“You wouldn’t want to hear about it,” Boz said, and then he went through the whole story of Boz and Milly: of how they had had a beautiful relationship, of how that relationship had then soured, of how he didn’t understand why.
“Have you seen a counselor?” Danny asked.
“What good would that do?”
Danny had manufactured a tear of real compassion and he lifted Boz’s chin to make certain he would notice. “You should. Your marriage still means a lot to you and if something’s gone wrong you should at least know what. I mean, it might just be something stupid, like getting your metabolic cycles synchronized.”
“You’re right, I guess.”
Danny bent over and squeezed Boz’s calf earnestly. “Of course I’m right. Tell you what, I know someone who’s supposed to be terrific. On Park Avenue. I’ll give you his number.” He kissed Boz quickly on the nose, just in time for the tear of his empathy to plop on Boz’s cheek.
Later, after one last determined effort, Danny, in nothing but his transparency, saw Boz down to the moat, which (also) was defunct.
When they had kissed good-bye and while they were still shaking hands, Boz asked, as though off-handedly, as though he had been thinking of anything else for the last half-hour: “By the way, you wouldn’t have worked at Erasmus Hall, would you?”
“No. Why? Did you go there? I wouldn’t have been teaching anywhere in your time.”
“No. I have a friend who works there. At Washington Irving?”
“I’m out in Bedford-Stuyvesant, actually.” The admission was not without its pennyworth of chagrin. “But what’s his name? Maybe we met at a union meeting, or something like that.”
“It’s a she—Milly Hanson.”
“Sorry, never heard of her. There are a lot of us, you know. This is a big city.” In every direction the pavement and the walls agreed.
Their hands unclasped. Their smiles faded, and they became invisible to each other, like boats that draw apart, moving across the water into heavy mists.
4
227 Park Avenue, where McGonagall’s office was, was a dowdy sixtyish affair that had been a bit player back in the glass-and-steel boom. But then came the ground-test tremors of ’96 and it had to be wrapped. Now it had the look, outside, of Milly’s last-year dirty-yellow Wooly© waistcoat. That, plus the fact that McGonagall was an old-fashioned-type Republican (a style that still mostly inspired distrust), made it hard for him to get even the official Guild minimum for his services. Not that it made much difference for them—after the first fifty dollars the Board of Education would pay the rest under its sanity-and-health clause.
The waiting room was simply done up with paper mattresses and a couple authenticated Saroyans to cheer up the noonday-white walls: an
Alice
and:
or
or
Fashionwise, Milly was doing an imitation of maiden modesty in her old PanAm uniform, a blue-gray gauzy jerkin over crisp business-like pajamas. Boz, meanwhile, was sporting creamy street shorts and a length of the same blue-gray gauze knotted round his throat. When he moved it fluttered after him like a shadow. Between them they were altogether tout ensemble, a picture. They didn’t talk. They waited in the room designed for that purpose.
Half a damned hour.
The entrance to McGonagall’s office was something from the annals of the Met. The door sublimed into flame and they passed through, a Pamina, a Tamino, accompanied appropriately by flute and drum, strings and horns. A fat man in a white shift welcomed them mutely into his bargain-rate temple of wisdom, clasping first Pamina’s, then Tamino’s hands in his. A sensitivist obviously.
He pressed his pink-frosted middle-aged face close to Boz’s, as though he were reading its fine print. “You’re Boz,” he said reverently. Then with a glance in her direction: “And you’re Milly.”
“No,” she said peevishly (it was that half hour), “I’m Boz, and she’s Milly.”
“Sometimes,” McGonagall said, letting go, “the best solution is divorce. I want you both to understand that if that should be my opinion in your case, I won’t hesitate to say so. If you’re annoyed that I kept you waiting so long, tant pis, since it was for a good reason. It rids us of our company manners from the start. And what is the first thing you say when you come in here? That your husband is a woman! How did it make you feel, Boz, to know that Milly would like to cut off your balls and wear them herself?”
Boz shrugged, long-suffering, ever-likable. “I thought it was funny.”
“Ha,” laughed McGonagall, “that’s what you thought. But what did you feel? Did you want to strike her? Were you afraid? Or secretly pleased?”
“That’s it in a nutshell.”
McGonagall’s living body sank into something pneumatic and blue and floated there like a giant white squid bobbing on the calm surface of a summer sea. “Well then, tell me about your sex life, Mrs. Hanson.”
“Our sex life is pretty,” Milly said.
“Adventurous,” Boz continued.
“And quite frequent.” She folded her pretty, faultless arms.
“When we’re together,” Boz added. A grace note of genuine self-pity decorated the flat irony of the statement. This soon he felt his insides squeezing some idle tears from the appropriate glands; while, in other glands, Milly had begun to churn up petty grievances into a lovely smooth yellow anger. In this, as in so many other ways, they achieved a kind of symmetry between them, they made a pair.
“Your jobs?”
“All that kind of thing is on our profiles.” Milly said. “You’ve had a month to look at them. A half hour, at the very least.”
“But on your profile, Mrs. Hanson, there’s no mention of this remarkable reluctance of yours, this grudging every word.” He lifted two ambiguous fingers, scolding and blessing her in a single gesture. Then, to Boz: “What do you do, Boz?”
“Oh. I’m strictly a husband. Milly’s the breadwinner.”
They both looked at Milly.
“I demonstrate sex in the high schools,” she said.
“Sometimes,” McGonagall said spilling sideways meditatively over his blue balloon (like all very clever fat men he knew how to pretend to be Buddha), “what are thought to be marital difficulties have their origin in job problems.”
Milly smiled an assured porcelain smile. “The city tests us every semester on job satisfaction, Mr. McGonagall. Last time I came out a little high on the ambition scale, but not above the mean score for those who eventually have moved on into administrative work. Boz and I are here because we can’t spend two hours together without starting to fight. I can’t sleep in the same bed anymore, and he gets heartburn when we eat together.”
“Well, let’s assume for now that you are adjusted to your job. How about you, Boz? Have you been happy being ‘just a husband’?”
Boz fingered the gauze knotted round his throat. “Well, no … I guess I’m not completely happy or we wouldn’t be here. I get—oh. I don’t know—restless. Sometimes. But I know I wouldn’t be any happier working at a job. Jobs are like going to church: it’s nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there’s something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week.”
“Have you ever had a real job?”
“A couple times. I hated it. I think most people must hate their jobs. I mean, why else do they pay people to work?”