Women and Men (98 page)

Three men wearing On-Strike placards stood across the width of the sidewalk. She would have to read the newspaper now because she had to be well-informed. Gordon had given up on her, she liked to think. Gordon, when they’d all been walking home from dinner, the men in front, Norma and Gordon’s friend’s wife behind the men, had been hailed by a girl, "Going out tonight?" and she and the other wife caught up and she told Gordon he ought to price them, they were neighborhood people, but he said, "They’re just interested in giving blow jobs," which Norma had an answer to but it would not be funny, he was always there ahead of her. But maybe there was more room on that point than just for him, and she’d said, "Maybe they like it," which she didn’t mean, and she wondered if he had heard. Or could hear. The Council’s new money, for instance. It dried her eyes right now. No one looked. No one looked away. She would not tell him she was on salary. He could ask about the Council’s new money. Let him.

"It will come to you," she thought, and the tall black pimp who stepped out not quite into her path in black, high-heeled boots and a high-crowned, insanely wide-brimmed hat that looked made of muskrat from one of the windows way over on West Thirtieth bent and tilted his head affably and said, "What?"

You will pass the Jewish restaurant, the Chinese, the Indian, the hotel, the church, the stationery store with the cleaner across the street. The girls and boys stand on the steps across the street, the steps of the acting school, waiting to go back in. Norma, you will come home from work by a route so invariable that the apartment house will come to you. The city thinks for you.

Gordon was inside her; but no, she had not wished the gap between the aches in her head and lower back to go on without her, so she hadn’t turned west on Thirty-fourth, but had gone down a block—then over to Park, then down then over a block but the gap was not just waiting for her as if it were last night in bed; it was with her now with the two pains that it was between. It was to be thought. She had to believe she had achieved a thing or two, this thinking that she kept with.

Her stuff was where she’d left it last night if Gordon had not put it away. He used to joke about putting it on his toothbrush. She felt in her speaking mouth that she had to think now on account of what had come to her—what he had communicated to her last night when all she could do was receive it, the thought, and hold it, but minus the future which had come this morning —but she had taken the white-and-blue tube of Ortho-Gynol out of the medicine cabinet but had put it back down on the sink remembering a night when she’d left the top off (next to the toothbrush) and she and Gordon had laughed about it in the morning.

The cycle of the household was where she’d left it this morning. Automatic morning that was once blind, blurred comfort. But automatic, too fixed to have room for a something it was waiting for, and Gordon didn’t hear her this morning when she took her pain from last night and with it the sound of his bath running and closed the front door behind her.

And so, ahead, she saw the apartment house, the restaurants (not the Jewish, which was in the block she’d skipped today), and the hotels, the church, stationery store, appliance store across the street, and the cleaner whose late Genoese father had been an actual tailor across the street on her side long before Norma had thought of New York. Once into the elevator she would be at the door of the apartment faster than she could think.

This morning the two pains, headache and lower back, received the two women coming at her from either end of the desk and room, Rhoda back from Washington—"We’ve got money for you, I didn’t want to tell you until we knew, and it’s a private source right here in New York, not federal money which is hard enough to predict but this is even crazier, apparently it’s right here in New York—we’re not asking any questions; do you understand what I’m saying? we’ve got money for you, two hundred a week"—and Kate, with a letter—"Hey girls, that building’s probably getting a prize, what do you think of that?"—she knew what Norma thought.

Norma couldn’t eat the cheese Danish that Kate put down on the desk with its paper unfolding. She had a job, though she’d been doing it for months anyway. So she ate the Danish but not lunch, and didn’t call Gordon. But at 2:30 had a cheeseburger with meat grease and juice rising through her cheeks yet did not find the gap, which she left to get bigger, until at 5:15, when she remembered she hadn’t gone to the bank at lunchtime, the shape of a pretzel sent her beyond the pretzel man past the prize building that pressed down on the old, vanished armory, and past an orange picked up by a man whose much younger girlfriend with longish, squeaky-fresh-looking hair didn’t know about the orange she’d lost. And so Norma through freedom of thought passed toward a thin, hurrying woman of indeterminate age (though Norma knew) applying lipstick to her stretched mouth as she walked along—and toward home, in all those directions that went on without her, toward Grace Kimball’s workshop where she knew she was to hear how hair is vanity so why not cut it all off and get in touch with your head, which is like your body and has something to tell you that men in 1976-1977 can’t, like Gordon now and last night, who said he didn’t care one way or the other if she went to the workshop, were all these naked gals in the workshop workshopping, he asked, were they throwing vases on a pottery wheel?, and she asked if he was thinking of the old women who in his old joke were up in the Bronx sticking the city’s pretzels together with their spit; no, wait, he said, the workshop’s your business, you know what I mean—he laughed and in his awkwardness a touch of color like fondness sharpened his eyes. Yet she had to think before she met him, for he was the source of the thought, and she had to stop being incongruous, not fitting, she’d lost two pounds up to last night and before today’s Danish and cheeseburger, so her breasts might be a shade firmer though they’d never been any trouble, they were smallish she had once thought but now she didn’t know—Gordon had once said he liked them, but he didn’t hear those voices any more or maybe didn’t know what to do with them any more, her breasts, and she’d read that prostitutes didn’t take off their bras; and therefore she should speak, for she couldn’t think unless she spoke, but whichever way she turned in the one operating phone booth she could not speak properly to Gordon, though she had saved that quarter she knew was in her purse somewhere. The unit call from Gordon at home cost less than a dime, and what with her magic new salary which she would be telling Gordon about in a few minutes after a day of unfaithful thoughts, yes, she remembered them like a series flashed through the city’s blocks but who could know what she was thinking? she couldn’t help thinking of what was in Gordon’s mind when he turned away from the eleven-o’clock news with its report on surveillance of foundations to look at her, his eyes blank, his tongue poking down in his cheek for a second as she then looked away and so did he, into the screen where CIA or FBI was being spoken of, but the message was in him more than the screen, like the shadow of the armory cast upward from deep below the ground where Gordon had told her to speak French to the woman whose husband needed razor blades, well only one blade would do, and then walking past the girls and pimps along Park she had tried to tell Gordon why English would have been better, that the French were not so patient as the Italians with foreigners speaking their language, but Gordon could always argue her down, and when he’d said, ‘They’re the foreigners, not us," she’d looked away at the long-legged black girls moving their feet around recklessly and laughing to each other, but she was going to be really naked tonight in the lights of Grace Kimball’s furnitureless apartment with jars and dishes of nuts and raisins and dried apricots on the window sills and candles celebrating the separation of the men from the girls who became
women
not
girls.

What if a man came to the door? A messenger. A retarded messenger.

Norma had no further to go.

Only a ride up.

Manuel gone home, no one on the door. Any stranger could walk in, like the broad-shouldered man in the lobby waiting for the elevator. The man from this morning. Did women imagine and men think?

She was so glad to see him that she found herself shaking her head and saying, "Anyone could just walk in here." Her shoulders rounded toward him gently. Her day had curved back to him with nothing in between their meetings. His clothes smelled. Of amiable smoke. And he’d had a drink; he had thick hair, all gray but not dull. He asked what floor, but his hand was passing over the buttons as if it didn’t matter. "As you were saying," he said—and smiled.

Again, it was kind but automatic but fast, a kind mouth with a thoughtful pout.

"You said something in Spanish and Manuel laughed."

"Pretty raunchy Spanish," the man said.

"It sounded very fluent."

Kind
wasn’t what she meant about his smile. She saw that, and felt good at the thought that
kind
was
sexy,
while he said, "I have to use it sometimes, but I’m always surprised how it comes—and I better not think about it, you know what I mean?"

They were moving and she had no time now to find anything out. So she asked right out.

And he said he went back long before Manuel. Same apartment? she asked. Kept it, he said. Things changed? Guessed he was supposed to say yes.

She didn’t want to get off into rent talk; it was like car talk.

She learned his apartment—9D—like getting a phone number. She thought she was quite a person.

Well, she was a mess—but maybe not. The crying had left her alive, and she didn’t give a damn, she was into the future, that was where she was coming from—and she’d come home feeling younger than she’d left this morning.

"Where are you coming from?" she said. She believed he was in danger.

The man’s pleasant face stiffened, twisting tighter against pressure. "They still using that expression?"

The elevator stopped at the ninth floor but Norma went on getting closer to her own, her legs went out to the man, she moved after he moved, and she was opposite the open elevator doorway where he stood, their arms opposite, his breath strong.

"I’m still there," he said.

"Please tell me about it," she said, and the door bumped his shoulder and bounced back.

"I will," he said, and she had the impression that somewhere he had already done so.

He had stepped back and let the door close between them.

But she was rising, as if the door had never opened and closed at nine —she had to deliver a message but wouldn’t know what it was until it came out.

She was already naked for her pre-workshop bath, and didn’t have on her the weight of a bottle of wine she knew now she’d meant to give Gordon in return, yes, for going to Grace’s for the "nude" workshop.

The door to her apartment was empty, the dark green door itself, numbered and lettered and with a peephole. She pushed her key at the lock and as she found the alignment the pressure already on the lock pushed the door in because it was unlocked. Nancy had been calling, "I’m not really hungry, Daddy."

He was in front of Norma. He extended his arms toward her, and she joined him (oh, a model that was fitted to him!). She smelled wine in his cheek and knew what he was saying before he said it: "I quit today."

You can always get it back, she thought, but he didn’t quite pick that up, and she murmured into his ear,
"Good,
Gordon."

His eyes skipped by as they had last night when he’d looked away from the news and seemed to speak, and looked back again at the TV screen; but the message she caught now along with other messages in his bony hands holding her arms was the same she’d heard in his mind at that moment last night.

It had said, "I don’t know if I want you."

She had known what was in his mind. Did he?

She had known; but how had she known? The power he had here was only what she had given him.

She had known what was in his mind because she had helped to put it there.

"Are you going to tell me you knew it?" said Gordon.

"You did the right thing," she said. She leaned over and kissed him on a crease of cheek. "Can I have a glass of wine? I’m a bit nervous about tonight."

Now why had she given him that? Why not.

She went to the bedroom. Behind her her older daughter’s footsteps curved away and seemed to stop. In pursuit of some intention.

"Is that all?" said Gordon.

"Speak," he said. "Did you cash a check today?"

"I will," she said.

He stopped at the threshold grasping the lintel above and letting his weight

go-

She went on with what she was doing.

She was not dependent. She wouldn’t talk about it.

"Is that all?" said Gordon.

She wouldn’t talk about it; she probably couldn’t explain.

"Norma?"

the unknown saved

He would sing out over his shoulder, Still there? She might be up in the trees, the way he tilted his head back, or in the sky, what there was of it—did this save her from having to answer?— and then again without looking he said over his shoulder, his heavy shoulder, Everything O.K.?

And he could be the one who needed help: she saw him up ahead, puffing, grabbing a sapling to get himself up, wobble, stagger, or along uneven ground appear to limp, humming, gasping through this shaded upper world of woods so she was concerned about him that this man who called over his shoulder (as if listening not speaking), Still there? could be himself the one who needed help.

Help, it occurred to her, once in the middle of mountain light. Not help from her, for she was only to ask what his symptoms were, that time, at the summit of a small mountain they had trudged and hauled themselves up and scrambled without direction except up, through an upward abyss of shade.

For they were very occasional weekend rock climbers. Scramblers. A dark pond at the top, they’d heard. Or an observation tower with initials cut into the gray wood, some still fresh, still pale or burnt-brown. A great rock, they might hear. A great view. A chalet with a player piano.