This sound thing was something else.
What are you trying to do to me? he said, his hands over his eyes.
Listen, she said.
I am, he said.
Her words were softer in the absence of sound, and he found that his were, too. Are you trying to make me believe this sound’s been getting into my head for years?
You’ll hear it, she said.
And then she seemed to have answered No to his next words before he’d finished saying them: You mean like tasting preservatives in a loaf of bread or a can of tuna? You want to persuade me I’m being poisoned?
He knew some chemistry, and he knew he was already made of chemicals.
The supermarket chemicals are different, though.
Yes, they were. But who had just now said so? If he uncovered his eyes, would he find out who had said the words? The supermarket chemicals are different. He could have said them himself. He knew about preservatives. But the words had come not out of him, they’d come to him; yet had he heard them said? The face of a good-sized school tuna came at him squashed to the curve of one seven-ounce can dividing his eyes. He’d lost the tock, the tock of the TV switch; and anyway now he didn’t know if the last tock he’d heard had been the On or the Off. How does the blindfolded captive wait for what comes next? He smelled her skin. It was the odor of unbitten apricot and somewhere between a peanut in the shell and nutmeg. She hadn’t known the smell of nutmeg and he’d brought her the small jar with three partly shaved nuts of the sweet spice—pits, in fact—brown outside, pale wood inside with fine branchlets of dark grain like a leftover slice of pear.
He wanted to uncover his eyes and look at her. But he kept his hands on his eyes. He felt compelled to.
He wanted to believe her, he thought. But having thought this, he saw he wanted not to believe her. Let her try something. Did spirits fly in the window to her? Yet wait—let those spirits wait in their own midair, like hummingbirds or dragonflies—yes, wait: he’d give her this much: she hadn’t said he was putting up a fight. He was sure she hadn’t said any such thing, whatever else passed between them in this atmosphere in which he now didn’t know if his TV was on or off. And this time he wasn’t out of the room as he had been last Saturday.
Last Saturday he’d been watching his first baseball game of the season; he had gone to the bedroom for the book of matches that he’d fetched her the night before—then back to the kitchen to the stove, when suddenly there had been someone at the front door; and as he went, he wondered if he’d left the game on in the living room, the sound was off and he couldn’t tell. He recognized one of the voices and he opened the door. The game had been on, as it turned out; but the point was that at that moment on Saturday the television set in the living room had been at a distance—game or no game—while tonight he was close up and with an interpreter.
The sound he now identified with his eyes closed in the palms of his hands was one he had never heard. Yes, he did hear a sound.
It was steady; that was what it was, it was steadiness itself. It reminded him he was feeling good, and so he thought it wasn’t a poison or a coefficient host carrying untoward influence or bad substance. It was there like the faintly gaseous purity of compressed air to be taken, as his breathing might draw it, in cycles of amount; but it wasn’t divisible the way drafts of air from one of the tanks on his back were; and if, hearing it now for the first time, he recalled the anesthetic wind that sometimes tasted of mentholated rubber in the first breaths of compressed air before he went down, breathing wasn’t what this was.
Because for one thing (had he said so to the girl who must still be in front of him to one side of the TV screen?) the hearing of the sound arrived all over him. What the hell was he saying! Distributed was what the sound was. From head to heel like a film of buoyancy. Or was he turning into an ear?—for the sound was something heard. And steady, so steady that it could not have been brought in here by the girl. But it was not him.
Well, he’d been telling her some of this, telling her during the last few moments. He could recall her silence. But was it that of a good listener or, if the TV was off, not on, was she now at a loss because she thought he was trying to impress her by faking it? She was past that with him, he hoped. Or at least above it. He liked her. They could communicate, couldn’t they?
Got it, he said. Had it all along.
Hey look, she said, the sound I meant is no big deal.
The sound had surrounded what he was telling her, as if it could be also a carrier outward from him. But it also steadied what he told her into a new silence.
Well, now he was not speaking. He smelled her all over him very slightly. The heels of his palms felt his cheeks rise and tighten in a smile at the words, You’re turning me on.
She had not said them. Had he?
The touch of her smell was all over him. She was closer than ever. Ripples over him were less his looseness of skin than the girl herself, dissolved toward him to preserve him, preserve even that comparative looseness of skin that was, well, mainly in the mind, skin which tightened into laughter: he was arriving inside himself, he was joyously guffawing so the warm-water kisser fish and the long cold shark and the doppler-headed dolphin heard him bubble melodiously down through his system coded words—My lady preservative!
He heard her, heard her trying to say, Hey, I just wanted you to, you know, hear it.
But she was near at hand, nearer than she knew. She was a hand, and it was conducted to him by this continuous sound he’d found in himself which yet was not him, for he was something else, its conductor.
Now he was not sure as to when things were happening. Tock goes the switch. The speed he heard went on, diminished and steady. Yes, and speed not of something.
It goes on, he said. It helps. Maybe I’m used to it, but it’s not too strong. It’s gone on longer than I’ve known you.
Or yourself, came back to him.
Just what I was going to say, he thought—but hadn’t seen her mouth open.
What has gone on? she said with audible doubt, with an emphasis that had waited a little too long before voicing the doubt.
Oh—why it’s a current. Strong, very strong.
But I thought it wasn’t too strong, she said. A current?
Like when you get inoculated, the antibodies may never need to be boosted. Like I’ve been inoculated against dead bodies that I might come up with, but that’s not the same thing; you have to have that inoculation again the next time you take that kind of job. But other inoculations, you know, they last.
You go in for lots of shots? she said.
This is hard to describe, he said—it’s so beautifully strong.
And with that, he dropped his hands and opened his eyes to find the TV screen was off.
The girl unbent herself and went full length flat on her stomach and ran a finger over the hair above his knee. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or intrigued, she said. You’re not hearing the sound, you know. At least not for the past couple of minutes when you said it was on. Because the TV set’s been off, man.
Maybe so, but the other thing goes on.
It touched you. Like someone else. I saw it. It had a beautiful effect on you. I felt it touch you. You had your hands over your eyes but I saw you smile as if you saw ahead.
What did it feel like? he said.
Well, ripples. Ripples in the skin.
I thought it was you, he said.
Maybe so, she said, but it wasn’t what I meant in the beginning. I meant the ultrasonic ray from this particular tube in the TV. That’s what it is, that’s exactly what it is. My dog tilted his head when he heard it. He tilted his head and he yawned like a silent whine. Because he heard what was coming out. It’s the ultrasonic ray—you can measure it if you have the right equipment. I didn’t want to hit you with that until you’d actually heard the sound. You know, the actual sound.
He wanted her to stay.
He said, I want you to stay the n
ight.
She said, I was going to ask.
And he heard her almost say, I didn’t have to say that—why did I?
He slipped away for a moment—she stayed where she was—he went to the wall socket behind the TV. He looked back at her. Her finger seemed suspended, waiting for at least some part of him to return; and from the darkened soles and heels of her feet up the crease between her calves and thighs that were neatly together like a diver’s to her shoulder blades he felt in his fingertips a trace leading him to a knot of tension where her neck joined her shoulder on one side.
Look, he said—and, still on her stomach, she turned her head so her profile was toward him. Even when a color set’s completely off, the plug in the socket keeps a small amount of current going in. They tell you it’s better for the set than unplugging it.
She went up on one elbow, her cheek in her hand, so her profile was tilted, and without the light of the TV screen he barely discerned the flare at the corner of her mouth.
Unplug it, she said, but he couldn’t tell if he heard humor in her voice.
He reached down, pausing to glance at his body. His thumb and forefinger found the plug. But then he didn’t unplug the set. The joke could have been clumsy. She curved around suddenly, she lay on her outstretched arm.
He was already with her. He knew she felt that.
What Found Grace Kimball, Goddess Quite Much Taken
It came after her at the end of a day and found her alone on her great uninterrupted carpet in her fully mirrored Body Room, and it was not the story of her life because not even jerking other people off was that. She was beautiful inside out, it was still turning into her, it had a handle on her, it came after her, but its sound no matter how far or near was unvarying. Plus, this could be all hers in a matter of minutes—forget man-hours—one long healing woman-minute of hand-made universe controlling your own rebirth if we’re talking birth control. It found her smiling lengthwise along her tongue, and Grace knew all this would happen—it was why she did it again.
It was the surprise it had like juicing fifteen hundred not only women in a great American auditorium. Don’t need a degree to fuck a university audience if there is light in their eyes, for they will give it back. Never mind that they came into the hall non-laughingly, multiplying before her offstage eyes into a fixed number of seats until they had to stand. SRO, the woman standing offstage with her had said. SRO? Standing Room Only.
Far Out, Grace said, but the woman said, "They’ve come to find out what is at stake." And some came two by two ready to invent their own lives and love themselves the last quarter of the century. Had the woman who had said it that day not known what was at stake, or wondered if Grace knew?
But here in her own Body Room on her own carpet this Self-Sex her term for it is to be shared in friendship/love with women and men alike: fallen back-on for back-up sex-respite or as trip in itself (words heard coming back to her—she let her stormtrooper assistant her own problem-child Maureen tell it): the old energy source retrieved each day I night continuum the holy joke let us be grateful for, coming back at will after you hit a temporary downer and think, You Lose. But no: it came in sheaves sprouting corn (ready for cream-canning to line the tempered bottom of her own faraway mother’s once-upon-a-time sex-negative orbiting cornbread skillet). And came in cabbage fringe and in a milk lining for Grace’s fingertip-spread heart of thanks. Because this chamber of walls mirroring candle-dusk could see. Because places could. And it would be a score of joy, scoring yourself, so she could step aside from her own body and let the recycled nudes coming out of her voice if not s’much from her workshop have the running of the world coming off Beef, Dairy, you name it, Caffeine, Grass, Sugar, Romance: she was there for them when they needed her and never forgot a first name, while if a friendship turned out to run its course quickly why that was how it was programmed: they came into her life and were gone along their own curve ‘way-way and she meanwhile in addition to the workshops ran the farthest-out or most energy-replenishing fuck in town, for the Goddess in her went thirty-five forty minutes up there at the peak, a speed of (it came to her) light far out but reversed so the actual peak wasn’t speed, it was slowness reaching where maybe no one had been: anyway, more than forty—for what was forty?—forty was the days some dude fasted for his pleasure: our dude, and more sex to him if he could handle it, what sexual energy, what crinkly hair (maybe he needed to come off hair like the rest of us, maybe that’s what was at stake, and Grace would feel her way back two thousand mere man-years to make a home visit, give him a scalp rub to grind off a few tight, glossy coils of that hair if he wasn’t out on the campaign trail, but), what spunk, what a whole hard-on of a dark person, out-of-the-closet next thing they oooh crucify ya.
His body’s cleansing high got Jesus what he went for, which was to run the show: and so as it came after her, she knew that what came after would find her without quite looking for her in its own sweet-yeasty time, the goddess being taken and by force that was her own feed-back that was all over up till the last converging grips, helping self or friend find self or just old words to get truth said. Or fucking self or friend.
Then it was still all over but out of sight and words, which were bullshit always.
Her full, shoppingcart day was coming to the point, and so now the hall phone going once crawled up her shin so far as her knee (the knee inside which her mother what a great talker sat in a faraway kitchen) and it could be anyone phoning—that’s what we love about the phone!—but Grace would sense who it was, it was her own baby’s-breath stormtrooper Maureen who’s hearing not Grace’s voice but "Grace Kimball residence" from the sassy black sister at the phone answering service): which can only make more abundant the bend of the approaching cosmos coming to her point so she has her way with (thankfully) herself, her fingers, her whole hand; and ‘twan’t her 1976 late-model Danish phone-shower-head dial a fine-tine/hard-prickle for there’s no privacy like a one-on-one shower, and ‘twan’t a flow of magenta from her felt pen into the big fat sketchbook she wrote things down in just like when she drew knuckles and muscles, cunts and cheekbones or the latest dream: so she also’s finding out how her unconscious is doing—how ya’ do’m’l—and ‘twan’t her cassette-recorder mike (neat smooth black-cockhead princess mike) she had in her hand.
She had it almost, her day-load cleared/vacuumed of words words shitfall of them coming down to one point alone. And if the phone’s being answered across the city at the answering service by the sassy and (Grace would swear) long-tongued black sister, baby’s breath friend workshop-assistant Maureen stormtrooper might still enter here using her own key coming to show Grace her newly done velvet head and Grace was with herself in her Body Room and could not be turned by Maureen even if Maureen stood right over there stretching on the chromed chinning-bar lintel at the threshold looking into this all but furnitureless space and fully mirrored nest of the abundant Body Room reserved for the Goddess, the outer entrance hall beyond and behind with its bakers dozen soft silver (painted/plated) cunts for workshop women’s clothes to be (H.O.A.) hung on arrival.
But Maureen can’t come here yet. The dayful was coming up to one point alone, and Grace would not quite bear down, she had the idea, the whole thing of it this time not spurred or oiled by thoughts of other hands or a little big toe working her over or the soft line where someone’s tan began.
How did it happen? Was it a Body-Self breath loose from words dragging at it? Her unlocked pelvis called aloft, and, in the old faith that so linked-up her lower back to her knees, but many knees getting ready globally to come together and take over, and her shoulders to her waiting voice and non-metallic (because non-carnivore) scent of her coming into its own (for women according to scientist Maureen smell and taste more truly than men), Grace had it all before her and she saw she had had it.
But say what it was.
What else but a bunch of lives who, in contact with your Body-Self love, are right here feeling you’re takin
g too much time: and then’s when you might accelerate or (even with yourself) fake coming, or just get up and go answer the phone, the door, the letter that’s easier to answer you think than holding yourself so dear you can flirt with yourself in the almond-oil bathtub and never forget the power not to be judged Good or Bad but waiting, which our female history has too often grabbed, so it is up to us, as if we were not our history, but—
Say that again, Grace . . . ?
A dayful bunch of lives turning each day secretly a great minute and a little year, secretly same shape but all you can do is know it, you can’t put it down, it’s the tip of the yelp, the coastline of your receding—
Your what, Grace . . . ?
A bunch of lives she has—
What, Grace . . . ?
Internalized. All her people, like she’s some newspaper. A friend’s gone-to-seed body. A suddenly-out-of-the-closet friend’s busted husband. Or faraway milk bottles with an upper stripe of cream hundreds of miles (years) west clinking cold moist rounded potential weapons in your forgotten dreams where there were now red-and-white waxy containers of homogenized if you’re into dairy products, which is a small outline of the larger, it comes to her.
Is it the shoreline of our mind, our consciousness? Is that what you mean, Grace? Who was it said, "the yeasty sea"? Some man putting in man-hours on words.
Goddess be with me but she feels others, like angels trying to get in on her act, trying to catch up, speaking like her language, speaking her, but angels are special, aren’t they?
Women and Men Page 16
