Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Rape? I thought, participating in some distant part of my body. And imagined that Maureen was taking too far some trial balloon raised by our friend like energy levels of a roomful of loving friends rapping or massaging — for that woman was my friend, too.

Rape? I thought. "Rape?" I said; "I don’t believe it." "You’re thinking just like a man, Luce," said Maureen. "Thanks," I said; "wouldn’t our friend take that as a compliment?" Maureen blew up at me in some confusion and left me where I stood — not really on two feet the way you were supposed to stand, rather slouching a little on one hip, but frozen in my maturity by her exit.

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.