Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

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 it 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."