Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

You go in for lots of shots? she said.

This is hard to describe, he said — it’s so beautifully strong.

And with that, he dropped his hands and opened his eyes to find the TV screen was off.

The girl unbent herself and went full length flat on her stomach and ran a finger over the hair above his knee. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or intrigued, she said. You’re not hearing the sound, you know. At least not for the past couple of minutes when you said it was on. Because the TV set’s been off, man.

Maybe so, but the other thing goes on.

It touched you. Like someone else. I saw it. It had a beautiful effect on you. I felt it touch you. You had your hands over your eyes but I saw you smile as if you saw ahead.

What did it feel like? he said.

Well, ripples. Ripples in the skin.

I thought it was you, he said.

Maybe so, she said, but it wasn’t what I meant in the beginning. I meant the ultrasonic ray from this particular tube in the TV. That’s what it is, that’s exactly what it is. My dog tilted his head when he heard it. He tilted his head and he yawned like a silent whine. Because he heard what was coming out. It’s the ultrasonic ray — you can measure it if you have the right equipment. I didn’t want to hit you with that until you’d actually heard the sound. You know, the actual sound.

He wanted her to stay.

He said, I want you to stay the night.

She said, I was going to ask.

And he heard her almost say, I didn’t have to say that — why did I?

He slipped away for a moment — she stayed where she was — he went to the wall socket behind the TV. He looked back at her. Her finger seemed suspended, waiting for at least some part of him to return; and from the darkened soles and heels of her feet up the crease between her calves and thighs that were neatly together like a diver’s to her shoulder blades he felt in his fingertips a trace leading him to a knot of tension where her neck joined her shoulder on one side.

Look, he said — and, still on her stomach, she turned her head so her profile was toward him. Even when a color set’s completely off, the plug in the socket keeps a small amount of current going in. They tell you it’s better for the set than unplugging it.

She went up on one elbow, her cheek in her hand, so her profile was tilted, and without the light of the TV screen he barely discerned the flare at the corner of her mouth.

Unplug it, she said, but he couldn’t tell if he heard humor in her voice.

He reached down, pausing to glance at his body. His thumb and forefinger found the plug. But then he didn’t unplug the set. The joke could have been clumsy. She curved around suddenly, she lay on her outstretched arm.

He was already with her. He knew she felt that.

It came after her at the end of a day and found her alone on her great uninterrupted carpet in her fully mirrored Body Room, and it was not the story of her life because not even jerking other people off was that. She was beautiful inside out, it was still turning into her, it had a handle on her, it came after her, but its sound no matter how far or near was unvarying. Plus, this could be all hers in a matter of minutes — forget man-hours — one long healing woman-minute of hand-made universe controlling your own rebirth if we’re talking birth control. It found her smiling lengthwise along her tongue, and Grace knew all this would happen — it was why she did it again.

It was the surprise it had like juicing fifteen hundred not only women in a great American auditorium. Don’t need a degree to fuck a university audience if there is light in their eyes, for they will give it back. Never mind that they came into the hall non -laughingly, multiplying before her offstage eyes into a fixed number of seats until they had to stand. SRO, the woman standing offstage with her had said. SRO? Standing Room Only.

Far Out, Grace said, but the woman said, "They’ve come to find out what is at stake." And some came two by two ready to invent their own lives and love themselves the last quarter of the century. Had the woman who had said it that day not known what was at stake, or wondered if Grace knew?

But here in her own Body Room on her own carpet this Self-Sex her term for it is to be shared in friendship/love with women and men alike: fallen back-on for back-up sex-respite or as trip in itself (words heard coming back to her — she let her stormtrooper assistant her own problem-child Maureen tell it): the old energy source retrieved each day I night continuum the holy joke let us be grateful for, coming back at will after you hit a temporary downer and think, You Lose. But no: it came in sheaves sprouting corn (ready for cream-canning to line the tempered bottom of her own faraway mother’s once-upon-a-time sex-negative orbiting cornbread skillet). And came in cabbage fringe and in a milk lining for Grace’s fingertip-spread heart of thanks. Because this chamber of walls mirroring candle-dusk could see. Because places could. And it would be a score of joy, scoring yourself, so she could step aside from her own body and let the recycled nudes coming out of her voice if not s’much from her workshop have the running of the world coming off Beef, Dairy, you name it, Caffeine, Grass, Sugar, Romance: she was there for them when they needed her and never forgot a first name, while if a friendship turned out to run its course quickly why that was how it was programmed: they came into her life and were gone along their own curve ‘way-way and she meanwhile in addition to the workshops ran the farthest-out or most energy-replenishing fuck in town, for the Goddess in her went thirty-five forty minutes up there at the peak, a speed of (it came to her) light far out but reversed so the actual peak wasn’t speed, it was slowness reaching where maybe no one had been: anyway, more than forty — for what was forty? — forty was the days some dude fasted for his pleasure: our dude, and more sex to him if he could handle it, what sexual energy, what crinkly hair (maybe he needed to come off hair like the rest of us, maybe that’s what was at stake, and Grace would feel her way back two thousand mere man-years to make a home visit, give him a scalp rub to grind off a few tight, glossy coils of that hair if he wasn’t out on the campaign trail, but), what spunk, what a whole hard-on of a dark person, out-of-the-closet next thing they oooh crucify ya.

His body’s cleansing high got Jesus what he went for, which was to run the show: and so as it came after her, she knew that what came after would find her without quite looking for her in its own sweet-yeasty time, the goddess being taken and by force that was her own feed-back that was all over up till the last converging grips, helping self or friend find self or just old words to get truth said. Or fucking self or friend.

Then it was still all over but out of sight and words, which were bullshit always.

Her full, shoppingcart day was coming to the point, and so now the hall phone going once crawled up her shin so far as her knee (the knee inside which her mother what a great talker sat in a faraway kitchen) and it could be anyone phoning — that’s what we love about the phone! — but Grace would sense who it was, it was her own baby’s-breath stormtrooper Maureen who’s hearing not Grace’s voice but "Grace Kimball residence" from the sassy black sister at the phone answering service): which can only make more abundant the bend of the approaching cosmos coming to her point so she has her way with (thankfully) herself, her fingers, her whole hand; and ‘twan’t her 1976 late-model Danish phone-shower-head dial a fine-tine/hard-prickle for there’s no privacy like a one-on-one shower, and ‘twan’t a flow of magenta from her felt pen into the big fat sketchbook she wrote things down in just like when she drew knuckles and muscles, cunts and cheekbones or the latest dream: so she also’s finding out how her unconscious is doing — how ya’ do’m’l —and ‘twan’t her cassette-recorder mike (neat smooth black-cockhead princess mike) she had in her hand.