Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Well, he was ready to stick a meat thermometer into me, Maureen said.

They don’t eat meat any more, said Grace.

Marv waylaid me over by the window, said Maureen, next to that insane gigantic bookcase, so the other forty people slid down to the far side of the room, it was weird, he was sort of hitting on me — he was excited, he asked if the vanilla yogurt was really true because he’d heard me say you’d mainlined it out of my fridge and there you were publicly claiming you’d come off Dairy: I told him to fuck off, he said it was his house, I said tell Sue that and then he said, Sue thinks she’s in love with Grace, did you know that, Maureen? I looked at Marv and said, Love.

Maybe they’ll leave all the furniture out there, said Grace.

Furniture is heavy. It can’t move by itself. You have to move it. It’s full of unknown past and future people who are an environment you have no control over. Space is freedom if it is free space. So-called easy chairs are carted into your space to fill a void. I passed this on to Maureen, who I sense understands this better than I. Her antique expertise during her marriage was deeper than anything. The space you put furniture in is yours only if you stand in it. You put a dining table into a space because you can’t move the space while you can move the table. So what, Kimball? What was at stake? Empty your hands of it to see what it was.

She stacked some Forums to throw out. Give the neighbors a thrill when they visit the trashroom. She paused over one with a photo of a blonde kneeling behind an Italian-looking stud on a carpet somewhere, side-frontal but discreet. She felt hungry and had a handful of nuts and raisins. She would phase out the raisins. To the music she trotted into the sleeping room/office to check the project items on her wall chart, she was sending the Pitney-Bowes mailing machine back to the people in Stamford when she got up courage to tell them she was not satisfied. These are really just vulgar details, Cliff said jokingly, but he meant it.

Her business trip had left her looking younger after six years. In the Body-Self workshops, her own trip had gathered like the story it was — she wasn’t trying to prove anything — she didn’t have to — all she had to do was tell her trip to the women whose ignorance about themselves and their inner, untouched freedom was no more sad than their insights and sudden group laughter — and new hope through eating live food, speaking out, taking responsibility for their orgasms; instead of hitting on obstacles that made it easy to not get what you need, finding a seed in you that belongs only to you and was always there waiting to be slowly moistened, not pried at dry. Power was where it was at: but power to change to what? She smelled raisins and three sorts of unsalted nuts around the corner in the other room forty feet away like smoke. She dialed the answering service to sample the action. It was the division of labor, these separate tracks. They got back to her, she got back to them. Those other tracks kept going — to get to them she would turn to them. Each phone call a whole thing, an operation, someone’s unparalleled story now including Grace. Dial that number: in came the track. What was this Politics?

She let the light settle onto the carpet and walls, and lens the window panes until she thought she could see in less light minute careless crumbs, crumblets, like crumblet shadows made of light, not noticed before on the barely shining little piece of mirror lying flat on a low low table across the room. One morning a week she would let herself be two feet taller right after breakfast. One more thing to come off. But boric acid was what she thought ecologically of because it could give poor big-little roaches tiny white grains of gas but she had never heard them pop, they went away like perhaps the city pigeons to vanish in secret. Come off killing, too. And what really was this Politics? Group power, O.K., to be grasped and divvied up. It felt Sex Negative, but it meant women and maybe mind/body attached to earning power. The political woman who had driven Grace and Maureen home— Kate — laughed loud, like how some of the workshop women came. And last night in the dark of the car lighted by a deli open late and a street light and in a silence at a stop light, she said she had never masturbated. No real surprise, yet also here was another kind of applause, coming out of years of silence, eyes straight ahead watching the traffic light. Your need and his need on separate tracks: that’s why you get a hard-on for yourself, honey. Masturbation no obstacle to anything else you want to do. Or want to give up — like killing roaches. Hadn’t there been a twenty-dollar bill rolled tube-tight on the mirror on the table? Abundance present here or present elsewhere was what absence meant. All alone you can invent it. Sue had wanted her son Larry to hear Grace:

Yes that’s how I see myself at eighty, eighty-five, ninety-five, a hundred in my wheelchair at the home with all the sisters, we’re all in our chairs in front of our TVs, good TV porn funded by a government inspired by the Goddess, a Body-Sex government decentralized all over the land, California, Florida, and here we all are, a bunch of happy old ladies in our wheelchairs, our vibrators plugged in, happily jerking off.

She had designed sessions with fifteen women and men around the edges of her Body Room: fifteen vibrators at once, with Grace in the middle, that’s sixteen, until the collective energy rose peacefully from the group, and some people made noise, Cliff always, but not Desmond, who was all legs with thighs of a bike racer and later asked Maureen to tell him her trip again and asked Grace if his fruitarian diet might be why he was ejaculating a foot further than before, beyond the small towels Grace had distributed, beyond the small, woolly rug he himself was on, and onto the free spaces of the brown carpet: Grace said she would have licked it up wet if she had known all that protein was going to waste on her rug. Masturbation opens a menu of life-style choices, though the rug fibers might be carcinogenic though with months of charge built up from vacuuming. Her neighbors up in the penthouse felt their floors bowing and their roller skates rolling down to all the corners of their home. All coming together roughly to some point. Each making a contribution. Turning to each other and away, knees up, knees down, breath rising in praise, turning ahead. The unheard-of story that was being told back to her might be her own but it was coming from the future in a changed voice. She was evolving into a new type of person, wasn’t she? — and from outside in as well. The world, it equals Love — but she was being invaded vividly sort of and not by the Goddess just now — by those Grace had given herself to. Or invaded by just these — hmmm, well, angels she had to reckon with because she had heard them talked of lately, she had never feared angels — she thought that’s what these humdingers might be, for they felt like more than one. The puffiness by her nose and around the eyes at Christmastime had been the cleansing juice diet: it was convenient that she and Maureen each had their own Acme Juicer and had done juice alone for two weeks once until a case of free-range pineapples from downtown overloaded Maureen’s machine and burnt it out. What if there was an angel in the pineapples eager to be in her and Maureen, but she had not told Maureen. Coming off pot the first time gave Grace a rheumatism that was the body’s natural cleansing, and congestion in the chest so if she’d saved her snot she could have gone into business. Maureen agreed with Grace that work was an addiction; did Grace now agree?