Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But it was not Maureen but Manuel, the day doorman; she heard him on the other side of the door and opened it as she was.

They’d taken him out of the basement and put him on the door, days. He’d been replaced "in the basement" by only a part-time handyman, who Grace thought could be a real presence only if he was really and truly as invisible as he seemed.

"When you coming up to fix the leak under my basin, Manuel?" They smoked an occasional joint, and Manuel gave her a hug but she never had her way with him and always said so to him those very words.

He wasn’t smiling. "I didn’t buzz you this afternoon; I figure it’s O.K." He had his blue windbreaker with the autoracing patches on the sleeve and he was small and strong, he could do anything in the building. He smiled at last, he couldn’t help it and wouldn’t want to help it, and Grace felt the whole congregated weight of all the tenants in the building caught inside because Manuel was outside, she got this clearly, as clearly as the mysterious importance of the storefront for the beautiful old lady and the heavyset man who appeared later.

She wanted to joke him out of what was the matter. She was surprised when Manuel said, "I’m not here any more."

"You’re what?"

"I was away from the door for two minutes helping Miss Rail into the elevator and I went up with her and helped her out of the wheelchair in her apartment, and the Super come and we had a big argument and he phoned the office and I’m fired."

Manuel was there but he wasn’t there. Grace was saying it was terrible, she’d call the landlord tomorrow.

4’You don’t have to, Grace. I got some people. Mr. Lustig, Mr. Goody, Mr. Mayn, you know they’ll go to bat for me. Hey, listen, I don’t buzz you this afternoon because it’s your friend coming up, O.K.?"

"You want a smoke, Manuel?" Grace didn’t have a picture of any of the three tenants mentioned.

"No, I got to get out of here. I just want to tell you, you know."

She wanted him to come in. She was glad he didn’t want her to call the office. The union’s going to protect him, get him in someplace else. So "whatever you hear, Grace, you know I want to tell you first because some people in this building they don’t like me, I don’t come running when they yell at me the sink’s stopped up, you know."

"Maureen and I, we’ll picket the building."

"No," he grinned, "no, you don’t want to do that."

"You won’t stop Maureen."

"You got another friend moving into the building, Maureen said."

"Yeah, yeah, that’s three down and a hundred and twenty some to go, Manuel."

"Yeah, that’s how I know her. She nice."

"Sue?"

Manuel shrugged. "Sue? I don’t buzz you when she came. She’s nice."

"Yeah, she’s getting there."

Manuel was going away, pressed the elevator.

"I bet you’ll be on the job tomorrow."

Manuel poked his chin out. "Super," he said implicitly, and shook his head.

"When was that, that she came?"

"This afternoon. You wan’t in? She’s looking for the Super, he just stepped out as she came in, she couldn’t miss him, he got Super on his shirt" — Manuel was grinning and shaking his head—"I never see her before, and she say she never met the Super, so I say Oh you’re Grace Kimball’s friend, you moving in. She’s nice, she’s O.K. She speak good Spanish to me. Keep looking at the names by the house-phone."

"That was Sue?" asked Grace, as if Manuel knew.

"Nice-looking lady with light-color hair, green sweater. She was looking at the names by the house-phone. She waited for the elevator. She look at her watch and smiled at me. T don’t have much time,’ she said. I say, ‘Super’s coming right back.’ Elevator came and she went up."

"Yeah, that’s right," said Grace. It was going on again, her story being told back to her. When me they report to, it is me they report. She did not tell Manuel Sue had dark hair. People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people. Were they people? Someone arrived in her, but ancient or future, who knew?

"Nice-looking lady," said Manuel, his own trouble not forgotten. Not lumpy till you got their clothes off and hung up on silver hooks, inner thighs with not Indian writing on them but good old American, lower buttock, pockets of trouble in the undefended and deceptive flesh of the back. The elevator came. "I got to go. I didn’t eat yet." Up front. Bye, babe.

But which story was coming back? Sue and Clara lumped together. In the dark, heavy articles of furniture are all the same, she had said to the man who labored in his sleep. Not the same if you’ve seen them by candlelight. Each one is different, each convolvulus unique. She had a hundred and fifty color slides to show this astounding truth. Dark lips, pale lips; rich petals swaying in the breaths of desire; or fine, long narrow neat leaf-edges; the hooded point secret, growing through the whole body yet still, though distended, the same; or a pendulous pinkie half out of its hood like a cock with its own shaft that you’ll see even better coming downward to the hood if you shave. Get a one-thirty-second-Pawnee hard-on just thinking about it, about each and every one, all there on slides whether the male-designed Carousel projector worked or not. Plug in, turn on; the vibrations are light but right, the underground waters are felt faraway and the right hand guides the wave length in its grip toward those faraway waters. Find what is right for you. The soles of your feet together. Let power find you, if you have to play hard-to-get. Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breathe. All alone we have to invent even that.

But the story was coming back, told back to her, and she didn’t know which it was. Prophetic meaning beyond words and in future so told back to her it came in a changed voice: hey get your bull voice gone public, had she become a man flown back in future to tell herself her bullish prophecies had been right on? yet the voice telling her back her own story — do voices hear? — was hers but a person she’d mistaken for Lou the husband man she wanted to show who was really another and she and this other are not quite facing each other deciding whether to get each other’s attention and her story being told back to her is so unheard-of and astounding she cries out, "You see! You are what happens to you." But, crying "Abundance ," she has to ask, Doesn’t what happens come from you? and if incredible energy-levels grow from cleansing and mental attitude/intuition that will not be brain-washed into turning thought/feeling into some legal/logical analysis headtrip, are these strong, changed women coming toward her (who are thanking her, exchanging information, letting the patriarchal wars go on in the jungles and up against the Wailing Wall), yes these women are what happens to and from Grace, let’s not get into heavy argument, though new thought regarding how a natural female up-front aggressiveness can love and really change competitive male aggressiveness, is what’s needed now. But this story told back as if she didn’t know it already proves familiar like the stranger telling it to her in future: an elite Indian healer who stood with her and they saw a mountain lean toward them; a story with an old couple chatting not quite communicating; a brother delivering milk, entering her cocoon bedroom one Sunday morning to compare what they called "Indian writing" where the bed had impressed soft warm cuneiforms on tummy and ribflesh, or entering her bedroom at one a.m. once to tell her everything, leaving on his motorcycle, coming back married, becoming someone she didn’t like anymore but then becoming a father weeping at her face-to-face so he almost truly saw her his sister and that her grief over the death of his boy her nephew on a motorbike was also great; a story including a woman escaped, a marriage that did not quite speak, the threat of Nothing-Happening/Death, the message of life lived by the bearer but with something missing so her being known to a thousand half-known people was a story she couldn’t ever tell, she was what all these other people had of her: her dayful coming to a point (like your head, she would say to her brother cuddling in bed, joking) while the old reliable hum — Fly me — rests against a corner of her, spreading her and bunching her as she knew it would — why, be my guest, why just come on in, why you just have me.