Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She phoned Maureen, who did not pick up — then did, to say she had washed out her roller and her brush and was just about to have her enema, and would it wait. Grace felt grateful, then, and to the Goddess, that the intervention of Maureen’s at times almost invalid-like health-and-cleansing number had kept Grace from speaking of what was, she saw now, better not spoken of. The nausea today, the shorthand models of her talk, her gig, her repeatedly unrehearsed life publicly given from her own self to others, in to others, her own distributed (that was it) person, an unlocked pelvis flying above Murray Hill.

The nausea from cleansing. Her shorthand memory. Cliff’s bitchy verses.

And the two looks of the heavy set, straight-spined man who had peered into the storefront window: the second look from the corner that Grace had turned away from, the first turning look that curved out with that outrageous male commandingness and included her: with nothing in between the looks except their awareness of each other, the glint in his button-hole, a street-singer somewhere thumping out that old Afro-ethnic "Wimoweh" that made her feel old, as old as the folksinging of the late late forties and early fifties, and in a doorway (she now placed her in memory) a young mime in a tight sports jacket with elbow patches Grace had seen working the New York Public Library steps and now she’s down on a sidewalk that the gray-haired, heavy set man’s first curving look had swept through without occupying.

A passing thought arrested by the sight of her velvet head. But he didn’t seem to pick anything up. How he would enjoy walking around naked!

The phone rang and Grace took it: it was Cliff complaining that Maureen had given him hell for interrupting her enema to ask her if he should get his head shaved. Grace told him more about last night. The dude in the western shirt and the gambler’s moustache who had talked highfalutin: was the point of sex only pleasure? and wasn’t the old idea of reproduction and evolution evolving itself to where how we grew into sex pleasure was evolution now rather than later? She thought that was fantastic, but she didn’t think of anything to say except this would be an evolution worth passing on to the kids, and Cliff said with slight jealousy did she mean you could inherit acquired pleasure, and chuckled, she thought dirtily. She repeated herself to Cliff, but he told her. It was her own feedback to herself.

New workshop sessions began next week: in sharing independences, give only what you like. Colonel Gibbon’s cassette fresh from San Francisco lay by the phone still in its package, the groans and guffaws of ecstasy coming through nonetheless: did Cliff want to take it home and play it? he ought to hear one of those northern California orgasms if he wanted a laugh.

Safely past the threat of earlier-in-the-day suicide, Cliff listened as she told how she had talked to Sue’s about-to-go-to-college son, Larry, who wanted to go in the city though his dad wanted him to go away. Larry had this severe late-teenage kindness which was condescension to his elders in flux plus passive curiosity. Kids shrugged like no one. The old lady on the street had shrugged, but she was crazy, but beautiful. Did Grace — Aunt Grace — want to have her way with Larry, slender, dark, quite pretty, shy, sharp: why not, said Cliff, it’d be good for him.

Cliff could keep her honest sometimes while he made himself mad, not her: were they two married? yes, to a friendship that was outside of them lest they get so alike they grow to that special homosexuality of marriage (write that down) (not very gay, dear).

She felt Cliff wanted to hang up. "It’s your body," she had said to Larry when they had heard his mother say across the room that Larry should get laid, it was what she had said. The kid’s brown eyes were troubled, or his molar had hit a pebble from the Port Adams deli: he was in flux. He had Sue’s dark, thick hair. Someday when he was fifty he would have a twenty-year-old girlfriend. Maureen at that moment had gripped Grace’s arm; Maureen’s eyes were (—"Maureen gets epileptic or mystical," said Cliff). Her smile had gotten fixed. Was Maureen crazy? It had been the incoming group at Sue’s front door, women excited at being at home together for something better than a shower or stitching flags.

Cliff now was calling to say he felt better, and to complain about Maureen, and not to again apologize for not driving Grace out last night but to say he had a buyer for the old white car, the buyer had a daughter in Washington, an impulse purchase. Manuel, the doorman in Grace’s building, knew him, and Cliff was paying Manuel a little commission. "I don’t know why," Cliff said, "but a nice guy you felt was judging you." The buyer — was this the point? "Had an insignia in his button-hole, military maybe; silver, a star, a circle with points coming out of it not all the same length. I asked, and he said, Wind directions."

"You’ll save money taking cabs," Grace said. She felt sick again and they hung up and something had been engineered around her that she didn’t quite get, though the Goddess does not need to understand. "We are the future," she had said to a couple of excited women, feeling sucked out of some place and toward them but there was nothing to see. She had noticed Sue’s tape recorder through the living room door and Marv there, fetched up high and dry in the other room staring at her as if she were the only person in the front hall crowded with people leaving, and he put his hand absently on the bookcase shelf where Sue’s tape recorder was, in fact on the black oblong thing with the silver handle sticking out: but Grace, having told Larry to come visit her sometime, they would talk, heard Larry say, "I’m going to college," and Grace said, "Oh, you’re going to college" — she was high but bushed. She was coasting, and he said, "I’ll drop up some night." He was shy — shy people were open — and he was funny and he liked talking to her — didn’t everyone? The Chilean woman Clara had said things that didn’t really tell Grace.

She registered — that Larry would be living in her building. Well, this was Change. If she was the future, she would come after herself. But, sliding away into Marv’s eyes faraway in the other room where he was apart from the departing crowd of mostly women (all women) in the hallway, and into Maureen’s tense grip on her arm, Grace turned to Maureen who seemed to come to the point: "You know Cliff could have driven you out, the car was ready this morning, he didn’t want to, that was all." And all this cluster of words and touch and sight was why the cassette had gone out of Grace’s mind at the last minute.

She now saw this, walking into her Body Room with Colonel Gibbon’s recorded orgasms in her hand (she’d never seen him but he had put on an inch and a half in height after ten rolphing sessions), and saw under her clock the white rose she had worn this afternoon surprising her straight ahead of her in a small glass vase on the bookshelf counter against the wall where her own recorder was on top of the box containing her Carousel slide projector she used in the workshops and there was something wrong with the drop mechanism and she was going to throw the projector out and get a new one.

National Orgasm of Women. The continent buckled upward, it bowed and shifted and waved. Arrived through her in order to belong to others.

She thought she ought to shout. She and Maureen sometimes did baby talk, nothing wrong with that. Don’t even say the word "wrong," said Maureen.

She veered off to her right through unfurnished free space to the high mirror. She lighted the big candle that came to her thigh. One day when she was fourteen she looked her father in the eye, they were at last within range, she was now five four but wearing heels, he five nine but a slouch. He smelled of drink the way he did when he hadn’t had any, like he used bourbon-flavored tooth soap, and she hugged him and her eyes watered and she didn’t say a damn thing, she was feeling they were about the same height. And she told this to the woman Norma here in the building who was going to be in the workshop, but it came out different from what it was, though Norma was a dear person and had a gift for listening that she didn’t put a high enough value on.