Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"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 Florida 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").

But her love for Grace became the power behind what we would discuss. And I could get puzzled — even by what Maureen said about my notebook when she sent it back — puzzled by having seen the Leader she followed in her and through her, when in fact that very visible Leader was between us: until I saw that it was me blocking the view and the view was of my future. And in the middle of one night, with Maureen’s words working in me, working away by dark, I found myself imagining that man they had known of who was supposed to have never had a night dream (what was his name? it went unmentioned), while Grace advanced the theory — but I was not awake. . I was dreaming pretty accurately stuff I already knew.

I had this letter from her. Not worth salvaging. From Maureen, that is.

I had a dream of being a merman. And in it that man reappeared, who does not dream, and I thought I once knew him or his wife. I woke knowing it to be true. And that dreams are what they lead to.

Of my notebook, or the part I asked her to read, knowing she would read only that, she said, "Luce, you could see both sides. The man’s and the woman’s. In fact a million sides sometimes. That’s a problem."

It occurred to me that she might not have read even what I had asked.

I pointed out to Grace Kimball that in wanting to be a "top," a business, a (God! a) vagina that is much more than a subtly hooded cock and its patient balls (lower extension of, i.e., shape of, outer lips), and its claims to ejaculate, and in sashaying around like a boy trying to look like a man or whatever I am trying to say, Grace was further confusing what a woman is. She said I might be right, but so what? she had seriously considered how she might have a child by Maureen. She laughed, then, and disappeared into her kitchen to bring me some tea. She was talking about the neglected asshole and how she would like to raise its status. She said she felt more comfortable with some gay men than some women she could name. She had a habit of listening that made you feel she was right there with you — closer still — beyond closeness — and eyes much warmer than all her absolute talk re: eye contact could do for me. She emerged with my mug, her warm, wonderfully healthy body somehow covered, though not by the mug and not by sweatpants or sporty camisole, not a stitch. ("Mother provider, hostess house-mouse, that’s me!") She asked if I wanted to go into business with her. The phone was ringing and it was her mother hundreds of miles away, oh more than a thousand, who was speaking to Grace again after not speaking for several chilly months — and they were laughing and hollering — at least I assume her mother was, too.

One day, Maureen phoned me and I knew who it was before I stepped free of the bluejeans I was getting out of when the phone rang; and knowing who it was, I knew I would never be bloodless and so never without whatever was in that bloodstream, whatever smoke or worm or liquor of future. And taking the receiver and drawing it close to my ear and my mouth, I realized that I didn’t see Maureen as a victim any more.

The black voices did not dispossess her in the slightest—

THE LEADER INCULCATES IN THE TROOPS FIRST AND LAST

SELF-RELIANCE WITHOUT WHICH THERE IS NO HIERARCHY

and she felt them part of her home, their shoes, the bluejeans of the younger, darker one, the dark green chinos (near prison-green) of the older, lighter one, their friendly beef-acid bellies, the lumbering low-energy-seeming vibe-rest of their courtesy across her Body-Room bending to rip up the old carpet, lay out the new: lay it out so snug at the edges that the carpet in its slight abundant rise at the margins had to be restrained — tamped down — before the tacks were hammered in, along the mirrored wall, the bookcase wall (gotta unload them books, written by men, women, some who didn’t know who they were), the window wall, the sculpture-and-photo wall, all this behind her as she passed under the silver chinning bar to answer the hall phone as friendly as, well, her own mother alive in her and well also in the middle of America surrounded by furniture and sheet music, bottoms-up Revere Ware and a whole family of table lamps, but having at last some Pleasure. But this call wasn’t her mother, yet wasn’t just the person who’s talking.