Women and Men (204 page)

"The length of the line shows how often you get wind from that direction—during the year, let’s say. And in another type of rose the lines thicken so you see how often the wind was strong or light or moderate." He drew her one of these, too.

"All right, I can see it," she said.

"Helps them decide where to put airports and buildings and vegetative wind screens and factories that smoke up the air. The wind rose shows the horizontal motion of the atmosphere. Now you know all that I know."

She laughed at that, and she didn’t give in. "What about the wind hitting us when the car got past the mesa cliff driving down to Albuquerque, remember how red the cliff was? wasn’t it near the Continental Divide?"

Have to ask a lot of a woman, he knew she was telling him to think. He asked her to
please
shut up. The one long car trip they’d taken.

And when they had a discussion about the check he’d taken from her checkbook and she said he was a shit but gave it a tired, unimportant sound he didn’t like, he told her that she was really thinking about his being away but, hell, he could be talking about the upper air with the Coast Guard and the civilian meteorologists just as well in Boston or Portland but he was talking with them here at home in New York.

He’d already talked to them in Florida, she said—and,
home?
she said. Maybe home for him—which made him laugh like the—yes, strangely like the—white pilot balloon ("pibal") that lifted for a second out of his mind complete with information on expansion and air resistance that was safely in his pibal notes—yet what she said stopped him. For wasn’t it her story that he was away from home all the time? But one day he saw (like a—like what singly neither had the words for) . . . saw like a resilience that the story was his story as much as hers, even if he would claim he’d never been wanted by the FBI like the man who among other things had actually bounced a check on the East Bank of the Mississippi which, granted, was real—that is, a snug, bright blue tavern north of Orion, Illinois, and just below Rock Island he recalled, where the river turns nearly west and the banks are south and north (whence come AP dispatches from the Chicago office to small member papers and radio stations). He pops a joke, but Joy is not put off her track, she goes to the bedroom passing the bathroom doorway through which a child can be seen sitting leaning forward on the John, a child whom the father also sees when he follows his wife angrily, who then brushes past him and leaves that bedroom passing again the bathroom doorway and the child who looks up at her and at the father. Elsewhere in time the decks of D-Day ships snap down into troughs like crevasses blown out by the Sicilian storm and as the decks drop down the silver bags of the barrage balloons snap their cables and rise up, up, so high the sound of the bag exploding is very hard to hear, isn’t it? Sometimes he couldn’t recover her face when he was away from home. Only her whole presence, watching him by just living, by being in a next room drying the lettuce or turning from a child to turn a page of the evening paper—to see anything, to skim some news—to check the horoscope, hers first, but his second, though she disliked horoscopes. He loved her; he could say it to himself and honestly tremble while at the same time he recalled her needling voice after him. "I see you going in in the first wave with your big helmet over your eyes, a gun in one hand and a pencil in the other." What’s a gun? You mean a pistol? a rifle?

Away From Home All The Time: Mayn’s story as much as Joy’s, and it got handed down. But this sense of their shared account, this story about his jobs and their marriage, was not the same as the thing that now sometimes happened between them during these years since she had moved away with the children. (They could never have had an open marriage—bodies refracted in the light of absent feeling.) And then—though he’d kept the lease—he had moved away too, and the children had pretty well grown up, and Flick was tougher to talk to but now could be told anything, which Andrew could not. If he was even present. Once her father saw Flick kiss her brother goodbye softly, the fingers of her left hand upon the back of his neck.

Together Mayn and Joy recalled each other, month upon month separated, then divorced. They weren’t together in any but this way; they didn’t live together—and often weren’t geographically close; weren’t in touch, or not so you would notice unless you were tuned into the void or you had high-sensitivity gear that could assess vibrations between the village in western New Hampshire where Joy lived and the motion through which Mayn’s assignments took him.

He and she happened once to find it convenient to be in Boston on the same day and they had lunch with their son Andrew who just about cracked his father’s hand according to his father when they shook, and who wrote his sister Flick that he’d had lunch with them, the two of them together with him in a restaurant near the docks, near the new aquarium (with sharks and turtles in their own custom-made cylindrical bathysphere)—the three of them like a family with an only child drinking Bloody Marys in a window that looked out on a cold, slushy street. They had converged on Boston, the mother from the country, the father from Europe by way of New York and Washington and Philadelphia, and there they were in a restaurant eating tiny bay scallops and baked potatoes.

The son wrote his sister in that fancy style she wasn’t put off by that the parents had been "curiously good" together (so the void either smirks or it’s a long, smudged radar trace of low-pressure front)—good together—a lot of laughs was partly what Andrew meant—Joy remembering the woman down the road who had the choke pulled out to hang her handbag on until her car wouldn’t run anymore and a muscular mechanic found the trouble soon enough, the woman down the road one summer; and Dad remembering the subway years ago, losing Andrew—on the subway, that is—Dad just back now from the arms talks with another story entirely that would have been spiked if he’d still been with AP about the Viennese fearing their cathedral would sink into the ground if the new subway went through, which was at least as interesting as a tall, dark-suited delegate whom the night before one had seen with an excellent young whore in a tailored suit now the next afternoon raising his eyebrows but not his translated, rather resilient voice at the danger in Russia’s ceiling being America’s floor.

But no, the way Jim and Joy knew themselves to be together at instants of recollection was more like a growth, a surprise someplace in the body, more like feeling, and your own bared limbs, nerves, tendons are entangled for you then to see if you can move the one part someone points to, and you can’t, or it’s trial and error, and is it that you think maybe you got someone else’s body warped in here too?
Feeling,
did you say?

Feeling left over from a dream.
Her
words. She never believed him that he didn’t have any but
day
dreams.

A dream like an obligation you wouldn’t put your finger on whose stripe of tooth-and-nail action bled apart on waking and went away, and the residue was this sense. Not a feeling you could really see, like Joy staring when she was embarrassed or nibbling her lower lip if she thought she had an edge. And nothing so real as light reflected off the balls of his smudged fingertips when she read the Sunday paper over his shoulder.

A Sunday morning, a Manhattan apartment, Mozart with his five happy instruments on FM, coffee still in the air, a ham in the icebox, Joy in her long-sleeved nightgown, frills at the wrists, thinking (he knew) of going out for German potato salad; Flick practicing her flute behind a closed door, low and insistent; Andrew old enough to get out of the apartment by himself taking his football to meet Dick or Larry in Madison Park among the sheepdogs and dachshunds and poodles and profound dappled bassets, patrolled at the perimeters by one or two snakelike dobermans too thoroughly bred—while back in the apartment sun smeared your polluted windows high above Manhattan which is still Manhattan even high up there, and Jim and Joy looking out from where he sat and she stood behind him.

No, they recalled each other; and recalling each other they were together. Common enough, after all. Except how they did it. How it happened. How they thought it happened, or knew that it did.

For here was what it was (an analyst in Boston told Joy to get it out of her head, it was just intuition or leftover intimacy, let’s get back to how and why, but, quoting the analyst to himself, Joy says O.K. but maybe not every event has a cause, maybe not the silent anger during the last haircut!—but then what’s intuition? comes the question from the void) well, theirs was the recollection of the other person plus knowing that right then the other person had it also or had had very recently, maybe a minute before, or would have very soon after you did, three hundred, three thousand, or—in the song learned from him which he had learned from a girl in Geneva, Switzerland, that Flick their left-handed daughter one day stroked on her guitar—ten thousand miles away, Flick who accepted what she heard her mother say about this "knowing" of her parents’ though it wasn’t the sort of stuff she would really believe, right.

But being both of them strong people, they would doubt that what they felt happen actually did happen, some communication or other. But hold it a moment—for a little life-promoting, species-preserving exercise, try doubting that word
strong
used so easily.

Living with someone for a long time like twelve years doesn’t mean you can’t someday lose track of the person scattered like a passage of time all through you, a petition unvoiced. Refractions, Mayn said of his life or that of others. (His daughter remembered later.) Yet when he and Joy were in touch two or three times a year, they knew.

That is, they thought they knew about times in between. Yet why so awkward to talk of? Embarrassing, as if splitting had been a catastrophic mistake.

The hook-up between them? an unknown word between them,
word
was what you got before you wrote, write if you get word.

Communication between Joy and Mayn? Explain the odd message units passing between them any way you wanted.

The desire to drop the other a line came like a sudden information, came while one-handing a bottle of mountain claret in a mountain motel in Colorado or driving slowly past a colonial cowpond in spring twilight, and they each knew that the desire to drop the other a line couldn’t be hope that things would change between them. They could have gone to bed just like that, probably. If they’d been snowed in, or caught in some future emergency in a city. Or en route, needing a bed for the night. A friendly scalp rub. A friendly hand. A friend, maybe. Your arm under his head. Laughing about getting turned on right after coming. But get back together? They could not. The thought was laughable, so maybe so was bed. The thought of getting back together was as tritely elusive as failure tried to be. It was, then, real at least. And it was preposterous.

Together they recalled each other repeatedly. They communicated but rarely spoke on the phone or any other way. Joy told Flick like a joke.

Communicated, O.K., but how? In their few letters?

A letter might be instantly answered. Oh it would be.

Unless it was from her and he was away. Out of the country.

But after such an exchange, the chance of another on top of it would sometimes discover itself, and they would know at whatever degree of distance from one another that they were a little put off by this prospect.

Of incest? No, nor falsehood.

Repetition. With increments.

Graduated,
he thought, graduated from First Marriage, a long enough one, graduated from an earlier hour of intimacy. His heart wanted to stop: for then, graduate
angels,
he heard her saying on the phone. And he exclaimed, You answered my thought! do you know that?

But then he couldn’t speak.

Go on, she said. He said, You answered my thought, the graduated part.

Oh, she said, with a bug in her voice, weren’t we always doing that?— or have we gotten better?, I mean now that we aren’t together.

Just the opposite, it seemed to him.

His body got enormously heavy. Bone-tired. More slow than tired, promising to give up and let him go on ahead, hands heavy as they were said to be under hypnosis. He shouldn’t have let the marriage go, and yet then she was saying—she was crying a little, she rarely wept but when she did cry she’d been able to without missing a beat or breath of her conversation. Was it an act? What if it was, it was real (it occurred to him). Tricky? she once said, Why I owe it all to you—but now, you haven’t put on weight, have you? maybe I wouldn’t be so bone-tired, she said (so heavy, she thought), if we could just answer our thoughts and not have this phone that makes me think of you inside me—tongue, nose, big nose—inside me—she guffaws against his ear—"Ear!"—and has to cough through tears.

Go on, he says.

Ear bones, she coughs, every one, right down to the lobe, kid.

He felt so heavy the flesh was pulling away and he was with her, yet here.

Repetition, she said.

We’ll try it someday, he said, not knowing what it was that he had let go, a household, a hug, an inner kiss.

He knew she was thinking of his hand slipping down her ribs.

Sounds like some experiment, she said: that shouldn’t be repeated.

But the event, unforced, did just that. Repeated itself. They’d sense together an embarrassment. They’d know it as surely as they recalled her biting her lower lip when she was sure she had him and she couldn’t lose. Or him shutting his eyes when he couldn’t win. As surely as they recalled his call from Washington the first week of July one year when they were married to say he couldn’t join them in the country the next day because of the airlines strike and Joy saying with the slant in her voice down which they slipped like dual sinners, Take a train, Take a bus—when she knew that the strike was an assignment: yet one that someone else could have covered, she hardly knew the people he worked with but she knew that (and she knew a lot about his work and would talk about it). Yet the children—it was the children who were most disappointed that July day; and he knew this and the slant in her voice that was her irritation for not showing more disappointment herself—because she didn’t know how much there
was
—and she looked through the dry ovals of big leaves up against the window, rhododendron, and to the left the spruce trees, two of them—no, three for heaven’s sake—three, at three in the afternoon, and she looked beyond them into the leaves of the trees down by the pond and through these into the stippled pattern of glare off the pond—it was three-quarters of a mile across and it was called a pond—and she said into the phone, "It’s nice here." And she thought they ought to buy the place, thinking, It’s only the two miles from the village, which wasn’t what mattered—but then she heard the kids yelling, and Andy Injun flashed past the window and Flick came rushing by the house, and Flick stopped short, wondering among other things what she was doing playing with him, her long, fine hair combed out down to her bare ribs, hair across her cheek, and she looked into the window at her mother holding the phone receiver against her head and looked with a blankness Joy wanted her husband there to fill, blank like the children’s two curiosities sitting one winter morning so unfairly at the kitchen table with their father when she came in the front door with last night’s clothes on—so unfairly late when they should have been off to school—and in Washington (with voices behind him) he said to her in New Hampshire, "I can see Flick and Andy, I can see them, listen I see Flick through the window where you’re standing, hey for a second you weren’t mad."