Women and Men (200 page)

Somewhere in the future Andrew and his older sister Flick who thinks he’s so much brighter have a lot to say to each other but seldom meet.

Meanwhile, hear yourself slog through the noise pollution of a street, what Mayn calls "bedlam," and his daughter years later learns from an older woman friend what Bedlam literally was.

"Grampa said he was tickled pink to see me."

"That’s right."

The little girl giggles, even without her little brother for an audience. "Tickled pink!" It’s funny.

On Second Avenue, that so powerfully carries from north to south the hills and bridges and tunnels of Manhattan’s east coast—well, one tunnel that he knows of—the morning sun low in the sky turns blinding against the snow and slick of the glittering pavement. Anything is here in this city, including all that’s outside, and the winter sun that has been fired silently off into the void above Queens and Brooklyn, the sun that has been launched into its old moment of fixity, stays there above the city, and there is nowhere else for a moment, since the sky east and west and up forgets New Mexico, Chile, Connecticut, the cobbles of Brussels, life that lasts from a Russian subway platform to a peak in Tanzania. The morning traffic blasts cycles of current past people standing on curbs as if the avenue were being excavated. Glaring noise that would be a gaping hole if you could just manage to get the joke, which is someone else’s. Hitler’s loudspeaker has been pulverized and each deaf pore of the future soaks it up and naturalizes it. A child among other children gets up the two steps of a yellow Varsity bus, and the father, his shoulders hunched and his bare hand in his pocket discovering the warm tangerine it’s been holding for several blocks, sees her then through the bus windows shadowed by the outside light, knapsack strap slipping off one shoulder; sees her make her way back to a seat on the aisle and ease around leaning forward away from the back of the seat giving her knapsack room.

The light is in his eyes, the little girl looks straight ahead. The day has begun. The young driver in a sweatshirt with the hood back has drawn the door to, and watches what’s coming over his shoulder, revving the motor. The girl glances at her father, starts a smile—just a glance, that’s all—that’s it—the day’s begun. She sees him with her faintly smiling glance, and that’s it, she doesn’t see him find in his pocket and hold up the tangerine she was going to have on the bus. He has the tangerine but not his gloves, and will save it for her.

The kid on the seat in front turns to speak to her over his shoulder—but the father can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl in the knitted cap under the hood of a quilted parka. They have forgotten home and parents, thank God. His daughter and the other children are in a thing that’s about to move, it’s almost not here, the eye reviews the faces on their way to school.

Sun, like a power now being used, strikes through the bus broadside and the bus eases out into traffic in front of a honking cab and behind a truck. The truck is silver like bare metal and when it is gone he is looking at the same old rainbow-shaped red-white-and-blue Grand Opening banner above the plate glass of the supermarket Joy doesn’t go to any more because they lost her delivery once; and the father is even more still before he turns to go. He feels good. His child’s cheeks were pink, rosy. She’s thinking about what’s ahead, not about her father.

Turning, he is struck—struck on the elbow. The man, the Italian fruit-and-vegetable man—"ey!" knows him and greets him in his arms as if by name hustling across the sidewalk with a carton of half-green bananas in his arms that he’s slid off the back of the Hunts Point truck. The white double-door of the funeral home is like a seafood restaurant and out of one small leaded window, her center-parted dyed-dark hair tight-combed, a woman’s round face is looking, and he knows she has an apron on, he knows her though not to speak to and she holds his gaze with a morning attention his brother Brad back home in New Jersey would think unfriendly—she’s Italian and she looks at you, but then this is New York and she looks away
and
back. His knee hurts.

His knee is sick, and the fancy deli’s sidewalk is city-full, the baskets of shallots, of beans, of dried stockfish on end with their long gray whiskery jaws like flat fossils for being open, and he wonders if the fava beans in the plastic bags can be the same he saw last month, pale and tough for a long day’s minestrone, flat like limas. No doctor’s going to touch the cartilage in his knee, it’s floating, that’s what it’s doing—it’s not really knifing him nerve by nerve, it’s acting up because he walked four miles back to a motel—two miles in green quiet, two along a highway—and yesterday afternoon Joy saw the swelling while unpacking his bag which she still feels called upon to do. But back in New York today if he can’t get in some basketball he’ll swim laps. Joy’s given up telling him to see a doctor.

He takes another way home, roundabout. He picks a plane out of the air, the noise. His hands are cold. The air seems less acid, more fresh, but isn’t. He’s going home. Not going home "first" before he goes out to work, because today he’s at home. Not working at all until he has to see his old bureau chief for lunch which is soon enough.

Out of the cold sidewalk comes the awful question since no one like them was supposed to get divorced: So who will leave first, he or Joy? Is it what’s coming to them? Stuff comes to him he can’t prove, like that each waits to be prompted by the other. Certain words waiting for them may do it. By the time he gets back she will have put Andrew on the private-school bus—it’s apricot-colored, caramel-pudding-colored, but you know what paint smells like, and like a lot of individual school buses this one suggests police, the administration of the city, not the microbus of the same size but many colors; an airport hotel gives courtesy transportation in this type of bus, and Andrew’s costs six hundred dollars a school year. Will she be home? If home, in the bathroom? Does she want to go back to work? He sees the children arriving home and pressing and pressing the buzzer.

A clear puzzle anyway. More clear than this noise. Who will leave first? Not her.

Joy will say—he knows she will—that if in the midst of this clear puzzle she should leave, he her husband has already left. The house, that is. They don’t think of it as only rented, they think it’s theirs, though they hate rent. The "house," the apartment.

We’ve jumped a few events. A good apartment is hard to find. A good woman is not hard to find; they’re all so damned good. At not quite complaining. Until you’re at last not ready. Picking a time when you were about to think. About to go. It’s painful for him, isn’t it? this traveling—painful quite apart from her.

He’s away often, so he knows the City even better, he’s always returning and what would he know if he had stayed home in New Jersey to revive the family weekly newspaper when it couldn’t be done anyhow, and he knows this part of Manhattan as well as he knows Yorkville, the West Village, Wall Street, Maiden Lane, the Battery, or knows the sound of three familiar dogs repeatedly greeting each other down in the street very late at night or early in the morning long before Joy’s alarm goes off, sometimes he doesn’t want to explain himself, say he’s way uptown crossing East Eighty-sixth Street in the middle of the block at two or three in the morning having found a Puerto Rican former super he wanted to question and thinking now he’ll catch a German bar before it closes but is met in midstream by a drunk sailor with a pale, wiry mongrel on a leash and the sailor grabs him by the arm and asks him to take the dog back there into the Finnish restaurant that Mayn then recalls noticing the sailor coming out of, with the awning—"Where am I?" the sailor mumbles as a few late (or early) cars and trucks rub them both ways—"Eighty-sixth Street, Yorkville"—"Take the dog for Chrissake"— the sailor didn’t want to explain himself either, and Mayn understood.

Mayn’s not with the regional task force any more, though the bureau would have him back; but, with the task force that took him out of New York all the time, he was based in New York—whereas now he’s not—but lives on here—though he’s away even more. Got it?

"So it’s been in your family," a man at a bar once said respectfully, "now that’s what I kind of always wanted—my own small-town paper, I got the clothes for it."

Name of Ray Spence. That operator Ray Spence, impersonal, funky (too early for that word), unkillable (forget the rat poison—he wouldn’t
have
to vomit). Came back at Mayn once in a Washington bar, "So what happened? Family lost their grip? Those small-town papers ..." But Spence with his clear eye for some rich man’s secret that could be forgotten even after it wasn’t a secret any more, whether money changed hands or not, Spence can’t know so much without a staff but came on as a plain old photographer and had a gift for the instant, and tipped the bartender heavily, and hardly touched his drink, or was it his second or third?

"It’s guys like you made me want to go into newspaper work," said Mayn looking around for another familiar face, finding it.

His child is halfway to school, he likes talking to her; she listens, then turns her attention to something more urgent; he has passed the renovated brownstones—some pink or white—they look childless here between Second and Third, opposite the massive brick blank of the phone company’s operations building, its windows steel-meshed against the morning’s prison of noise outside; it’s his neighborhood—call it Murray Hill, give it a name to remember (sounds like it was changed). Now he passes going the other way. The three heavy guys in windbreakers stand around smoking, there’s a king-size cylinder of beer on the curb and a Danger sign propped in the middle of the sidewalk—a crane as high as the six-story building makes people going to work raise their eyes but they mostly don’t look all the way up at it, it’s parked there and a man in a gray felt hat sits in the cab talking down to the men on the sidewalk, his hand appears along the cab window, he could use a shave, he’s got a plaid wool shirt under his windbreaker and he’s wearing gray kid gloves, Mayn feels the soft, tight give of the leather in his own fingers, it’s in his inside pocket, his small notebook. A gigantic switch console once slow and scaleless lowering against the sky stands in the crane’s truck bed and two men are looking down out of high windows in this building. Far up on company time. They’ll live in east Brooklyn, they’ll live in Queens, their kids nearly grown, wives are maybe at work, maybe sitting in the kitchen, settled in a chair on the phone to a daughter who’s discussing he doesn’t know what— last night. Not nudity you can be sure.

He has passed the renovated brownstones. He has passed the unfinished-furniture store drawing him like a restaurant with its warm sweet pine dust, a chest of drawers in the window, a pigeonhole desk, a rocker if you like rockers if you like the curves.

Meanwhile the Irish free-lunch bar pays the rent just; the shapes in there at this hour, the shoulders, the bill of a cap, an elbow, an anchored hand, are so dim to him through the damp glass, the place so dark, darkness some grime paid on profits of last night, that he might just get a whiff of last night’s slops, but from the sidewalk he sees himself in the long mirror passing behind the bottles.

Along the wide avenue he’s window-shopped the imported shoe store en route to the TV repair. And here’s the small sidewalk office of the plumbing contractor where he tried to buy a steel access door the super couldn’t find for Joy for a ceiling with an old leaky pipe up inside it—the fat woman under a bare bulb will always be on the phone at this hour staring through the plate glass on the lower right of which is
JOBBING PROMPTLY ATTENDED TO.
He’s passed the kraut deli with a steel tureen of grass-sweet, mealy pea soup to take out. And everywhere the new restaurants appear and fade—one an antique shop that kept some of the stock when they converted to spinach salad and quiche; he’s passed the A&P where women on food stamps buy hamburger rolls and giant Pepsis and you can get the cheapest good unground coffee anywhere but how old are the beans?—a coffee broker once bought him a drink beside the most beautiful lake in the world and attempted to find out what he knew about the tobacco lobby in Congress so he was hypnotized by the man’s multilingual indirectness but kept waking up wondering who this "we" was he spoke for; Mayn knows about weak coffee out of town that you can see down through, and Bridgeport’s ravaged waitresses, and midwestern high-school kids in aprons, and western cowgirl hostesses, they come by again with more steaming globes of it black, but transparent at the edge of the cup. He can reach Manhattan more or less—he’s passed the bakery with its layers and stacks, brown, sugar-dusted, glazed—where crisp butterflies and brown-and-white pignoli-nut cookies touch the tongue hinges as the immigrant eye is touched by the glue-slick apricot, peach, strawberry tarts glittering so toylike they could be a month old. He’s passed the Moravian church with the black-and-gold historical plaque and spiked iron railing where they bend No Electioneering signs around the spikes, on Election Day, and where a friend of Joy’s goes to O.A.—Overeaters Anonymous—where the A.A. "meeting" also meets, and a Senior Citizens coffee group rounded against the backs of the chairs, and a trash-recycling headquarters Joy calls Jesus Saves, and he’s passed out quarters to the bums against the railing who until he gets near them are nodding in serious conversation like personnel waiting to go on duty, and getting away from them he finds himself stopped looking into the New York sky which is cold and possible, pressing down upon you some chance of neighborhood, his and hers, between them shared though more by Joy who’s here more than by Jim, who can’t save a marriage.

Indians and Pakistanis move in, and one shop might hold spices, T-shirts, plastic luggage, and rock records—in suspension—or like in a big old suitcase; the neighborhood will absorb these shiny-haired brown men—he sees their future here—who walk with their feet out and maybe a step ahead of their females and under their overcoats wear white shirts without neckties (like orthodox Jews, but unlike Jews unbuttoned at the neck). The neighborhood will absorb them and their soft women, while they don’t seem to live here, and maybe they don’t—while carloads of them will career out of Park Avenue South and run large old cars into spaces between a dark restaurant and a brightly colored sari emporium, and maybe you see a whole costumed group standing beside a car with its trunk open or its hood up, always one or the other. Strong marriages.