Women and Men

IN FUTURE

She wanted him because she felt he would love her. He loved her because she was beautiful and funny and saw through other people even to what was beyond them. But she said, Sometimes I don’t think you want to be loved, sometimes I really think that.

He thought, Well, that’s O.K. You have to ask a lot of a woman.

Sometimes he didn’t think.

He told her he loved her and sometimes told her why. She made him feel newly returned. She understood this.

And he told her stories, some asked for again, some never the same, some that developed into others, some that she (though not their romantic, huntress daughter and hard-headed, retiring son) eventually found odd and threatening and became indifferent to: stories about a diplomat named Karl who carried a small Japanese pistol against his ribs because the secret of it being there at a conference thrilled him like telling on himself; stories about how Andrew Jackson rode a searing streak of lightning at an Algonquian rite of miscegenation and proved his courage but divided his brain permanently in two, or how once he loved a village attorney’s daughter from western New York who understood better than any the disappearance of the stone mason turned printer William Morgan who had threatened to publish a comic testament exposing Masonic secrets; stories also about the East Far Eastern Princess who paid a visit to the American Indians and flew in on her giant bird that was to become impossible because it missed its own food and took to eating Navajo ponies.

He told her a whole lot of stories while often claiming to know very little and be an authority on nothing, and some stories he didn’t understand and at least one was incomplete in his telling if not his soul, and his daughter came upon her own conclusion to it; in the beginning he told his wife about himself, fell silent, touched her arm, her waist — cracked a joke. The two of them amused each other. They got along like people who don’t need to talk too much, though they never took long car trips together. Never say never.

But they would blow up like other people: she when he said she was too damn good phoning his father twice a month; he when she accused him of just tolerating an unusually young navy captain who held down a desk job overlooking the Potomac and visited them when he was in New York.

He was content for her to be a housewife if she was content, but more than once said she shouldn’t permanently give up her job. But they knew that when she went back to it another job would be there. The next job. So they didn’t believe in forced unemployment.

When she married him he was a newspaperman based with a New York task force — that general area — and might not travel a lot. But she knew also that he might. And he was what she had been looking for; he had character and downplayed his knowledge and was physical and humorous to a fault and faintly tragic, but when you are in love you maybe don’t spell out all the details at least to the other person. But maybe this is untrue and you are so open you say anything at all.

Years passed and the two of them looked back, they didn’t always look ahead. But then it was often the other way around, and they lived in the future, which came often enough.

But what came first? What drew her to him or him to her? Easy. Not hard to think about.

They were about the same height, or almost. They weren’t at all incongruous, but their frames were different. She was slender, he was broad. She was tall, like her sister, and her legs were alive and noticeable through whatever she wore. Sometimes she stood with her arms sharply akimbo near a doorway.

Her eyes would hold him a moment too long, then drop with an invisible blink to his mouth. Her eyes were straight and explicit. She smelled sometimes of the lightest lavender rinsed through the cold skin of apples or diluted into, he felt, the spaces of some dry drawer holding a cardboard box of sachet (though he never looked); and it was just a hint of lavender taking him away from itself to remind him of what he could not place beyond a second of very green, almost sweet apples he recalled, which she also smelled of and which he did find — found like a less sweet berry in the smell and taste of her perspiration (as he once years later told to one other person in a rare moment of pinpoint intimacy).

She admired the dark hair on his wrists that went up under his striped shirt cuffs; but, strangely long afterward, she noticed a birthmark on his left wrist under his watch strap, a speckle of pinpricks like a cluster of freckles or tiny moles; he had hair on his wrists and some dumb recklessness in how he paid attention to her, her face, her reactions, and he had the lumbering walk of a man who might be smooth and rhythmic in sports but to her it meant shyness and a slight chip, though she would almost never point out this shyness, but he knew she knew him, as if he’d read her mind, yet found there her belief that he would not hurt anyone — she pretty much meant physically.

She had purposes, and she knew he felt these. He could be boisterous and stubborn, although an eavesdropper on the two of them alone would not have seen much of this in him.

What came first?

She gave him hell the first time they went out, but this did not come first. They had met in New York in a Russian place uptown where a friend of hers spent several nights a week because she was in love with a somewhat doomed, very middle-aged Russian family man who sang deeply to a guitar, sang like a deep-drawn bow across a bass viol — and wore a red, high-necked blouse with Cossack brocade on it so he might have scars on his neck. He had long lines down his face and it was from these lines that the lean face hung. Her friend’s love for the Russian was painful because he was nice to her. And he had shown a quiet deference to this young man Jim Mayn. Mayn was the name.

The first time they went out, it wasn’t at all uphill, but she gave him a hard time; she knew apparently so much more than he about the President’s lower intestine right down to his tan pyjamas and the semi-classical favorites he listened to, while downstairs in the hospital conference room the presidential news secretary was asked if there was still no one-word description of the President’s condition; and this heavy-set guy Jim Mayn smiling at her across a table at a Cantonese restaurant in New York had actually seen the President the preceding Thursday night laughing himself silly in a Washington hotel full of photographers at their annual dinner; and when she said the man must not run again and the whole thing was ludicrous, this heavy-set, strong-looking man she liked drank his beer that they had brought into the restaurant in a six-pack and he said Oh Eisenhower, Stevenson — and murmured in song "Pay me my money down" — it didn’t matter much as long as they could get two cars and a power mower into every garage, and a transistorized hearing aid into an eyeglass frame now. (No matter what you know how to do, you’re not going to phase out the strontium 90 from your milk.)

So she gave him hell — an insider, the cynical kind, do-nothing — and then she shook her head when he shut his eyes smiling like a blind man, and he shook his head, saying, Don’t be so damn hopeful about things. And they were both shaking their heads when he opened his eyes upon her amusement and said she reminded him of his grandmother in a 1900 photograph posed on a bicycle in straw hat, puffed sleeves, long skirt, dark bowtie, one discreet toe on the grass.

She asked if this was a compliment, knowing it was.

He said his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

I can imagine, she said, wishing she’d thought of something better to say, her eyes bright, seeing him for herself, her slow smile made witty, to him, by the pinch of her teeth in her lower lip and then her tongue. And at this point they were aware of time passing — he, of the excellent dark, rather coarse hair held up in back with a comb, and "her own eyes" (which their largeness and somewhat hard though momentary fixity made you identify them as) now turned upon her own hand lying along the table; she, of his large, sluggish or sleepy eyelids, and her hand, and the hazy blue and dark brown of his tweed jacket sleeve; and she suspected he had maybe two more or less under control girlfriends at present and was thinking something like How long till I make the grade, and will I have to ask her? — but then saw she was thinking the question from her side, and out of nowhere she said, Learning to whistle is like kissing, I mean learning to kiss — I mean if you learn from someone you love. It could have been dumb, her speaking so — but it wasn’t.

Then he didn’t call; then in vain she called him, and this was 1956. And then the next night — a Thursday — he called from Montauk and she couldn’t hear the sea so he held the receiver away from his ear for her to hear, but she did think that this independent man was not with anyone, and she was quite sure she smelt unsmoked cigar and garden mint over the phone and wished that she had put her hand out to feel his arm when they had had dinner. He said he would be back in New York the next day, and for a moment they both knew he had said it frankly. She ran her hand through her hair and he asked her what she was doing.

She said she was thinking how to put off a client tomorrow morning.

"Just tell him he has to wait," he said.

"She’s an architect," she said, "and her client’s getting impatient, that’s the thing, it’s this new light the Japanese copied from the Italians and it’s been ordered but it seems to have taken a long time, and now two real-estate guys in New Jersey are going to manufacture it a lot cheaper if we can wait. It’s the lighting business."

"What do you mean ‘seems’?" he said.

She felt some parts of them touching and she leaned toward him.

He said, "Is her client a woman too?"

She laughed, she knew she had tickled him.

He said, "You know me," and he said words he hadn’t known were coming but came from long memory as if he were off in the future, "I want a woman to get everything that’s coming to her."

She said, "O.K., I’m laughing, but you’ll earn that."

"Easy to get into, hard to get out," he at once regretted saying and knew he would remember. But "Hard to stay out," she answered, knowing (as she told him next day) that at that moment on the telephone he had got the grip of her eyes, or (as he knew but never told her) the memory of such grip thrown through his body like a passage of time. He was used to her at the same time that he didn’t know what to expect.

Her name was Joy, a name he wasn’t crazy about. But, though their love had its silly, dependent side, he was no good at thinking up those nicknames like Leafie or Needles, Nuzzle or Lark — or Sorry (his father’s for his mother Sarah) or Sam, his brother’s name for his wife — Sam — or, for a while, Joy’s name for him, Ghost, or Ghostie. It was from the song "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and it was he who had sung it to her in a whisper while the black pianist ("Negro," then) had played it in a pre-inflation French restaurant with buttery, average food (quote unquote, James) the second time they went out, though afterward they called it their third Chinese meal, and at the end of the song he said, "Let’s go."

Once when he visited his father in New Jersey he ran into old Bob Yard down at the Courthouse — Bob Yard, black-eyebrowed old part-dog, part-goat, part-horse, the electrical contractor, an Elk, like Mayn’s father, nothing else in common except that neither of them saw much of Jim from year to year. Bob liked to nag and jab with his penetrating voice like looking for inside info that he had himself all the time, and this time Bob asked if Jim had a picture of Joy; and Mayn happened to have a passport shot (in which Joy looked disturbed as if she were about to be transported somewhere). Old Bob — Bad Bob — held it up against the sun. His prominent front teeth and the eyes a little close together though not "bad" looking made him look stupidly like Mayn’s father but with a narrower face: "Your mother would have liked her," he said, "I can see it in the eyes. Your mother’s approval."

"In Joy’s eyes?"

"Your mother’d know how to say it. Your mother turns over in her grave hearing me speak for her. She had it coming — all the times she wouldn’t speak for herself."

The tongue came out and licked the lips. "Turns over with gratitude as if she was alive. The combat boys said it during the War: ‘Nobody dies.’ Though she might not say so."

Beyond the Jersey Central crossing, two men in dungarees came out of the firehouse and stood looking downstreet and one of them was Earl Haight with the red beak of a nose that had been red from the time he was a kid— Earl, from Mayn’s high school class, father a County Jail guard aiming to be nominated for Justice of the Peace. The other man outside the firehouse was Ira Lee, the Indian whose family had lived in the same narrow frame house for years at the power-company end of the black section. Mayn’s grandmother had taught Ira to garden. Crew cut former halfback. Mother a long-fingered halfbreed Creek from somewhere in the mid-South who had cleaned sometimes for Mayn’s grandmother. Father a Saconnet descended from the famed woman chief of that small, not originally nomadic Rhode Island tribe.

Bob Yard brought the photo down out of the sun. "Jimmy, you were smart not to stick around," he said. " ‘Course the paper, you wouldn’t have kept it going, no one could" — and Mayn heard the Jersey r roll through him like a hundred familiar greetings on the family porch three minutes’ walk from here, less than fifty miles from New York, "Get it steady," said Bob Yard, "cook for you, have some kids, get it steady. ‘Course you guys moving around, you get it steady anyhow. She cooking something for you?"

Mayn had to scowl like a smile or laugh. His father didn’t talk like that. Not that with old Bob you talked openly about everything. Mayn was way in the future staring back into the past wondering if his own father had been unfaithful to his wife’s memory even — words made you laugh and history fell apart into tales and isolated mysteries threatening to be trivial. But his father wouldn’t talk like Bob. Mayn didn’t care if his father was a prude or wasn’t.

Joy could be romantic, and she knew he was too, though she played to the other side of him, the part that wasn’t one with her. But the romantic in him was that he didn’t give a damn, though he didn’t say so. (Their daughter one day years later at a restaurant said, "You and Joy didn’t talk things out, I’m almost sure of that, I mean like me and my friends do.") He took Joy to Bermuda once on two hours’ notice, a pretty dashing but a rather funny thing to do to her, though to tell the truth she’d felt like it all day; and he made abrupt statements to her that made her go moist in the eyes (like he’d dreamed of someone like her when he was in high school, senior year, long before he knew her, he meant it) — she felt paid back too much, why was that? but she thought he meant daydreamt because he always claimed he didn’t have sleep dreams — (he liked, he said, the way she came into a room as if she were all by herself and going to be) and when he told her once that he was happy with her, it almost made her cry (she didn’t tell him) and later by herself it, or something, did make her cry. He didn’t give a damn about anniversaries or candlelight on mahogany, but he would buy her two dozen yellow roses, lay the soft greenly crackling cone of paper on the hall table as if it were not to be noticed even after they were finished hugging and kissing. He’d hardly ever written her a love letter, didn’t give a damn about old letters except ones he could quote from, couldn’t play house with his bride, though did tell about his family and his hometown, and Joy (he was asked to believe) recalled what he said sometimes better than he recalled it, though he’d tell (and remember) specially about his grandmother and her house down the street, his haven— for she had told him weird tales about the West and taught him to whistle.

But he didn’t give a damn about blanket chests — or a spinning wheel seen once through the fire-bright window of a New Hampshire inn; didn’t give a damn — or was not sentimental — about their first TV in 1959, an Admiral (and why did he think of it?); and he liked but could take or leave a cave painting they’d brought back from France (without the cave!) — a working honeymoon — yet he did care more than he showed about her favorite record in 1956: (shepherds calling across a valley; a child invisibly hearing a country lullaby; southern sun coursing through someone’s vibrant objection to a wife) Songs of the Auvergne. Sure he liked music. Listening to Dvorak when he’d come home from a trip, he said he knew she wanted to take flying lessons; and she was amazed he knew, and he said, Oh he thought she’d mentioned it (but he knew that it had come out of the blue — he put it out of his mind). She told him he liked the "coming" part of coming home, and he realized she was right. There wasn’t time to mail postcards from where he went, so he brought them home with him. He wasn’t sentimental about snapshot albums or possessions (his, hers, ours), or the soft green and cheesy chalupas at a restaurant on the corner that reminded her of a family place in the north end of Chicago, though a pan of oven-toasted and salted almonds their first Christmas brought back his mother’s furtive eyes with such a dryness of the mouth he forgot he had told Joy she used to make them and he didn’t recall till weeks later, so the mystery of the parallel stayed real. He wasn’t sentimental about Joy’s dough-bake Christmas-tree ornaments lying brightly colored in the cardboard box on the rug one December day he came in from La Guardia Airport to find no one home and in the middle of the living room this flash of green, red, turquoise, gold — a gold elephant, a blue dancer, a dark green shining-shellacked fir tree — but of more interest was a damp towel he sniffed hanging on the shower-curtain rail — flesh-rubbed — a message the skin of his hips took, that was lust in an absence he chose for a message — but more a presence than a real message; and she was so "there" — so "there" now—in how sometimes she watched for him to make the first move and then it didn’t seem only his, or his at all. He could run his hand down her back all night through the last button of bone into a spread softness doubling itself in curves back and forth larger than fingers or hand — and down her side and into the soft, sharp dip above her hipbone that sent his thumb inward in a small arc to touch tendrils only to find eyes glistening in the near dark, and her hands were better than his, you might say, even to when she’d lend him one of her hands to move from one place to another. And Bob Yard said Mayn’s mother would have been grateful for this marriage — marriage of love, he really meant, though those words of Bob Yard’s, not himself a sentimental man, brought back eyes that would have seen what the elder son saw in this person Joy, who he thought saw through other people clearly yet saw through them even to what was beyond them. (Say that again, slow.)

She talked of a house they would build, near water she imagined you’d see through the trees. An open-plan house built around a huge tree — he had to laugh — no, she’d seen it from a car years ago, the tree, a hundred feet tall, six feet thick at least, not a branch on it, all gray like a rock, but alive (she thought it had been alive) — he had to laugh — and her loving uncle had looked away from the road before she had a chance to speak and had said it was a white oak. It was far from here but you could find oaks like that in New England too, and it was what she wanted, like two children, a girl and then a boy, Flick and Andrew, who Flick felt was so much smarter than she was and who when he went to college years later was a maker of riddles.

Joy’s father had been a chemist with the paper company in Chicago— Donnelly. The chemistry of paper, not that you need to talk about your work. Her sister got on better with him.

In the beginning Joy talked of a future she seemed already to have shared with this fellow Jim Mayn her husband, as if it had come first, so clear was she about it, and quick to catch him thinking her own thoughts about fair-to-poor rural schools when he’d hardly known he was thinking about schools though when she told him schools didn’t matter as much as she’d once thought, he had a spasm of caring still more for her, caring twice as much as he did about the two kids whom he was very content to love — while he did feel in his bones that if she was better balanced than he, she still didn’t admit to herself what it felt like to be preferred to her children, preferred in his sharp, erratic way.

Where were the children? Flick, the sharp-spoken girl, and Andrew, the potential roughneck (he’d suddenly start yelling to himself; it was funny, it was like he’d suddenly started digging down through the Earth — maybe he was hearing things, hearing even then those riddles he used to make up when he went to college). Where were Flick and Andrew in the marriage, in all this?

Everywhere and nowhere. (Her father said she really listened, but her mother shrugged.)

Or everywhere, both parents could sometimes feel, though Jim and Joy saw themselves as wise enough to let their children be free of them.

He listened to her build the house she had in mind and fill it; and he had to speak; but then he said only that. . well, here he was.

Was he her old-fashioned future? As her sister’s minister back in Aurora, Illinois, had said, commitment in terms of marital union is like living already in the future.

He didn’t know if he could keep up with that future (whether or not he ever got to go to China).

Except that when he could admit abrupt rage in himself upon returning to the apartment and then, as he came in, see Joy watching him from where she was (like a neighbor’s ocelot — more like a friend’s shepherd watching a man and woman she knew leave in the morning — though more like a wife who was prepared for him) and just as this irritation of his toward someone he loved rose and then finished toward her in a rush, and he stood roughly and said something and went toward her, he felt that coming home was coming back: and when she said, "Do you like being here?" (so the words came together though they were divided by time and by sense and between said and not-said), "it’s nice here, isn’t it?" (she’d built a record cabinet, she’d fixed the wall telephone’s loose box)—"when I heard the elevator door, I knew it was you and when I heard the lock I knew you hadn’t shaved before you left the hotel — I know what you’re thinking, don’t say it — the children aren’t home yet — the last thing you want is to eat out tonight, tell me the truth" — he felt that what he’d come back from was some future, and what he’d come back to was an abundance threatening to waste itself on him. With his assignments, you see, he made sense of each individual one.

She told him what had happened while he was gone. Not a whole lot. She could stand with her arms akimbo as if she needed to take up a bit of space.

Sometimes she would know how not to come to him at the door, she would stand in the middle of the living-room rug instead and he could put down his case without taking his eye off her. Once she’d been sitting cross-legged on the sun-covered ochre rug, the ochre sun-struck into a growth loose through the spread of dark, interleaved pairs of bloomed coils, once upon a time beaks, each the beak of the rainbird if you please, standing each upside down to the other, and she was part of the rug so that he looked at both and didn’t know which came first, and this was more crazy than being irritated at feeling grateful; she wasn’t asking for gratitude any more than the eyes of his long-withdrawn mother (inherited by his happier grandmother?) really gave him gratitude for marrying for love.

What happens is never what came first, it seems to Jim Mayn, and Joy doesn’t see what he means for he says it even less clearly than that, and then shakes his head at himself and grins grimly as if he has to go off now and talk to someone he despises and once in the middle of an alarm clock going off he smashed the bathroom mirror without a drop of blood and his small daughter came and asked him why he had done it; what happens is never what comes first, it seems, but how about when what comes first has not yet appeared? It is waited for, as if it might be seen approaching through emptiness. It is thinking him! With ways of thought that aren’t his any more than they are Joy’s or his daughter’s, but these broken statements like he was a cracked philosopher in another life, or a traveling charlatan, another system, come into him, out of him.

Flick and Andrew had a lot to say to each other later on about their parents. Andrew was confused but brilliant about it. His father tried to tell him how to write with few words for his seventh-grade English. Did Jim ever tell anything like that to Flick? She and her brother thought not.

Jim was away too much, they later said. But newly returned was what Joy said she made him feel.

But returned from the future where, say, two people had been turned into one, which economizes on feeling: his daughter heard this at the end of a story one night, she was quite sure.

Yet also another kind of One, offspring from those dubious Two, is different from them, and alone; and as he looks back to the former Two, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he cannot see where they went; and deserted by that origin, this One (namely, Jim) feels thrust untimely from that lost Two into the future, where he should be glad to be because it’s where tomorrow’s news is, but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery smarter than he which is that of his unhappy mother disappearing into the elements, he has on one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost river to then find it in the future where he travels (whew!), or, to put it better, his wife didn’t always know where he was coming from, and, believing him not unfaithful, told him nonetheless that he wasn’t all there. But as her never-at-a-loss friend Lucille Silver put it, What man is entirely committed to his marriage? Which for Joy did not cover the thing that was happening to her.

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.

The newsstand has gone out of business on Thirtieth Street, he sees; and so he’ll buy his paper in the women’s hotel off Madison, the occupied lobby at this hour he doesn’t want to think about or look at, Joy said it refutes the syndicated astronomer who says We are not alone — well that’s not "Mother" at her funniest — she gets herself a magazine here or maybe late at night a pack of cigarettes out of the machine, she’s not the type to smoke, why does she? it’s incongruous—"it’s not your sort of hotel," she said, but she knows him for an old cocky blood who’s got all this extra amiability he can give them, they’re women, women in housedresses sitting smoking; and Joy almost understands this in him, rouged women on canes, women in slippers staring ahead, watching the Middle Eastern desk clerk waiting maybe for something to do, or in easy chairs they’re turned toward small side tables with a lamp lighting a tabloid newspaper that spreads open down off the table. An odor of scent passes through him like the music tuned from the front desk, and he smells as if down the elevator shafts or out of the dark phone booths (doors folded half open) last night’s canned beef stew, women neither alone and independent nor not alone, and the vacuum cleaner starts up right behind him and he sees he’s stepping over the hose, while a woman as old as a grandmother watches him approach and holds on to a walker (wading in rapids, shivering in Chicago, slowing as if to thicken against the wind) and when he nods, she says at her own tempo, "Five and a half percent, six percent, six and a half percent, seven" so that if Mayn observes every possible detail of this world, he might never get home — but the man at the newsstand counter, his hand clamping his pack of cigarettes down on the counter next to his paper, says he’s glad to see him.

He’s passed the sculpture-materials store, and the offset printer’s who’s leaving the business to his Bahamian assistant next year and retiring to Lake-hurst, New Jersey, where the Hindenburg blew up. Passed these places often — often slowly, walking with small children (they knew where your hand was without looking), as if those certain presences have been left in the daytime absence of stories he told at night — mostly tales of the East Far Eastern Princess, her giant carrier bird that took to eating Indian ponies on a visit, or the Inventor of New York who did pathmark work on wind stress for high buildings and never got credit, who went west and met the Navajo Prince when he was in love with the East Far Eastern Princess but just as the Four Worlds were materializing together the Inventor had to ride back to New York because in his absence it was disappearing even though he had invented it, maybe because he had invented it rather than discovered it.

A hand reaches for Mayn’s on one side and he for another hand on the other side. And now, after years, it’s because of the children that on the harder days these streets have seemed less a neighborhood than ways to elsewhere, so that he might despair and wrongly — and despair of giving his children something else even though all this is what they know they have and they are busy, and they haven’t the chance to forget all that he knows. But, since they are his memory’s guarantee, it’s also because of his kids that these blocks have made a neighborhood that sometimes when he opens his eyes can’t be residential, but then is. Just as he wonders if the children have anything to do with it all, when Joy stands at a window staring at the decorated beauty of high, turn-of-the-century office buildings and textile warehouses or cutting rooms, underwear, whatever’s inside, with round-arch windows and blue stripes and flowery pediments and scrolls and other decorations the names for which he doesn’t know staring up from the street ten or fifteen stories the way he used to think about New York fifty miles away when he was in high school, and above all that architectural decoration and the overhanging rims of the roofs a sky that on a day like this you’d never believe is better for astrology than astronomy, but it’s Joy at their own high window looking out and she says, "Those water towers, those sawed-off silos, you know something, I have no control over my life."

His wife this morning has said that Flick is nine and doesn’t have to be walked to the bus. He knew that, didn’t he? she said.

Flick objected and asked him to help her wedge her house-shaped lunch-box into her knapsack—"He does have to walk me." She remembers what’s what.

"He doesn’t," said the boy in a soft tone of discovery staring at the spoon gripped in his hand, a monogrammed spoon that belonged to his father’s grandma — staring at it and turning it, staring and turning his neck so slender his plaid shirt looks man-size, the dark mole clear and small below the hairline.

"I think he does," said the mother, seeing through the conversation, and on the spur of the moment tossed her husband, ten feet away in the hall, a yellow apple which for an instant he felt his teeth slowly, slowly, neatly bite into in mid-air but he has taken it without thinking, in his cupped fingers, and in a trice it stands on the hall table beside bill envelopes that need stamps.

"You don’t own him," said Flick. "Yes I do," said Joy. "Does she?" "She only rents me."

"Your hair’s gray," said his daughter reaching up to smooth it at the ear as he bends down to her hand.

"It always has been," says Joy, who sees him take up one of the envelopes.

Joy never liked mailing things. They laughed about it. He said in the presence of a friend that Joy turned it into his obligation, and the friend said it should be easy for Joy to figure out what was behind this feeling.

Andrew has turned abruptly to watch, grinning, and leaves his cereal, goes into the hall, grabs the apple, and flips it to his father, "Hey Dad, can we go to the library today?"

His father grabs him as if to get hold of the question and wrestles the small, ambushed shoulders into a hug. "If I’m back from lunch," he seems to have said before.

He’s passed the new library, second floor just for children. And now he’s walking over the crusts of snow, and a dog ahead has balked and is being dragged but won’t go further, it’s the salt on the pavement — the dog’s paws sting. Salt was tossed all over the pavement in front of this office building, tires slithering, a cab door sounding not quite shut, a black man’s breath into cold air, his breath like engine steam above his two-decker trolley of coffee and Danish halting for him to reach around to yank open a glass door, and in the brisk fantasy of this morning in this commercial residential point in Manhattan — residence used to be good business but no more, says the landlord — Mayn remembers that Joy has started having the paper delivered — recalls on another street a few minutes ago following a young woman— well, not following—but following her too closely, she was swinging her butt but she was moving right along yet was going too slow for him though he couldn’t get past her what with the garbage cans and the tree plots, and she turned her head to catch him in the corner of her eye like an animal — he smelled her powder, her morning perfume, whatever.

He’s almost home and loves his wife. She’s ahead. What’s the matter with them?

A new couple stayed till one, their girl-child is now in public school again and they’re rich enough to believe in it — and Joy said that she thought the man, who was very presentable and well-educated and was in the aluminum business and praised Women’s Lib (—bib, crib—), had wanted to be treated like an invalid. Their child at six had greeted the arriving soon-to-be-nude women of a workshop and had made the gossip column — first name (basis) only. Joy knew them from the library where she and they had reached for an opera album at the same instant.

The man’s feet — extremely big to say the least. And when he had put his drink down he had held on to it unless his wife was talking. His wife had talked about him, and there he was, temporarily, in the room. She shouldn’t have, both because the guy might just have been not there (Jim later said) and because she seemed to make him materialize there (Joy later said).

"Invalid maybe," said Mayn, "and he did have a helluva cold, but she’s sure talking about him instead of something else that she won’t put her finger on, and it isn’t anti-Semitism in Space."

"I like talking to you, Ghostie."

"I think I’m drunk. Well, she’s bored with him but she thinks it might be her. In the kitchen he asked me if he hurt your feelings asking if the rug was genuine and you’d said a genuine imitation, and he asked if there was anti-Semitism in my business and he asked if one thing didn’t come on top of another too fast in the newspaper racket (he’s humble and sensitive and insulting) and was there any continuity? and I was going to say Yes, but he suddenly said, like he was explaining something, that he had to change his life — before we knew it it would be the seventies — and then—"

"He laughed very loudly," said Joy. "I thought you’d told him a joke and he was the kind who doesn’t remember them well enough to tell them— we heard him laugh out in the living room, we thought you’d said something, and she said she hoped Tom wasn’t telling you about the models he makes, and then she said she’d bought him ten pairs of socks on the spur of the moment this afternoon, his mother bought him six pairs."

The light is now red — how’d that happen? — and Mayn won’t hurry— models of what? — no two of the four of them had gotten around to that — the cars seem to wait, he can’t fly, he considers limping — that is, across against the light. Last night he heard "Ghostie" for the first time in a long time. It’s been a short walk, he hasn’t gone far. She will bend her head to one side combing her hair at night — that’s what she does, the circles of coffee in his gut melt the path to her — he has stood over her holding her shoulder in his hand, as she bends her head resisting the clutch of the brush with that look of arranging something inside her head that she can’t always see. Seeming as if she has an idea what is wrong with the world around her which might be the people very close to her.

Maybe she won’t take angry action on what she knows.

She is ahead; he sees her out there. She can report of herself more than she is willing to know but of him knows more than he for one is able to report. She is funny and beautiful and she wants to let Jim know without words that she knows he thinks this of her. Andrew and Flick’s mother who is quite a character to them had a job before she had them. Before she had a job she had a home with a father in Chicago who, with his large, inky-black mustache, entered the house at a violent, silent run knowing his first wife was busy upstairs. She preferred upstairs and managed always to be there. He pounced on the piano, however, and plunked a few bars of "Meet Me in St. Louis" knowing she would not come downstairs but would be waiting for him when he crept wickedly to the top of the stairs until one day he found her dead, her hand held in Joy’s sister’s. Whereas for his second wife he would also play, but she could never be trained to stay put but could be seen plunging silently downstairs before he was safely out of the second bar of Albert Au Revoir’s "Banana Waltz." Kind of a depressive man, besides. (Had enough? Joy asked, and could eventually communicate this question without words by dropping open her mouth and glazing her eyes.)

She is funny and beautiful. She is not Jim, no matter what their marriage (he once observed) threatened them with.

Once on a morning like this he didn’t have his key and she opened the door in a big towel, her half-peeled banana in her hand, and she said smiling, 4’Oh it’s you."

He knows what’s happening. But not why. Does she want him to be away less? He doesn’t know, and the reason is that he asked; and she answered Oh yes she wished he were away less. But what he wanted to hear wasn’t to be heard in her answer. Ask for her touch; fine. Or ask her which of the people they saw socially she’d be content not to see again; ask her why she lets the phone ring at least twice even when she’s right there, ask her why she said hardly a word when he brought the salvage diver by for a drink — and she’ll say she shut up because, because, it was the absent presence in the diver man’s talk, the man’s very young girl friend, whom he discreetly bragged about in the shape of her record collection, O.K.? — or ask Joy if she originally expected to be happy having made a good match, or ever thought of getting off under the bathtub faucet no hands like Lucille and her workshop friend, or has ever run amok; ask her why she gave up smoking one week while she asks you — call it him—if you smoke after intercourse and answers her own question (I haven’t looked); or ask her to shut up — or be asked to shut up when he tells Joy she should go back to work; be asked once when silent, having been silent for a minute, having been already asked to be. As if some unspoken answer had matched what he’d wanted to hear in hers at other times. But for all these successful askings (no complaints, take care) you still can’t ask her to tell you not to travel so much, and expect to get the truth. You hide your heart in this apartment like a Christmas present not yet wrapped or — for she hides hers sometimes too (yet that prior you is also she)—like a plumper tummy in a Danskin leotard dusky like old-fashioned stockings, while he, the deployed emplaned husband hides between here and there like the shadow or chance of one end or the other, yet seems to be only at one end of the other.

He still had this sneaking idea that they’d always had a perfect understanding, but he wouldn’t claim so to his daughter when she was old enough to talk to — that is, about this — sometime around the time she had discovered a lot of words, including "tedious."

He and Joy — meeting of the minds is relative, you know; it doesn’t mean you agree, like seeing the delicate neck of your little boy looking over his shoulder at what he’s drawing and you run a finger up the neck into the hair and he doesn’t say anything.

Relationship was the word. Relation. Each was the other’s closest relative. Closer than blood, and clearer to boot — clear friction. Not just that he on his back with his knees V’d out licked her insteps’ wrinklable arches while from below her she divided and trained his soft-skinned old beanbag either side of her soft, stuck-open breather (take a breather, sweet) while he broke the V of his knees to run his own instep up and down her ribs, pigeon-toeing under onto a softer flesh to the returning touch of separateness, each soft spot of nipple marking his motion. Well, you can’t exactly tell it, speak of it, except some other way, say indirectly, with the door closed — but where are you? For example, let them watch TV in a room or hunt for change in a dark taxi, or one lie on a bed in a hotel room while the other moves into the bathroom or out. Soft points marking motion. Life’s in parts, and some go together and some don’t, and some incongruously don’t, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.

(She’s ahead. So’s he.) It isn’t an opening, that part of her, or not only an opening; it’s a coming out as much as an opening in — more so; an irregular bloom: he thinks rose, but no, he’s no good on flowers. But heading toward her on a loud morning in New York knowing they may leave each other but on some other hand (whose touch in him is each child’s and his wife Joy’s succeeding each other in dissolving substitution confusingly endless he hopes) she is ahead, and she is funny and beautiful.

He knows what is happening. He sees events fall. And fall back. Away from him. Another self, she might once have been his.

But did he see? Was he a witness? He has known so much, how can he know so little? He wouldn’t have thought he’d get so friendly with Avery ("Ave") of the big feet and the hand on the glass and the tall body that looked for air to lean on and, behind glasses, eyes that wanted like the hands to talk — Ave the metals engineer (well what are you going to do with a guy like that?) making his ungainly entrance on what was proving to be the last night Joy had ever said "Ghostie."

They see into the future, she through him, he through nothing. She is behind him, the two of them Indian file, and she behind him like a wind that’s past. He sees into a future, doesn’t he? The children are beyond them — grown.

And then he is there. He was there all along. A silent transfer from here to there. Truly from the future, she distinctly hears him say.

Certain years are done with. Force that drew them swung them past one another. The years? Or him and Joy?

Only in this way can the new mystery appear. Would he bet on it? Is it just pollution?

Looking back, no longer together, they might try to think what came first. Three, four years after their separation — on course to new decades.

Together they recalled each other. But they did not speak of it. Except once on the phone. That is, they did not speak of how it happened. For it was together, yet they were not together now in any but this way, he and she, nor had been for several years (though each sometimes forgets — he waking one morning out of a hundred, she dreaming and waking in the middle of the night in the country)—"and anyway I’m not alone."

But for one lapse, the time on the phone wasn’t referred to again; they were embarrassed or they were preserving it, that is preserving the oddity, the shade of this secret communication, illicit visiting rights. She told her son, who took a scientific interest.

But this new kind of communication was not the same thing as their story.

They had a story that seemed to get easier to tell. It was that he spent so much time away from home that he was impossible to live with. He moved around. He traveled. He wasn’t a traveling salesman, for he traveled in order to get hold of things, not unload them. Yet get and then unload. For at times he hardly altered the handouts he received on behalf, at first, of an organization he drily pointed out to his wife was non-profit. It didn’t sell stock, like United Press which became United Press International; but his organization was mutually owned. By its members — and don’t call them "subscribers" on pain of excommunication.

So what?

"You liked the idea of me," he said, "you know you did."

He’d never talked like that before.

"You don’t have to be away so much," she said.

"I didn’t use to have these chances. I take them when they come."

"You could be a bureau chief."

"In another city maybe, but not now. We’re so much better off."

"Well, I like New York," she said.

"But you don’t want to stay in the city," he said suddenly. "You want the country."

"But I don’t do anything about it," she said.

"Don’t you!"

A frozen lake and green sunny trees were right behind him, behind his back, even though he was in a New York living room, and she looked right through him and took him along with her into summer-thick weeds under a window that were really the endless crop of furry green mint.

Well he wasn’t proud of his job and he wasn’t at all ashamed. He had gone to work first for a wire service — and left. But later, before leaving again (in a way), he had come back for a time to work, but came from Texas to New York, where he’d hardly known he wanted to be — though everyone else wanted it. Lateral transfer from, say, Dallas to Oklahoma City, was not the policy, or not for promising young newsmen. At least at AP.

One of the great cooperative news services, if the void may say a few words.

He had gone to work for the Associated Press in the early fifties when the new TeleTypeSetting circuits had come in.

TTS. It hardly affected him. More news faster. The operation worked, and so did he. It was the inevitable future.

What would he think of this first job of his? First, that this was not exactly — that he was not — or not yet — exactly his hero Ernie Pyle reporting impressions of drought in the Dakotas or lepers in Hawaii. A man named Boyce developed a national column, but the AP didn’t specialize in bylines.

Ernie Pyle had walked through the London blitz.

"You’ll live," said Mayn’s father in New Jersey, though the son hadn’t complained.

TTS meant that now a story had to go off in just one take. So it might have to be held until the last minute, no sneak previews. You couldn’t send pieces of it as you had them and then follow with last-minute inserts or new leads. More likely wait, then have to rush. Then what? Then where were you? Maybe go home, if you could.

A fairly clear filter comes down in front of you soon enough and it’s a clandestine screen and you see through its history, a blank of words not soon enough if ever said between two married people, some desire for power over the other that betrays itself only as the desire for no-power, also a blank between what goes on outside this home and inside. He didn’t like history in high school, or thought he didn’t — dates were made to look like causes of effects — and he made his grandmother laugh with his made-up stuff about how General Jackson had a stomach ache and had a man shot whose family’s history and that of New Jersey and its view of Indians were thereby altered. Mayn did not like history, didn’t understand it any more than the fourth dimension. Well, all he meant was he didn’t know history.

Well, Ernie Pyle now. He was remembered. His stuff became books, which sold back home. From Africa to Sicily — the engineers’ campaign, making bridges and mine-sweeping miles of beach so the guys could take a swim — in the war that you just missed. Still, if you can’t remember, you also can’t forget "the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving." And the Ernie Pyle to be remembered was also the Indiana farmer’s son getting out an undergrad daily that subscribed to AP; Ernie Pyle a college editor in Indiana, received Kirke Simpson’s dispatches on the Unknown Soldier being buried in Arlington. Ernie Pyle was moved by these stories and ran them in the pages of The Student. In 1923 he was a headline writer for the Washington Daily News. Later the real Ernie Pyle rubs alcohol on his hands because he’s told to, though the friendly lepers at Kalaupapa would never shake hands.

His words impress themselves through the white space where there isn’t any type, and in this way they pass warmly through stuttered quanta of perforations on the TeleTypeSetting tape that holds your dispatch and operates the TTS linecaster over distances hard to grasp: "the perpetual moving" — words known by heart—"the never sitting down." Sicily more than a word afloat jaggedly off the Italian toe—"go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again." You press beyond the Iroquois forests your grandmother (as if she were the smooth storyteller) read to you that also never leave you, you press on through the bare Sicilian landscape, you die and you keep moving (oh, you like the "you" in all its callused corn), you burn and shiver with malaria, you die and are wounded, have a drink, see action, occupy an empty village; you press ahead and your hand expecting anything pushes against a heavy door and there’s nothing on the other side except bad weather and Italian prisoners, a lack of resistance hard to account for unless underneath the landscape filling up with Italian civilians were to be found buried a hundred thousand army uniforms doffed at the flick of the Black Hand’s underground finger, a grand shrug of the Sicilian surface, a nod from the Mafia don answering favor with favor in response to a coded word now untraceable (they said) to the source, namely a secret creditor behind the bleakest, most northern walls in the New York State prison system, and flown (say) by navy fighter, passed (say) mouth to mouth, eye to eye, and heart to heart so that the American fighting man with Lucky Luciano behind him doing fifty-five years in Dan-nemora prison, while here and now he’s led by the Black Hand, advanced to take positions that were often not held at all. So what about it, Ernie, did Luciano help engineer the Allied success? Did the Mafia cool it for the Yanks? Ernie Pyle’s life was there in lives of other men so that his understanding of them takes the place of their future that is not at all there, while the closer they get to the front the less they know what’s going on — they’d know if they were back in New York. All they know is tomatoes hanging in the fields, plasma hanging from Sicilian trees. The front; the popping and deep chug of explosion. "Without water you’re sunk," Ernie wrote. (Mayn’s father in New Jersey liked that one!) And sooner or later "it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull dead pattern — yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo" — Troina, where American blood mixed more with German than with the mysteriously absent Italian — with the sun you imagine coming up out of Etna which is as if islanded upon the sea, but no, Etna’s nothing to write home about, no dragon, the Italian doughboy from Boston, from New York writes home about the future, Ernie Pyle knew them, he saw the engineers lay down beach roadbeds of chicken wire and burlap, he got sick, a kid called him "Pop" because he was "gray-headed," and when soon enough he died on the other side of the world in ‘45—same year as Jim Mayn’s mother — he was famous.

But today the perforations on the TTS tape (that came in in the fifties, the void repeats) are also holes bearing dispatches unmemorable as the tiny waste circles of newsprint punched out with a loose-leaf punch onto a library table by a drifter of a journalism student whose family, whose father ("You’ll live"), ran a weekly in New Jersey that folded (joke!) at the end of the War not because it didn’t rent an AP line but because it didn’t go out and get the county advertising. The journalism student is punching holes out of clippings so he can ring them into the binder of an assignment notebook, getting them all together. And this prepares one for a job; yes, this — while his father (prematurely retired) divides himself between other people’s newspapers, the porch, eventually TV, and always the trotters (whose red earth in great deep chunks is like a friend’s red earth on the Colt’s Neck Road where the horse corn grows so thick and green the earth disappears up into it) — all is preparation for a job. Though not the only preparation for a job. Any more than the marriage union is a preparation for divorce, separation, dissolution, or vice versa, though no preparation is needed for the hammerlock a boy gets on a newly returned father or at the same moment the weight of a girl sitting on the father’s legs.

Joy had called her husband a correspondent. He was. She told him he was crazy not to go for bureau chief. She told Flick.

He left AP. He came back.

He met an Argentine who owned not only one other South American country but four papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to boot, and as everyone saw it, that was what changed Mayn’s life. Later a clandestine backer of a women’s bank. A clean-shaven Argentine named Long who saw something in Mayn. Something beyond the mutual friend who brought them together, an American specialist in languages of the Uruguayan pampas, and beyond the amusing tales Mayn told Long about a friend of his father’s covering the Hauptmann trial and the explosion of the Hindenburg. Long sent Mayn where he discovered he wanted to go, and once let him get mad and resign; and then a month later after dinner with an AP traffic chief in Texas who’d known Mayn for several years, Long rehired Mayn. Joy wasn’t clear how it had come about, and in those days she seemed to act like she knew more about his work, his subject matter, what took him away, than he did, she made it her business to know, but about the rehiring she didn’t know and she saw through Jim’s shrug that he didn’t know either (except for one reason tossed out, namely that Long felt Mayn cared about the work but not a damn about the job). Well, he knew she thought she was proud of him, but then he thought she made too much of his work. (Say that again.)

Yet he did care about the job. They each had a streak of the secretive and indecisive, Flick once said, but the proportions were a mystery. Even when Joy had told him he should be a bureau chief with AP she would say also that if ever she got out of New York she could really get into the country. As for him, he spent so much time away from home he was impossible to live with. And while they were married the phone made things worse.

Too much time away: this story of theirs had run for several years before that word correspondent became a bad gag in the mouth of someone who liked her, who called her (Mayn had heard it) "chere" and said, "Quite," when he agreed. A young divorce lawyer with connections at the UN — well, yes, young — and "divorce"? maybe that was a trifle harsh — who said that in this case maybe there was no corespondent. There was more to him. But how could a guy say a thing like that? For Joy had quoted it to Mayn as if she wanted him to say to her How could a guy say a thing like that? ‘Tedious," their daughter Flick would have called it if it had been three, four years later, "incongruous" was another word, "illusory." She went through a period when she made puns. Some boys got into that, but not girls. But "Who did Mom inherit that job from?" Flick asked one day when she came home from school and didn’t get it — the hair in "inherit" — when her father turned his head to laugh and nearly shed his blood upon the wifely scissors working on his neck.

Well, Mayn had gray hair when he married Joy, but gray hairs or not, the two of them had been through the wars together. That was what Mayn said. Said about her, she felt, as if she had often been one to start whatever they had then been through together. But didn’t Joy say it too? Said it to her friend Lucille. Been through the wars. So? Yet sometimes it had seemed like nothing, like the gap between JFK at 9 p.m. and San Francisco at — actually — midnight Pacific Time, and one year it was one. Blanched shadows receding off to the left along the Rockies visible under the plane’s own moon. Not wars at all. An evening out, days at home — in tune — nights away from home subtracted like bad behavior as if they didn’t count. Not wars. More like falling away from time, falling through your own vaunted resilience, through nothing — but falling. Falling upward, even. And at home as well as in a hotel. Falling out of bed at dawn so your fall was broken by the ceiling. Jim. For Joy didn’t do that sort of thing, her daughter pointed out to her, product as she was of them both.

The void lets out a smile, which he and she might feel as a breath of relief somewhere that what had happened to them could be said so.

Been through the wars. A common breath let out like deep thought that was the two of them or nothing, and much heavier stuff and finer and more subtly worked out than either of them could have thought, such intellects as they were.

Been through the wars. A real-estate hot shot (though nice guy) named Sid living with a girlfriend now, and one day on the tennis court got a phone call from his doctor asking him to come in, and they decided he had two types of cancer, one possibly they couldn’t do anything about, the other his lung, and because his former wife, who was a lab psychologist working with animals, had smoked (at him) for years, he went looking for her and found her at dinner at the Mayns and told her, no less: but no one did anything, including him. The children were in bed.

The void will calm things down. Speaks through you like a whole thing of force and membrane neither yet full-grown. But in the person of those whom that void after all keeps moving, the void disperses time and the particles by which it is told until the equality of all things can become too much and a drag. And the nick in the back of the head that shows barely through the hair is not only a blood type but a section exacted from a singular person who might need to be saved at the expense of someone else.

How he knows ahead of time when she enters a room — is it some throat clearing he has lent her as if she like him were dialing a phone number and getting ready to speak? or is it some warning she has lent him in a private smile he knows (and pays for knowing) is there around the corner of the hall doorway before she comes in sight? — and if he knows exactly tonight how their host will enter behind her, as if for the moment they two weren’t intimate kitchen-sympathetic. Has life with Joy made Mayn this way?

This knowing is like some out-of-character eccentricity; he’s an ordinary guy, for God’s sake (and God would rather he’d stop thinking that) — not much of a believer — and when they arrived a while ago and the host kissed Joy and shook hands, Mayn felt the presence of another woman who wasn’t there, a wife or woman paired with the host. He did have an ex-wife somewhere— though not somewhere in the living room — but the point about the host’s kissing Joy was that his absent woman was imagined by Mayn as sticking out her hand to Mayn, kiss balanced by handshake, well a pair of couples needn’t be symmetrical, need they? yet the messages don’t quit coming; and in a Windsor chair near the fire (the andirons too far apart, the chemical log sagging and collapsing to bridge its break with a blue-green flush) he gazes at the young detective in a blue-and-red ski sweater who’s cutting his law class tonight, who’s on the floor between Mayn and the fire talking equally to Mayn and Lucille Silver who calls him Rick and questions him and he’s responding so Mayn is getting a garbled message part of which is that (which he knew already) he brought the detective here tonight and brought him like a message unknown to the bearer — well, Rick is in an A.A. group with a free-lance frogman Mayn knows, and Rick is cool for his age, his cheek crackles with shadow and color, so (Rick’s saying) he’s got nothing but respect for that guy’s homicidal instincts — so — so — so Rick (he’s saying) is about to get hit over the head, right? so he’s standing in the street telling the kid in the big white T-bird to put that thing down, but there’s someone behind Rick — Lucille crosses her legs in the corner of Mayn’s left eye and a flow of fleshly concern — flesh turned to fluid — gets to Mayn as Joy, having come in, falls cozily into her chair to his left across the white room, knees together sliding together off away from him as if she would tuck her feet up under her in his direction; Joy grasps Rick and Lucille in a look that opens like her lips which part — Rick and Lucille, who’s half again Rick’s age and twice as present to Mayn as Rick is to Joy (Mayn’s sure). . and when Mayn (who doesn’t seem watchful) swings his head a little toward Joy she seems to open her eyes in a glance that bears so much condensed attention out of the past so completely and painfully but, for a flash, so entertainingly to him: for example, Lucille likes more danger than the young cop knows (for, according to Joy, Lucille has twice disarmed her son — yes, literally — his father taught him to shoot a big.38 and ordered him never to carry a pistol), but Lucille doesn’t like risk quite so much as she is thought to by Jim, who likes her O.K. and distrusts her more than she knows because he confides in her once in a while. Joy’s teeth show but her tongue crosses her lip and time halts in her face as when one of her children takes a long look at her, a radiant thought that wished its way there from elsewhere in her body because a blankness at once slipped over Mayn’s eyes large enough to include the extra wine glass she has carried in here and has set down on the table beside her first glass — doubling that prior silence out in the kitchen beyond the living room that Mayn has received like rays passing through these minutes of the young policeman’s choice tale. Until a hatch falls in and all the objects in the room course into the foreground, into his eyes but not Joy’s, and there are for him no people, just objects and the space to go with them. But Joy’s tongue tip and a glint there on the lower lash of one eye give Mayn the fine word from her that please believe her whatever he thinks is going on it’s not public, what’s going on between her and the host — Mayn’s nameless witness won’t name him; Mayn is the witness — the host, the glowing, controlled man, has followed her not quite soon enough into the room and at once turns her from the cop’s rendition to tell her her father was smart to give her Texas Instruments in ‘57 even if she didn’t get along with him — but is this a tribe sitting here in this room? is this what it is? Mayn has the words ready to ask — and is he one member of the tribe and Joy another member (whose father if you want to get technical once in his cups threatened not to give her away) and Lucille and the policeman? And the man? The man’s name is Wagner and his place of work is some huge association where he keeps an eye on the pension portfolio. An "inside dope-ster" Joy called him to Mayn, and Mayn had heard it before, from someone else. Or in advance from Joy’s mind. Mayn wondered how much of Joy’s and his own story she’s put into words for this Wagner, and while Lucille, a friend in need, is asking Rick’s hours, saying married people see too much of each other, that’s Jim and Joy’s secret, Mayn drifts toward Lucille like his smell but his smell become conscious reaching her thoughts, and he says— out it comes—"Aren’t you a bitch." Yet Lucille seemed sincere in what she just said; and later when Joy bawls him out because Lucille is one of their close friends, he knows she’s instinctively getting away with it because, though it was true if not visible, he’s had that and can pay for it, and for a moment he and Joy are crazy together, though in a Connecticut motel next week he wakes to a Kansas City motel near the river, near the market too full of very raw animal-carcassed buffalo fish, and will never see Lucille Silver again because he’s kissing her goodbye, having told her in this dawn dream, for he claims not to night-dream, that for an offspring (like. . what’s her name?. . Flick) to have your courage shot into orbit by the dual thrust of united parents inc. is a great thing indeed unless the launch pad is unfinished or otherwise incomplete, and then for gawd’s sake don’t look back.

Their story covered many years and it was that Mayn spent too much time away. It even once got called that — a cover story; she’d said it to him in a letter while they were still married. (He remembered it when he took his daughter out to dinner some years later, she wanted him to sign a petition to get a Philippine writer out of jail. Jail? It might as well have been the Death House!)

He knew a handout. Some of his work was taking press handouts off a counter or desk in a busy room as far away as it was familiar and nondescript, handouts that were sometimes little more than a friendly pitch Xeroxed off an electric typewriter hustling a product (this was the point), and a newsman could put these handouts on the wire more or less condensed. But he would also go after assignments where you didn’t get a handout because what there was to peddle, to get onto the wire, wasn’t immediately clear, though he didn’t believe in what wasn’t clear, and he kept after the briefing officer of a natural-gas company who would turn away from figures like 7.5 trillion barrel-miles of various gas liquids and anhydrous ammonia being carried through more than two thousand miles of pipeline in 1961 to the claim that this firm was a "future" firm operating in a frame of reference not less than Energy itself and Related Earth Resources, and how can you be anti-Energy? you might as well be anti-American. Joy understood what he tried to do and liked him for it.

In May of ‘60, no longer working for AP, he did with the government story on the overflights what the story did, or said to do. With itself, that is.

Routine report: pass it on.

Mayn was like any company man or stringer.

So Powers, the pilot, was photographing weather — or (like a mechanical part of him) the plane was photographing weather; and the flights over Russia were routine weather observation — NASA said so. Now Mayn knew — or figured — that the story wasn’t true, and he had heard that it was not true from people who ought to know but also from a man he didn’t like named Spence for whom the extreme altitude of the slender U-2 plane gave to it, gave to the plane’s glinting eye, an exponent of threatening force, a light too powerful to see with the naked eye unpeeled.

Ray Spence was far away but approaching Mayn in the form of Mayn approaching him — that’s what Mayn felt. Well, people weren’t always credible.

Spence told Mayn back a story Mayn had told him about the newsman who got the jump on everyone else at the explosion of the Hindenburg. Mayn mentioned this — that Spence had told Mayn back his own story — and Spence laughed, but too long and softly as if it was understood Mayn had made a curious joke. "How’s the family newspaper?" he then said. "Got any good numbers in your book?"

But the government overflights story which everyone knew wouldn’t stick made Mayn, who was fed up with words within words, curious instead about the weather. What had NASA to do with weather and what was there to know?

So he was in Florida and later he was in California. Not into space he said — not space, not science — not ESP — and you could throw in the Fourth Dimension (and he didn’t mean the bar in Brussels of that name for he had a quizzical way of showing off or the book store in Dallas). Weather satellite — that was the size of it. No, not science — as Joy should know, who knew him.

You called the satellite a grapefruit. And all he was seeing was exactly how a four-pound grapefruit covered cloud belts across a quarter of the Earth. Then talking to the Coast Guard. Aboard a white weather ship about to leave for the Bermuda Triangle. Tall, thin meteorologist in the weather shack up on the boat deck facing aft, a Texan (‘‘originally"), with a German uncle in Chile multiplying bees. A German grammar on a folding chair on the rolling deck. A man in khakis with a bad black Texas mustache, no kidding, and an unconvincing habit of in the middle of his talk to Mayn calling out, loud and jolly, to any kid who came by with a wire brush or an electronic technician’s tool kit, then one who materialized below on the quarter-deck photographing a huge seagull standing on the rail. A global network of weather stations. Mayn could get into that. The man with the mustache lent him a manual which Mayn read and forgot about and later decided not to mail back from New York after the cutter had put out for weather station. This global network looked so compact, but put yourself in it and your neighborhood is endless. This thought followed him, not he it.

Up?

The curvature of space he would leave to other minds than his.

He talked to Joy about the weather. So then he’d be unable to explain his interest in it. That is, to her — at least when she said, "But blue sky in the winter in New York — but in Chicago over the lake, you’ve never seen how the water goes up the sky, it attracts the horizon, it lifts it, my father used to say — why, meteorology — what do these guys know?" ("I know, I tow," said Mayn.) "What about rain against the window—" ("Don’t be an idiot, Joy.") " — against the window the summer we were at the Cape playing Monopoly?" "Look, Joy": he drew her a wind rose:

"The length of the line shows how often you get wind from that direction — during the year, let’s say. And in another type of rose the lines thicken so you see how often the wind was strong or light or moderate." He drew her one of these, too.

"All right, I can see it," she said.

"Helps them decide where to put airports and buildings and vegetative wind screens and factories that smoke up the air. The wind rose shows the horizontal motion of the atmosphere. Now you know all that I know."

She laughed at that, and she didn’t give in. "What about the wind hitting us when the car got past the mesa cliff driving down to Albuquerque, remember how red the cliff was? wasn’t it near the Continental Divide?"

Have to ask a lot of a woman, he knew she was telling him to think. He asked her to please shut up. The one long car trip they’d taken.

And when they had a discussion about the check he’d taken from her checkbook and she said he was a shit but gave it a tired, unimportant sound he didn’t like, he told her that she was really thinking about his being away but, hell, he could be talking about the upper air with the Coast Guard and the civilian meteorologists just as well in Boston or Portland but he was talking with them here at home in New York.

He’d already talked to them in Florida, she said — and, home? she said. Maybe home for him — which made him laugh like the — yes, strangely like the — white pilot balloon ("pibal") that lifted for a second out of his mind complete with information on expansion and air resistance that was safely in his pibal notes — yet what she said stopped him. For wasn’t it her story that he was away from home all the time? But one day he saw (like a — like what singly neither had the words for). . saw like a resilience that the story was his story as much as hers, even if he would claim he’d never been wanted by the FBI like the man who among other things had actually bounced a check on the East Bank of the Mississippi which, granted, was real — that is, a snug, bright blue tavern north of Orion, Illinois, and just below Rock Island he recalled, where the river turns nearly west and the banks are south and north (whence come AP dispatches from the Chicago office to small member papers and radio stations). He pops a joke, but Joy is not put off her track, she goes to the bedroom passing the bathroom doorway through which a child can be seen sitting leaning forward on the John, a child whom the father also sees when he follows his wife angrily, who then brushes past him and leaves that bedroom passing again the bathroom doorway and the child who looks up at her and at the father. Elsewhere in time the decks of D-Day ships snap down into troughs like crevasses blown out by the Sicilian storm and as the decks drop down the silver bags of the barrage balloons snap their cables and rise up, up, so high the sound of the bag exploding is very hard to hear, isn’t it? Sometimes he couldn’t recover her face when he was away from home. Only her whole presence, watching him by just living, by being in a next room drying the lettuce or turning from a child to turn a page of the evening paper — to see anything, to skim some news — to check the horoscope, hers first, but his second, though she disliked horoscopes. He loved her; he could say it to himself and honestly tremble while at the same time he recalled her needling voice after him. "I see you going in in the first wave with your big helmet over your eyes, a gun in one hand and a pencil in the other." What’s a gun? You mean a pistol? a rifle?

Away From Home All The Time: Mayn’s story as much as Joy’s, and it got handed down. But this sense of their shared account, this story about his jobs and their marriage, was not the same as the thing that now sometimes happened between them during these years since she had moved away with the children. (They could never have had an open marriage — bodies refracted in the light of absent feeling.) And then — though he’d kept the lease — he had moved away too, and the children had pretty well grown up, and Flick was tougher to talk to but now could be told anything, which Andrew could not. If he was even present. Once her father saw Flick kiss her brother goodbye softly, the fingers of her left hand upon the back of his neck.

Together Mayn and Joy recalled each other, month upon month separated, then divorced. They weren’t together in any but this way; they didn’t live together — and often weren’t geographically close; weren’t in touch, or not so you would notice unless you were tuned into the void or you had high-sensitivity gear that could assess vibrations between the village in western New Hampshire where Joy lived and the motion through which Mayn’s assignments took him.

He and she happened once to find it convenient to be in Boston on the same day and they had lunch with their son Andrew who just about cracked his father’s hand according to his father when they shook, and who wrote his sister Flick that he’d had lunch with them, the two of them together with him in a restaurant near the docks, near the new aquarium (with sharks and turtles in their own custom-made cylindrical bathysphere) — the three of them like a family with an only child drinking Bloody Marys in a window that looked out on a cold, slushy street. They had converged on Boston, the mother from the country, the father from Europe by way of New York and Washington and Philadelphia, and there they were in a restaurant eating tiny bay scallops and baked potatoes.

The son wrote his sister in that fancy style she wasn’t put off by that the parents had been "curiously good" together (so the void either smirks or it’s a long, smudged radar trace of low-pressure front) — good together — a lot of laughs was partly what Andrew meant — Joy remembering the woman down the road who had the choke pulled out to hang her handbag on until her car wouldn’t run anymore and a muscular mechanic found the trouble soon enough, the woman down the road one summer; and Dad remembering the subway years ago, losing Andrew — on the subway, that is — Dad just back now from the arms talks with another story entirely that would have been spiked if he’d still been with AP about the Viennese fearing their cathedral would sink into the ground if the new subway went through, which was at least as interesting as a tall, dark-suited delegate whom the night before one had seen with an excellent young whore in a tailored suit now the next afternoon raising his eyebrows but not his translated, rather resilient voice at the danger in Russia’s ceiling being America’s floor.

But no, the way Jim and Joy knew themselves to be together at instants of recollection was more like a growth, a surprise someplace in the body, more like feeling, and your own bared limbs, nerves, tendons are entangled for you then to see if you can move the one part someone points to, and you can’t, or it’s trial and error, and is it that you think maybe you got someone else’s body warped in here too? Feeling, did you say?

Feeling left over from a dream. Her words. She never believed him that he didn’t have any but day dreams.

A dream like an obligation you wouldn’t put your finger on whose stripe of tooth-and-nail action bled apart on waking and went away, and the residue was this sense. Not a feeling you could really see, like Joy staring when she was embarrassed or nibbling her lower lip if she thought she had an edge. And nothing so real as light reflected off the balls of his smudged fingertips when she read the Sunday paper over his shoulder.

A Sunday morning, a Manhattan apartment, Mozart with his five happy instruments on FM, coffee still in the air, a ham in the icebox, Joy in her long-sleeved nightgown, frills at the wrists, thinking (he knew) of going out for German potato salad; Flick practicing her flute behind a closed door, low and insistent; Andrew old enough to get out of the apartment by himself taking his football to meet Dick or Larry in Madison Park among the sheepdogs and dachshunds and poodles and profound dappled bassets, patrolled at the perimeters by one or two snakelike dobermans too thoroughly bred — while back in the apartment sun smeared your polluted windows high above Manhattan which is still Manhattan even high up there, and Jim and Joy looking out from where he sat and she stood behind him.

No, they recalled each other; and recalling each other they were together. Common enough, after all. Except how they did it. How it happened. How they thought it happened, or knew that it did.

For here was what it was (an analyst in Boston told Joy to get it out of her head, it was just intuition or leftover intimacy, let’s get back to how and why, but, quoting the analyst to himself, Joy says O.K. but maybe not every event has a cause, maybe not the silent anger during the last haircut! — but then what’s intuition? comes the question from the void) well, theirs was the recollection of the other person plus knowing that right then the other person had it also or had had very recently, maybe a minute before, or would have very soon after you did, three hundred, three thousand, or — in the song learned from him which he had learned from a girl in Geneva, Switzerland, that Flick their left-handed daughter one day stroked on her guitar — ten thousand miles away, Flick who accepted what she heard her mother say about this "knowing" of her parents’ though it wasn’t the sort of stuff she would really believe, right.

But being both of them strong people, they would doubt that what they felt happen actually did happen, some communication or other. But hold it a moment — for a little life-promoting, species-preserving exercise, try doubting that word strong used so easily.

Living with someone for a long time like twelve years doesn’t mean you can’t someday lose track of the person scattered like a passage of time all through you, a petition unvoiced. Refractions, Mayn said of his life or that of others. (His daughter remembered later.) Yet when he and Joy were in touch two or three times a year, they knew.

That is, they thought they knew about times in between. Yet why so awkward to talk of? Embarrassing, as if splitting had been a catastrophic mistake.

The hook-up between them? an unknown word between them, word was what you got before you wrote, write if you get word.

Communication between Joy and Mayn? Explain the odd message units passing between them any way you wanted.

The desire to drop the other a line came like a sudden information, came while one-handing a bottle of mountain claret in a mountain motel in Colorado or driving slowly past a colonial cowpond in spring twilight, and they each knew that the desire to drop the other a line couldn’t be hope that things would change between them. They could have gone to bed just like that, probably. If they’d been snowed in, or caught in some future emergency in a city. Or en route, needing a bed for the night. A friendly scalp rub. A friendly hand. A friend, maybe. Your arm under his head. Laughing about getting turned on right after coming. But get back together? They could not. The thought was laughable, so maybe so was bed. The thought of getting back together was as tritely elusive as failure tried to be. It was, then, real at least. And it was preposterous.

Together they recalled each other repeatedly. They communicated but rarely spoke on the phone or any other way. Joy told Flick like a joke.

Communicated, O.K., but how? In their few letters?

A letter might be instantly answered. Oh it would be.

Unless it was from her and he was away. Out of the country.

But after such an exchange, the chance of another on top of it would sometimes discover itself, and they would know at whatever degree of distance from one another that they were a little put off by this prospect.

Of incest? No, nor falsehood.

Repetition. With increments.

Graduated, he thought, graduated from First Marriage, a long enough one, graduated from an earlier hour of intimacy. His heart wanted to stop: for then, graduate angels, he heard her saying on the phone. And he exclaimed, You answered my thought! do you know that?

But then he couldn’t speak.

Go on, she said. He said, You answered my thought, the graduated part.

Oh, she said, with a bug in her voice, weren’t we always doing that? — or have we gotten better? I mean now that we aren’t together.

Just the opposite, it seemed to him.

His body got enormously heavy. Bone-tired. More slow than tired, promising to give up and let him go on ahead, hands heavy as they were said to be under hypnosis. He shouldn’t have let the marriage go, and yet then she was saying — she was crying a little, she rarely wept but when she did cry she’d been able to without missing a beat or breath of her conversation. Was it an act? What if it was, it was real (it occurred to him). Tricky? she once said, Why I owe it all to you — but now, you haven’t put on weight, have you? maybe I wouldn’t be so bone-tired, she said (so heavy, she thought), if we could just answer our thoughts and not have this phone that makes me think of you inside me — tongue, nose, big nose — inside me — she guffaws against his ear—"Ear!" — and has to cough through tears.

Go on, he says.

Ear bones, she coughs, every one, right down to the lobe, kid.

He felt so heavy the flesh was pulling away and he was with her, yet here.

Repetition, she said.

We’ll try it someday, he said, not knowing what it was that he had let go, a household, a hug, an inner kiss.

He knew she was thinking of his hand slipping down her ribs.

Sounds like some experiment, she said: that shouldn’t be repeated.

But the event, unforced, did just that. Repeated itself. They’d sense together an embarrassment. They’d know it as surely as they recalled her biting her lower lip when she was sure she had him and she couldn’t lose. Or him shutting his eyes when he couldn’t win. As surely as they recalled his call from Washington the first week of July one year when they were married to say he couldn’t join them in the country the next day because of the airlines strike and Joy saying with the slant in her voice down which they slipped like dual sinners, Take a train, Take a bus — when she knew that the strike was an assignment: yet one that someone else could have covered, she hardly knew the people he worked with but she knew that (and she knew a lot about his work and would talk about it). Yet the children — it was the children who were most disappointed that July day; and he knew this and the slant in her voice that was her irritation for not showing more disappointment herself — because she didn’t know how much there was—and she looked through the dry ovals of big leaves up against the window, rhododendron, and to the left the spruce trees, two of them — no, three for heaven’s sake — three, at three in the afternoon, and she looked beyond them into the leaves of the trees down by the pond and through these into the stippled pattern of glare off the pond — it was three-quarters of a mile across and it was called a pond — and she said into the phone, "It’s nice here." And she thought they ought to buy the place, thinking, It’s only the two miles from the village, which wasn’t what mattered — but then she heard the kids yelling, and Andy Injun flashed past the window and Flick came rushing by the house, and Flick stopped short, wondering among other things what she was doing playing with him, her long, fine hair combed out down to her bare ribs, hair across her cheek, and she looked into the window at her mother holding the phone receiver against her head and looked with a blankness Joy wanted her husband there to fill, blank like the children’s two curiosities sitting one winter morning so unfairly at the kitchen table with their father when she came in the front door with last night’s clothes on — so unfairly late when they should have been off to school — and in Washington (with voices behind him) he said to her in New Hampshire, "I can see Flick and Andy, I can see them, listen I see Flick through the window where you’re standing, hey for a second you weren’t mad."

"Oh get out, you only knew because I told you," she said.

"No you didn’t — you were telling me to take the train, and you were thinking of buying the place. You could run it as a non-profit home" — the words came out like that.

For your old age, she’d thought; but there in her ear — knowing she hadn’t said a thing about buying — she had felt him as if he were standing behind her, saying, as he now did say, "No for Christ’s sake excuse me, I only meant maybe I couldn’t get back if I didn’t go away. How’s that?"

"Lousy," she said.

"I need a haircut," he said, thinking of that Ray Spence, his hair as long as the Beatles’ then, and his speckled hand coaxing a goatee he had grown, looked right through Mayn when Mayn said a grim hello thinking of Spence’s hair, not his deals — sometimes she told him it was time—"I feel grubby, itchy," he said, and abruptly he was not so much in her ear as in front of her: not some male to be photographed for a frame on a wall enclosing a room — though she’d seen them do it both ways, woman in all her skirts seated, man above on two feet, but now he was seated in this photographerless pose into which she would put the two of them once every month or six weeks for many years in the city — hair the same matched with the same scissors, times collapsing into the same mindful hands playing above the same immemorial head in the city, and in the country in the summer, in New York, New Hampshire, come to think of it Brussels for a time that she had unilaterally terminated after the school in the person of a large-breasted teacher in a white blouse had repeatedly tried to make Flick right-handed — and in these poses Mayn was always in front of her, the wide head of coarse, grayish hair, a dish towel tucked into his neck, or an old sheet like in a regular man’s barbershop, for she’d taken her son Andrew to the barbershop on wide, prosperous Third Avenue that his friend went to, Andrew tight-roping the curb of the sidewalk, rising up on his sneakers as he did when he and his father and sister walked hand in hand through a slower-moving crowd from the subway to the Stadium, it was an exaggeration of the way everyone might walk in health and happiness.

In the barbershop Andrew wanted his mother to be not there yet not to leave.

It was like acquiring genuine qualifications under pretenses, and the next time, before his father took him to the park to play ball and then sit on a bench eating hot dogs and ice cream while his father recalled one of his own grandmother’s Indian stories about the giant Choorian bird that, like an intercontinental transoceanic steed, flew its mistress the Princess Nay of Manchoor to the land of the American Navajo and Pueblo but, in the absence of its accustomed food, ate the chief’s horses until at last he had to do something about it, Andrew was able first to take his father to the barbershop as if introducing him to a place where Andrew was known — knew the ropes, knew the drill — and so Andrew was glad to find his barber unoccupied and go directly to the chair where, standing, he could say that only he was having a haircut, not his father. (He said father.)

Whereas Mayn favored a barstool. That is, in a bar.

That is, if he was going to be talked to from the side or behind his back. Maybe she was right, maybe he had been massacred by bad barbers for years before he met his wife. Saved my life, he said one Sunday Lucille was there for breakfast. You owe her that? asked Lucille, looking down her nose and through a fresh bagel she was about to bite. You’ll leave her if you lose your hair. But that wasn’t it either (the bad barbers) — for he had felt massacred by good barbers, the alien size of the steel, sounding between the low, stationary voice and the traveling touch upon his soft head, each abrasion between the shears sealed by that higher-pitched tsit raced by the music breath of the blades opening, inching. Joy had thought of cutting his hair, or he had asked her to take over, they didn’t recall who started it. He lent her his head to practice on. She was pregnant with Flick, they both recalled that. He dreamed she was chipping the hair with a tool he couldn’t see and he woke up in sly self-defense when the pieces began coming down on top of him.

Nearly twelve years of his prematurely gray hair piled up around them so now he needed more than the eyes in the back of his head that she’d said once she knew he had because he had thought he needed them.

Oh sometimes he thought that was all he had, the eyes in back. She laughed; she couldn’t help it.

But come on, she said — while he receded again (or was that her expanding with some fit of contentment?), receded through the years of living together, it was several years now—"Come on be serious," how had he seen the two things behind him? — seen her lick her lips and the tear push out onto her lower lashes?

"Leave the eyebrows," he said, and wanting to lean his head, eyes and all, back into her — wherever those back eyes were (she having withdrawn her long scissors, he felt sure) — he must have made some move he did not feel, for she was laughing about those eyebrows in the back of his head, "Don’t lean back!" But he was sure he hadn’t moved.

"Aren’t you there?" he asked.

"I’m there," she said.

But come on, how had he seen Joy lick her lips, and how had he seen the tears weighing upon her eyelash?

He panicked. Why had he known these things? Were they some waste?

Panicked the way when he’d waited for a man he had hit to get up off the floor and the man didn’t, and the panic wasn’t that this was the man’s apartment or a man named Martin Wagner might find his nose had turned more than a corner and left him with a future headache he would not be able to feel in the morning (and it was already morning) — it was a wild space in him flown in by Joy and this guy made of nights spent here — probably panic not about that but the time through which had happened slowly what he hadn’t seen he couldn’t take until there it was. The ultimate push-up the man on the floor seemed attempting, or words out in the open he couldn’t take back; he’d been around, he wasn’t so shockable, yet there he was on the future end of a thick cube of time you saw through, looking back on how he’d awaited a love that was still there on her side too. And was this how, later, he panicked at seeing (when he could not see) the lick of the lips and a grand tear weighing on the eyelash?

Then he saw why.

It was that he’d known what she was thinking. So of course he could see what her face would do. Was he awaiting a terrible loss of her that would bring him some news? What a jerk!

He in front, she cutting his hair right behind him so that with the small of his back he could butt her tight belly as if its hardness were its largeness and he with his reverse face could come only into nosing tangency with it while it went on its way — on with its thought. Her thought. Which he did not presume to know. But couldn’t stay away from. That is, he was minding his own business and she was snipping — still learning — and they were discussing his father: of how, a full ten years after the family paper run by his father and his uncle had folded, his father had said this other son of his would never have kept it going if it had been still printing when he was old enough to think about taking it over, never in a million years, not with more county business, not with a connection in Jersey City or the State House.

"As if you’d been the one to let it fold," said Joy.

"Well, I would have — he was right."

"He couldn’t know."

"I’d delivered enough of his bread-and-butter job printing to know the future."

"That’s what I’m saying—"

"I know that’s what you’re saying."

"Wait, I haven’t said it," she objected.

"Make up your mind—"

"Not in so many words I didn’t say it, but it’s what I meant. He was making you responsible for what had already happened to him years before because carrying the paper obviously wasn’t in your future — not with the weekly competition — they tripled — and getting the farmers around the county, and the advertising."

"Your scissors are soothing."

"Experience is."

He could feel her almost drop the subject.

He said her name.

He leaned back but missed her. She was looking at the job she’d done. She was looking at him. Looking into the back of his head that he knew she would heedlessly nick someday, if only a paper-thin cut — as if the music in the next room were being played by her upon his scalp, and she could heed only some thought that, let’s say, she shared at that moment with him.

A record ended and they heard a fire engine getting louder, and a new record dropped softly.

‘‘There’s a lot to my father."

"Come on, I know that."

"Well, not that much."

She laughed.

He’d brought up the subject. Put an idea in somebody’s head, get it back with interest.

He heard her breathe, and she wasn’t thinking how to even out his hair, she was thinking he’d said this instead of what he felt about that man — as a father, a husband for his mother. Mayn had felt her sympathy but in the exhaled breath he felt the quantity of her knowledge of him, the sheer neutral amount. And he was about to say, well, he’d had his share of choices, his father had let him alone. ("Sorry this is taking so long," she said.) But Joy began to cut his hair again while they both knew that she might push at his weaknesses — until they went away! — and get at him, but not the way Mayn’s younger brother Brad did, who needled brother Jim with what the local electrical contractor Bob Yard had said in the barbershop, in the atmosphere of sleepy talcum cut with a dash of sweet hair tonic, and Bob had said Jim Mayn was too damn independent, a wise bastard to boot, too smart for his own hometown — until Jim let Brad have it, which was what Brad had wanted all along, to be told he was in a rut and had never known enough to know he seriously wanted anything, he was timid — while (wait) in his own business smarter and better than that old cable-throwing fuse-screwer Bob Yard any day of the week. Maybe their father wanted the same treatment but never got it.

"It’s too late to punish him for your mother," said Joy. "Stop dwelling on it. It’s a mistake. It’s tedious for you and me."

Surprised into almost laughing at her "tedious for you/’ those shrouded eyes in the back of his head had sensed the onset of Joy’s left hand, her comb hand. Not in order to comb but to finger. To say that she understood and that it was over now. And to say she was glad she was pregnant and knew he was, too.

They laughed at that — at his being pregnant, too.

The warmth of her feeling went all over the back of his neck, and it went on for years and she wasn’t pregnant now. Children give you something to talk about, but they didn’t need that, and yet when sometimes they couldn’t speak, the thoughts spun off and they had this idea that they were thinking the same thing, though when they were married they didn’t know if they were spending these identical thoughts on each other, which would be a strange economy, or only thinking without conveying the thought to the other. Conversations repeated themselves, but she stopped occasionally saying there was a thing he wasn’t telling her. About the past? No. It feels like the future. (And this was long before he tried to tell his daughter, who had been vouchsafed these gropings by her mother.)

"I said there was a lot to my father — why do you blame me for what might be in my head but I don’t say it? Why have I got to be held for what I’m smart enough not to belly-ache about? I mean" — he was staring into a kitchen wall when the calendar and phone materialized out of it and were there—"why don’t I get credit for not saying some things? What is it with you? how come you’re giving me the business when I’m only thinking my spite, not saying?" (She laughed.) "Is this some punishment I’m supposed to get regularly? And ‘spite’? where the hell did I get that word, I never say ‘spite’—it must have come from you."

Well every event has a cause no matter what they’re saying in the next twenty, thirty years, and behind him knowing he hadn’t picked his moment to be provoked Mayn had seen the tear she raised the knuckle of her scissor hand to catch as surely as he saw her tongue tip come, but — like an emergency support mechanism (he heard himself later supply).

"In future you better watch it, kid," he went on lamely in such sudden unhappiness he thought he didn’t give a damn about this stuff that came out of his mouth as if nothing had just happened, but he was uneasily glad Lucille Silver wasn’t attending this haircut because she would have attempted to wipe him out for speaking that way.

All right, Joy made him say things sometimes; but this was worse— "better watch it, kid," fond slight falseness, that might be then so bad good as to be laughable and she’d either grind off his ear at the head with her shears, or make a funny sound as if having made contact beyond him, subtler than the silly old college songs she sang to her daughter.

"It is the future," she said, "and as whoever it was in your family used to say, ‘don’t spare the horses’ "; and he felt nothing between them but a long range; just as well his chair didn’t face a barbershop mirror.

But the arch cheer in that dumb remark had calmed her eyes, he knew, and he heard her teeth coming down on her chewing gum.

She snipped some more. "Damn," she said, and stopped, and curried him with her fingers and went on.

And so he plucked then out of a void—the void, if the void may say so — a story — every time a story, until their secret tempos {tempi, his mother would have said to a musical partner, No she wouldn’t) located each other again as really the same (as if neither could want power over the other), until years later (still like some future becoming the present), under more experienced shears a story came to him from somewhere in the luggage checked in his head on the flight home last week, and he smiled and he told it to his wife — his wife of ten years, Joy. He’d run into this smart guy Spence. The story came from Spence. He knew Spence from way back, talked in his presence, met him without meeting him, a good listener the shit, Washington, New York, San Francisco, someplace else — and what Spence knew Mayn didn’t want to know; and this time Spence’s back was to Mayn, who, in the lobby, had seen him saunter across from the elevator and enter the bar but whom he now recognized anyway for his richly stitched long buffalo-skin jacket, the heavy slick of now-Hawaiian-dyed black hair, and the speckled hand moving out to the side independently to take nuts from the dish the bartender had set down between Spence and a woman in a suit and a big red hat. Mayn knew Spence’s face before it turned and the high husky voice easily included Mayn in what — after the too brief reference to a job he of course knew Mayn had been offered — Spence had resumed telling the bartender.

About a pounding (the pounding) in the Earth that Spence had heard and felt, so that the crowd voice that came with it seemed to come right up from the Earth he was standing on, right?

Yeah, said the bartender, who was very big, well that’s a funny location for it right next to the cemetery.

For Spence had been in a fine American cemetery hunting for the caretaker so he could check the lot chart and take a look at a grave — old mound that had never had a headstone — but he happened to find the family on the far edge of the cemetery and just when the pounding faded and Spence later recalled some bright colors moving through spaces in the trees, he heard this swishing and scraping. He had found a space that he thought was the unmarked grave and he was turning around to check exactly where he was when he heard a click nearby and a golf ball skipped off a gravestone apparently and rolled past and he watched it stop a few paces away; and he now realized he’d had a sense of being watched on this weekday among the sweet-smelling green and the personal gossip among the breeze-freshened gravestones and the doors and windows of the mausoleums, where he was exposed as if bright day was creepier than darkness honeycombed inside, but this sense did not go outside the cemetery on the side where the golf course was — but was right here.

And then the door of the little mausoleum next to him opened out a bit and a young man in white jeans appeared and watching Spence every foot of the way went and picked up the golf ball and returned to the mausoleum, closed the heavy door and stayed looking through the glass and ironwork until the glass absorbed him and he wasn’t there.

But Spence is grinning at you, is very open — as everyone’s beginning to say — the word, that is — and Spence includes you so you can be part of his ongoing business — and incidentally at this point grabs with one speckled hand for the peanuts, looks between Mayn and the guy in the red jacket behind the bar, and says, "I know what you’re thinking" — goes back to work, checks out the stones in the vicinity of the unmarked grave, and, without giving the guy in the mausoleum the benefit of a so-long-buddy glance, slopes off down an aisle, his hip-pocket notebook in hand. But runs into a big angry blonde who materializes in a red-and-white polka-dot sunsuit with an iron over her shoulder and she’s looking for the golf ball. So Spence gives her a smile and says he saw the ball but didn’t get a chance to pick it up and shows her where, and they separate just as Spence sees on the other side of the golf-course fence a sturdy Oriental gentleman all in this loose bag of a pale blue costume flanked by two golf carts (his and hers) with a hill behind him. But now the blonde calls back to Spence, What did he mean, a chance to pick it up? Well, he feels that he’s half-interested and he walks back to her and tells about the guy in white jeans and points out the mausoleum and she’s looking at him pretty sharply, she’s got a couple of inches on him and he says, "Yes, no kidding," but grins again and he watches until she gets to the mausoleum and tries to yank at it and can’t, and other sounds come from the side of the cemetery away from the golf course and Spence looks at his watch and thinks of the dead conversing with one another lying there on their backs not turning their heads. Give Spence credit, he’ll hold your attention if he can. And the blonde is over there shaking the door of the mausoleum but she stops, and, shading her eyes, she leans in against the glass. Then she yells that there’s no guy there and Spence shrugs and laughs and goes away toward the gatehouse where his car is and when he hears that pounding in the Earth again he thinks it’s what it was, but then he hears her breathing and it’s her and she’s striding toward him her iron in her hand like a drum-majorette baton and she says, "You bastard," and he starts laughing and runs like hell and they chase all over the cemetery until he shortcuts himself to a good enough lead near enough to his car so he can get to it and make it out the driveway, and he’s thinking about the guy who went back in the mausoleum — relative of an old fragrant guy in overalls maybe — and Spence looks back and, you know, she’s still coming when Spence is out at the highway waiting his chance to turn, and here she comes so he’s got to get onto the highway the only way he can, going the wrong direction, and almost steers over the white line looking back at her. And at the cemetery, the whole place somehow.

And when Mayn asked what were the other sounds, the bartender said with a frown, "It was the pounding he mentioned."

But no, it wasn’t. "You know the pounding," Spence had said.

"Horses’ hoofs," said the bartender.

"Oh man, she was beautiful," said Spence, "but she was angry. I stay clear of angry people."

Pulling the bartender’s leg surely. But if the tale was true, say the pounding was Spence himself. Does a man with speckled hands have a heart? If so, the tale had left in Spence more than a smile accelerating down a highway in the wrong direction as if the blonde had commandeered a car and left her lama boyfriend holding two bags. The horses (spared or not) weren’t just one of the seven American winds, and Spence was no touring humorist, he meant something; the speckles all over the backs of his hands looked scaled but as if scabs had melted back into the glistening skin.

"Your golf course next to the cemetery, the cemetery next to the race track!" Joy said.

Mayn felt his heart surface. "The race track? What track? He didn’t say a track."

Mayn found the scissor point upon his temple. Joy would tell Lucille for sure, and he could see Lucille’s hair, a lock, come down over her forehead as she lit a cigarette and listened. She called them two hundred percent married. He recalled Spence once telling one of his own stories back to him, a guy who was Bob Yard’s niece’s friend by marriage whose shoes had hurt so much that he hadn’t gone out onto the Lakehurst airfield with the other newsmen for the Hindenburg mooring, and when the silver bag let out its potential fire and blew but not sky-high and somewhere a radiocaster was crying, this man with tight shoes who hadn’t gone out onto the strip had a headstart on everyone else getting to the phone.

"What’s Spence doing in your old backyard?" said Joy, who didn’t know Spence. Her hand was smoothing, smoothing, as if thinking, but not about the haircut. Call his cemetery a backyard? There’s a distance and he’s nearly there in Jersey in the town where he grew up. Cemetery, race track, mere coincidence.

Mayn thought, "I’m crazy, I can’t help asking again." And he said — but without turning to look at his wife with all those years of cut hair around them—"But you know what I was thinking."

"Oh I suppose, Which were the names Spence was looking for? because maybe they’d mean something to you, does Spence do that kind of thing?" Joy’s hand ruffles the back hair upwards, then smooths it down and lightly left to right.

He said, "I know you hate newspaper work, you do." "Just what I was thinking — but the names that Spence was after?" "It crossed my mind," he said, "but I don’t know any unmarked grave, but I was thinking, Was the fellow in the real mausoleum or did Spence make him up?"

Mayn did not ask to be caught up on what he’d missed, but you couldn’t tell if the bartender was falling for something or Spence himself had fallen into some unexpected field of the cemetery — Mayn hadn’t words for this likelihood — a field — a field of pounding inside the Earth (O.K.). Who was it said the Earth was the roof of hell?

Mayn, when they had met after the U-2, had thought he wouldn’t want to get drunk with a man whose mood jumped back and forth (let alone the speckled hands) from these little stories say of the Chicago wire service (AP had he said?) borrowing the weather off a radio station and then selling it back to the station, from the cozy, maybe-it’s-the-end-of-the-world-tomorrow interrogation of others as to facts he seemed already to know, to an inquisitive fear one night seeking Mayn’s eyes out while plucking the mouth with the speckled fingers (God, were the tips speckled? he didn’t remember and maybe he had been drunk, so a past he didn’t recall was why he told himself that he would never do any serious drinking with this adroit, neutral, orphan man whose curved fingers plucked at his lips) as if to tempt out the idiotic rage Spence (neutral?) had betrayed in Washington the night of the U-2: it was the camera’s beam, that’s what it was, the reconnaissance plane is beam of laserlike (well) venom multiplying down altitude upon altitude (but upon Russia!): so Mayn had felt drawn into that cemetery. Well hell! so what if no one least of all Mayn talked lasers in ‘60.

He told that whole story to his barber. "You know what I was thinking?" he asked to the wall in front of him, feeling the cool blade rub down off hair onto skin.

"Oh my God!" Joy said, thinning the sideburn near the earlobe.

"What?"

"And right now you’re thinking, How did you manage not to guess Spence was talking about your own hometown."

What happened then was that — his head whipping round toward her— no music, it happened without music since the last record had finished — his head came about so suddenly that he thought, How could I not have been afraid to lose my eye, for where would the scissors be? And he heard Joy cry out — at maybe his anger that she’d heard his story better than he had — though she had made him feel, yes, not alone; but no, she had cried out because of what she had done to herself, she’d pulled back the scissor point as her left hand came across and he turned — and her left hand like a padding had followed the scissors faster than they jumped back, and the palm of that left hand caught the point with a surprise as sharp as the medic’s detonating prick in the pad-tip of the middle finger for a blood test now no longer jabbed in the finger.

"Hey," so quiet he had surprised himself; and he took her hand and licked it almost before his eyes could see the thick point of blood there. Kissed her hand as her nails clawed in against his cheek and he stuck out his tongue and touched blood.

The music from the other room seemed long gone.

He had a hair on his tongue, which she did not know about.

But he’d already found the thing in her palm.

It was the future he’d been living in and coming back from. He would like to tell his son someday, but his son would believe it too easily.

"In future," his father had said at bedtime after Bob Yard and the newspaperman with all the stories had gone, "you will not be eavesdropping under the porch when I have visitors." But Jim had been there first. Under the porch. Just there, not waiting for anything, much less some bald-headed visitor talking about death and about trotters, methods of execution, evidence and verdicts—rendering a verdict, the word was. His father had it all turned around, there’d been no eavesdropping.

His father did not hit him.

A slap might have been a relief, a kick from one of those shoes scraping overhead in place of that punishing tone you couldn’t quite see. A punishing race, the local paper reported.

Mayn tasted blood, but he was in Joy’s body looking from that future he habitually came back from. Came back to this marriage even as now with the salt of the blood sequencing to him he wanted to tell her but did not dare feel the reaction he’d get from this smart person, tell her that as the holding pattern at the end of his latest trip went on he had for a while not known where he had been — that is, where he’d had a quick shower and breakfast; that is, where he had Departed from (with a capital DEP) — so he’d squeezed a hand into his pants pocket to find the ticket, and seeing Springfield he then found next to to (next to three or four to’s) the typed word void, and he started to show it to the woman in the window with its tight shade down against the New York afternoon sun just as he caught her eye and he wished Joy could observe her.

And in the blood that clung to his tongue — moist to moist — (so his tongue felt creepy sprouting), he knew that he would give up, he and Joy; they would do it together, that is give up, as staringly as he had once said to Flick alone, because he didn’t want Andrew to hear, that he didn’t blame their mother for feeling him impossible to live with — so smoothly said that the girl answered with a diplomacy of her own smoothness to say that that wasn’t true — definitely, you know, not true.

But when the blood went down and he gulped and he heard his lips smack a little as he opened his mouth and closed it, he was in the wind like the tatters of plastic wrap caught and streaming in the trees up Park Avenue, wreckage of things not said though chased right up to the skin of these things by what on the other hand had been said—"You said I should take a job but it’s not easy when the children are getting home at three, three-thirty in the afternoon." "Three-forty-five." "And you thought you were thinking up ways to pass my time." "That’s how I passed my time flying home from the motor capital of America." "Is that all?" "Wasn’t I right for the wrong reason at least?" "Pay attention, man, don’t you understand — you’re never right—" " — or am I ever right?" "You sound like my father." "I don’t complain like he did." "You’ve only heard me say so, Jim." "You made me feel like I was there." "You gripe about your father." "So do you about my father." "I hardly know your father." "O.K., then, neither do I know him." "At least I take the children out to see him, Jim." "Not always by yourself." "Once with Lucille." "Once?" "Another time, too." "Then twice." "And I will again." "With Lucille?" "I will again."

Did he draw blood? No, the blood he tasted rose to her scissors drawn by her. But tasting it he knew what she was thinking. He felt it in his throat, drying. That all he and she had been doing was having him a haircut. Well, the void from her point of view of his was the void between them out of which he had found elbow room to pluck a story to smooth things over. Oh but in those days (he’d say), in those days (speaking to Andrew or Flick who liked such stories less — or Joy) in those days when the great tribal roads were strung out like pavement with silver dust and people in certain quarters of the world had ways of disappearing into next month — in those days, he’d say, speaking of the monster in the form of a pyramid that came traveling up out of the south from Mexico propelled by a barrel revolving or below to trap the Inventor of New York while he was dickering with the Manchoor Princess, the Anasazi healer, and the ill-fated wanderer-scientist the Navajo son called by the Princess "Prince," dickering not (if possible) about the giant bird’s steep rise in horse consumption, but about the treaty agreed on (in principle) setting up the Four Worlds Adjacent which discovered in the Creation’s Four Corners meeting back to back and looking outward a new weather we make ourselves so as to have something in front of us (is that it? fit it in); in "those" days, he would say, but then couldn’t help thinking also of right now, the children growing, his job developing, his wife deciding not to go back after all into the lighting-design business — get a degree, a degree — and think that now was "those days" too.

"Can I see?" he said to her.

She showed him her hand and there was nothing, no blood.

In that future, then, they’d do it together, give up.

That is, split.

Compared to their parents, this was progress.

But oh Christ he knew her! It would have to be exactly mutual, the relenting; and like long-distance phone receivers coming down at the end of a call, it would have to be at the same time.

Was that due to suspicion? Was it stubbornness? United we fall.

He loved her young face. Her father had looked young up to and beyond his death. But she looked at you as if there were something in you that was beyond you. She got like Lucille Silver sometimes and would look at him so he felt elsewhere or like falling apart, scrambled, and she’d musingly say, "I don’t think you care about your work enough — isn’t that crazy? — the thought came to me — it doesn’t make sense, I mean with all the time you’re away doing it — but the thought came to me from you."

Like their daughter Flick, Joy remembered every damn thing he said, or he felt she did, and sometimes more than he, and she knew he had an idea of what it was like to be her — as if the story or thing he’d said that she recalled more of than he had been delivered by him to her sealed — and she remembered not just stories told more than once. She told Flick about Spence and his cemetery story. And the man who sabotaged a wire-service plot at the Lindbergh trial: the plot pretty tacky for these later days of free-lance electronic technicians traveling the AP circuits, old stuff compared to days of video monitor screens that AP bureau staff watch hour by hour; but still a pretty advanced plot for the thirties — to scoop the Lindbergh verdict. And this man, this saboteur of spies, who knew nothing of the lady handwriting expert who, instead of being allowed by the defense to testify, hid out with a farmer for she was afraid for her life, knew the men who were to be secretly stationed up in the old wooden bell tower: for there they were waiting to get word from their own man in the shirt-sleeve-sweltering courtroom below who was the only one in the courtroom wearing an overcoat, he was hiding a transmitter — but the men in the bell tower, poking a head up now and then you can be sure, got along so well with each other that they reached a state beyond mere news — and by the time the jury came back in, the men in the tower were so well along snorting and recollecting other times quietly guffawing that they got the code wrong from the man in the courtroom and in their turn signaled from the bell tower to their relay at an outside phone that the guilty verdict included a mercy recommendation (which it did not) and this news hit the headlines first.

But for heaven’s sake, Lucille’s musical, witty, calm voice of the Now future says, What’s so great about the Lindbergh case, I don’t even like him, what’s so great anyway? I know he was a hero flying the Atlantic all by himself — it was a chance to be alone! — but why did the kidnap sell so big? you can find more awful things to sell than that.

It was an immigrant stealing an heir, said Joy.

Mayn’s own words, pretty near. For he had said — more than once, he saw—"An illegal immigrant appropriating an American hero’s son."

But Joy hadn’t picked up that that answer didn’t satisfy him. He was too dumb to do better, even the ransom notes had been written by someone other than Hauptmann. And he saw that his words coming from Joy had come from him and not just previously but right now (and off balance because of Lucille) — as if he’d said them now instead of quite a while ago.

Listen, said Lucille, that case was a sensation before they arrested Hauptmann.

Newsprint can make anything a sensation, Lucille.

That’s my name all right, Jim, but if you want to get personal, do it right. The papers don’t pick up just anything. They had a direct line to the family mind.

It was a two-way flow and it was all one mind, Lucille.

But what did it?

Lindbergh made history.

History made Lindbergh.

No, Lindy made history; newspapers report it; a daily paper is like a molecule of history — how’s that?

Not good, said Lucille.

Not bad, said Joy.

She was looking at Jim the way Lucille did, with that precise, clear, yet tediously sexual attention that was like sympathy yet maybe meant to make him need something less good. Need something less good? (He couldn’t say it or feel it better than that, he surrendered to a nation not himself, voices that passed through him. They wanted him to weaken, to say dumb things. Did he hate them?

Wait — hold on — did he hate anyone? Displaced at left halfback by the Indian Ira Lee, he’d taken over fullback in the single-wing days of Texas A&M’s line-bucking Kimbrough.) And he said in answer to Lucille, even to Joy: Oh the big deal was wealth and safety, wealth’s safety, the safety of safety — oh (he said, feeling as free as not knowing what came next) safety in a country house with the cash stacked up in the basement with a flag tucked in around it, but — (he ran out of freedom). .

Yes? came a fourth voice after him, a male voice, Yes? — money in the basement—incredible — unheard of! — and it might have been a brother voice speckled with electronic shivers in transmission and pressing him from an emptiness — a what? — but what fourth voice, when here he had with him only Joy and her friend Lucille, suddenly her friend, and he knew it hadn’t been like that always, not in ‘64, Lucille’s year of the young cop Rick ("Don’t let me hear you call cops ‘pigs,’ darling!") nor ‘65, Joy’s year of Wagner and the year of that awful scuffle leaving Wagner on his own floor with nose and neck deflected left and right respectively, but Wagner’s trouble or pain distinctly greater than his assailant’s jealousy, which in its lessening was a new unknown.

— but a fixed trellis up the side of the house must not become a movable ladder, said the semi-retired assailant, how do you like that? how’m I doing?

You’re crazy, said Lucille, that’s how you’re doing. It was men, it was a men’s promotion, said Lucille (who had once been heard to say, like a quietly embarrassing bad joke, that she preferred to be with men once).

But what if the Lindbergh kid had been a girl, then? said Mayn.

Men even more, said Lucille at once.

Innocent women and children, said Joy between them.

They’ll say "my son and heir," said Lucille, but never "my daughter and heiress," and even if they thought those words, they’d mean her honor, they’d mean the money that laying her would bring.

A gap occurred, he was sure, and as if he were being commented on beyond him, it was a model invitation to him to be not here, or he was the head of a slain enemy now honored with best tidbits stuffed into its mouth, insert an honorary cigar and a word or two — and if the gap or void was different from him, it still gave off a scent of almond, nature’s unsalted, unskinned almond, sweet wood (familiar but thinned past something or other, the grain, the tongue-dissolving grain or meat of the actual nut) — was it Joy’s shampoo? and was that tongue of his her tongue, that dissolved the way crazy people thought they had someone else’s limb, say? And he looked at her hair all around her eyes while she and Lucille looked at him.

And together with this almond essence (bathroom cabinet) occurred a creamy-salve slipperiness to his mind, yes — well this is getting pretty hairy, pretty sensitive — and this slipperiness (damn it) was being where no traction was, but none only if he tried to find it, tried to move. And an impression passed through his lostness that friends Joy and her confident (confidant— conf\daunt!) Lucille would like him to go back where he came from though in the wordless interim Joy seemed to (damn it) say to him: You never wound up the Morgan story, the man in western New York? (oh yeah) who in the middle 1820s had threatened to tell certain local secrets of the greatest secret society in the Western World, the Masons — are there Tibetan Masons, aboriginal, arctic? — and one day was charged and jailed in Canandaigua and still more dubiously allowed the next day to disappear with the help of an abductor pretending to be his friend (I did finish it, I just didn’t fill it out) (or, said Joy, connect it to anything else like the price of eggs or—), his friend whose identity and connection with a famous resident of Washington was learned by a village lawyer’s daughter from her secret lover, a plump journeyman printer, who vanished from Canandaigua taking with him only his secret, the tools of his trade, and the heart of the attorney’s daughter, and reappeared in the employ of a Socialist Free Press run by a workingmen’s party in Philadelphia: there the village attorney’s daughter joined him, was pursued all the way from western New York by her lean and wheezing father, a prominent Mason, and through an agent of the great man met Jackson himself in New York City where that yellow-skinned gaseous and indigestible smoked Hickory fell in love with her, for herself or for her secrets none knew except, apparently, the father or uncle of that very Hermit-Inventor of New York City who helped Mayn’s own grandmother Margaret when she came home from the West in 1893 or ‘94.

That is, that is. . Joy only seemed to say to him, Tell us how Andrew Jackson defended women and children against the childlike Indians he thought he was the father of—

and how (Mayn continued) the woods were full of insane survivors missing the tops of their heads which had held each its own Manitou or private god dreamed in bird or snake form, say, and these were being collected to make a new common denomination of mutual god. And Mayn asked himself off the top of his head, Why do I tell these stories as if they were finished? (He heard his little daughter start to sing in the next room.)

But Joy had not spoken out loud.

Joy ran a hand through her hair and looked as dumb as her husband had felt, but she’d gone pale in honor of his picking up a piece of her thought, her picture, his scalped lunatics, her bumpy debumped scab heads, his Jackson, her Andrew, their woods, woods owned mutually, like the dreaded Red Sticks, the Creeks, the Cherokees, what have you? more hatcheted than hung, tradition had it — and in which woods were to be found the Choctaws who gave slain enemies a month of mourning to make friends of them. But Joy and Lucille could not hold out and their eyes met and they shook their heads at his whimsy, which, like the message the blindly obedient messenger unexpectedly opens to see for himself, turned out to be a remark that he hadn’t foreseen and that seemed smarter than he was, while — wait—

But he wasn’t there (was he?) — since that was future. So Joy’s absence was not either.

Which accounted for why right now (right here and now) he could jolly her gently, here and now in a kitchen with Lucille: "Flick’s no heiress but thank God she has Joy’s looks" — Lucille ignored him—"and brains" — the three of them hearing also the words that traditionally occupied the space of "brains" understood to be Joy’s — but what the hell, only a saying, and men can’t equal women — all in all he didn’t have to cope with this new tedious intelligence thrust around him by circumstance in order to accept their— their — all-around strength. They were agreeing, Joy and Lucille; agreeing— there in a kitchen more or less with him and as, suddenly, the mid-sixties looked up at him like a mere substitute for the late sixties — agreeing with some nodding of heads, Joy’s dark, Lucille’s gray-blond, with papery craters under her eyes enlarging their blue more than showing as her full cheeks and wide mouth worn and used and powerfully impressed by its own thought and coming-on-to somebody to move and to kiss (he felt — he felt her final contempt) — they were agreeing, Lucille and Joy, that you was never safe from relapse, the words you said always carried other words underneath them that said it isn’t really you making the demands; no, be your gentle self, kid, be cool, that’s a way to yield, and later tonight or tomorrow you’ll get him to give in and stop the check with which you paid the black (chauvinist) electrician who left one dimmer switch so it won’t hold the brightest notch, or 'That’s a relapse?" said Mayn, crinkling his grin, Lucille looked so steadily at Joy, while she recreated a mid-marital reveille the gist of which was her arm, "my big soft arm," slamming over onto her husband’s sleeping face—"Oh I did that once," said Joy, quite happily and Flick never got quite into her mother’s head at these times "of" Lucille, so what Joy felt or agreed etcetera, was kind of clear but only kind of — at an instant when Frank had claimed to be dreaming of a good fuck that cleared the air whereupon he opened his eyes into the inner spaces of Lucille’s arm, got out from under, dripped blood out of his nose onto the sheet and was so angry, not yet awake, that he cocked his leg and kicked her out of bed the way you break down a door.

Into a next room. Of things said but too long unsaid. You tell me what I’m feeling.

A void of things ran through him he’d never said: You never tried to have power over me, you thought; and this was because when I made love to you you never had to ask for anything, not that a woman could ask.

A void of things he’d never said ran through him, fronts hitting him but a ground beyond him to be known if he wasn’t so damn lazy, known like some math he didn’t yet know for weather prediction, evolution of the atmosphere, ray on ray breaking him down into future — was he in the future? — redoing him more than a pretty fast stick of Acapulco Gold when an ounce had not caught up yet with the price of fifty minutes with Joy’s shrink (the man himself used that word) — wait, he meant not that, not that (and he didn’t smoke much) — he meant rays like when he had a fast stick alone having started smoking apparently full of relief at having phoned Joy in New Hampshire (therefore summertime? not necessarily) after he’d had dinner with their eighteen-year-old daughter Flick (eighteen? but she’s only ten in ‘66—Flick? Flick? from flicks, flickers, movies) who wasn’t getting along too well with her mother and didn’t always listen to her father’s jokes and stories but would break in sharply — Who was this Spence Mom said was snooping around New Jersey? But relief wasn’t what he was full of after all as he took his second pull on some good ballooning Hollywood and held it, thinking (or letting himself be grown into a thought), but instead losing breath, his heart running around him, and for being wrong about his own state (for it wasn’t relief he was full of but fear and absence) he paid the price of dying and dying and dying — his heart turned pot black, then no-color — until, afraid to call room service for what he wanted, he wobbled, sallied forth like rolls of a wave yet down the elevator shaft (and as if up) and then out into a midtown wind and to a newsstand he created as he walked toward it over the pavement in brand-new size 11!/2 wing-tips springy and slippery, a newsstand where all the tough guy standing outside his stand had was two big stacks of the Daily News and Mayn asked — he didn’t know how slowly — for an orange—"Have you got an orange?" — and the man (broader even than Mayn) looked at him like a leper disliking another leper and scowled like a competitor in a card game who’s been successfully asked by his neighbor for what he happens to have — and then — because Mayn (along some multiple web-route of New York veins and cracks) knew the man would — the man reached inside the counter-window of his stand and produced one, a large, thick-skinned eating orange, and watched Mayn as Mayn bit it skin and all, while families of tourists three or four abreast — one grandma whose feet hurt — sauntered like incognito posses uncertainly home to hotels, seeing him, he was sure, and maybe not telling him that while he thought his one-time wife Joy was in New Hampshire, she it was who was the gap standing beside him smiling into the orange, though not knowing that whereas he suddenly wanted, like a pastrami sandwich and another where that went, a News, he would not give the man the business as if in return for the life-saving orange Mayn had foreseen, but would give the man something in future even if he had to through a substitute.

Some good news to sell? You’d want to give it away, good news. Like a good story, which they’d just created with the aid of a clairvoyance operating through a scope of Hawaiian at the far end of which he’d seen an orange. Like the world’s mercy. Given in a headline to Bruno Hauptmann, if only a recommendation for mercy.

The man with the tight shoes had told that one, Bob Yard’s niece’s friend by marriage who’d scooped everyone else the day the Hindenburg caught fire and blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Those weren’t the stories Andrew asked for, sitting on a park bench flipping and catching a baseball with one hand so it irritated his father who didn’t interrupt the story to tell Andrew to stop because he knew Andrew was showing interest in this way.

And so Joy and Jim, Jim and Joy, sat at the kitchen table without their girl and boy one December night. (Looks like Jim must have been home!) But wait: here’s Lucille, too. And it’s not night. But it’s the kitchen table— kitchen sink, white light, brilliant new brown-and-orange linoleum. And Lucille has trapped them in an entertainment that shows no sign of ending, it’s all ending, and so the situation is this: Sally, who could never tear herself away, you know, partly because her parents had bequeathed her the faith that you never get something for nothing, is getting five hundred a month from Buck for the next five years, right? (and after that a dollar a year, which is another story, which as it turns out we won’t be coming to), but Sally will lose the five hundred a month if she spends more than twenty-one days per year with any man, cohabiting or just company for dinner. And I (Lucille) called Buck one night and told him he was afraid to let go and he should take a look at his girlfriend, scarcely out of high school so he must hate women, right? Right! he said at once, he must hate women, that’s half the population, and he gets off the point telling about a Christmas birthday present this kid just gave him wrapped up in newspaper, you know, but an unusually beautiful newspaper collage was the way the wrapping turned out, and I said don’t get off the point, the point is Sally and this twenty-one-day arrangement. Buck gets huffy. She was the one who wanted out, he says.

But Buck, you should really let go of Sally.

Let go! he says, and for a moment he knows there’s nothing more he can find to say.

Yes, let go. You think you’re being a good daddy to her but you’ve tied her up for five years in this chastity prostitution and the only alternative is secret affairs as if she were married.

Two days a month, says Buck, is good for her health.

More like two nights if you divide twelve into twenty-one.

That’s the only time she does it, anyway, says Buck.

Things might have changed, Buck.

Things have, Lucille.

Why don’t you drop the alimony idea entirely? she says to Buck.

It’s Sally that wants it, says Buck to Lucille (which is me, and imagine me putting my hand gently on his arm over the phone).

It’s both of you that think you want it, I suggest to him, and I think he feels the hand on the arm, he’s on the attack but he’s got his cheek on his hand and lying on his stomach and he’s beginning to feel the massage.

Suppose, I say, I get in touch with Sally and tell her how you feel about the alimony.

Go to hell, he says. But they have the same lawyer; you know Jack Beebe, who takes notes on envelopes wherever he is, whoever’s talking, and since Sally thinks she’s setting up her own little catering company, she’s been having dinner with Jack at her place and one night Buck phones and Jack picks it up but Sally grabs it away from him and Buck wants to know what’s going on and Jack disappears, and Buck tells Sally he thinks alimony is beneath them and doesn’t she? And she asks him if he had her favorite charity in mind as a substitute and he wants to know who’s with her, and she says someone incredibly nice and she’s really busy, Buck, and in the silence filled by the music and, as it turns out, Jack Beebe’s breathing on the extension, Sally is heard to say, Buck I don’t want the money, if you want a witness if you want to draw it up I’ll put it in writing, and in the pause with three breaths on a two-way hook-up (two male lawyers and one lay woman) Buck is upset enough to say like a kid in a small voice, "OX., Sallums." And she hangs up and starts crying and is comforted by Jack at her end.

Then before they know it, they decide to take a vacation in England go to the theater and to Scotland, and Buck’s going crazy not putting two and two together and asked me to dinner but it wasn’t possible but then we did have dinner at a Greek restaurant and I said I hadn’t seen Sally, and the upshot is that Buck draws up a paper one night which his girlfriend is probably too young to witness and invites Sally to cancel all alimony payments and he puts thirty thousand dollars into Sally’s bank account so everyone’s happy, but Jack Beebe doesn’t want Buck’s money because Jack wants Sally and they’re going to get married but Sally has given Jack an ultimatum, she won’t marry him without Buck’s money. And so they’re getting married but Sally says basically she’d like to just borrow a husband for twelve months. And that’s not the end of the story, kids.

(Mayn’s own true wife observed of his unfailingly courteous handling of women that when she saw a man rude to women she would at once think he didn’t like women, as if women — whom she sometimes heard her husband call "girls," even when not out with the "boys" — required her husband’s special treatment.) Fit this in.

And so, to return, Joy and Jim sat at the kitchen table one December night late facing each other, wondering who would go to bed first, their fingers near but fixed and heavy. She wondered if the apartment house would go coop, and he asked if she was interested. His hand was around his coffee mug, her hand lay on her purse, a leather purse with a brass snap.

He was going away for two days. Plenty of shopping days left.

He asked her what she wanted this year. He put it quizzically enough and with a plainness of feeling, he thought, but they both knew she liked surprises.

She thought a moment — or waited — and said, "It’s something practical but obvious."

He had to think — and he knew he wasn’t too good at presents. Her purse was worn but he wouldn’t get her a purse. Flick could, though Flick was almost twelve; she could, but she had big ideas. He wondered if Flick was asleep. She slept with such abandon, while her brother slept with huddled concentration.

"I’d like to buy you all a house in the country."

"Sleighbells and woodsmoke."

"I mean the house was always your idea, but I mean it."

"We will."

"It seems far off."

"We will."

"But you want something practical and obvious for Christmas. Is it something that you have and you want a new one?" He was just talking.

She got up and she heard Andrew snorting horribly.

They laughed at the noise, and the noise softened.

They were scared, and the fear passed between them, according to the void.

He couldn’t think in the midst of what must be her thoughts too. She’d made a fist around the purse. "Obvious, you said. Is it visible? Can I see it?" he said.

Joy sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten him. She looked at him like a zombie and she said mechanically, "If you were more observant, you’d know."

He wanted to be dead for a moment. She was offensive.

What drew him toward her? He’d lost time.

"If I were more observant—" he began but ran into such interference he didn’t catch up with the words he wanted, and in their absence he half rose and reaching out lifting onto the balls of his feet he struck at her with his open hand as she pulled back.

Off the top of his head he struck at her, and the kitchen bulb turned them into bilious kooks who might have drunk too much and woken to some such fact or other — but they’d drunk a third of a bottle between them and three hours ago.

Her look at him was still empty, but not void.

He heard himself say (getting up), "Why did I do that!" — getting up maybe to try again, this time not to miss, but he was so sure of something else that he hung there on his hands leaning at her, his eyes like mental cases all by themselves — she saw through them into his head but emptily, uncryingly clear through his head to a point beyond him — his eyes vomiting drops of dumbness, imbecility — he was sure that he had said, "Why did I do that!" — said out of his murderous belief that if he should ever hit her he would have to leave but said too because she, who had pulled back just an inch enough, had thought those very words he had said.

Had thought them first. Or at the same time.

They were both crazy, but no he was protecting himself thinking that.

"Give up," she said — had he heard it in the future and now could hear in the present? "Please give up."

That was all there was to it.

That was it.

But later, during weeks when she was getting ready to leave, she asked him questions about himself. She asked how his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

"Who knows?" he said. His brown leather grip stood in the hall where he’d left it hours and years ago — well, that was a cheap comparison, two to three hours was the time — if he was confused, the lease was one reason, for he’d been thinking about holding on to the lease of the apartment as an investment (though the landlord would let him out of it), holding on to it as if because he’d seen in the elevator that very night a woman (but it wasn’t that she was a woman) who’d recently moved in — into this building he’d spent so many years in — a friendly woman in the elevator, short fluffy hair, smiled right into him but no man-baiting bullshit, but with beside her the tallest Oriental he’d ever seen, and standing beside her as if hung from the elevator’s ceiling, a metal plate you would push out if you were moving something too high and then you could look right up the dark glimmering shaft as if you might fall down through its greasy hairy skylight — new to the building the woman was — was that it? it should have made him in his present state of mind want even more to go, get out, be forever away from the apartment house — but he was confused, too, because he was repeating and repeating the information he’d just received that Joy had gotten Flick a partial scholarship at a boarding school in Vermont not too far from their town in New Hampshire, an "academy" Andrew called it humorously because in the fall he was going to public school, which he said could be worse because he’d have in his class two of the town kids he’d played with every summer as long as he could remember, and one of them had a snowmobile. Andrew became more sweet; he was more than bright.

"I mean," said Joy, "how did she teach you to whistle? — did she tell you what to do with your mouth?"

"I don’t think she ever told me." He spoke deliberately, slowly.

"You just do it."

"Well, I do remember it was in bed early in the morning, I was four going on five."

"My father was cooking me breakfast by then," said Joy.

Mayn looked at her with a question she felt they couldn’t use, which was — and he picked it up — You sure we ought to be doing this? Isn’t this a bit too charming?

"And I would stay with her some weekends and I’d crawl into bed with her, my grandfather was in another room sawing wood with knots in it, and her gray hair was let down in plaits"; and he thought he smelt apple, but maybe it was hearing the doves outside in the morning air and the house floated upon the day; "I remember her soft skin."

Joy looked at him as if to say, You’re speaking differently.

And his grandmother and he had giggled over his attempts at whistling. He knew the true sound was there somewhere in the void and he went for it. Her pale lips puckered. Her eyes watched his lips until she couldn’t help laughing and then herself couldn’t have whistled if she’d wanted to.

Nor could he. Until one morning he could. He’d woken her up. Her back was to him. She turned over and right then she smelled of oatmeal and what he maybe didn’t know then was witch hazel, and she couldn’t get her eyes quite open or she could but didn’t see yet, and then when she did she woke up — right there with him — woke up with a smile at him puckering and trying so hard he saw his own nose — or was he five? — looking down below her face so as not to catch her eyes and he wet his lips again. And at the instant when she would have giggled, even with admiration, a couple of things happened: she didn’t laugh, number one, and number two he found, held between his lips and his tongue tip that moved up and down behind his teeth, a free space of air and sound that he could do what he wanted with, and he couldn’t now recall what tune he whistled — maybe "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" — but he was proud and smiled with his cheeks, and they giggled facing each other while he heard his grandfather, whom he loved to listen to the radio with, snoring in the other room, pillowed head shining as it did, even in the long dark, big nose up in the air. "You can whistle anything now," his grandmother said.

And years later — not so many years later, and well before there was a Flick or an Andrew for him to retell a couple of her stories to — he’d written her a letter when she was very sick, but he’d gotten into it, recollecting the whistling they had done. He’d described all the whistling he’d done since. All the cities he’d whistled in. Across the landbridge connecting the coasts. The bathtubs and the nights, the classical records he’d whistled to, and the cabs he had heard doormen whistle for, and whistling he’d been doing at a street corner sometimes only to break off and wonder why he’d been whistling, and two beautiful girls that a group of sailors had whistled at in the rain in Tacoma. He wished he had that letter to his grandmother Margaret, their letters had crossed. She had filled her letters with news but had given the town the name she herself seemed to have inspired him to think up when he was very young, and they would look each other in the eye and he was stuck on his autobiography that everyone had to write for eighth-grade English and that she’d said not to get into a state about because it would come soon enough, and later his grandmother Margaret always referred to Windrow when she wrote to him and, with one lapse, used that name to no one else.

"Are you going to unpack?" said Joy.

"Who screwed around first?" Flick asked him one evening in New York, no longer in a mood to reflect upon an amazing grandmother she’d never known — her grazr-grandmother.

Flick was eighteen and he was probably going to South America in a couple of weeks and she was in a brief period of not being in touch with her mother in New Hampshire, though both parents wrote her every week. The waiter would probably not have been curious, but the waiter had gone away, while the father was telling the daughter that old Bob Yard the electrical contractor who had wired Flick’s Uncle Brad’s house and the town’s streetlights all the way up to the cemetery but not including the traffic intersection near the race track had never relinquished his war story of the man who died twice in the Pacific and, coming to, after death number one, correctly predicted that six American ships would be sunk by Jap suicide pilots in the battle for Leyte Gulf and that we would stop the Kamikazes only with the granddaddy of all bombs — then died again for good with a magnetic halo shining golden over his belly.

Flick said anyone could have predicted the bomb: it was just bigger.

Mayn said he never knew if Bob Yard — Bad Bob Yard — believed the story, he wasn’t the type to believe it though Mayn’s mother might have believed it; Bob was a horny old wolf, but his wife thought he was a scream and they had an understanding, which meant that once she ripped a tuft out of his head (save it going gray), but the understanding must have included her and his, his and her, absences from home, and his words (shaking his head) that they were both getting on — at which she laughed looking to Jim he thought for agreement that her husband was droll—"getting on in years, I mean," said Bob, and they both had to laugh at that, and because crazy as it or they might be they did sort of get on together.

Flick said she would have shrimp kebabs.

Her father was trivial, then? But then he got the grip of her eyes like a memory and she smiled and said it would be nice down where he was going, it was summer, she seemed to remember. And he said come to think of it her mother and he had had an understanding that worked best at a distance— which got him a laugh that was a bit off — but then out of Mayn came the unforeseen notion that over the phone the diaphragm waves retained a remainder of message units that did not get translated back into words at the receiving end but just went on. He had some of that stuff surprisingly in his head, and it made her think of how her mother had sometimes called him "Mayn," and once in a letter he’d consoled Flick for her supposedly barren imagination by telling her that the void was not just a regular void and empty but was full of all that we did not expect of ourselves — which actually surprised him, that is to find himself saying things like that.

He told the waiter they would have the grape leaves and some roe, and the waiter said, "Taramasalata," translating it into sharp, frank approval.

The waiter went away.

"Who screwed around first?"

"It was officially mutual, I don’t see how that happened," the father said; "but on the other hand, it wasn’t much. From time to time we both felt our hearts weren’t in any of that stuff. A shrink — pardon me—"

"— very funny—"

"— asked her if she’d ever cheated on me and she walked out of his office. But she came back because she wasn’t sure if it was the word ‘cheated’ or the surprise, and she knew he was better than that, he was a good man even if he used stupid words — well, square. You know. And there was cheating."

"I know."

"We were cheating ourselves."

"Oh, great. Of what?"

"I don’t know. Frankness? Because we were more afraid than silly, can you understand that?"

Flick tipped up her glass and finished it and seemed to drop it back down to the table. She made him feel he was pausing and making her wait.

"Sometimes I was afraid I’d find you all dead when I came home."

"From where?"

"Anywhere."

"Like Washington or out West?"

"Or someone’s apartment."

"I remember you called from Washington and Mom cried when she hung up."

"You know something, I always got the grip of her eyes when I phoned, it went right through me like a memory you know, it felt like a passage of time," he was saying, thinking of when he’d once felt this but hadn’t said it.

"I guess you were very married. She told me you were shy, but I never saw it."

"One part of your mother and me was very conventional, O.K.?"

"But this screwing around went on. And I don’t even want to hear about it."

"You want a one-word description of it all?"

"Like Eisenhower," she remembered.

"Very good!"

"Maybe I can think of a two-…"

"Funny, it was more an emotional screwing around, if you can understand."

"I don’t see what you mean."

"Long talks. With the other person. Agonized, inconclusive. Helpful."

"Sounds O.K. Sounds weird."

"It was close. While on the other side, we had a high resistance, went at it tooth and nail, on foot and by word of mouth — I mean the marriage went on."

"Why didn’t you end it?"

"We did," he said, and saw that she felt his stupid pain in her unsaid charge Not soon enough—she always acted like she knew what was what— and her pain was for having wanted him to think those words, go on thinking them, yet his and maybe Joy’s was to have covered up the signs over the years, the warning signs, so the children were more surprised than they needed to be when the time came. Andrew had said he had thought it had happened because his parents stayed up all night arguing. This was what he had said to Flick and Flick had started to cry when she told her mother.

Flick said, "We’re all going to have a good life, Dad."

"Whew!" she said with her breath.

Mayn’s cheek came up hard; did he look skeptical, smiling?

A Greek place up in the German neighborhood and they’d only had a glass each, but he relaxed his cheeks and managed to say, "See what the booze brings out," guessing she saw what was in his eyes, though then he suddenly thought of how good the crusty sliced loaf of bread looked in its napkin.

"It’s not booze," she said, "it’s wine, it’s golden wine."

He wondered if she liked the government agency job he’d gotten her in Washington? Or helped her get. She didn’t want to go on with college and she’d been gallivanting around the country in some kid’s car and they’d crossed the Mississippi four times on the way west, camping bright-eyed under a dark curve of continental sky. He didn’t bat an eyelash when she asked him who Mayga was because Joy had told her she was a woman in his life and her death had looked like murder. He said, "How did she ever hear of Mayga? She was just a colleague." But Flick thought he was wiped out.

Later he said, "Call your mother." He had hard, dry crumbs all over his place.

Flick didn’t answer for a moment. "One side of my head says O.K.; the other side says Oh shit why should I?"

She seemed not to know what was obviously in his head.

Andrew, Andrew.

Jim visited him occasionally totally unexpectedly, but more often he kind of worried about it and thought he must make a point of flying to Boston or having Andrew to New York or Washington, the maker of riddles. All but one of which riddles came out as clear and economical as a good lead: the one in question, however, sweaty and long-winded like the sweaty expensive late-night grass it came from, and assembled mostly from what the father over years had said to one or another about himself: Somewhere two people are turned into one; yet witness another One, lone species offspring from these preceding two; and as he, this One, looks back to them, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he can’t see quite where they went; and, deserted by that origin, this One feels thrust from that loss into the future, where he should be glad to be because, newsman as he becomes, it’s where tomorrow’s news is; but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that aborted origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery far more intelligent than he which is partly the Shock of his unhappy mother once upon a time disappearing into the elements, he has on just one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost origin as if to find it in the future where he travels—

(whew! a lighter voice exhales returning or retelling the riddle to its subject on another late night).

Not the night here, though, toward the end of which, after a Greek dinner with his daughter, Jim called Joy when he was alone, feeling steady then, but not very solid.

Hello, he heard her say, softly so he felt no one had been thinking about him just before he’d called — which was kind of maudlin, which in turn might be the tariff on what was possibly just plain true. But her second hello wasn’t your enthusiastic Hello! but the same quiet, thought-like word, so he felt that she had been thinking about him, or she’d been thinking about her relation with Jack.

So here Joy was and was willing to talk but she made him feel it had to be about something. Then clearly she thought maybe he’d had more than enough. Her voice hit him and he got a still breath of the New Hampshire night from behind his eyes.

He thought he would (he said) drop in on her and Jack.

Has Andrew written you lately? she asked.

She didn’t quite say not to come, but she didn’t want him.

Which let him feel he didn’t know what she wanted. Which was, he knew, what she wanted — mutual debt minus time.

He expected to be in Montpelier and he could get a plane from there to Keene, he thought, and he wondered if she was looking at Jack while she talked. What the hell is it that happens anyway, he thought, you get a divorce from somebody you love because there’s too much between you, too much nerves, too many wrong pauses; and you go from there into a lesser relationship, isn’t that what happens? — and were these some words coming from his daughter’s private thoughts at dinner? — or somewhere else? — or from him alone? He didn’t mention dinner with their daughter Flick or the book that Joy and Jack had sent her for her birthday, The Letters ofF. Scott Fitzgerald; didn’t mention a disturbing and involved and unanswered letter from Andrew many weeks ago, but like a blank Mayn saw the dark back of Jack’s head bending toward the different-shaped stones framing a hearth that had seldom been used in summer. He said he didn’t know how much time he’d have after Montpelier, and Joy didn’t ask him what he’d be doing in Montpelier. He said it was about an insurance investment in South America, he had to ask a few questions without telegraphing his moves by making an advance appointment, though a lobbyist who was trying to get a rider onto a bill that was still in committee and who was pretty good himself at being in two or three places at once might have told the man in Montpelier that Mayn was quite capable of materializing.

No one was running for cover exactly, but — and he asked if she recalled — and she interrupted him with "the letter I wrote — why wouldn’t I recall it?" The "wouldn’t" stopped the flow, if there’d been any, but he was dazzled and his heart was on the move, he bet she heard it. But she was demanding that he not stop, he felt that. And so he told her O.K. if she came on like that O.K. then, he was answering the letter now ten years late in which she’d said "cover story."

"But it was answered," she said. "By phone, by letter, and" — he knew she’d dropped her eyes—"by nothing."

"But I wasn’t always away, and I wasn’t away that much, was I?"

Meanwhile she was saying under him and over him, We had all that out — Christ how he got into her mind and she couldn’t think straight, they were into each other for more than either could afford, or at least afford to think about. No, he said, she’d said his being away too much was their cover story. Corny, said Joy, but we all get that way. She was quite fond of the old apartment — aesthetic distance, she said (and he saw the night shadows of maple branches and couldn’t make out if the spruce and pine were pale with snow). Please, he said — and felt he was inciting her to hang up — and said then not what was in his mind but something truly trite, which went something like What world are we living in where it’s wrong to need the warmth and familiarity of another person, your spouse — bad word — your man, your woman — too possessive — let me finish—

Oh for God’s sake, she said (and didn’t say what he felt he distinctly picked up and without a "dear Jim") "You’re in your cups" — oh the unfairness of that! — he knew he’d phone and tell Flick, who would sound interrupted, whatever she was doing, except she’d pay close if tired attention and even get a little laugh out of it. He let his hair down more than ten years ago, he reported probably quite exactly what Joy had said: "What’s between us is what we were and you’re not going to fix that. Men and women often don’t get along. I hated it when you were away. I knew I would. I kept track of what time you arrived places, sometimes it made me feel more like an old person than a sailor’s wife. Then you came back. Then you went away to Bridgeport, Cape May, Boston, Florida. You came back. You went away, and a box of grapefruit arrived from the Coast Guard. You came back from Portland with four serrated spoons and ate some of the grapefruit. Suddenly you didn’t go away — it often felt like that — there you were, pinning up Flick’s hair while the tub ran and the faucets and pipes were groaning and you were still getting the last hairpin in and she was stepping into the tub and you thought she’d fall; I was thinking whether to pick Andrew up or let him yell and you got the pin to hold and your hand touched that little shoulder and I had to admit that, well, my husband touched me too like that, but damn it all (yet it’s a family, it’s a family!) yet I thought damn nice of him to borrow us — to^Hit in an appearance and put up that little girl’s hair for her bath with my hairpins, two years old, three years old, four years old, she didn’t get private about herself with you till way past what the book said but she did with a babysitter (that Irish girl from just the other side of Third who lived in the tenement brownstone they tore down to put up the apartment high-rise everyone kept saying wrongly for months was a Howard Johnson motor inn, who would tell you when you walked her home that the priest had been getting her alone a lot), with that Irish girl in the room Flick wouldn’t get undressed at the age of seven. But I was used to you being away. It affected my thinking. What thinking? I did a lot, I thought, but now I don’t think it even was thinking, it was like years of our both play-acting that we didn’t claim (you know) power over each other. So there you were. I thought I shouldn’t turn the TV on; you were home. I had suddenly to be contented. I was crazy. You didn’t talk about big events, and I thought I was glad you didn’t, and you think history’s a mess anyway. So I turned on the TV anyway. There it was, Judgment at Nuremberg you’d thought you’d missed. Playhouse 90. Good. You were glad it was on. You went away and it was like coming into range. But I must have had that range; listen, when I married you I thought I knew all about your being away and then home, and you would be—

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. ."

And then against some bitter amusement with which she kept guard, he did not continue, did not say more, for it was being said, what there was of it, and it seemed to be but one word; yet like interference through this one word he then also heard in the air between them what she would say tritely, sentimentally, dumbly four years later by phone the night he’d taken Flick to the Greek restaurant, "Women and men maybe weren’t meant to get along": something less far-reaching was what had been meant — by the meaner, that is — and her father didn’t say the angry words of contempt for her thinking that she knew were in his mind and she liked him for so then she said, "Sometimes you don’t think," but beyond the interference which made him feel alone he heard the one word as if it might go on like a vibration that goes on borne by he wouldn’t happen to know what — inertia — how would he know? — and wanted to say it to her but hell she was thinking it and more than thinking it he felt she watched him to see if his eyes shut in despair or he let out a grin and took a quick big breath which could mean he would tell her a homecoming story about an arrow of lightning scorching the crotch out of Andrew Jackson’s pants until he couldn’t ride it any more but took it in both hands and, identifying it as Indian, slung it thousands of miles west where instead of disciplining the not-really-so-red Indians it lanced the Eastern Princess’s giant horse-eating bird, wing and heart, which rejoiced the Indians to be rid of what to them was an unfamiliar monster, was alarming to the faraway Choorian parents, but was as much an inconvenience to the Princess as the devotion of the Navajo Prince, and a challenge to the Inventor of New York who had hoped to get a ride home on the bird, which took off in the wrong or anyway other direction while the Navajo Prince with useless secrets on his person followed the Princess to the east coast only to be turned into a nocti-lucent cloud by one account or shot by the Princess or Harflex her suitor in a field looking over the town of Windrow, by an account that maybe not even Flick’s father knew nor why his grandfather was out in Pa. in early 1894 talking to union people planning to join Jacob Coxey’s march on Washington and a Pittsburgh astrologer, Cyclone, Jack London ran afoul of when he himself came on the march disguised as a San Francisco hobo — man and wife (you don’t say "wife and man," remarked Lucille who impressed Flick for a long time until her smartness wiped everything out except a miserable and witty and glittering cynicism) — and Joy would wait like an actress counting and would say O.K. she would, or he’d find it hard to give her a short answer, or any answer, to a question about his work, and she’d say "Don’t look down your nose at me," though she watched him with attention and love, which sometimes he thought were the same and sometimes not, until he couldn’t bear it and, here in a club the annual dues of which she’d more than once asked him, he now leaned back and spun round to catch her watching him though she was in his ear, and he hit a voice not quite at the instant he saw spots and had a jolt in the back of his head knocking the tray the waiter had brought though not upsetting the old-fashioned glass and while he stared at the waiter whom he knew, he said into the phone and she said to him with as perfect timing as the timing with which simultaneously he said to her, "You made me think it" and he knew he had called to know she was, for whatever reason, thinking about the one word which was a name and was the person she’d asked him pointedly about before because she’d guessed the person as dangerous and she had seemed once to have listened to this person (only a name to her) more clearly in one story than her husband himself had listened though she had never met the man and had heard Spence’s story only from Mayn and had never been near Spence, for it was Spence who had been in her mind, Mayn knew that, and the reason might be the intimate and painful night of the haircut or might be all these stories she’d liked at first but come to fear as she feared this motion sickness — no, habit—her husband had, that kept him moving though she had guessed also that his work was dangerous also to him and not in the crude and usual sense, but dangerous like dope, yes? but Spence, like a code word, had been in their minds at this moment of 1970 in New York and New Hampshire and he and Joy both knew.

And it had been in the gap of their separation during which he had reached for the phone amid a stream of white towels, green clanking lockers, clattering squash-racket heads flickering by his chair, a clank of scales, a sweaty essence of rubbing alcohol, shaving lotion, the breath of sweet whiskey, and other words and sights altogether heavy enough so that he might have thought to see this word Spence materialize here but Mayn knew that this was unlikely in this absence of his own in which he could no more conceive of his children never having been than miss any more a real ten-year-old boy named Andrew (who’d start talking to him as if he’d never been away saying, "See, Jimmy has this dog that’s having puppies") and whom at five he had lost on the subway, and a real three- or nine- or twelve-year-old girl named Flick who listened at eighteen to his tales of — let’s tell the press it’s called—telepathic separation (though he never put it that way), telepathic separation, there’s the inside dope — and didn’t say a word, and whom likewise he didn’t live with any more — partly because the boy wasn’t five or ten any more (though he might live to lose his old man on the subway) and the girl, who was two years older than the boy, wasn’t nine sitting in a yellow wall of a school bus any more but was fourteen now and would be eighteen in 1974.

But say the word.

Mayn said it. Spence.

"Yes," said Joy into the phone as if she were part of an experiment, "I was thinking it all right."

They exclaimed at how this correspondence occurred. They didn’t know. Did Joy know what Spence had said to Mayn once when a prominent importer had committed suicide — said he knew Mayn’s mother had committed suicide because Mayn had told him but thought maybe it took a second suicide to balance the first — but "I never mentioned my mother to that son of a bitch—" "Remember you’re not very bright, pal," Joy said, "he’s given you your own stuff back so you didn’t pick it up." Well that wasn’t accurate, but he wasn’t going to argue. They joked and he exclaimed again and said he wondered if their interstellar communication was the real thing, but he said he didn’t believe in this real thing anyway, it was coincidence, but Joy said she didn’t care about the proof of it, which (he at once said) was beyond him in any event (and beyond the scientists too, he thought); still she seemed uncertain (uncertain for her), and he thought she was seeing someone seriously, it was two years since 1968, and he asked to speak to the children at the same time thinking that the knowledge he and Joy had of each other sometimes made the children not there, and Flick wasn’t home but Andrew was and asked when his father was coming to see them, he’d made a headband and a belt with the leather kit and was going to make a pair of real beaded moccasins. Mayn felt his hand getting cold and felt it on the dry compactness of kapok — the life jackets Joy had spent time pricing one spring — and he put his drink on a table, then took a quick sip and put it down again and said to his son that yes he would visit them in about two months but he would have to ask Joy and maybe they would take a trip in July, and when Andrew said he would ask Mommy now, Mayn managed to hold him, knowing Andrew thought he’d meant all four of them; but then he couldn’t bring himself to say to Andrew, "You, me, and Flick" and he asked Andrew to put Joy on again, but after Andrew said, "O.K., Dad," he said to his mother, "Dad wants to take me and Flick on a trip," and Mayn called into the phone "In July!" so that a man standing in a towel who had just said "Six percent" to another man in a towel stopped talking and looked at Mayn as if July reminded him of something he didn’t want known, say he was speculating in kapok futures, one hand protectively over his balls.

Joy said, "You never told me you’d been in South America and I do read the paper and I guess I happened to hit on Spence because you’d said he had a bad reputation and took chances you wouldn’t take, but worse than chances; and I knew it was business you were on but I worried."

He had believed her, but her worry had been a new kind of distance that scared him — was he, well, another person now to her? — but what did he expect? And she hadn’t gone so far as to say he ought to have told her.

He didn’t owe her anything.

The waiter’s bar check had had a dark-gray arc across it from the glass. Now he and Joy had said goodbye and he had forgotten to say, Give my love to Flick. Maybe the marriage had not broken up.

But here was Flick in ‘74, and the future he had once felt divided from by these trips back home to his family was his state now.

Yet multiplied with more than interest and fascination and capability and a push of what might have been lonesomeness if it had been all around him instead of just behind him — multiplied also into what he recognized as having been once familiar, namely being in two places at once: in the old days, one of them was that household of his parents where old troubles were reinvented every day or week and the least of troubles was his father’s getting out a paper every Thursday — and the other household was his grandmother’s down the street where he looked at albums of brown snapshots of his mother on a tricycle, his mother on a swing hung from the maple in her backyard, his mother at six and seven darkly calling with her arm thrust out into the sky; the same unusual mother who once before her own disappearance into the elements had told him of a mythical town his grandmother (her mother) had named — and then Jim’s mother caught herself — that seemed also to be their own hometown, and Jim had been able to tell his mother that he knew the name of the town, which did not exactly enable her to die with a smile on her face because she didn’t die — at least, not then — but enabled her to smile remembering stories Margaret had told her too — albums, albums, and albums at his grandmother’s down the street where, when he stayed there and heard the doves like liquid flowers opening again and again, and the distant sleep of his grandfather, he would get up twice each early morning; the household where (in bed) he learned to whistle; and where he unearthed clippings from the nineties when his grandmother had traveled to Chicago and the West, mailing her indulgent impressions back to Windrow to be printed in the Democrat, and never let herself become an old person leaning painfully forward in a chair in order to hear.

Multiplied now into a life he could not explain to Joy. Except in some condensed report of acquiring information, and getting at the truth. And not wasting any more words. So many covering the distance they’d come. While feeling also that a world for which the word world was wrong was happening to him like a long-range capability and he might be part of its vein and cracks if he knew more, but the knowledge brought out the coward in him if laziness was a form of cowardice; and if he would not bang his head against someone else’s table at night thinking again how he might after all have found a way to live with his wife, he could feel wasted by his freedom, he could phone the dreaded Lucille once, and he could like her, and be told to see a movie called Persona and see it and wonder if women were Lesbians, this freedom of his renewing him to be courageously annihilated in future until he became half-convinced he’d been turned into some future more fearful and less original than dabbling imaginers had already worked out. And so he would try to get away from that distant future through which he fell, by seeing such other times as perhaps had not been altogether lost and seeing them so well that they came back into being, times the world had passed through and times when he and his wife had hurt each other — had shown some soulmate kinship in how they moved apart — had even had a lot of laughs — even to finding in the paper at the same moment the morning after Playhouse 90’s Judgment at Nuremberg that the actor Claude Rains had had the last two words of his outraged question deprived of sound — kaput — because the sponsor was the American Gas Association which in 1959 supplied almost every kitchen range in America. The question was "How in the name of God can you ask me to understand the extermination of men, women, and innocent children in gas ovens?"