Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So she’d had to visit Marv this morning, bring it home — and play it and be affected by it. It certainly was not dynamite.

But the tape was behind her, but she had let it into her day as if it could add to her the next time she made an exhibition of herself, when really she didn’t rehearse, everyone knew she didn’t, and the pleasure of laughing at her own jokes and the gig of growth was like the ultimate private personal high of her going public, she could not quite say all this. Yet knew her life felt edged near a blade that all her words ignored. And someone knew this about her. Who?

Driven, though, by some words in last night’s talk certain as a mantra, undeniable as your bullshit really could be. Driven back to this storefront in Greenwich Village.

There was a heavyset, gray-haired hombre in a suit looking into the storefront so close up that the two signs up against the other side of the glass looked out at her as if they’d been missed by him — she saw them while he saw inside.

He meant to be there. How did she know that? Because he looked into emptiness, and kept looking. Her gaze fell upon his shoulders; they were set back square though he leaned "into" the window. In the corner of her eye the same black dude in the alligator was sloping close, and this gave her a sneaking sense of neighborhood, he seemed to have been on the move along these few streets all day — not prostitute corners (the women turning, looking uptown, downtown, crosstown), especially not this morning and now at two he wasn’t in the vicinity of anyone resembling a hooker, though she had felt somewhere in his "Mama" this morning that he was friendly enough to be a pimp. Yet more close and free. Someone could give her more information, she knew only what she felt.

The black dude did not speak, passing her, she recognized from somewhere a very blond, short-haired girl all in black standing in a doorway with her boyfriend passing a joint. She had turned to face the storefront window across the street and the heavyset man in the suit who turned and saw her without looking, glanced back into the window, then the other way almost toward Space so she caught a glint like a piece of mirror on him somewhere, and he moved on, paused at the corner, which he reached just as the black guy on Grace’s side of the street reached the corner. And at this point ("At this point’n time," her father once would say) the heavyset man turned directly to look back diagonally across the street at Grace who managed then to be looking at the storefront window but though feeling that metal glint again not seeing anything: so she got this bad sense of being pushed, which was coming really now from the words that she now understood had driven her from her apartment.

On tape she had been through that unspoken private life of her marriage, "thru" her wife-provider trip, her Freud trip, her still ongoing Art trip as life was art; then, There Was Sex After Marriage or The Resurrection of the Nude Body; then, food trip, body trip, letting go, then breakthroughs and corners turned, through to discovering your hands through carrying a knapsack, your head through letting go of our greatest source of Vanity, the hair — to the great and memorable idea (probably a gift from some dude, but it’s what you do with them) To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it.

She found in her chest a kink of nausea, a lid afloat on what wasn’t quite there, and she wanted to vomit in the gutter but she couldn’t. ("I’m going to purify my system so that eventually I will be able to eat even shit." Laughs and embarrassment in audiences past and future — belief, wonder, recognition, and conversion.) And then she was glad she had not vomited, because, as she said to herself, suddenly holding back a flash of someone else’s (whose?) degeneration and madness (whose? her ex-husband’s? some future person’s? Cliff’s?), I know that I am feeling pushed and I think I don’t know why but I know it’s what I’m feeling.

Also, the heavyset man had turned to look back. Well, what’s wrong with women barfing, belching, farting? they’re not goddesses on pedestals, ancient maidens playing girls’ basketball that allowed you two dribbles before you had to stop running and look around for somebody to pass to with your foot stuck to the floor as if you were paralyzed.

This time, though, would not have been free vomiting. The cornered feeling that she of all people now felt came not quite only from the taped words that had been around her from morning till night. Her hands were free.

No, and she knew it all the way back home; knew it bending her silver gear levers (as if she needed the two of them and ten separate speeds) bending them up and down to test the tune-up she had just paid one man for that another much younger man had taken much too long to do probably too quickly; knew it as she pedaled suddenly between pedestrians who crossed against the light; knew it coasting the fenders of a double-parked car as the door opened, raced the light at the wide Twenty-third Street crosstown intersection through a field of potholes; knew it and almost lost it at last near home seeing a woman named Jane who regarded Grace as a celebrity, thin, red-haired, round-shouldered Jane knocking on the glass door of the bank while two small kids ran away from her around the corner of the building — knew it, knew no obstacles to it (except its own sweet time it had taken her to see) what she’d seen well before she’d reached the bike shop (for the second time today) and paid ten dollars and rolled ahead down a sidewalk, no pedals, no feet, a track laid out by the wheels— no: the cornered feeling was in what had been seen before she reached the bike shop: seen when the heavyset gray-haired dude had turned from the storefront: and, apparently not looking across at her but mentally continuing to turn as if he saw her, he moved off down the street: for this was it: his turn. But then, when he came to the corner and looked back, her turn came. And the goddess of good old eye contact had turned her eyes away. There was the empty storefront and she had meant to be here but now she didn’t concentrate.

Where was the black dude from her periodic cluster? She now thought she wanted to follow through — or, bike or no bike, have him trotting along beside her. But he had vanished round the corner and she saw around that corner for a second but it faded: she faded, leaving her sight somewhere round that corner — but she did not think like this (coerced, nauseous).

And the curb right across from the point where the black dude had been was occupied by this heavyset prematurely gray-haired gentleman who had turned for a look back: and she had a spinning sense that he had known she would be there, near the storefront — a tough, square man, businessman but what business trip was he on? without a hat — a restaurant-owner, whose place was near here, or a lawyer with the habits of a senior jock, how he walked, but his mind she could blow if he gave her the chance, she a lady headed for the bike shop in running shoes, velvet head, O.K. said Larry, when asked to run his hand over it. But nothing might be the response of this cool, worn, heavyset, gray-haired guy, calm at the corner, a private eye maybe. While she looked at the storefront without really looking at it or its two signs, until she thought if he was so curious why hadn’t he gone in to that Messenger Service/Psychic Consultation storefront? He had instead thrown first that curved look out of some part of his eye (not sizing her up though at all, no visiting fireman with a flag in his button-hole drifting toward an afternoon bar): then at the corner he looked again, this time straight at her so she felt she was waiting for the afternoon show in the storefront window, and in the corner of her eye she saw him light a cigarette, which was extremely important information to have. She was on her way to the bike shop, the past was past, and there is no future.