a real beginning. You take up the piano. Not the violin, it’s too hard.

Mayn said he didn’t understand "when you begin you lose the beginning."

This particular business started with Gordon skipping fifth grade, but he had been
in
fifth grade for more than a month. But he had skipped just the same as if from fourth to sixth. And the event would be fully as important as his far-sighted father could foresee.

Mayn asked for enlightenment here and there, and Gordon saw the tolerant man Norma had seen, and this came into Gordon’s thoughts together with a magnetism that seized him as if all this stuff twenty-five years ago and more were easier and flowed better than the untenable future which was now. But he didn’t stop; he remembered that Mayn had covered arms-control talks and had a father in New Jersey and had recently returned, Norma said, from the Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and knew someone who’d been on the cover of a magazine—all this from Norma, who always remembered.

Not that Gordon didn’t; but here he had found himself unexpectedly in sixth grade and with a stranger. Gordon later didn’t know if he really had had in him at the time this suspicion that the event of his skipping a grade would be covered over
and
infiltrated by the years on either side of it and it would practically get skipped itself.

But an event when it happened: everything got drawn to it, and bounced back off it.

Understood later.

Mayn said he knew what Gordon meant. This seemed kind, for Gordon had been unclear.

As much too late as it was too late to know if the sixth-grade teacher with the rouge on her cheeks, and the quick movements, and the small, round face and dark eyes, Mrs. Hollander, had a view of life. Or what view may come and grow out of a time of horror into life again. The woman herself when she once or twice spoke of it, could speak of it so succinctly, though slowly, that her gathering distance from it could have been from the beginning a measure of time besides that first blindingly increasing space. It became overwhelmingly simple, a cause of understanding.

The roof of her apartment house had a comparatively low barrier-wall around it and one day her child, her little girl, not so little—which was why it happened—had tumbled over this barrier-wall where she was playing ball, and fallen six floors to the street where some boys were playing, and had been killed, though not instantly. And Mrs. Hollander was there on the roof and had called to the child to stop.

She said her child had been old enough to know better, and what she could not get over was that her girl’s last reaction to life had been—she didn’t know—"terror," she said, as if for a moment she were not the mother.

Gordon had known almost as soon as it happened. But some ten years later, after he had moved to another school, a boy’s school, and graduated and gone to college, this woman Mrs. Hollander said the very thing about death and terror to him that she had said to his parents, who had liked her for her strictness and humor and an awful bravery that was maybe a secret comprehension and control of what had happened to her in this incident of her nine-year-old daughter who could run so fast. Maybe the kid’s reaction feeling herself go over would have been simple shock. But Gordon wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Hollander.

Gordon sometimes said too much. Mrs. Hollander had told him so. She’d known how to. She’d been good to him and he’d been a favorite of hers.

Mrs. Hollander was the sixth-grade teacher when Gordon skipped into sixth. He had lost a friend or two at the moment when she entered his life— or thought he had lost a friend or two. And somewhere in there he had almost learned to keep quiet.

Because at this time in his life some things unsaid hurt. But hadn’t hurt less when they got said.

One thing especially. Which Gordon had only thought he minded.

Thought? asked Mayn so quietly it might have
been
thought.

Well, he thought he minded, but later decided he didn’t.

Minded what? said Mayn.

It came out; it had to. You don’t say that kind of thing yourself. Which was why when Dickie said it as they bounced a ball between them walking down Montague Street, with the harbor in view out ahead of them, the thing Dickie said made Gordon feel like shrugging and saying, "I’ll see ya," and turning in at the paper store to see if a new Submariner comic was in—the sleek hero with the slanted eyes and the long, adept face.

He’d heard the words all day, that first day he’d skipped. Heard them in the boys’ washroom, in the playground where he was kidded about skipping and had good comebacks out in the open air. Heard them almost in the insect scratching of steel nibs and in the pauses when they were being dipped in the blue-stained volcanoes on each desk, and now and then a unanimous pause came as if the amplified insects had taken off.

"You thought that then?" Mayn said.

"I think it now," said Gordon. He’d heard the words also when he and his new sixth-grade classmates some of whom he’d already known had passed down the hall to the stairs and the floor below for Art at one-fifteen, passed the fifth-grade doorway and a couple of kids who were his classmates the day before looked up from their desks at this activity in the hall and saw him, they must have, and the change had been like nothing except in the greasy wood smell of the old, dark floors and the corn soup coming up sweet and humid from the cafeteria in the basement of the school, a decision had passed without his taking it—either sixth grade or fifth grade; not both.

But the actual words in the air hadn’t been said until Dickie said them coming home.

Dickie said, "So you must be smarter than me."

A heavy conclusion they had put together through shared thought.

Well, Dickie was a wise guy. What did you answer to a thing like that?

Gordon was a quieter wise guy. The right answer passed into his head, but he said, "There’s lots of ways of being dumb."

Yes, the right answer had passed into Gordon’s head and out.

Dickie swore at Gordon for the "dumb" remark, yet was kind of serious. "So you must be smarter than me."

Gordon said to Dickie, "Come on, that’s not what it means. I happen to read a lot—"

"—a lot of comics," said Dickie.

"—and I always was a good speller, and I work hard. And I read a lot," said Gordon.

Dickie said—and they laughed at this—"I mean, you must be smarter than I thought you were."

Mayn laughed. Gordon liked getting a laugh.

Gordon’s parents, really his father, had put the decision to Gordon the night before—definitely a Wednesday—and so what the hell, it was a decision already made. Yet then taken, he felt, by
him
behind his
own
back. His father said the teacher Miss Gore thought fifth grade wasn’t enough of a challenge for him (or was she fed up with his whispering?) and his father agreed, and sixth grade would not be too much for Gordon even with the year already begun; and skipping a grade, he’d be that much ahead.

They were into November already. His father pointed this out. Gordon had been thinking about the fifth-grade Christmas pageant. It had been cast and he had ended up an angel and not Joseph. It was by secret vote of the class but also by choice of the teacher. Parts had been announced by Miss Gore, and two girls had looked at each other and one girl who got what she wanted had put her hands over her face, and Gordon had thought Goddamn it he’d wanted to be Joseph and should have been, he was taller than all but one of the boys in the fifth grade, and he had wanted to be Joseph but was going to be an angel in the pageant instead. Or this was what he was still angry about when his father told him he was going to be skipped into sixth grade starting the next morning if it was O.K. with him. At the Christmas pageant the sixth grade would carry electric candles like the rest of the Lower School except for the fifth grade, who always played the parts and took turns reading out the Bible story at a lectern with one small shaded lamp up at the front of the auditorium, and those who had parts wore costumes and stood in a tableau of the stable and the manger, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men, angels and two little kids from kindergarten to complete the picture. Gordon was out of it now. He didn’t mention this to his father and didn’t mention it to his mother.