Women and Men (210 page)

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.

"But I could enjoy TV with you. Why not?"

"Remember when the sound went off on Claude Rains?"

"He was the judge at Nuremberg."

"Sentencing Paul Lukas."

"Yes, and suddenly they bleeped the sound. The judge said ‘extermination’—no, that wasn’t it."

"It was ‘gas ovens,’ ‘ said Joy, and they laughed—which was like a moment of silence.

"You didn’t say
what
was being covered by this cover story of ours." He wished that he’d called from a pay box. He’d have asked her to call him back, and she would not have said, "Get the operator to charge it to your number" and he knew she hated the expense of long-distance calls, and he wondered what that pressure would have done to this call in 1974.

"Covered?
Oh I guess letting you travel so much."

"Would you have stopped me?"

"Your eyes," she said into the phone, "you’ve got them closed."

"But," he said, "if you bite your lip now you’ll nip your goddamn tongue." The cuteness got to him then, but so did such expensive knowledge.

He heard a man’s voice behind her—but whether speaking to her or someone else was hard to tell—while she said, "Oh we know all the reasons. Pick one. Pick one angry reason. Remember how my father loved me and then kicked me out to be a high achiever, remember how your father never left your mother, or was it the other way around? it was the other way around."

How could Joy?

He heard himself in a soap opera, but he couldn’t see himself.

She’d lived with him for twelve years, at least twelve years, and knew all about his family. Distance was what she had now, and she had the range, oh didn’t she! (And coverage.)

He said, "It was the other way around. She died." Joy had always made him feel he owed her something beyond him, but then she said it, "You make me feel I owe you something that’s beyond me."

"Listen," he said, "did you really forget about my mother dying?"

"I agree," she said, when he was just thinking Oh why did I phone?

So she knew she would hang up, and they both did, and he had the edge this time on account of having encouraged Flick to phone Joy tonight but now that he’d made that virtuous feeling explicit to himself he’d lost the edge, he was always in the wrong, but then he was convinced she was saying the same thing at that moment, though to a country gentleman with brown cheeks and a fair liquor budget, and a lot of books, and a rack of firearms. What was
their
cover story?

Always in the wrong? But Flick with her start-fast-and-suddenly-stop voice, her quiet tension, her inquisitor’s indifference, her way of shifting to the other side of her chair like she was preparing to get at you or to leave, she didn’t make him feel in the wrong even when she said one night when he arrived in Washington and phoned her and because she didn’t want to go to the football game with him Sunday she went out to dinner with him right there and then though she’d already eaten—said like a child blurting out what she really means yet so that afterward this seems one more thing thrown into the gap of what’s really and truly felt—"But how do you
know
your mother committed suicide, they never found her!"

"Oh well," he grinned at his daughter, who knew him well, "can’t blame her if she tried and failed."

Mayn blinked and he remembered yes that in that letter that used the words
cover story
Joy had said things about their parallel parents and a mother who left, at least for a long time which was as good as forever—he didn’t buy a word of it—but he’d jumped ahead of this stuff that Joy had arrived at with a nice analyst who’d taken her to the theater—no, it was the young lawyer who said "Quite" when he agreed and took her to hear him argue an appeal in the old court building on Madison Square with the sculptures of philosophers, or they looked like philosophers or some such charlatans standing on top and Joy had said the carved and cushioned stained-glass courtroom was like Lüchow’s restaurant when this lawyer had taken her there for dinner—but oh Mayn had jumped ahead, plunged on beyond likenesses between parents and childhoods into what, he did not know—some accelerated coverage—until years later he now in 1974 looked back to a 1970 phone call (thinking his work used him, not the other way around, and why was he going to Montpelier, Vermont?) and thought he ought to have been able to stay married, he was so close to Joy.

For it was the one phone call in which mention had been made of this thing that often happened between them at the distance that had sometimes seemed to work better the greater it was, but then seemed always to be the same, like a voice sprung out of the phone’s diaphragm from Paris or Chicago, it didn’t matter, it might have been Kilimanjaro where he’d never been, but this time New York had been where he’d called from—he knew damn well some of what was in his mind, he didn’t live in New York any more than Joy did but he’d just (after all these years) become a landlord, an absentee landlord—at noon he’d put his name on his late landlord’s son’s new dotted line because this quiet heir by agreeing through the state attorney-general’s office never to evict rent-controlled tenants in order to sell their apartments had bypassed co-oping, which would have required approval by thirty-some percent of the tenants, and he had begun quietly to sell off what apartments he could—a vacancy now and then to friends, or a deal like this with Mayn who had held on to the lease when he’d moved out quite a while ago and now for the time being would pay a reduced upkeep, get a good rent, and figure to resell in four to five years, and it was all very clear: here he was at the club half-dressed, he’d asked a waiter to bring him a drink and he’d reached for a phone—he kept his membership at the club though he wasn’t in town much—his hair was damp, it was wet at the neck and a drop ran down his ear, she never asked him about money, his salary or how he lived—he knew the waiter, the waiter knew him—he had the phone in his hand knowing only that he wanted to call her and knowing that she was going to call him—he knew this with absolute certainty—and knew that she when he got her would not say she’d been going to call him because it sounded phony to her: and with this in mind their voices then met and when he had said, "This is totally unrehearsed," and she had come back with "Impossible," and he, "Don’t tell me what you were just thinking," and she (at a flirtatious slant), "But you know," and he (pressing into that awful empty gap which might be just long knowledge of each other but now as if they were inside each other’s body which was a third body—or fourth—that wasn’t anywhere), "I love you—you know that" (which wasn’t what he’d phoned to say, he thought) and she, "It goes without saying—almost," and he, "You were thinking . . ."