Women and Men (138 page)

I turned to see on the other side of the trees a car pass in each direction like curtains closing and opening at the same time. I looked at the other front door, with little oblong windows on either side of it. It led to the main part of the house, a one-story suburban dwelling. I pressed the one bell again and didn’t hear it and realized I had never heard it and then remembered I had heard it once from inside. My feet were cold. My wife was lying on her elbow, thinking less hopefully than I about the past, her hair down, shaking her head and smiling. I could very nearly see my host, and he was looking at his watch and saying to whoever was with him, "Wonder where he is."

What was happening had never happened. I stared at the bell, which was in the corner between the two front doors, and in the corner of my eye I felt appear and disappear in one of the narrow panes running vertically beside the right-hand door a face, and I could have sworn it was a woman. I rang once more and peered through the glass beside the right-hand front door to see what I could see. A carpeted foyer. The end of a living room maybe. Part of a window looking onto trees at the north side of the house. I stepped back.

Everything had passed out of my head and I had no idea what was going on, until then the right front door unlatched and swung open, and there was my host in broad daylight—hair not too thin, freckles at the temples, faintly wall-eyed. He was shaking his head, or he was rolling it, I don’t know what he was doing but he had been amused before he saw me and he was feeling just as good now. His eyes were misted and attentive. He was a different man. He had on a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. Along his jaw and cheeks was a silvery sheen of stubble.

He’d had something to drink, and his leisurely, slow speech hit me like a code: "Do you know I phoned you?" He’d had a few drinks. He chuckled as slowly as he talked. "I tried to put you off, but I didn’t remember in time."

I said, like a person of lower rank, that no one had gotten the message; and at once I saw this was an odd thing to say.

"My family arrived last night. From California . . . from Washington." He flipped his hand out to the side. "I didn’t expect them until Christmas Eve, and they got away earlier and phoned me and—" he threw out both hands, happy with fate.

I said something like What the hell, sorry I didn’t get the message.

"Didn’t get the message?" he wheedled, and he chuckled as if I had come up with an idea he hadn’t thought of, and he frowned unsteadily. "Well, come in and meet my family." He stepped backward, and I stepped into the foyer with my cold snowy feet and felt huge.

This was the other part of the house, not where the study was, and I had lost something, which, it came to me, had been my opportunity to go on waiting.

I followed my host out of the dark foyer into a living room that opened to my right. And although what I had lost was my purpose, I found in the accident, in the awkward foul-up, a polite power.

My host was introducing me by my surname to two young men in their twenties, his sons. The introduction didn’t take long. Behind him, from somewhere at the far end of the room a tall, dark-haired young woman appeared as if drawn out of hiding. There was a door there. She must have been in the room talking with them. She was the woman here. All that curly hair of hers seemed playful in its abundance.

The son on my right did not get up but raised his hand to shake mine. The hand was hardly waiting to be gripped; it was where I was not. A scar like a seam cut down across his forehead and finished at the bridge of his thick nose. The second son, whose equally pale face was bearded and who wore a gold ring on his ring finger, took a swift stride or two toward me, gripped my hand, and stepped back. Beyond him the father came to introduce me to his daughter, who came forward and shook my hand as if she were shrugging. She wore bluejeans and a large, luxurious ski sweater, dark green, with a high neck that came up under her chin. Her hand was cold. Her face was very tan. I started to say the dumb thing that had just come to mind but didn’t say it; she blushed; I realized her hand was cold because she had been outside.

I had left my wife’s present in the taxi.

The three young people were being given what I had envisioned as my time, and they didn’t want it, I mean they didn’t want mine. Their father was feeling no pain. They had been talking about who I could possibly be, before their father had hauled himself up to go confirm his suspicion. But before that they had been talking of a whole life. But he must have known exactly who it was ringing the bell.

I said, "You all haven’t been together in quite a while."

I was a little angry, partly about leaving my wife’s present if not the thought that went with it in the cab. Well, they weren’t saying what was on their minds, and I was in this as if I and the father between us had brought them out. These serious young people. He knew me very well. The girl looked at me as if out of a tableau. She and her brothers were three serious, invaded faces. They seemed young for a thirty-five-year marriage. Nothing could be said until I left. Yet I could say what I wanted, for I always did here.

I knew what they had been talking about, knew it as certainly as I found a freedom in my embarrassment. But then no, I did not know what they had been talking about. I thought of the woman who was absent from this room. She came to me as if I had seen her.

"I’ll call a cab," I said.

"Oh no," my host said slowly, "I’ll drive you, I’ll drive you."

I decided that the door at the far end of the room must lead to the kitchen and beyond it the garage, a car, a lawn mower, a ladder.

"It’s better if I call a cab," I said and felt in my eyes looking at the fire on the hearth a warmth of excitement beyond my politeness.

"Oh no, I’ll drive you," my host said. "It’s not far to the station."

His children looked to me. Their father knew me. They wanted me to disappear, by cab.

I had a grievance. The clock struck a quarter of, and there it stood on the mantel; I’d heard it many times from a distance.

I knew where a phone was, and I nodded and left the room, and my host came shuffling along the carpet behind me. I found the way from the foyer into the other wing of the house. I went into his study and he said, "Where you going?" But just as I reached for the phone on the desk I heard a car horn close by, distinctly stationary, and instead of the phone in my hand I found I had made a fist. I turned to my host, and the car honked again.

"I had some pretty good stuff for you," I said.

"Good stuff?" he said, and smiled and rolled his head. My words had come back to me.

"I’m glad your family’s here," I said, feeling sincere.

"They’re delightful people," he said, as if that’s what they were— people. "I can’t tell you what delightful people they are."

"You’re not going to like what I’m about to say," I said, "but you should have tried harder to get in touch with me."

"Damn it all, you’re right," he said, and smiled with good-humored understanding of what I had said.

"Well, you don’t need visitors today," I said. I meant
extra
visitors, but then I didn’t mean that either. I saw us in a car, and he was playing games with the white line.

"Your time isn’t your own," I said. "No," I said, "I mean if you’re going to give time to someone, you don’t want to give it
away.
I mean, it ought to be still yours. How about that?"

"That’s pretty good," said my host.

"It wasn’t what I was
going
to say," I said.

"I know," he said, and he seemed more my equal than a widower or a man with a few drinks in him or a man made happy by his grown children returning to his household the first Christmas after his wife’s death.

The doorbell rang and I went through the unlighted next room in this wing of the house that I was more or less familiar with. My host followed me.

I put my hand on the knob of the front door I usually used. We’d been in another room today with an audience. Except that that wasn’t it at all.
I
was the audience, but that wasn’t it either. My time was theirs. As simple as that. This was his family even more than last year, when his wife was alive.

"I had some good stuff for you," I said.

"Will it keep?" came the voice behind me—"because I don’t know about next week."

The three invaded faces had vanished into my head. They had never been there before.

I pulled open the front door.

The strange cabdriver with the powdery, wrinkled skin held out my shopping bag to me and nodded when I told him I was coming with him but . hadn’t phoned.

I shook hands with my host. The last step had been mine and so was the next.

"I’ll phone you," I said.

"Do that," he said.

This is the end of the story, except that I now see I should add that when I returned home much later my wife, whose sense of humor is unpredictable, asked me among many other things how it had gone with my man in Mamaroneck. I replied that we had had a good exchange, though somewhat abbreviated, and we had wished one another Merry Christmas, etcetera. But, thinking of her question, I kept an uneasy one to myself when I said, "I came up with a couple of things."

"Like what?" my wife asked.

"Like the gods," I said.

"Oh,
them,"
said my wife.

"Have I ever told you about the gods?" I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if—"

"You never said
that
to him," said my wife.

"Wait," I said, but she went on, "You sit around and tell him stories on an informal basis as you say."

"I had competition today," I said.

"Well, that makes it more interesting for all concerned," said my wife. "Whatever happened to the gambler who bet his brother’s wife against a boat?"

"Hold on and let me say what I’m saying," I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if we will; but they have
their
lives—I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say."

My wife took a long look at me as if I were a way of seeing something. "That’s what you came up with today? That’s what you came up with in your abbreviated session during which you had competition?" She paused and tentatively continued: "You found out that he had
his
life—is that it?"

"But I’ve never entered into his life as much as I did today," I said.

My wife thought a moment. Then she said, "He wasn’t alone." She paused. "He had guests. He had people with him." She tilted her head, eyeing me. "It’s Christmas; there were people there."

My uneasy question burst out, "Well if you got the phone message, why the hell did you ask me how it went with him?"

But this was the funniest thing my wife had heard all day, and I was amused at myself to see her laugh. She said, "Believe it or not, I got myself together right after you left this morning, and I’ve been out until half an hour ago. Did he say someone answered the phone here?"

I didn’t remember.

"Maybe it was a burglar," my wife said.

What I recalled was that I had said that I would phone and he had said, "Do that."

I wondered when I would phone him again. It might be a long time. I said to my wife that the gods leave some things for you to figure out, and my wife nodded sagely, eyeing me, and observed that that was true, very true.

Very,
very
true, I told myself.

"He should have let me know," I said. "It would have saved me a trip out there and back."

"Did you tell
him
that?" my wife inquired.

"As a matter of fact, I did," I said. "What I didn’t tell him was that I felt your presence there with us."

"I always feel that, but thank you for telling me," said my wife. "By the way, who
was
with him?"

"His family," I said.

OPENING IN THE VOID (smile)

... so much for the Foley Plan to make of this or any prison a home some know exists already of all men’s skills, the closet priest, the born brewer; shirtmaker, teacher, lawyer, Indian; singer, woodworker, Houdini, machinist, interior decorator (the guard beat up for hanging a "hanging" across his cell’s pillared front), the printer and the plumber, postman, nurse, angel, mason, and their comrade green thumb and let’s not leave out the economic mind who got us here (smile) bartering equalities for a family so open-ended, Jim, that Maximum Security withers away like memory of a den of guards, while ploughing its way outward to market surplus fertilizer, knives-forks-spoons-plates, vibes, vintage, fabric, and ideas from such soil of Inside Energy that where we have builders we will have architecture, where lawyers arise judges will be needed, and where green thumbs, another land. And what is
your
story? someone interrupts. What did
you
do to end up in this endless community of minds? I sometimes hear angels talking talking talking nearby and all they want is to be like us and live only inside our limits, change their lives.

But so much for the Foley Economic Plan to best use this Maximum Security Facility: the walled garden unfortunately for the time being notwithstanding is
outside
the walls: while inside them, Jim, growing pain goes down with any beans, canned corn, rice pudding, any milk you had in mind to be thrown up if desired in reverse menu a la the raw diet guru woman one day visited from New York City with outlandish sex shit so that I have to forget I first heard of her from your fellow prison-visitor the generous South American gentleman whose wife knows her from women’s workshops I could see my Miriam attending once upon a time in order to help herself get over me. Tell me a story, George, she said, hey Foley tell me something, anything.

Or pain is messages (believe a well-known dentist, who should be exposed for practicing without Novocaine so as to prove pain is) "nothing but messages": or was it Novocaine he was
drilling
for?, but the message I never got answered from the light of my life?—if she can’t get back to me it’s her choice though I am always with her (tough luck, dear Miriam; tough luck, Mir’): though not all inmates here know Getting
Through
is what this place is all about, getting not out but through to me and you (for James you too, give or take certain Cubans resident here, could be in danger) getting through at that special speed of Earth I learned and from no book—just the speed our light is slowed suddenly, bent by oil slick, blown glass, intriguing haze, eyeball, juice, gray matter, blood, sweat, or sea that that light falls into yet is not lost; or
air:
remember the grasshopper that landed on the biologist’s deck three hundred seventy miles from land? what air did
it
travel through?