Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  And even these you must empty your hands of, as she had not quite been able to show Sue, who was changing her life but maybe into new Habit Patterns that would grab her just like she grabbed what Grace had to say about Decision-as-Necessary-Shorthand, about Siamese Marriage, about carbohydrate hits: but prophetic, Grace had been called—by Sue, come to think of it—when Grace had said, You will walk out someday.

  So why should Grace not find the meaning of her day sloping back to her? But in a new voice, not the silence of the burly driver of a bus that fell apart and back together at each dip so the man up there behind the bar with his walkie-talkie (while women communicate directly, she found herself adding to future gigs), the driver here wanted to finish off three non-orgasmic senior citizen ladies who had boarded the bus but not reached seats and were holding on as if this was tomorrow spelled backward like the letters on the front of an ambulance that’s not free, God as if this was tomorrow and there was no bus, only a loop to swing on, they were not quite making it into orbit. He knew what he was doing, floored his pedal, flipped the huge wheel, job-secure in the picture of his wife bent over the obstacle course her vacuum led her orbiting her kitchen while attached by a long cord to a plug in a socket, the noise all but overcoming phone, future doorbell, and other sounds but not the aroma that added up to three American cheese and sweating bacons she had grilled for lunch one after the other, yes, leaving the oven on after the first grilled cheese and bacon in case she had a second: foresight guaranteed: but why was she vacuuming in the kitchen? how had Grace seen that? Switch scenes and see the husband of Clara tall and thin with a foreign moustache levering the cork out of the bottle like pumping water, he like the busdriver’s wife proved to be with appetite as Clara had foreseen rising awkwardly from her mermaid folds on Grace’s famous carpet, didn’t have time for a cup of tea, saying she had to think about her husband’s dinner he would be hungry after his trip. Was he a traveling man? Not now, not now; just someone he knows who was unable to come to the city.

  This woman Clara respects her husband and this is everything to her, she thinks; his words are her words coming to her like her own. He is tall and moustached, for I saw AROUND her to HIM standing behind her, there he was, and Clara says he is thin no matter what he eats, potatoes, beefsteak, fried bananas, chile, a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Funny, her nerves are showing and I thought nerves of sprung steel, not meaning like when they say it of charismatic male criminals, also revolutionaries with bombs, Clara’s fear seems made of steel. He has many worries, she said; well, so has Clara herself. Her share and unshared. The tall woman in the window at Sue and Marv’s can speak on the politics of Worry—share his to forget your own—she’s into Power Margins, what you leave potential for yourself resting assured that your treasury is on tap if you know that you take him as an equal however he sees or fantasizes you.

  And this dark argument of a woman, thin but without muscle tone, awesome, waiting politically to be said No to, waiting outside if Grace (who, comparatively untechnological except for phone showerhead and Acme Juicer, had been impressed by young Larry’s report on nerve gas) needed a ride back to Manhattan: Sure, can you take me and Maureen?—for burning fuel should move as many of the people as possible: Which one is Maureen? the woman had asked vaguely.

  But the man introduced into the system today by his lady Clara, this tall-ly metabolized mustache of a business-trip-upstate husband—brings home worries (to Clara), "up the river," Clara had said, like a tourist visitor, meaning the Hudson—had she smiled?—and is much encouraged by the homemaker of his home if not to handcuff her to the bedpost later on, at least to leave his worries on the doorstep—when these worries might have forced her, his cook and live-in lay (haloed by the odoroma of guinea hen enchiladas from a supermarket top-loading freezer as he with his one-and-a-half boring sex fantasies enters their hallowed living space, to let fly with her worries, which may not concern the long, narrow world at large like his worries which are important and therefore at rest because powered by dollar continuum though his secret anxiety about having this "Sure Thing" status tunnels into that Rest to siphon out the underside-rear-spout emptying the dollars-continuum of all but its nerve-gas buying power: his worries may not be about sales volume and what the Johns in Washington say about inflation, but which still matter, because if a revolution in a foreign country is holding up a delivery of a system, can you really get into that like you get into how a husband gets irritated?

  Well, in a workshop we do a bit of everything: I’m open: we share sexual information, we talk about Body-Self image, we do some yoga, I demonstrate massage, we explore masturbation, diet, alternative energy-bases for self-love because even in a regular sex life so many women put a man’s orgasm first. We feel that—

  We? the question came, but who had Clara come looking for?

  Yes, economic power isn’t enough by itself, after all it gives us a heavy-duty matriarchy which is just as sex-negative as this number the men have been doing on us for centuries.

  It’s not easy.

  Who’s talking to Grace besides Clara? Is it Grace herself?

  The world has become awfully complicated.

  So do we leave it to the guys to understand?

  Too complicated to beat.

  Fly, thought Grace, while the flying is good. What was it the beautiful old lady had said? they fly me, but I am the wings. Write it down.

  What does your husband do? I asked Clara, and then knew I had felt I was flattering her in advance. She started to say, "He is." And "an economist" came to me—her talk-converter isn’t like mine. "An economist," the words she would have said (and if I am supposed to be so prophetic maybe that is what he will be). But she said, "He is a consultant." "Is your life his?" I asked. "He would never take advantage of that." I wanted her to come to the real point. "You have to learn to live," I said. "Maybe that is a way of putting it," she said, as if she knew literally a world I did not, and again I thought, Danger: but could it be something other than the real danger of losing your self? "Putting what?" I said. Then like a man, almost like Cliff, Clara got her words out too fast—

  The words came back to Grace, I mean I want to (her accent thickened for the next word) survive—to leave.

  I reached for her arm and she let me touch her. I thought she would cry but she’s tough: but then I got it: leave was what came out, our American word that rhymes with give was what she thought she meant, and she wanted to leave. Not go public. But if she is brought along gently. Nurtured, for how she needs women now. To share with the goddess in her. To share information and break the old self-esteem barrier. But she is no breadbaker.

  And there was something funny about her respect for that distinguished husband: so he was not interested in being tracked down by journalists, Grace was happy to give interviews, her life was to be shared, just let them quote you accurately.

  But look at me going back later to the Messenger Service/Psychic storefront when I told myself I needed to get my bike now that they’d tuned it up and added a link to the chain due to worn-out derailleur (male-designed).

  Grace had by then (but it was way past noon, why had she not sooner) played last night’s tape all by herself, Maureen was busy, played it denying herself nothing; taking it as she had given it—National Orgasm for Women, but not her N.O.W. quoted as a joke by Cliff when not on his monthly suicide alert: seriously a national orgasm: but so was the past crossing a street toward Martha and the lone guy taking care of her, only to be just missed by the whir of a red bike as oblivious of her as the jock in the saddle, but inside that wheeling whir was a clink and, though of chain, bolt, kickstand, or fender, it was a milk bottle delivered out of the past on that route a single milk bottle can clink all by itself as easily as be spilt: she felt the neck and the stripe of cold pale-yellow cream below her thumb and forefinger nineteen hundred and more miles away and the cool base of the bottle’s heavy glass in the palm of her right hand for a while: while, as she looked hard for the boy
she loved who was her brother who had come and gone who got up before dawn dutifully and with an underlying mischievousness, too, that only she knew in him, left and along his route came back with the family’s milk and left again—she smelt behind her the breath breathing right through her as if to find something better beyond, when it knew too well: the hoarse breath of her unwashed father who was the living and half-blotted-out memory of last night’s moderate controlled drinking when you did not know where you were with him, for he could get courtly/serious, which might be worst, or most near to threatening, swinging his head and eyes slowly around so his perspective felt curved to her while he, up early, at the top and bottom of the midnight barrel appeared to know that there was nothing out there across the clear porch of morning beyond his daughter and the white misted bottle in her hands, upon which, she would turn, turn, turn (through his—she knew without looking—averted eyes) and step away holding the milk to her, leaving her father to bend just over the threshold for the other quart likewise delivered an hour or so ago by his son, who drank a quart first thing in the morning on the job and another at home during the day, good for missy’s milk-white skin, it was said—always the wrong information authoritatively shared, wrong if she had had pimples which she had not, but the wrong scoop period, but she made up for it now in her forties telling an echoing cassette-ful of mainly women (in a hospital-auditorium in Connecticut, in New Jersey a redone horse-barn, a north-shore Long Island home) how to survive. A good bunch! Did she make them good? And in the midst of this replayed spiel, eyeing the four shelves of art books, sex books, food books, and self books, and, feeling in one shin—why? that she ought to throw some of the books out, she had had the urge to be on her bike; more, have it. The tape ended with the warm, dry crash of clapping which got abruptly breathed back into the waiting silence of the small machine. Her mother phoned across the country. The abundantly dark-haired super stood at Grace’s door talking too long; well, she would talk to anyone who wanted to, but he talked too long as if even if it got abstract about obscure storage space being created in the basement out of nothing by this super, and about Respect—a commodity, he heard himself saying, hard to come by when you had to deal with some of the older tenants—still he figured she might like him well enough to, at the ultimate moment, flash: wasn’t this what all his talk meant?, he imagined that Grace possibly flashed for Manuel (now the doorman, once the handyman, who raced cars somewhere out of earshot in New Jersey) and for Spike the spick-and-span porter whom she liked to bullshit with and would never cover up for necessarily if he rang her bell alone. These blue-collar types shouldn’t have known how to take her but they did, and didn’t even sense they got an education, she was in a separate class. (By the time she was a hundred and twenty would New Jersey mean anything to anyone?)

  And then came the voices of the T-shirt operation’s representative and the woman with bad posture (political woman, Grace recalled, heavee, with a touch so serious and urgent she would be serious and urgent making love yet hopeless and noisy)—who wanted to be Grace’s secretary but was into relationships not pleasure, and then a number of other Items as if the day existed in advance.

  In the form of a list.

  Whereupon some overheard words drew her in reverse to hike downtown, she needed that bike.

  So it was that she again passed the storefront she had put out of her mind with the black dude in the alligator who had more important things to further than see signs in storefronts.

  Messenger Service/Psychic Consultations, Readings, it said. Another New York operation, yet a play front for what male-female mystery?

  She had come back downtown because she’d been driven from her apartment. Maybe by what the tape told her? Maureen would have known but Maureen was painting her kitchen today, controlling her environment, planning to leave it for an apartment in this building, caching yogurt behind an overwhelming sack of stubby carrots in the bottom of her fridge: so much tougher than before she had met Grace coming off marriage in danger of being restored to her now retired nuclear parents where the sun always shines, before she had gone on her power trip which was really turning her toward science, toward cleansing, toward a balance of nature where everything was related to everything else, sprouts on the sill to high colonic enema therapy with the bull Mama in the white coat who turned the dials on the machine and filled your belly to orgasmaximum—to science, yes, to juice cleansing, carrots, celery, oranges, to changing American fields from grazing to grains, from animal to vegetable; and Grace had got her started, just as, coming from someplace else, Sue was getting started now; the workshops and talks were always new starts, this was the timeless factor, she would write that down, she liked being heard, which was why at the end of last evening at Sue and Marv’s Grace had, at the door, responded to more compliments by recalling Cliff and saying suddenly to Maureen, who was at her side of course, "Cliff should have come tonight, you know that?" and Maureen had looked her quite lovingly in the eye and said, ‘That woman who’s driving us home is a creep," and it might have been then that Grace had wanted to be alone and had forgotten to rescue the evening’s tape from Sue’s machine.

  So she’d had to visit Marv this morning, bring it home—and play it and be affected by it. It certainly was not dynamite.

  But the tape was behind her, but she had let it into her day as if it could add to her the next time she made an exhibition of herself, when really she didn’t rehearse, everyone knew she didn’t, and the pleasure of laughing at her own jokes and the gig of growth was like the ultimate private personal high of her going public, she could not quite say all this. Yet knew her life felt edged near a blade that all her words ignored. And someone knew this about her. Who?

  Driven, though, by some words in last night’s talk certain as a mantra, undeniable as your bullshit really could be. Driven back to this storefront in Greenwich Village.

  There was a heavyset, gray-haired hombre in a suit looking into the storefront so close up that the two signs up against the other side of the glass looked out at her as if they’d been missed by him—she saw them while he saw inside.

  He meant to be there. How did she know that? Because he looked into emptiness, and kept looking. Her gaze fell upon his shoulders; they were set back square though he leaned "into" the window. In the corner of her eye the same black dude in the alligator was sloping close, and this gave her a sneaking sense of neighborhood, he seemed to have been on the move along these few streets all day—not prostitute corners (the women turning, looking uptown, downtown, crosstown), especially not this morning and now at two he wasn’t in the vicinity of anyone resembling a hooker, though she had felt somewhere in his "Mama" this morning that he was friendly enough to be a pimp. Yet more close and free. Someone could give her more information, she knew only what she felt.

  The black dude did not speak, passing her, she recognized from somewhere a very blond, short-haired girl all in black standing in a doorway with her boyfriend passing a joint. She had turned to face the storefront window across the street and the heavyset man in the suit who turned and saw her without looking, glanced back into the window, then the other way almost toward Space so she caught a glint like a piece of mirror on him somewhere, and he moved on, paused at the corner, which he reached just as the black guy on Grace’s side of the street reached the corner. And at this point ("At this point’n time," her father once would say) the heavyset man turned directly to look back diagonally across the street at Grace who managed then to be looking at the storefront window but though feeling that metal glint again not seeing anything: so she got this bad sense of being pushed, which was coming really now from the words that she now understood had driven her from her apartment.

  On tape she had been through that unspoken private life of her marriage, "thru" her wife-provider trip, her Freud trip, her still ongoing Art trip as life was art; then, There Was Sex After Marriage or The Resurrection of the Nude Body; then, food trip, body trip, letting go, then breakthroughs a
nd corners turned, through to discovering your hands through carrying a knapsack, your head through letting go of our greatest source of Vanity, the hair—to the great and memorable idea (probably a gift from some dude, but it’s what you do with them) To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it.

  She found in her chest a kink of nausea, a lid afloat on what wasn’t quite there, and she wanted to vomit in the gutter but she couldn’t. ("I’m going to purify my system so that eventually I will be able to eat even shit." Laughs and embarrassment in audiences past and future—belief, wonder, recognition, and conversion.) And then she was glad she had not vomited, because, as she said to herself, suddenly holding back a flash of someone else’s (whose?) degeneration and madness (whose? her ex-husband’s? some future person’s? Cliff’s?), I know that I am feeling pushed and I think I don’t know why but I know it’s what I’m feeling.

  Also, the heavyset man had turned to look back. Well, what’s wrong with women barfing, belching, farting?, they’re not goddesses on pedestals, ancient maidens playing girls’ basketball that allowed you two dribbles before you had to stop running and look around for somebody to pass to with your foot stuck to the floor as if you were paralyzed.

  This time, though, would not have been free vomiting. The cornered feeling that she of all people now felt came not quite only from the taped words that had been around her from morning till night. Her hands were free.

  No, and she knew it all the way back home; knew it bending her silver gear levers (as if she needed the two of them and ten separate speeds) bending them up and down to test the tune-up she had just paid one man for that another much younger man had taken much too long to do probably too quickly; knew it as she pedaled suddenly between pedestrians who crossed against the light; knew it coasting the fenders of a double-parked car as the door opened, raced the light at the wide Twenty-third Street crosstown intersection through a field of potholes; knew it and almost lost it at last near home seeing a woman named Jane who regarded Grace as a celebrity, thin, red-haired, round-shouldered Jane knocking on the glass door of the bank while two small kids ran away from her around the corner of the building—knew it, knew no obstacles to it (except its own sweet time it had taken her to see) what she’d seen well before she’d reached the bike shop (for the second time today) and paid ten dollars and rolled ahead down a sidewalk, no pedals, no feet, a track laid out by the wheels—no: the cornered feeling was in what had been seen before she reached the bike shop: seen when the heavyset gray-haired dude had turned from the storefront: and, apparently not looking across at her but mentally continuing to turn as if he saw her, he moved off down the street: for this was it: his turn. But then, when he came to the corner and looked back, her turn came. And the goddess of good old eye contact had turned her eyes away. There was the empty storefront and she had meant to be here but now she didn’t concentrate.