"It wasn’t my bike but that’s right I gave it to him. He’s retarded like Paul Revere was retarded. He’s right out there, thinking it through step by step as good as any feminist. He has trouble getting the words together, but you should read his notes. I love him."
"And he works for one of these reader-advisor spiritualist women who has a sister in the same racket up in the Bronx who just happens to be the one who was consulted recently by one of the doctors associated with that clinic Lucille works at because she told me he went because an opera-singer friend of his went to this woman on the advice of that woman Clara, the wife of the economist, who was in your workshop."
"You lost me there, Rima, but anything my people get up to is their responsibility, just like their orgasms, and it’s all orgasm anyhow."
FEMALE SEX PROSTITUTION FOLLOWS MARKET LAW
LIKE ANY OTHER PROSTITUTION EVEN [ . . . ]:
MANY BUYERS AND FEW SELLERS MEAN HIGH PRICES.
"Well, I only wanted to ask about this guy Santee, who’s in your workshop tonight, because you know he calls himself Spence when he’s at the prison talking to that con who didn’t dig your masturbation trip? and Santee when he’s renting your space to the messenger boy for his bike right next door to—if you can believe this—a warehouse theater that’s rehearsing something with music that no one can find out anything about except there’s a sign under the bell that says LET IN or something—LET IN because a piece was torn away—and Lucille’s doctor friend was seen coming out into the street arguing with this guy Santee, and if you can believe it this aura reader in the Bronx whose sister is your bike boy’s employer was seen going in and out of there, too."
Oh yeah, they were putting on some gay opera, Grace thought she had heard, so maybe she could dig opera after all if they only would not take it so seriously but she didn’t like sitting in a theater basically. "Listen, dear," she told Rima, "I know what’s going on, O.K.? Let me see it, when it’s finished, O.K.? No hard feelings. Everyone doing their thing. And by the way, Jimmy Banks isn’t my messenger boy; he’s his own."
The rug installers had not made a sound for minutes. Rima was saying she would be in touch. (Rima was lying that she would be in touch. A double lie—because she would!) Grace was hearing, like a word "We," a hollow noise in her words Glad I know where you’re at—knowing it was potential death she was passing through, and no words for it and no regrets; and through that hollow came such a heat of uncertainty she said the Prostitution Supply/ Demand formula again and there was still a blank in the middle of it—she reached one hand out to grab the cool chin-up bar in the doorway near this hall phone; the blood was going right out of her, but who could see it?, and Goddess-blood coming in at once but the deed was done and she’s hanging by both hands, and the older rug guy, gray of hair, brown of eye, appeared before her to report they had to go finish another job from last night that they didn’t get to do this morning and would be back sometime in the afternoon, and . . . —she doing some chins? Grace let go, she put a hand on his arm: "I got the men’s workshop coming in tonight, I absolutely got to have an operating carpet by six."
But, no problem. And when the younger man with his long fingers and long nails asked what was that workshop, what were they into, Grace thought, Getting it together, but it came out "Dreaming others’ dreams for them right then and there in the group."
"I had one just last night," one man said, but Grace, who thought to say, People have such potential, said, "Dreams of power, dreams of glory, dreams of hang-ups." "Getting it together," the younger man said.
The older man said he had a workshop in his basement, and they all laughed. "Get it on with yourself," Grace said. "That’s right," said the older man.
She heard, Help, but not as a cry for help but filling something up that had been void; and she said, "I think I dreamed a mountain was coming."
"Far out," said the younger man.
"And you know it kept me from knowing it was coming near me and was right in my vicinity."
"What’s in that mountain?" said the older man.
"It was wide and very, very heavy," said Grace.
"That’s gonna end all dreams, man," said the younger man, and the three of them agreed, laughing. "You know, that was it," said Grace; "the mountain coming meant we didn’t have to dream again."
The younger man asked how come all men in that workshop.
"Men have problems with each other, their bodies, their touching capability; you see them walk around and shake hands and they want to keep holding hands, you know, but they’re not in touch with their bodies, not white men anyhow," said Grace.
"Is that you?" the younger asked, pointing at two impeccably shave-cunt-positive headstand shots Cliff had taken of Grace. She beamed. "Yeah, that’s me."
She asked to look at the nails of the younger one, and took his right hand in her hands and smoothed the back and peered through the delicate paleness of the nails to the flesh beneath, and she turned his hand over and stared at the little map printed in each fingertip. He asked her if she could read palms, and she said she could read fingerprints. The older man said, "Every one is different." Grace said, "Yes, I have a different type of fingerprint than yours." "They’ll catch up with you," said the younger man.
She went with them, when they went. They dropped her on a windy street below Union Square, and all the time she knew that at that moment, when she had become Rima and saw what was coming she couldn’t do anything probably about it; but what the fuck, pre-menopausal, why blame it on the "men"? go with that blue mare she had heard of even if it took her into the evening skyline, she knew she must have dreamed it, though she would not say so. But then she knew, though she did not tell the men, that she had not had that dream about the mountain, it had come some other way.
It didn’t matter, but she didn’t believe they were finishing a job left unfinished last night. But she knew she was going where she had been before and knew that the old man and the crazy old beautiful woman would be there like once before, and weeks ago that seemed so little time, littler and littler, that it might have squeezed right down into being a future the goddess gave her a glimpse of.
A block from where she was going and near a shop window crammed with madras skirts and brass implements from which a fat Middle Eastern stud contemplated her, she stopped a gray grunge of a derelict. He didn’t remember her. He put his hand to the bulge of his pocket. She gave him a dollar and wasn’t going to buy him a shave or bring him home for a bath and shampoo included, old female-hormone head of mop hair tangled all over old scarf ace but shagged soft as cashmere. "What are you doing?" he asked as if he had been interrupted. "There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Bleecker Street—A.A., you know? Why don’t you go?" she said but with her own secret pace carrying her past him. "I’m not dressed for it," he said; "you got some haircut, lady."
He frowned sharp blue eyes out of the dirty, dim goat face. How to stay thin on pre-processed carbohydrate. He yawned his awful mouth at her like he’s breathless or laughing his way toward sinking a few teeth in her heart. She holds his arm, his good tweed sleeve. "Goodbye," she says. "Why not," he responds. The thick-faced man in the shop window nods at her, smiling.
So it’s a fairy tale or she’s out of her depth. Yet she never is, so long as she remembers that old higher power; but which one, because Rima is beyond her, and unimportant, but leading her into some emptiness Grace might not be equal to: trivial and terrible and a consequence of all words used so largely in workshop as if for the universe casting for each of us our own goddess-shadow that’s bright as we’re dark (and enough to go around for all our individualized auras)—words used very largely, etcetera, but rather used for home (-is-where-the-heart-is) where politics is rampant in the ripest guilt and manipulation while some few people like Rima she helped now cast her on some asshole other-people’s trip which maybe was real politics, Man-type Washington-smelling power Grace had said was any woman’s right and not corrupt except in the
use that people made of it, but as far from hearth and home meditated-on by Body-Self self-content taking a solitude trip as Power which she knows she sometime has can’t maybe be; and she needs Cliff but is drawn on to the Messenger-Service/Psychic-Consultation storefront because she was living she knew where other crazies’ dream worlds need acting out, though if this be alternative gross feedback then what’s there to be afraid of? Yet, preceded by her eyes—suddenly seeing ahead that Burmese woman with one leg whom she could help who is not a memory of a workshop but a divinity before her with on one side nothing below her coat, and who’s yelling laughing to a beautiful Occidental guy, "Get over here!" yelling the rings off his fingers—the clear power route broached by Body-Self and the exposure of patriarchal poison-gas-type underground warfare centuries old to subjugate sharing of information to sex-negative male sharing of sisters (the world is your igloo) who are asking not to rule the world but only to experiment with self-image, mutual work, and in-your-own-body love, now seems destined to enfold an only seemingly unknown-type corporate-conspiracy-constipation linking like some unreal science Clara’s opera star whom Grace hoped might join a workshop, and the wonderful (newly spelt) Feaulie who from his maximum-security castle-retreat up the Hudson rejected self-sex (so he said) for astral intercourse with some girlfriend in Manhattan Grace bet didn’t know about it which, though astral, was the physical sensation of telepathic beaming back and forth between two screens like an eyeball of light bounding between interferences, roadblocks, men-type misenergized anal glop when what he was really onto though not yet into was in Grace’s opinion (of telepathy) a communicating by whole body (not its mere insane brain) and as telepathy could get boring if you didn’t keep up your end and be getting it on or about to constantly (and you might get droned-out on Maureen from Florida measuring time-of-digestion of hard-boiled free-range eggs against time of usable energy derived from yolk and/or versus white), so the obstacle to keeping the inter-void tele-rap interesting was not just seeing that each center of the whole-body had its own flow thing (forget the chart!) and the intercourse started high and stayed high like where her sculptor friend Raya (with the husband who three times burnt down the house in Westhampton) began in order to work toward the ground but here with Grace there was no ground, but when whole bodies got in touch either liver to liver, lung to lung, shoulder to shoulder, heart-focus to heart-focus (where heart’s specially noise-prone), or, on the other hand, person A’s (say) ear-focus to person B’s (say) lower-back (an interchange where all that the mouth would not at the moment speak and was being heard growing greater but in these scarily narrower and more and more compact zombie-bombies of "I’m your mother if you want and I’ll lose you if I can just get you inside me" and "Your inner thigh smell mellow-yellow and I own it ‘cause the rest of you don’t catch on," drew to the brain-side tiny bone-faces of the earworks to pulse through them such scoopograms out the other side to the other’s miles-distant, territory-distant lower-back anxiety-knots (potential-knot or cartilage-real) as were so fast answered as to have gotten back before the A-messages (not to be mixed up with the Alpha position) were finished (as at toilet) for she knew these B-cushies, launched from knots of tension to blow so big and soft it takes A’s whole-body ear-mouth to receive that kiss-of-breath message, and no buyers and no sellers but not socialism either, nor even whatever one of her uncles in his cups used to think he meant when he said the word "socialism" (she saw him stand up out of his easy chair with his glass balancing in his grip his whole, pelvis-locked body and knew that this was past and not future but the gap in her demand-supply prostitution cliche was to be filled, was to come, and so were many women and men, and so was, apparently, the athletic, anxious woman with the potential ex-husband named Hobby, so clearly testified to), and the larger set of words might as well be voices but she wasn’t at all sure, now that it’s the goddess on her lonesome we give credit for this wonderful new cross-organ system like wind blowing like constant future answering messages before received so long as it ain’t heart-to-heart or pancreas-to-pancreas but cross-organ, and such a high she’s glad to come down off it to cope with Santee-Spence’s business trip with one or both of these south-of-the-border Reader-Advisor Psychic-Consultation bullshit artists, one of them located where the wonderful old couple passed by, as pair-bonded as their separate lunacies might shape.
The storefront hasn’t moved. Grace is nowhere else but here. And Jimmy Banks worked out of here and still does part-time, she knows so he can cover himself and his bike in case mom and the social worker compare notes and determine he’s nuts or a Mongolian hard-on and force early retirement on him and that giant jaw of his, so poor little cock he can’t quite go public. Yet here they really are, the old couple, still together after a century, and she hails them.
"Oh we are ready to begin again," old lady calls, and a broom comes sailing end over end out of the third-floor window of the building downstreet just missing a hill of fruit-and-vegetable trash part of the Korean landscape at the end of a row of garbage cans; a high-chair follows, vegetable to vegetable, thank God baby not in it, and lands on the hill.
"I came," says Grace, with tears in her eyes, as if she weren’t in fear.
"We could see that," said the grizzled old growler-man kindly reporting a fact worth reporting.
"That silly pair, where are they?" the old girl lamented, so beautiful in lavender dress showing beneath old gray coat with animal fur at top.
"I’ll go in and see," said Grace.
She wanted to bless the old lady, the mole on her jaw, the darkish eyebrows, the prominent nose, a woman maybe not mad or senile after all, just eccentric visionary like a million women whose visions don’t get cared for.
The interior is weird. A gypsy bullshit side. And a counter with small file drawer and telephone and coffee container over there. Senora Wing in gold and red and black sitting at a round table with a sign on it saying "Senora Wing." At the counter a guy who must be Turnstein: vain about all that piled kinky hair shaped like a second head. A man with weight of worlds still untapped on his broad, jammed shoulders, he’ll have a hunch before he’s forty, having been over forty since he was a pube to his mom’s dictator-martyr. But also an inset bunk area where these utterly juicy and fascinating androgynes—great Goddess, Grace would like to be nude with them, their coming awake there, they love each other, what is this window-performance shit? Grace is not still out on the sidewalk where high chairs rain down on Korean fruit-and-vegetable landscapes but she would like to be there with the old lady and gentleman, figuring what’s their trip, what’s going on, such a live pair; something going there, for sure, and she almost needs their story but Rima’s bullshit is like a problem at the bank that, you know, won’t go away, though when will the rug guys return?, and thank God the men’s workshop’s tonight.
Turnstein’s hopeless in the flick of the big eyes everywhere. The dumbly, accidentally sculpturesque detouring line of fluorescent light overhead turns this story away under the table or into Grace’s head, she’s aware of her blue peacoat and her purple sweatpants and high alligator boots. Is this place real, and she’s got things to do. And who cares a shit if Rima exposes Grace for a sex-fiend therapist-without-antiobiotic-conceptual portfolio, and yet:
"Yes?" says Senora Wing, looking her up and down, especially down.
"Yeah," Grace says, waiting to get equality by sitting down across from this heavy-duty bull-mother who gets Grace into contact but where’s that wholeheartedness you need in war and love, and the Goddess, where’s she?, Grace knows she’s into a tricky transaction if not dreadlocked to the ultimate stranglehold. A broad-shouldered man with stud-gray hair should walk in here now, but won’t—but where’s he froml, he’ll come to her, he is in this someplace, and the Santee character, not big but aura-affirmative, something long-distance about that dude, the fringe jacket, get it off him tonight, he might not just be inside: so, is a very large number being done on her for bucks, for expose city? for some higher pow
er?—but all she ever wanted (poor little Gracie!) was ... a blank that cuts in like before, and she’s kidding self (though not Body-Self) kidding herself she knew just what she wanted with workshop celebrity cum taking economic and spiritual responsibility for her life.
WING: I knew you would co’m. What is yr name?
GRACE: Are you a sister?
WING: Yr name, madam?
GRACE: Grace Kimball. Are you a sister, dear?
WING: We find out. Cross my palm with your forearm.
GRACE: (Doing so, so she leans close to Wing) Hey, far out: cross-limb communication. What’s going on, Wing?
WING: You came from the West, some years ago, and you are looking for something.
GRACE: What can it be?
WING: Your friendship vein is your strong suit. You have many women friends from many lands. They tell you their lives. This can be risky for you. You are looking for something they have not told you.
GRACE: You are looking for something they have not told you. You have a sister. So you are one.
WING: (Smiling grimly—definitely not non-orgasmic, but . . .) No, Madam Kimball, you are looking for something they have not yet told you.
GRACE: No, you are, but you’re getting mad and I’m your client. Tell me more, Senora. We’re sisters somewhere down the road.
WING: You have a gentleman coming to see you soon who knows people you know, and you must beware of him because if you let him in on your knowledge of a person from across the water that you know, he may use this so that others will come down on you very hard.
GRACE: Is that a promise, honey?
WING: (Seriously ignoring Grace s implicit acknowledgment of threat) You came from the West with Indian blood in your veins. You have a father who have a problem. Your mother plays musical instrument. You worry ‘bout her. You had a dark man in your life and he went away someplace I am not sure—change arm (points to Grace* s other forearm, which Wing now receives in her palm)—Long Island, he lives there now, I think—never mind. There is another man but he is married to a woman you know and you hear about him but you need to hear more, because he is in danger and you could help him if you get his wife to tell if he is planning a trip—
Women and Men Page 150
