Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Swings are anti-acquisitive. No one belongs to another person, O.K.? That’s why you need a space that isn’t bound by furniture. But I think we should hang up before we start a new interview."

She felt the woman’s fighting breath. "You sound like that woman in your workshop who’ll insist on two minutes of silence in the middle of a conversation? — it’s embarrassing."

"I’m ready for two lifetimes."

She had to speak to these two dudes laying the carpet, only to them; but Rima went on, There was one other thing. . and Grace knew its dynamic, which was all that mattered; she was braced for its content.

In the next room the hammer duet stopped and energy rose into her ears like a heat binding the beats ("One more thing, Grace. .") of some future-size bongo or possible flashing of the menopausal current she was readying herself one day to ride: a new trip, after all, maybe on a blue mare by some reports ridden by her incarnation as that Navachoor love-addict energy-scientist hero of the buffalo tongue’s power, in the finest dried portions, to fuel change or so a number of people divined, including the Prince himself, who had grown in her heart since Lincoln had touched a power or a story in Grace that had been there all right, native Paiute as she surely was at least a small fraction to her fingertips or, the label came out of nowhere if there were such a place, Far-Orient Mountain-Tribe, air-expressed (as fast as credit-card payments by telepathy get through the mails) into her (no matter the distance) just as fast as her own sixteenth or thirty-second blood from the southwest territories of old America or other continents in her flesh — and as fast as Rima’s real reason for calling from behind the (of course closed) John door of Rima’s straining little spirit that was getting it on with the business trip, give her credit.

"Maureen said you ran a workshop at a prison; is that true?"

"Oh it’s very true, it’s so true — it was probably an all-time organic high."

"Orgasmic, Grace?"

"Money in the bank, dear."

"You had trouble with one inmate?"

"Yeah, yeah — one guy; don’t we all."

"Yes I knew it was a men’s prison. One wouldn’t necessarily assume it was, I mean in your case; I mean, just hearing ‘prison.’ "

"I like men, too. I just believe in segregation for the time being."

"I gather it was a masturbation workshop."

"We gathered information and exchanged it. We rapped. You can imagine all this from your experience. I told them weeping is like sex. You know those guys can’t put a curtain up, so they gotta go public. Energy level up to the rafters, Rima."

"I don’t really know what that means, Grace. But it was through Clara, right? — the wife of that Allende economist?"

"That which economist? Maureen didn’t tell you that. I found out I knew the legal liaison woman who goes up there twice a week; she got me in."

"How did you manage a masturbation workshop at a men’s prison?"

"We rapped. We exchanged information. It was beautiful."

"Who’d you have trouble with?"

"We reached an understanding."

"Thanks, Grace. I’ll call you about the workshop next week."

"Do what you want to do, Rima."

"I always do, Grace. Oh, one other thing…"

Grace was glad, oh so glad, of the men’s experimental starting. She would handle it. It would be great. It would be tense and explosive. It would be strangely loving. Some of them didn’t know how to masturbate. They stroked too far down the shaft. And some didn’t know how to brush their teeth correctly. She wanted to say to Rima — but then did, "Sometimes I can’t stand women. Did you ever take that trip?"

"I don’t get the vibes on your ‘sometimes,’ Grace. But, you know, my mother—"

"I can’t hear about mothers and daughters any more. Oh shit, baby, you’re not all women." She was getting everybody else’s shit short-waved direct but not her own.

"What do you mean, I'm not?"

"Don’t quote me, Rima, I’m experimenting. That’s where the surprises are. Women never had the chance to just experiment."

The hammering resumed. Energy breathed away into the clammy phone, and what came back? Someday she’s gon’ be not there for some of these people.

"One other thing, Grace…"

A fat woman loomed — perhaps an obsession of some of Grace’s workshop daughters — and Grace had encouraged this fat woman to take off her clothes and the woman said she never took her clothes off even in front of the television, which she watched four weekday afternoons, and had long ago given up expecting her antique-dealer husband to tell her she was fat.

":. . I hesitated to ask. ." said Rima, and it was part-Grace, part-Rima clogging the phone line.

A thin, athletic woman Grace knew was an as yet unknown woman who in future would come for help (validation, support), sat cross-legged and leaned toward a great dark-peach-colored goddess-candle and put a hand on her Romantics Anonymous tummy and groaned and cried like the gripe was in her gut; she said she rotated upside down sometimes, dizzy like pre-meno-pause, but she’s too young — and told Grace O.K. she had a smashing job now and was split from her documentary-director husband who needed her but needed her to be there because otherwise he couldn’t ignore her and she said Grace had helped her see that his way of having her was inside him, inside his chest, so he and she would live together but all she — God, all she could seem to want was to go back, she’d even had a fine, upstanding lover to give her a sendoff back to Hobby, her still not legally separated ol’ man (ouch, ouch, ouch) — so this must be the first time she had come to Grace. Had Grace forgotten her? Was she to come?—

"… one other thing," Rima was continuing, "since I have you here on the phone and you’re going to run for President: you gave your bike to a black kid, right? a messenger? autistic? retarded?—"

"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."