Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

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.