"Where the furniture stands in the room, the body’s flow is blocked," the Sketchbook-Notebook read from months ago so it was like a letter, ones she’d never written her Dad:
Told Maureen, take your colonial ladderback = part of your coming-off-Marriage trousseau, and lift it and put it over there to the right; then step through where it was. She smiled sweet stormtrooper’s baby’s breath smile, said it wd take less energy to go around the chair and leave it where it was. But in that case, I said, she would have to go around it whether it was a Colonial ladderback seated with that pale, crickly-sounding caning, or an ugly armchair overstuffed and undersprung, because, I said, "Furniture is furniture." And good old Maureen replied as if in touch with my body more than her own: "I understand." Maureen is ready for another clean break, it feels like.
At ten-thirty this morning Grace visited the offices of her last night’s hostess Sue’s semi-busted husband Marv to pick up last night’s tape. Where his aunt-secretary, permed and nonorgasmic, got up and moved because her desk would not, yet because she had been a part of it while sitting. She was indeed a wonderful woman, as Grace had heard him say. "She’d do anything for Marv—money in the bank," Sue had said and here she stood in a doorway frame as bonded as a Wall Street messenger and treated to a Chinese lunch on her unnumbered birthday ("odd-numbered" birthday she would sweetly say, reported Marv to Sue, who told Grace, who for a terrible instant could not visualize Sue), a woman knowing every inch of his office there in the communicating doorframe behind him twelve hours after Sue’s remark and now gaping at Grace’s velvet head given her if she wants to do something with it, sit on it, blow on it, touch it tenderly/experimentally, till she turns into a person Grace knows and likes her and would touch her wrist or non-orgasmic arm or shoulder or the small of her back, and say, Listen, sugar, it’s O.K.
Marv would not send a messenger to bring Grace the tape this morning, having been one himself by commuter train early this fine day from the home where once he had been chief-bottle-washer, down the Long Island tracks to these two Manhattan business rooms of his with key-protected outside John where he still was boss. From the house in Port Adams, he had brought the tape that had been left in the tape recorder. Grace will someday have a Men’s Workshop, too, and betcha life with Marv in it. And then as last night and last year she will always trust herself to speak the words that come to her.
As this man, a gold band bonded to his finger, did not. She smelled vitamin pills in the blood of his breath while she absorbed without trying to understand the bitter, bitter words as he handed her the tape she had left in what had been but now was not his and his son Larry’s (though still maybe Larry’s) home in Port Adams, just moved out of to an apartment in Grace’s building, a fact lost to Grace’s mind when the tape-delivery had been discussed: the truth behind his words now worked away in his neck bent toward her: "You have your public, Grace, but you should try listening to yourself."
"I hear myself, I don’t listen," her eyes watering, her toes out, her hand now on his hair-darkened, warm arm, for he was in his shirt-sleeves and one sleeve was rolled up.
"That’s right. You always go too far," said the shaking voice. "I try to," she said, "it’s how people know me, it’s how I’m public." "You fucking little corporation," Marv breathed just between the two of them, "now you finagled a place for me in your building."
No use telling him that his out-of-the-closet still-wife Sue (who Grace very privately thought would not last six months with another woman but would not get back with Marv) had done this directly with the landlord’s agent, whom she knew; and no one had told Grace (it was a surprise! and, for her, not a bad one, because she liked Marv and Larry both) but then it came to her that Sue had said she had a surprise for her, and Grace at once had thought of their eighteen-year-old Larry, who stood with hands clasped behind his back, so aloof, alone, and funny/friendly, thinking always into the communal gig-bank. The phone rang then in Marv’s office and Marv’s secretary had her sex-negative arms crossed over her chest pushing her breasts down and turned away without uncrossing them.
Marv—what had he said?—"I think I hate you."
"Don’t hate me if you don’t really want to," she said. Her eyes watered warmly, she had felt hit all over her but inside in her blood. She thought of her Sketchbook-Notebook, old talk-converter: she was going to have one day a week of silence hermetically sealed.
She knew Marv couldn’t get going and let her have it. "You’re such a string of ..." He didn’t finish, and she took the words as eye-to-eye as he let her—he was looking just past her cheek—he told her how she had undermined his life with Sue, supporting all people seeking exit from relationships. Last night he had had that fixed smile hosting a rainbow buffet of live food with the teenage son Larry, while the hostess Sue mingled, and once late in the evening they had seemed to arrive at one spot in the room at the same moment and Marv hugged Sue and said, "Atta girl" and "Good lady," and Grace had heard heavy-duty Kate say, "He doesn’t mean it."
So everyone agreed, Marv had a long way to go in the mid-seventies of these United States, as Grace’s father had used to refer to them. So Marv had been kicked by true love before he could kick it.
Did he know how to properly brush his teeth? At least he had learned to eat. Decision Therapy could surprise him: you have nothing to lose but the people bugging you.
She really liked Marv, and he really liked his sharp, quiet son Larry, and he was trying to work with Sue without knowing any rules, that was what he looked for, too bad.
She had left the stale light of his office, turning to wink at the secretary with her bib and her heels, who had answered the phone and reappeared in the doorway to the other office as if she had never moved from that doorway, part of a set of furniture that they had forgotten to move and that was missing someplace else. Grace was ready to feel different.
Grace was in the street in her hundred-thirty-dollar abundance boots. She sensed that the office had been not long, as she’d felt while there, but squarer. And the secretary woman, upright as they came, maybe her alertness to Grace was the basic business welcome she knew, quite respectably animal, don’t knock it. Grace felt back there with her, getting closer and closer. But she had to strut past six hundred pounds of overweight, overpaid male silence now mainlining beer at ten-thirty in the morning (so who’s this dyke-cock-suckin’ hooker circus?, came the two-to-one white-over-black majority) leaning against their parked truck. Yet bearing down on her and employed at least in a flashy up-and-down-shouldered style of walking came a black dude with his high ass in a swing who said (up front) softly, "Mama!" as she said, "Daddy!" signing equals all the way deciding she didn’t have the time to exchange phone numbers because she had to get home to play the tape and because this real free-enterprise West Indian coming on to her own one-eighth Pawnee (according to family lore) had to be in her periodic cluster though she only vaguely thought she had seen him, and so he would appear again soon anyway, as physically fit in his late twenties as she in her early forties.
Beyond him Grace saw a girl’s hand in her boyfriend’s back pocket, thumb free to move, above the four fingers. But across on the other sidewalk moving the other way, there was the beat-up old guy again and the beautiful old woman: he was having trouble with her, did they really have anywhere to go?, Grace started across and the passing alarm-siren of a wide long van rolling away on its rear wheels behind a police tow truck passed under her nose and she could have been hit by this hysterical men’s world where they hadn’t turned off the van’s burglar alarm, and then she sidestepped a whirring red bicycle, it whipped around her, seemingly on both sides of her and she thought, I will be as old as those people I am going toward, because the clink like armor worn by the bicyclist was milk bottles moving toward a porch not to be found within miles of the old couple here in Manhattan: a porch more like nineteen hundred miles away. Did anyone sell milk bottles now?—weightily balanced and already in the glass if what you needed was a quic
k hit.
The man, as she reached their side of the street, was pretty beat-up, wasn’t he? Like his face had been swung around to either side of his high skull and the skin had fought back and sort of won. His companion the old lady—she’s fabulous for maybe seventy-seven though perhaps babbling— drew them all together. Did Grace know her from somewhere? His hand on the old lady’s arm, his thin arm tense, handling her—he liked her, knew her, and yet he had had years of separation from her or predecessors, some helpless history she had shrugged off was for him almost a danger that made him rational crazy. She moved her head softly side to side and had a white, plastic-looking rose pinned to her sky blue cardigan, talked at the same time fast, they overlapped each other like excited strangers, interested shadows, Grace felt. "Fly me . . ."—surely Grace had heard the words, as in the unspeakable stewardess gig for one of the male-run, financially shaky of course airlines, "Fly me," the old lady said, "fly me—they wind up in that window, for crying out tears." Oh she was making up for lost time with all that talk. And then as Grace gained the sidewalk, the man, his stubbled face mysteriously dark-scruffy-moustached and from the temples a fan of spider threads every which way unchecked even by his strong, faintly twisted nose—he so thin and straight—turned to the beautiful old lady—what’s he doing to her that she goes on like this?—and she (saying he should really keep that moustache, it came out a different color from hair, as if she had received Grace’s projection-thought) turned away toward the shop window hopefully, and he with her; and Grace saw that with the two of them she was standing watching a show. But at first the empty window held nothing more than a gray sign, MESSENGER SERVICE, and a rainbow star and across it, READINGS—PSYCHIC CONSULTATIONS, also then the lurking reflection of the old man.
Then a pair of twin-like people appeared and flew at each other: pummeling yet silly: yet Grace wanted to be there mixing it up with them. Their mouths were open not just for breath but for receiving, she thought; and they laughed and grimaced, but kind of hurt each other, wore a lot of rings; and the thing was, you almost didn’t know if it was girls or boys or one of each —far out!—and granting the difference between the two you felt they were warped twins with a new twist. One of each, Grace decided, as she moved up on the old couple, for the long-haired young pummeler in an old suit, no tie, had frail shoulders but stubbly cheeks and misshapen head while the short-haired one in a blue-and-gold-sleeveless jersey with an insignia had good chest development and biceps like those of Grace’s heavily-into-anesthesia dentist but soft, creamy skin. Now they hit hard, they bumped the broad window glass of the storefront, rings glinting off their knuckles, here we are, here we are, this is where we are, this is where we all are. Then the smaller, queer-headed male dropped his arms, dropped them and stood open: but was it wanting to be hit?, a little M to S?, but no, open to the other, his twin sister (Grace believed), who shied away, put up an arm to shield the face toughly as if to throw a punch, then faded out of the window destroyed. "Fly me, will they!" said the old lady; "why I am their rings!" But the one Grace thought was twin-sister returned and raised her bicep’d arms, brought hands together like a prayer, split them apart so Grace saw the Zodiac-like sign on the strongly breasted chest, the sister (if it was sister) turning out of profile, and what looked like smoke or some quickened reflection in the glass shot from this kid’s body in a puff of cloud, and the other, drab in the old suit as misshapen and large of head, fell forward, stricken dead, into the spell of its sibling and fell down below the level of the window only then to rise so the two of them could turn to the old couple smiling and Grace said, "Far out." The old lady clapped and clapped—"I am their rings!"—"You mean wings, honey," said the man—and she wanted to go into this place but was held back by the man who in holding her turned toward Grace whom the old lady now turned to see as if she remembered her (which was what Grace truly understood, for Grace for that moment was that old lady, jerking off into the future or reversed into the alligator abundance boots where Be crazy is Giving away in order to have what you give).
She was on her own free carpet for a long moment then not entranced by the sound of her voice on the tape of last night, remembering girls’ basketball when you got one dribble after which you had to glue one foot to the shiny wood floor like charming prisoner stretching and how the legs spread —no, she was here on a street near the bike shop, she was in two places or minds at once as she’d been seeing and freeing the old lady who seemed now to forget the show put on for her in the window of the Messenger Service/ Psychic Consultation place.
"Been a long time," said the old lady. "Martha," she said, offering her hand but cutting off her word very sharp, maybe remembering she had forgotten her last name. Grace introduced herself and ran "Martha" through hundreds of named people she’d talked to and when the Hermit-Inventor as Martha called him tried to draw her away, Grace told him to lay off, Martha could take care of herself. "Martha," said Martha, "is only one of my two given names and I’m giving it to you; the other one I gave back." "To the Indians," said her protector who now burst out laughing at what Grace had said. But he laughed so at this he seemed not to care, at the same time as he dropped the old lady’s arm—maybe her name wasn’t Martha—and said to Grace, "This is not a good place for us to be, by this window, those people in there are out of their minds."
"Which people?" said Martha, her eyes filmed with depth.
"See?" said the hermit running a hand along the angle of Grace’s arm bent at the elbow and unmoved by his touch.
"Why don’t you let her do her own thing," said Grace, wanting to be on her way.
But the old man said, "She’s much taken with you." He said it softly but the old lady Martha said, "He always does that." She shook her head. "Can’t explain. I have another name."
"I know what you mean," said Grace. "I think I have another name, too. Maybe it’s Martha."
The man said, "She wants to drink a beer now." "Morning, morning, he always does that," the old woman said. She shook her head, opened her mouth, couldn’t find the words. "I can’t explain."
"Much taken with you," the old man said, a bit curtly. "Wants to drink a beer now."
The black dude in the alligator hat reappeared from behind the van across the street where the men of the van had been having their beers; the black dude whom, it came to her, she would have her way with, was reappearing, and the van moved away from the curb in the opposite direction and Grace needed to go and the black dude was not to reappear until later, she was sure.
"But what was that show in the window all about—the brother and sister?" Grace looked from one to the other, back and forth, eye contact, bring them both in.
The old woman shrugged, it didn’t look right on her but her face clouded together and she didn’t know. Not even quite how to shake her head. The man took her arm as she turned back to the empty storefront window. "Brothers, they’re brothers, they kill each other and get up again, the man inside doesn’t know what to do with them." Her companion looked over his shoulder at Grace, shook his head in jerks as if to say, harassed, that Martha, if that was her name (it seemed to have an r and an a in it) was "out of it." He said, "Another time, kid," and the old lady said, "Old hermit crab," Grace thought, but to Grace she said, at impressive length, "He makes me out to like things that it’s really him that likes them," while her escort/old friend bending toward her caring for her (Grace knew) kept saying, "Like what, like what, like what?" and at a distance words came to Grace, a curtain opening and closing at the same time, "Well, sometimes we like the same things." And right then, Grace actively put from her mind the fact that her cassette waiting for her but on her person was a portable headache she could get rid of if she would. Like she almost couldn’t help going into the Messenger/ Psychic Readings storefront behind the empty, unfurnished window and see what weird business trip they were advertising in the window grab-ass she had enjoyed watching.
Was Marv’s fury ripping her to shreds? Did she not know what she
felt? The tape in her bag had been drawing her home, but blocks and blocks of the city waited in the way. A bus appeared and she got a radiator seat at the rear where she could look at how the black dude in the alligator hat came past on the sidewalk going uptown and suddenly eyeballed her right on through the window. She could not get out of her mind her own taped words she was going home to play. They were live, they were her own, and when she got off the bus and bought one small white sweetheart rose at the florist and stuck it through a button-hole of her shirt—and later when she was jerking off to the goddess in the mirror as she had known she would—she had known she was being drawn home to know later what she knew already.
But on the bus’s hot seat and in the florist’s and alone in the mirrored Body Room, she heard the clink of milk, pieces of her bike, forks on Sue’s plates last night, and she heard a deeper, longer milk clink. But they were Marv’s plates, knives, forks, cups, saucers, embroidered tablecloth, and bottled pure Garden of Eden apple juice just as much as they were Sue’s or young Larry’s, who with tender shining forehead sat in the kitchen reading a book about chess but toward the end of last night’s evening figured out how to mix and was much in demand discussing the space program (manned versus unmanned, got heckled, shrugged it off) and chess, which he might be outgrowing at eighteen. While Sue gave the mother-provider trip a twist reporting that she had told Larry he ought to get laid. It was about time, he was almost eighteen, and, even standing over by a window trying to understand a tall political woman you knew would phone the next day who spoke painfully and too fast or too slow, Grace heard Sue through the noisy talk in the large room saying it—it had been what Grace had told Sue, that Larry should get laid, and now she heard it come back through the room to her, family history.
Women and Men Page 19
