Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

living off his wife, who cooks him gourmet animal protein, picks up the baby from sitter’s on way home, where Dave’s been making all-day sculptures he doesn’t sell that look like lungs, hearts, enlarged livers

and my kidneys after a motorcycle trip to the Finger Lakes, take your lumps and if they harden on you shrink them with concentration, while last year Dave Shea was of some "school" making mockups 3-D diagrams of vertical traffic Cliff calls inhuman. I agree this Dave is spoiled for the mid-1970s, though recalls according to Cliff natural childbirth like it was his own. I think, Why does Cliff get his ass in a splint, but he doesn’t pick up on my thought, must have been bent right around it by the kind goddess who knows when you’re not ready. Historian always more feminist than me, he’s not feeling so suicidal now: says isn’t it great Dave was there when his kid was born. But where was Dave afterward? I asked and Cliff agrees; yet, "Male plot to take over world," he chuckles, not so sure what he himself meant — did he mean—

— give yourself back your head, a dayful of head coming to a point of nothing but Love / Power cluster: which drew in along her Black-Dude-street-walk an interesting Old Couple, and not married, she was certain, but deep — and they had a story— what is your trip? (Grace went), projecting her mind to new people — so different from each other, he skin-and-bonesy, ravaged, rangy, the old lady so pretty (and nuts) and charming, and old —not cunt-old and maybe not cunt-negative, the beat-up man still in his late sixties gaunt-pocked navigating irritably/kindly along the sidewalk this soft-faced, half-gone old lady. But they had given each other their looks right before Grace’s eyes, like the light off each other’s face and you felt they were not on fixed income but into some other trip.

And later — later — not last, though; never never last (for there’s your sound system, and there’s always the phone. .

— which now rings as Grace thinks it — to be picked up by the dark-cream of the Answering Hand somewhere in the decentralized system covering the city). .

— but later —after the businessman who kept vowing to put a cunt-positive drawing of Grace’s into T-shirt production but declined the bunch of orgy-swarming fruits in purples, silvery reds, and persimmon orange as too artistic, a fat-sounding man — and after a visiting sociologist (dear Sketchbook) on a week’s whirlwind from Denmark ("advanced sexual company hopefully") whom she will describe to

Maureen with her baby’s breath (cut flower) problem which is all Maureen’s got left to come off of except the one biggie, Grace herself though some days Maureen is turning carrot-orange — yet can compare notes at two in the morning like no one anywhere, scientifically, softly, reporting she has bettered her orgasm endurance record earlier in the day only to recall from years ago being home in bed with flu — whereas in Denmark shit they do what we do here, it’s obvious from the Dane, the sociologist very interestingly bald shave-cut with three lateral strips of shortcut sprouting — a man with three degrees

was studying American group sex in relation to and as support capability for the bottom-line pair bonding of couples that attended the group swings: which Grace is phasing out for a primarily open group-future while this sociologist-drone with a long but foreignly supple hard-on he was coaxed to bring forth so they could compare hard-ons still turned her on to herself in terms of historic fantastic break-through (gotta hand it to him) for he, after an international pause, consented to pay a fifty-dollar-an-hour consulting fee Grace spontaneously heard herself request because who was this guy to use her time for his thing, so that when she put his cum-towel in the hamper and later powered her Electrolux over the field of her mirror-to-mirror carpet she found herself unexpectedly in the sweet, not-overweight but posture-impeded/shoulders-forward body the actual body of the Danish sociologist’s wife houseworking a minimum half day pausing while dusting piano to peruse a Forum her husband left on top of his opera album, the night before he left amply equipped with traveler’s checks in denominations of twenty and fifty to visit the equally vacuumatic Kimball.

And after the successful Kate last night with the stark face of a sailor and diesel dedication to the seriousness beyond power which is political seriousness just as the power is political power — all in pursuit of being Grace’s assistant, when the job was, for the immediate present, taken unofficially by Baby daughter of the revolution Maureen who says that she is paid "in kind," when Kate, smiling under the smoked glasses, asked what she thought the job was worth; and after dear smart Cliff, old old friend Cliff but don’t say "old" (who is so full of knowledge who wishes through it all to serve her even were she to try to be First Lady but political beyond politics), with some classical music behind him who had to hear about last night (having offered to chauffeur her out to the Long Island appearance but reneged) and had a buyer (just like a coincidence) for his old white car and Cliff now wanted to have dinner at their Jap place because he was suicidal (or just guilty for having let her down when he had said he would drive her out to her gig on the Island, and covered that feeling with "Are you sure that’s correct? Whose dictionary are you using? — does ‘witch’ come from victim?") then, in the late shank of the day—"curving" (she wrote in her Sketchbook) "like a road that you know has to stop curving but doesn’t" — there came a streaky-blond-haired foreign woman, Clara, to the threshold of this warm place.

She came in person about the workshops. Grace almost had to get this out of her. The woman had not phoned. The workshops were starting again next week. A woman with an English-type accent and the name Clara Mackenna and a United Nations orbit like what Grace had once felt at a UNESCO nutrition meeting at an Italian woman’s Fifth Avenue pad overlooking the park, it was false composure and a different sense of money, having money that was taken for granted yet also not at all thrown around, foreign money, not Abundance money (which was Only Money), but foreign and vague except that that vagueness was tight like a banker if you got down to it. Was it a home Clara had here? She was actually South American (at least through her husband, whom she cared about and who Grace knew loomed like someone dangerous waiting in some other room). So the politics of marriage mostly unstated in all the words that seemed to state it, felt like capital P Politics somebody sleazy being threatened with a gun in a foreign language, standard men-drama.

In a pleated tartan skirt: a woman with a look in her forehead and hands, fine active hands, warm backs-of-hands as thoughtful as the forehead invaded by brittle Upper East Side hair, yet worried hands, worried palms maybe, a smooth rhythm and a classy look of dignified trouble (do we mean, "fright"? Grace heard someone in her, maybe a new self, say) — anxiety over why she had come to Grace Kimball’s apartment. Rocking the boat? Some secret but so predictable terrorism in the home? Unknown lives not yet lost. It took women to get wheels turning, one week you’re seeing your eyes in the window pane and hearing the door opening, the next week you are the door (write that down) — through it, trace a curve slung ahead of you scary as some old starfish newly growing in you from a little lump that already knows doctor talk, you hear it in you, — ectomy, — ectomy. Women in Grace’s apartment talked and talked as if their clothes had gagged them for years. And if our Puerto Rican super who you knew only half cared how many good years he had left and responded to eye contact by squinting as friendly as he was astigmatic and to a hand upon his forearm when his building was receiving Kimball criticism, turned upon her to condemn her "friends’ " cigarette butts on the floor by the elevator {and Kleenex, and cellophane from a pack of cigarettes), he would come in and sit on her rug with her and have a hit of Morning Thunder, and once half a joint, and sort of enjoy slugging it out with her when she said it’s the habit women get into where they’re the hostess who cleans up after others, and he knew she might… he didn’t know what— but if he said the word? — but the words came out in a bit of dirty talk but no come-on, as if the apartment house was too real — this once elegant home of temporary plaster jobs and electrical wiring of a gauge long outdated.