Women and Men (49 page)

Dance-like she cocks one leg out to the side, soaps herself, and you find the other cake which is thin and bends, but around what? And you reach through the steamy water and soap her moving arms, which stop moving.

"We’ve hardly met," you say.

"Because you’re condescending. You’re a funny kind of condescender and if I were you I still wouldn’t be able to know just how you condescend to me, and it doesn’t matter much now."

"I
said,"
you threaten, "we’ve hardly
met."

"You do a job but don’t know why," she says as if water weren’t cascading screening you both from the times and from dryness. Lecturing: "You’re O.K. at your job. But why were you at Skylab? You were mumbling in my head and I was half asleep and I know it had to do with why you were at Skylab but it wasn’t your job and I woke up the next morning feeling like you’d let me sit in your home but I didn’t take advantage of it—and Skylab wasn’t your job but it might have been. You know? And why you were at Skylab is like the other part of why you’re here with me. Is there something going on? I’ve seen you four times in three years, Jim."

"We’ve hardly met," you say in some other body which she would refer to as He.

"You’re not married, isn’t that so?"

"Not right now."

She turns her shoulder away and seems to be thinking of all that lies between you/him and the prospect of turning off her shower; it is hers.

She scrubs her face under the water without the soap running off: how does she do that? If you can talk to her you can stop being in two places at once (which is O.K. to be if you’re one of a growing number of gurus with multiple commitments and not enough time). She’s walking a beach in Florida with you; then last night on concrete here in New York months and months later and on that heavenly ceiling.

"After dinner you gave me hell not too sweetly."

"You thought I did."

She was coming to you closer and closer without moving in the shower, so you did not have to make her up looking back from the future, which was your combat status and is a capability lunatic to mention. Being in the future and being able to live back here in the present only by making it up. Jim Mayn and Jean stepped off a curb, the back of last night’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel gently crowding them down into the alley of old Lexington Avenue, a men’s shoe store all lighted up behind them, this little range of the city no harder to make up than grandmother Margaret moving up Park Avenue in a carriage at the turn of the century, for you—he—look past the corner up the crosstown street to the hedges of Park Avenue.

"I know we hardly know each other but do you mind if we go to a movie?" she had said.

"Sitting in the movie will be like lying in bed."

"Thanks, Jim."

"We’ll get us a paper."

"No wait—" as if he was about to leave her to go locate a newspaper —"I want you to know why I want to go to the movies."

"I want to know."

"There was Cape Kennedy and that pool table and the motel and the canceled launch; and there was once in Washington; and we had some phone calls which I really liked; but I feel like the Other Woman—weird, I almost don’t give a damn about you, and I don’t talk like this, you know?—and I feel as devoted as the Other Woman is: as if we had been seeing each otheron the sly all these years a couple times a week and there’s just time to have a drink, dinner, and go to bed."

"Tomorrow’s Election Day and you’re not going in to the office till late."

They walked realistically hand in hand to get a newspaper. They made to cross the street again; Mayn let go her hand, he stepped off the curb looking at a hurtling, disintegrating cab coming at him carrying ancient authority, knowledge of this New York City, so that the driver thought here’s a guy, he doesn’t
have
to raise his hand. But, the brakes crying out prophetically, the high-slung real yellow chassis skiing in toward the curb, Mayn raised his palm (Peace or Stop), felt good, shook his head, but the driver, abandoning his brakes, now found the light changing to red and, against his normal practice of running the red, had to stop since he’s confused, or felt he had to.

"Wait," she said; "I want you to know why I want to go to the movies even if you
already
want to know."

"You’ll tell me even if I don’t."

"Wrong!" she claimed, laughing anxiously. "I’m not necessarily going to."

"Please tell me," he said, stepping back onto the curb and looking down into her angry eyes—were her eyes so young as she?, the colors had been put through much thought.

They opened to the movie timetables. "I feel like I’m already there," he said, and, as if they had made a movie decision, he closed the paper and kissed her, their two soft, closed mouths moving a little upon each other and she opened her eyes so she knew—was that it?—that he wasn’t looking over her shoulder. She said she would like to take a shower, and he murmured that there was a movie near here where you could do that, and she murmured that he had been out of his marriage for too long. No sweat, he added. He felt, through her hands, his clothes on him by the material yard, yards of thickness.

"Oh," she mildly disagrees—and reaches out again under the hot water from her own shower head in her own bathtub in an intimacy created by her own chosen shower curtain.

Oh you believe in the two of you, here in an O.K. shower, you don’t have to pinch yourself, only her, and she pretty well thinks you are here, and you don’t believe in people who indulge themselves thinking they could be in two places, particularly since today, Election Day, you don’t have to be anyplace.

"You voting?" she asks.

"Nope." But all she knows is that you’re reclaiming a place in the City that friends are letting you reclaim because they don’t want it any more, they’ve sublet it from you while you waited to buy it, a family of friends, friends of the family, living there but now they’re leaving the city. Not out for a week yet. She knows this stuff and that you’re coming from Washington, from the West, from really not too many places, newsmen don’t travel incessantly, but you don’t speak of South America, it’s not too vivid.

She doesn’t know your daughter’s phone, nor that it’s a new number and in Washington, or how old your daughter is; but there’s a thumping on the front door, isn’t it?, but this young lady hasn’t heard.

You’ve made your living off information often from those too willing to give it, and reporting it like income, and for too long your aim has had to shift. You’re awake enough to feel the water altering you; it’s what it does so much better than cleaning you off; like the soap making us slippery.

"Pair-shower time," she said; well, it’s the age she lives in like a place that keeps getting away from you,
into
you. It might be the age
she
is.

"Lower."

"There?"

"Hold it—I mean, right there."

"I know my place. Have we reached it?" she asks.

"Did you hear someone at the door?" he might seem to change the subject.

"Did I?"

He would turn on the cold if with his eyes closed he knew which faucet. "I think we’ve ..."

"Hey, oldtimer, you with me?"

"I think we have broken through ..."

A kiss from you seals two mouths from the shower’s bombardment, ties them with a soapy hand below, until you give that hand of hers a remote-control bump and she smiles you off. You’ve got a mile of rope in your lower back and a coat hanger in your shoulders and you must stretch.

But you don’t get clear of the two places, the two at once, and you’re the window, and she’s looking at you from one side like she thinks you’re getting off somewhere else by soaping her own dear breast; but she says, "Are you in the thick of something? Why do I feel it’s so close?" and beyond New York or the dead lava of New Mexico’s earth you feel the shower head is spacewise transpondering you two, and when you audibly recall her words, "I just saw you all over again," and you thought this angel wasn’t particularly romantic you step away from the steaming shower that’s talking to you out of its silver disk-head, and, looking behind the shower curtain to the damp yellow tiles and a huge black towel cloaked on the door like a bathrobe and the toilet and the mirror now steamed that in another bathroom you briefly shared with her in Florida, once said, "Look me up" but here doesn’t know you—you hear now in the shower the woman’s voice as long ago as Joy your lost wife saying, "What’s the matter, did you hear something?" and you think you may not be here after all but through a bend of light seeing it awfully clearly.

She rounds her palm on your hip to slide on around and soap-finger you at the point of your tail—for you are some earlier thing’s future.

You cough and cough. She frowns and rubs your slippery back; she knows a good cheap hypnotist who’ll get you to stop smoking, she’s almost unhappy (she’s frowning so).

The film she wanted to see had gone on already, fifteen minutes’ walk away: take a cab (you said), and it took fifteen minutes of
sitting
to get there, next to each other arm in arm—while you listened to her and told her she could be apologetic about bringing you into a movie half an hour late if she liked—so she, after thinking, said you meant you liked it and why didn’t you think why? But the point was, you were going into a film half an hour late and it was the film she wanted to see even if you didn’t mind, and
this
was the point—and not that she was apologetic.

You had said her being apologetic was very sexy; your daughter said
very
like that. The cab had arrived and Jean wouldn’t let you pay, she was forward on the edge of the leather seat, the woman in the box office was talking on the phone, an old garden-variety clock your father would have on the bedside table beside the glass of water and the yellow-labeled bottle of aspirin and
Wood’s Thoroughbred Racing Illustrated,
and a clock here with green hands and a yellow face stood beside the opening at the base of the cubicle’s window, and after Jean said she had been in this situation before about paying, you won a compromise you didn’t care about:
her
movie,
his
cab fare: but, you explained, because in her paying all or part (well, dinner would have been going too far, and at the Pressbox at that, where she’d gritted her teeth and enjoyed her prime ribs hadn’t she?, dinner would have been letting women into the lockerroom, you said, though you understood there were coed saunas hither and yon nowadays, or at least a Tasmanian economist and his myopic lacrosse-star son reported same at the gym-pool complex of a prominent Middle Atlantic university), you found some sweetness of knowledge in her knowledge of you, and found this right through the paying at the box office where (like a nervous host figuring the tip while the waiter stands near) she wanted to take you up on Apologetic being Sexy but there was a static-fresh ten-dollar bill peeling away from the packet with the bank’s fifty-dollar paper band around it and four ones wrinkled and curling and skating with reverse wind back toward the hand that she said made her feel like this had happened before and pounced on them and slid them outward again as if not wanting them, and this girl you’re with (whose apartment you were already visualizing from under one of her bed pillows which was how you in an occasional crisis slept) was suddenly excited because the time given in the paper was in fact for a prize-winning Eastern European cartoon so they had missed less than twenty minutes of the feature, and as a boy tore the tickets right-handing the stubs to Mayn and the bright, dark photograph which was their screen was straight on regardless of the slope that took them down the narrow house like a movie theater in an Italian movie he thought, quite crowded; and, putting her hand on his shoulder in the darkness of other people’s hands and laps and legs as they tried to see two seats, she whispered that she had always wanted to see this—forever—and he loved her then because she hadn’t remembered to ask him if he had seen the film.

He looked at her and at the screen now darkened and there on the screen three people he knew were standing face to face alternately talking and silent, and she drew him in off the aisle, and as he came between the screen and three people whom they had to step on, one of the characters on screen broke silence and spoke and was speaking when Jim and Jean—Barbara-Jean her parents called her (long-distance)—sank into the audience and looking at each other’s perfect faces both began to whisper—He: "I love—" synchronized with but halted by her "I love black-and-white," but he heard himself substitute as silently as what she had halted, several adequate covers for the vinous, garlicky "you"—such as "coming in in the middle it’s like getting it twice"; "New York sometimes"; "these people"—onscreen, that is, for they were still there as they were one teenage afternoon at the Walter Reade Strand Theater in a town near the Jersey shore called, in the high-colored atlas of his secret pacts with his grandmother,
Windrow,
and he’d gone with a couple of his friends and had run into his kid brother and his brother’s shy little girlfriend—not that he hadn’t known they would be here, and his pale brother had looked past him as if he hadn’t been there, because Jim had not worked that morning for his father at the newspaper that was running itself toward liquidation run mainly by the father who had married into it—when despite his calm demeanor everyone especially Jim’s younger brother knew that Mayn Senior’s suffering over their mother’s being gone and dead was too great to bear alone. And on the screen that was finally revealed by two traveling curtains that parted for the cartoon and a newsreel and closed again in order to rattle open once again, these actors and a couple of actresses who had already appeared once talked frankly and dangerously to each other as if even when they were afraid of being caught—hurt—killed, they went ahead with their way of moving, looking away so that the screen losing their faces darkened, looking right at another person so you the onlooker might have been the trick mirror they looked through (though Jim didn’t know about such things at that age), these people who were getting ready to pull a job went ahead with their way of just sharp, abbreviated talking so the silences in between might have been all the admiration they were receiving from the unseen, unknown, silent while candy-crackling audience including Jim and his teenage friends—one of whom said out loud, Oh cripes I thought this was gonna be in Technicolor.