Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But what found her now as she came down let down by the sky into low waves of the mirrored room must be more than this meaning of her day that had seemed so clear during the grip and spit-flo- here -I-am of cum fed back to cosmos.

So clear it had brought together her out-of-the-closet friend Sue’s busted husband Marv, who in good anger but bad hate for once wasn’t thinking twice about (nor secretly aiming at defusing or "forestalling") what his opposite number would feel, in this case Grace, in his office this morning where she had for some reason in person gone to pick up the tape of herself; and brought together streets going and coming spun together with sun made brighter by the filter of the old city; and had brought that old couple who were not a couple but looked alike across the street, like everybody’s strange old couple: you think, they don’t want any help; and brought together the black dude with the alligator hat she knew she would meet, pusher, pimp, parking-lot attendant, business person; and brought together her own sounds she had actually played off the tape when she got back home:

Herself speaking to a group in Long Island, or making them a group, last night and the phone ringing below the sound of the vacuum crossing the free, earth-brown, empty carpet of her Body Room. Meaning of her dayful so clear it had brought together also calls left with the answering service and some taken when she felt like it — and she’d heard in the rise and fall of the ring as she came in her front door the call from her mother nineteen hundred and some year-miles away, a ring she did not answer until later when she had played her tape, then came her mother again, who phoned to say that she had a Date, this lady in her late sixties, granted prodded by her daughter longdistance, maybe less Grace’s Mama than a Woman, with a spacious white porch out there on a wide street and a relation to each stick of furniture like meditation if not jerking off by a long shot, her daughter told her in no uncertain terms long-distance, so that daily dusting (once upon a time the dust of others’ haste leaving the house — but coming back in the house, too) was like the singing her mother did at an upright in the living room. "Deep Purple" and "Love Divine All Love E-ex cell ing" and "Oklahoma!" — dusting like a lover of antiques who will never sell; dusting free of charge like zipping down to the supermarket driving these days without a license which she let expire because the duster of tables and washer of dishes even only her own now and launderer of dish towels and cooker of days should be beyond the law, as beyond freedom and — and she had a happy talk with the man down cellar whom she had called to fix the timer and the baffle on the furnace.

Streets of New York spun together with sun converging in an underwater fire (where was it coming from, the bottom of Grace’s mirror? the double glo from a giant candle? words a boy had read to her once?) the meaning of her day out of her hands then coming from where she lay on her cushions and beyond this small risk like some foreign hand gently joining her own on her breast, the risk in the person of the woman named Clara this afternoon with almost an English accent who said she was not English who claimed to have phoned earlier and got no answer, and had come here anyway to speak face to face apparently about the workshop, and who could not have got no answer if she had phoned because the service always picked up; and who had therefore (Grace concluded) not phoned at all: a human fib from this light-haired, light-boned, bone-strong, will-strong woman with amber eyes and a mole above her lip; in some measured way alert — but only in her whole person looking over her shoulder at what would happen, while seeming wise, and so, seeming in some fascinating (yes) public way not to care what happened behind her back. What could happen? Maureen coming in suddenly? she didn’t know Maureen. Clara was not liberated, but the words, while accurate, scattered inside your head with a not-mattering quality. Was it simple gross danger she had brought into Grace’s Body Room? Was Clara human? Grace could ask the question to herself seriously.

Clara was important, and to Grace, as the meaning of the day formed: but so that when the day ended this evening on her cushions, she had already told her day and it was feeding back to her the teller from someone she had already told it to: not the man she would show, but another: so that it was part of that unheard-of story beyond celebrity-gossip being told back to her, her own story (wasn’t it?) reported altered — through water so it swayed and slackened getting to the point and wasn’t so bright as it could be, and not only her own story as big as the cloud that came buzzing over her and became her like a void that reached her as she reached it. ("Void oid," comes the deep voice, "just so long as you’re Cunt-Positive," comes Brother-Sister Cliff’s chest-cold-type voice (from where? from vibrator waved into sound system? from phone-showerhead, notebook, combination pen-mike? from Grace herself, her phrase taken by him but not her void that found her as she found it, at day’s end thinking tonight how well-known was she, and once well-known, did this maybe not change at all but other things about you did change?).

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and moistly for good fruitarian measure. And she sighed and yelped small welcome to little last nitwit licks that buttered through her hips, for the vibes of the buzz converged in the old hum that that same busted double-knit husband Marv on Long Island last night had said got really in the way, Grace, for him when she had made him try it upstairs although he locked the master-bedroom door (but she heard it going even when the toilet flushed and bathroom door down the hall opened). She laughed for the unknown familiar man now down the hall whom she couldn’t quite see now (not the man in her mind, Lou, whom she had to show, who’d been her husband —she breathed the word harshly — but) another man, unavoidable, who had been telling her the sense of her day and the unheard-of story she had now lost all but the sense of. They were talking it all out at this end of the day. She had herself, she was not alone. The goddess in the high mirror cemented to the far wall dropped her knees. And this whole day that she saw, she had seen at once all around her, round and round, as she came, while the phone went softly, tinkling in two places at once simultaneously reincarnate she suddenly knew, though she had two phones, one in the H.O.A. hall, one in bedless bedroom.

But one also in an office hours ago that smelled of ink, smoke, coffee, and indirect lighting that never got turned off and had aged to an impermeable tint that stuffed the place and made smoke and coffee smell alike; phone ringing in a busted husband’s office just before she had gone away into the street. She liked the street. It was where high boots did best, alligator skin around her calves. And the street was where she saw the beat-up old guy and the strangely Jiof-quite-pair-bonded old woman on the other sidewalk at the instant she knew in another vein that the stars shone out of the day sky too, right down to her without interruption. She had last night’s tape cassette in her bag slung against her ribs and she had been good, she had been good last night in a house in the suburbs, electric-eyed Sue’s new out-of-the-closet Love-nest, where else, which could almost have been Grace’s home were it not for the goddess, though not with the man who was still somewhere her husband one of these days, and Grace saw a future in which she got his Hungarian wife learning to breathe in a workshop.