Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

The Sketchbook talk-converter could also be a silence-converter, for to Clara (who after the strange tone of voice when she said, We are political refugees, said, I am happily married) Grace had not said what had come to her about Clara:

Someday [the fresh page read] she’ll just up and leave. It feels like someday soon. But she is resisting hard — microscopic sea-creature capturing food in a mucus balloon which is the dwarf house it lives in. But I had this crazy idea this afternoon that Clara has just found out she’s pregnant and it’s someone else and she doesn’t know what to do. She sees herself as the last person in the world to separate and go away and live on her own — plays cello — and disappear from the life she has lived. But maybe she can come with the Goddess’s help (Marv said to me: Isn’t anything sacred to you?) to see herself as the first woman ever to do it, which is always to some extent true, you’re deciding alone. But also hundreds of thousands of women have already done it and they have their stories to share with Clara, who looks like she can argue more than "tell" and she is like a person from a small, narrow town coming to the city. She does not see how masturbation opens new varieties of life-style choice. One thing is certain: she should not have another child. Why did I think she was secretly pregnant? She looked away from me and when I followed her eyes I was looking at my white rose in the vase and had the idea.

Grace’s new friend Norma listened and listened to Grace’s story of her family light years away from here and would probably tell her husband. They sat in Grace’s sleeping room/office where her sleeping bag lay parallel to the wall under her fresh-air window that on a rainy night mirrored her face. Well, Grace had gone public. Did she even know how to hide stuff? Cliff called her an exhibitionist. An example. A model. Could be diet mattered more than psyche, Cliff said, headed for another suicide alert, but when menopause comes, go with it, the electricity of it, the converging messages that are wonderful patterns coinciding into good old cause-effect.

When it happened once in a blue moon that putting down the phone she felt like shit, she would ask herself why and look around her clean, warm-colored space. She would take a deep breath and find out always. A couple, for example, whom she’d gotten it on with after they’d all sampled a weekend Decision-Therapy workshop along the Manasquan River in New Jersey who wanted her to help someone they knew because she had told them about her own workshops and her trip. It had been, she decided, their two phones at that end that left her feeling like shit when they all hung up. Or the man who moved dressers in his sleep phoning the morning after to ask her to come to Washington on the spur of the moment, he had business there (she had longer hair that time), and she’d "had to" say no, she’d hung up, felt like shit, and decided it was because she wanted to make him laugh and cry and yell again. Or her mother — who’d asked for news, and gotten it with bells on like riding nude on a cop’s white horse down Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday; and her mother after all Grace’s news had said, "Grace you go too far." Relapse-ville — but whose. "Of course I go too far. That’s how I get known."

Picking the phone up, though, now, she’d no time to ask herself why she didn’t feel good about the voice in her ear because the voice in her ear (which she’d heard so recently she didn’t recognize it) was saying, "How’s your head," and she was answering this woman’s voice that did not know her (and threatened never to go away), "I’ve been into it all day, and I haven’t accomplished a thing."

"Oh I wasn’t sure how you were this morning, you know," the woman’s down voice nursed and coaxed. Or was it a man’s, a young, soft voice getting at her, around her?

It was Kate the political woman, or was she a politician, ride home last night, call this morning, need a ride, need an assistant to handle your mail, your mailings, your phone, type seventy words a minute, sin (joke).

"Oh I’m just opening like a flower all the time, Kate, how are you?"

"Oh I’m O.K., I guess. I woke up this morning and heard a man saying out of some magazine article, ‘This is a post-feminist era.’ Am I being a pain in the ass?"

"Yeah, yeah — did you get it on with yourself last night?"

"I will, Grace; you’ll see."

"Listen, dear, I’m in the middle of an enema, I gotta hang up. Be talking to you."

"What, do you have your phone right there in the John, you picked up so fast."

"Yeah, yeah, phones all over the place, hanging from my shower head!"

"Sounds like music."

"I got rid of my bathroom door. It’s sociable. Be talking to you, Kate."

"Do you know if there are any apartments in your building?"

"You could phone Maureen she knows the landlord’s agent in the building."

"Not sociable today, are you?"

"Got this enema trip, Kate. Be talking to you."

"I think you always are, Grace."

She gave a friend a send-off so the friend came back. Was that it? She almost had it. She would buy some flowers for Maureen. No she wouldn’t. Don’t try to justify your life. It’s up to it to justify you. (Write that down.)

The phone rang, seemed to stop, then started. She turned both phones down so that from the living room she could just hear the near phone where she sat against a wall, and the one in her sleeping and work room not at all. The mirror grew around the candle.

More you give, more you have to give were old words she suddenly didn’t understand, but pointing ahead, pointing forward. This microscopic sea organism Clara described—"our country has a long coastline" — made its house of mucus, but the wall did get clogged eventually and then it blew a new house out of the mucus skin it had already secreted for a rainy day.

Just when she saw what the mirror was doing, it started doing something else, an illusion she had, let’s say, painted on the wall to make its length look higher, this floor just below the penthouses had lower ceilings than the rest of the building.

She almost had it. She was against the cushions. She was going to love herself. The periodic cluster would bring the black dude. She didn’t want him yet, he could stay behind the moving van.

Her right hand lightly touched the vibrator, her heels began by touching each other and then the balls of her feet — the bottoms of her feet were flat against each other, her knees lowered outward to celebrate the double cones of the mind as it united with whole stretched heart and flower-lipped ear and clitoral shaft and the receding lights and slow waters of vagina. One knee eased upward and she might rock if she wanted. Her finger rubbed the switch almost on, but a sound came nonetheless. She had almost seen the meaning of the old couple different from each other but approaching each other in looks, and the milk bottles clinking like a rapid, too rapid bike with something loose, and the calls coming in with offers and demands, and Sue getting an apartment here, and Sue’s busted husband Marv bringing Grace her last night’s tape — having to — and the voice telling her back her own unheard, unheard-of story, and almost but not quite most of all the heavyset guy with the prematurely gray hair whose looks like her own had the strange power to curve and to go on and on.

But the sound she had heard like imagining her vibrator’s secret soul that never stopped running on its abundant (AC-DC!) potential that she had told about and told about, was her door, and when she reached her door she knew it could not be the black dude fulfilling the periodic cluster because he would have been announced from downstairs, they would never have let him up.