Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Was Marv’s fury ripping her to shreds? Did she not know what she felt? The tape in her bag had been drawing her home, but blocks and blocks of the city waited in the way. A bus appeared and she got a radiator seat at the rear where she could look at how the black dude in the alligator hat came past on the sidewalk going uptown and suddenly eyeballed her right on through the window. She could not get out of her mind her own taped words she was going home to play. They were live, they were her own, and when she got off the bus and bought one small white sweetheart rose at the florist and stuck it through a button-hole of her shirt — and later when she was jerking off to the goddess in the mirror as she had known she would — she had known she was being drawn home to know later what she knew already.

But on the bus’s hot seat and in the florist’s and alone in the mirrored Body Room, she heard the clink of milk, pieces of her bike, forks on Sue’s plates last night, and she heard a deeper, longer milk clink. But they were Marv’s plates, knives, forks, cups, saucers, embroidered tablecloth, and bottled pure Garden of Eden apple juice just as much as they were Sue’s or young Larry’s, who with tender shining forehead sat in the kitchen reading a book about chess but toward the end of last night’s evening figured out how to mix and was much in demand discussing the space program (manned versus unmanned, got heckled, shrugged it off) and chess, which he might be outgrowing at eighteen. While Sue gave the mother-provider trip a twist reporting that she had told Larry he ought to get laid. It was about time, he was almost eighteen, and, even standing over by a window trying to understand a tall political woman you knew would phone the next day who spoke painfully and too fast or too slow, Grace heard Sue through the noisy talk in the large room saying it — it had been what Grace had told Sue, that Larry should get laid, and now she heard it come back through the room to her, family history.

And even these you must empty your hands of, as she had not quite been able to show Sue, who was changing her life but maybe into new Habit Patterns that would grab her just like she grabbed what Grace had to say about Decision-as-Necessary-Shorthand, about Siamese Marriage, about carbohydrate hits: but prophetic, Grace had been called — by Sue, come to think of it — when Grace had said, You will walk out someday.

So why should Grace not find the meaning of her day sloping back to her? But in a new voice, not the silence of the burly driver of a bus that fell apart and back together at each dip so the man up there behind the bar with his walkie-talkie (while women communicate directly, she found herself adding to future gigs), the driver here wanted to finish off three non-orgasmic senior citizen ladies who had boarded the bus but not reached seats and were holding on as if this was tomorrow spelled backward like the letters on the front of an ambulance that’s not free, God as if this was tomorrow and there was no bus, only a loop to swing on, they were not quite making it into orbit. He knew what he was doing, floored his pedal, flipped the huge wheel, job-secure in the picture of his wife bent over the obstacle course her vacuum led her orbiting her kitchen while attached by a long cord to a plug in a socket, the noise all but overcoming phone, future doorbell, and other sounds but not the aroma that added up to three American cheese and sweating bacons she had grilled for lunch one after the other, yes, leaving the oven on after the first grilled cheese and bacon in case she had a second: foresight guaranteed: but why was she vacuuming in the kitchen? how had Grace seen that? Switch scenes and see the husband of Clara tall and thin with a foreign moustache levering the cork out of the bottle like pumping water, he like the busdriver’s wife proved to be with appetite as Clara had foreseen rising awkwardly from her mermaid folds on Grace’s famous carpet, didn’t have time for a cup of tea, saying she had to think about her husband’s dinner he would be hungry after his trip. Was he a traveling man? Not now, not now; just someone he knows who was unable to come to the city.

This woman Clara respects her husband and this is everything to her, she thinks; his words are her words coming to her like her own. He is tall and moustached, for I saw around her to him standing behind her, there he was, and Clara says he is thin no matter what he eats, potatoes, beefsteak, fried bananas, chile, a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Funny, her nerves are showing and I thought nerves of sprung steel, not meaning like when they say it of charismatic male criminals, also revolutionaries with bombs, Clara’s fear seems made of steel. He has many worries, she said; well, so has Clara herself. Her share and unshared. The tall woman in the window at Sue and Marv’s can speak on the politics of Worry — share his to forget your own — she’s into Power Margins, what you leave potential for yourself resting assured that your treasury is on tap if you know that you take him as an equal however he sees or fantasizes you.

And this dark argument of a woman, thin but without muscle tone, awesome, waiting politically to be said No to, waiting outside if Grace (who, comparatively untechnological except for phone showerhead and Acme Juicer, had been impressed by young Larry’s report on nerve gas) needed a ride back to Manhattan: Sure, can you take me and Maureen? — for burning fuel should move as many of the people as possible: Which one is Maureen? the woman had asked vaguely.

But the man introduced into the system today by his lady Clara, this tall-ly metabolized mustache of a business-trip-upstate husband — brings home worries (to Clara), "up the river," Clara had said, like a tourist visitor, meaning the Hudson — had she smiled? — and is much encouraged by the homemaker of his home if not to handcuff her to the bedpost later on, at least to leave his worries on the doorstep — when these worries might have forced her, his cook and live-in lay (haloed by the odoroma of guinea hen enchiladas from a supermarket top-loading freezer as he with his one-and-a-half boring sex fantasies enters their hallowed living space, to let fly with her worries, which may not concern the long, narrow world at large like his worries which are important and therefore at rest because powered by dollar continuum though his secret anxiety about having this "Sure Thing" status tunnels into that Rest to siphon out the underside-rear-spout emptying the dollars-continuum of all but its nerve-gas buying power: his worries may not be about sales volume and what the Johns in Washington say about inflation, but which still matter, because if a revolution in a foreign country is holding up a delivery of a system, can you really get into that like you get into how a husband gets irritated?

Well, in a workshop we do a bit of everything: I’m open: we share sexual information, we talk about Body-Self image, we do some yoga, I demonstrate massage, we explore masturbation, diet, alternative energy-bases for self-love because even in a regular sex life so many women put a man’s orgasm first. We feel that—

We? the question came, but who had Clara come looking for?

Yes, economic power isn’t enough by itself, after all it gives us a heavy-duty matriarchy which is just as sex-negative as this number the men have been doing on us for centuries.

It’s not easy.

Who’s talking to Grace besides Clara? Is it Grace herself?

The world has become awfully complicated.

So do we leave it to the guys to understand?

Too complicated to beat.

Fly, thought Grace, while the flying is good. What was it the beautiful old lady had said? they fly me, but I am the wings. Write it down.