Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  For a few months, in those days of ‘76, the answer to the "power" question was money. As it still is, a year later, and was in the days of those great castle-women of Europe Maria di so-and-so, Marguerite of somewhere, who handled such power in their hilltown bastions with or without a consort that I would have worked for them in a minute, and gave orders with an ease that Maureen’s Leader might approach only with humor, standing in her fantastic plastic boots at the advent of a taxi and ordering Maureen and Cliff—a curious assistant he was—to get into the cab first. Then the answer to the power question proved in other days quite steadily to be "Self-sexual," where even without a job’s money or success (but don’t assume you ever have one without the other) you can work on your body and be whatever you want to be sexually and find that the goddess was always in you (even, as I pointed out to Maureen, in that part of you that persisted in not knowing the goddess was inside you because where you’re coming from is very important to where you wind up) (No, said Maureen, that was not correct because to dwell in where you came from was to get back into the past, and who cares if you thought when you were a kid that you didn’t have dreams when you were asleep?) (To which I responded that I didn’t know where that was coming from but . . .) (Maureen said it was some friend of a friend of our mutual friend the Leader, who had told Maureen that she was convinced it was possible not to dream asleep but that something had to give somewhere and this man might have unusual powers flowing out of or into the void of those dreamless nights. Some such bull, I didn’t say.) And yet a lot of outside information was making life quite interesting in those days of late ‘76, early ‘77 when I found myself loving Maureen, wanting to hold her, to rock her (which she liked), knowing though that I must also not lose myself in this love for her, loving the charm in how she talked the helpful, oversimplified dogmas of her guide, whose own attitudes seemed less extreme—she sometimes liked men, I mean; she sometimes shrugged off her own rigidity about blocking the transverse colon and blocking the labyrinthine (my word) progress of the goddess in the circulation of the soul, or about the locked pelvis vis a vis our capacity to manufacture self-negative meat acids within our systems even when we were good, upstanding vegetarians (though fruitarians—interestingly the position Maureen arrived at just before her departure—was going too far). Information, did I say? Its flow among us larded surely by mystical fictions put us more on the lookout for it. But the Leader, herself by various accounts one-sixteenth, one-eighth, and one-thirty-second Indian, had a list of women chiefs back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a goddess known as Our Grandmother who really had created the universe and had told the winds to treat Indian women as if they were the winds’ sisters and if the women pulled their skirts up to their waists to frighten clouds away, the winds must not stare at their naked nethers; but the Leader had once humorously told of dreaming a reincarnation of herself as a Navachoor Prince who had actually met Our Grandmother and dickered with her about obtaining for men a standing with her like that she accorded women.

  But what was happening? There was the Leader’s career, shifting from week to week, not so much in those public appearances and visiting workshops where she helped women to understand that they were not isolated or freaky or ugly or mean in their needs, as in projects and ideas that came and went, an article in a magazine here, a newspaper piece there, and of course misrepresentation as a sex fiend or female segregationist or male impersonator by the mainly male press even when the piece was by a woman. Shit, she liked people.

  And Maureen? Why what was the matter with me that I fell in love with that girl? that legionnaire, that nutritional scientist of the Great Change (let’s not say "revolution" because the corporations go on pricing us up, up, into the echelons of their abstract intuition of American futures), that handmaiden of the goddess whom I of all people (because the Leader was not available that day) had taken to the clinic where she had her first abortion (feminist in clarity as in its experimental source) and it went from her with that distantly gross plummet of flush, that explosion so that any person, man or woman, might be afraid, hearing it from the next room—as if something else got sucked out, too, like your last ovary or your Little (i.e., lower) Heart or five laps of lower intestine, sucked out maybe more subtly as in a promising new trick of cataract removal, and as scientifically as Maureen had experimentally concentrated, at a swing, on controlling the accessibility of her ovaries by pleasure-committed breath-transcendence or a self-induced temporary infertility, pill-free of course but no diaphragm, which is not for beginners! Maureen? She left the bank, of course.

  And she left her apartment (clean break, not even a legal sublet) in Greenwich Village, and now when you saw her in the elevator she was traveling to or from her own apartment, often from it to her Leader’s with a large cloudy Mason jar or a wooden salad bowl home-covered with foil. She had given her Leader all her savings becoming thereby for her sake a partner (I hoped in enterprises both multiplying and amalgamating under the Leader’s name— therapeutic, media, even clothing).

  Maureen became a leader of the building when the landlord had dragged his heels. There were interesting chips of the upper brick facing that had begun to fall down onto the street and sidewalk first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon and a newspaperman I had known some years before who had moved back into the building was reported to have told a fellow tenant who announced classical music on a small but surviving radio station who had told it to his wife’s lawyer also living in the building who had told it to his wife, who told it to me in the incredible basement laundry (with its underwear-shredding dryer) and back to its original source (who told my source that it was better than what he had originally said) that the Housing Authority (postponing for a week its inspection visit) agreed with the landlord in the theory that somewhere between those upper facings of the building and the sidewalk that was in danger of coming up to meet the aforementioned chips the chips had become arrested in mid-air and would continue so until the landlord received word of Housing Authority action on the tenant report.

  Also, the boiler had gushed oil, driving into the normally foodless laundry room two or three (unclear) rats the size of large weasels. Maureen held a meeting, then another. I loved her. There were deranged ladies who had so little surface left in their anciently rent-controlled apartments they had to live on their upper walls or on the ceiling, and they came to one meeting or the other to ascertain whether they could be evicted, and one out of four of them was willing to withhold rent. Maureen retained a young woman lawyer we both knew who would not take a fee at first; and Maureen established an escrow account at the nearest branch of the giant bank until recently her employer. She had about one quarter of the tenants with her.

  Her Leader was for buying the building and turning it into a self-healing, self-supporting community; but the building was not for sale. The Leader promised that the following month she would begin withholding rent but had heard that our landlord had introduced rats into another building on the other side of town to get rid of his almost exclusively elderly female tenants. The radio announcer’s wife’s lawyer, commenting on the radio announcer’s "rats the size of weasels," said weasels were what we needed since they ate rats. A leak days after a snowstorm descended down one "line" of apartments from the top floor to Maureen’s and stained a magically colored Near Eastern woven mat during the night and when her bathroom ceiling came down one afternoon while as if by the same token five tenant-complaint calls from unemployed elderly female tenants were recorded on her machine all while she was out picking up four crates of small, dark, non-toxically grown oranges shipped from her native Florida to an organic outlet practically next door to an Italian restaurant where our landlord was a known patron, she handed over the chairpersonhood to a young man with a rare dog on the second floor who checked security twice each night and had found the doorman once across the street at a deli waiting for a western sandwich; and Maureen withdrew her escrow rent money and spent i
t on redecorating her bathroom and withdrew from the tenants’ association at a time, incidentally, when a real-estate broker living in the building had found out that two, maybe three apartments had been sold to their mainly absentee tenants through some loophole that did not entail co-oping the building or not as yet, and one of these new owners worked at a foundation housed uptown in a French Renaissance delight crazily encrusted with terra cotta mazes. Maureen was up front about all these things that she did.

  As about organizing the messengers: When this unofficial union proved to include only one woman, a Cambodian aristocrat who did secretarial work on a hot typewriter and other business in a mainland Chinese haberdashery surprisingly near the aforementioned foundation plus her qualifying messenger stints on a hot bike that was less of a liability since serial numbers don’t function in the bike-turnover world, Maureen wished the group well and excused herself just at a time when the original inspiration for this group of primarily retarded messengers, a black kid with amazingly large, out-of-control teeth, had discovered that he was being exploited by a man who had infiltrated a small theater group because he believed it was a front for some bloody escapade to do with Latin American politics and the clandestine history of a Middle Atlantic newspaper family, and the black kid had tried in vain to get free of this entrepreneur, and did not speak easily but communicated with Maureen.

  The night she ended her affiliation with the messenger union, she and I sat all evening in my apartment. I was happy knowing she was content to sit and read. I looked up from my chair and she did not raise her eyes. She was reading, not meditating. And it was not just the book that kept her from looking up to meet my look. It was me. And at first I thought it was a me she took for granted as a sometime lover. Then I guessed she did not look up because she did not have quite enough faith that I had become the person she loved. I did not believe, like her Leader, that most men secretly wanted to wear garter belts and black silk stockings; I did not believe that the sins of the Catholic Church stained the glass at Chartres, I did not believe Saint Joan less or more a woman for having waged war, I did not believe that medication was a global male-doctors’ plot, I did not believe that women ejaculate the same way as men, or that a fruitarian diet lengthens a man’s ejaculatory range if range is what one is after; I did not believe there was a Goddess but I did not say so to Maureen, in whose very body and feelings I sometimes felt myself so firmly lodged that I couldn’t tell if I was stalled in some place of romance where to stay is to be nowhere, or was doubled or reincarnate in her, which I also would not announce to her except as an impersonal principle, and she agreed, convinced the miracle was open to anyone who could participate in the Goddess. Freedom is not sobriety but sobriety is freedom, the Leader had said after an all-night body-trip with parallel—in her "case" multiple—orgasms for both but without penetration by her one-on-one visitor, an Irish monk touring American population centers in quest of funds for his remote foundation, trouble-shooting too: sobriety itself might mean no highs; but booze went down not up, and there were potential highs non-addictive-related, said the I have to confess luminous and warm-hearted Leader to the workshop-ready Eirean—so the Irish certainly weren’t wrong . . .

  There came a night when Maureen and I were supposed to get together. I was so near her now that I entertained some insane idea of moving out of this building that I basically loved. I had sensed the day before that Maureen could call our evening off. I had so braced myself for this that, neck-knots, instep-tension, pelvic lock-cramp aside, I was worse off than if I had been a militant Lesbian nonetheless doctrinally devoted to no-attachments, which would be pretty hard in an already terrible world.

  I had thought there was something between us beside the void. Within twenty-four hours it was distance.

  No response from Maureen’s apartment. Phone, doorbell, house phone (though I did not tell the doorman who it was I was buzzing).

  Meditation? I wondered. Something gentle. An unplanned fast. A sprouts study weekend in Massachusetts with the Leader. But I received a call, then, from the Leader, which wasn’t too strange but was part of what had happened.

  They had become too close, she said. Maureen had turned our mutual friend into a priestess or mother; and separation was indicated. She sat near me, her legs crossed, a sheen of body glow lifting free from the curves of her excellent skin, the eyes friendly and attentive to me while it was she who spoke. Maureen had bonded. She had to go. She knew it but had to be told. She nodded and nodded, the Leader reported, all through the announcement, nodded and expressionlessly wept. There is a gap here—but who is it between? It must have been sad for both of them. She had been a sister-lover, then a mother to Maureen, who would always go purely too far like a scientist doing basic research around and around the clock. The Leader had been all things to Maureen, with whom she didn’t like to, literally, "sleep" though spent many a night with Maureen in rap, illuminated by the goddess and her messages to all who had learned true history: which is feeling repressed underground to flow in circles or into others unknown to it or them maybe; the repression of feeling, hence fact, and invitation to addiction, hence imprisoning fantasy—a patterning of habit (the words mine or doubtless someone else’s maybe—do I not make sense?—or not originally anyone’s)—the escape from which (I’m boring myself) is both the periodic revolution in your life or, for the Leader, "hopefully" to find a habit of constant self-loving evolution (her words!) that is pattern each time until you almost see it, and right then it shifts: a drug analogy, I thought, as if the Leader were addicted to Change.

  Maureen, I saw, had opened the door thinking to adventure into some earth of science, of agriculture, of healing; but at the last moment she turned around (if not back) for Grace Kimball, our Leader, a pretty well-known name by now. But she was asking—as she never asked of me—only to see if Grace was still there. And she was. And in the same apartment that she and her ex had lived in until once upon a time she "left" him. And she is there, when Maureen turns. There like light. There, though, only to then say to the poor follower who thought she sought power, "I am not here for you. You were going out the door. That’s good, dear. Really good."

  "I gave you what you were able to ask for," Maureen said one time— because (as I tried to tell her) I prefer body or deeper signals to voicing my heart-blood’s asking via the short-order sex-by-menu that turned honest lust into a strange fashion of honesty. "You gave me what you could," she concluded. As if I were that person she said the same thing to in a brownstone in Brooklyn when he invited her over to view from his windows those national celebrations in the harbor during the late summer of last year.

  But I had found with her that I needn’t be a cynic, and not even after she left me, having probably never been with me; for I had not even thought to be sour about prospects, life, and so forth, while I was for a period of months turned toward Maureen. What did the poet say?—Grace and her crowd do not trust old or new books of passion, they make up their own something or other. And what did the poet say? I know he was not my lover but I know some words of his all over me yet even as I set out to say them and am struck dumb and can only point to them because I have really and truly (believe me) come up to those words but as I say can only point to them, meeting them, and having made them mine, say them in my own way: so whatever I do I have the look of leaving. Living is leaving. For work, say!

  Is that too sad to be anything but romantic-addictive-ultimately-sex-negative? I knew a prostitute who would not name her price ever, but would take what she was given. Is that sex negative or sex revolutionary? S.N.? or S.R.? Abbreviations recall the hospital newsletter I create each month.

  I decided on a certain new type of workshop Grace Kimball told me she was starting. She said she would go back to the other workshops with regret because Maureen had helped her so much and often taken them on her own, though some of the women said it wasn’t quite the same.

  Maureen had a mother in Florida. A father, too. She went to Flo
rida and lived at about equal distances from her parents and from her brother, who was the most agreeable soul in the world and would sit with Maureen for hours, or do a yoga trip; they explored enema therapy by the book, by the machine (which might be like a Hollywood chocolate factory for all I know), and by life/sibling experience, and I heard through Grace that for a while it was nip and tuck whether Maureen would go into enema professionally instead of that other amazing land of foot massage that made even me a believer right down to my toes through one of which a Japanese "sister" once divined that I had had a persistent kidney infection when I was younger and more vulnerable.

  Maureen returned to me by parcel post my notebook, with all these things in it.

  I get abstract and vague. I didn’t so much find something out as found myself in something. Well, there’s a lot of this kind of talk going around these days and I kept it to myself.

  You can’t give me what I want, she said in the honesty of these recent days; but that’s O.K., Luce, she said.

  What I never knew quite well enough, even in the honesty of our arms freely finding each other, was that her need was not for what she said: and my desire, if it had passed into her life easily and received, would have given her what she hadn’t known she wanted or was it at that time a turning?— some slight curve of a long turning from that life she had found away from the mother who ruled without ruling and, I gathered but only from Grace’s hearsay, did not much love Maureen but did not let her know; and turning from her life in New York—which had ensued upon her tour with the Peace Corps in South America in the late sixties (never talked about except as wonderful harsh landscape, and only if I insisted on Maureen sharing some information beyond the foreground of her abandoned banking "trip").